I'm in charge of distributing bank stuff to people who request it, and something that I'm wondering about is how other guilds do distribution of epic gems for gear. Do you have a limit on how many per week/month/?, just have a straight policy on "best in slot", do they cost dkp, or something entirely different? I'm in charge of this and I'm trying to get ideas, see how other people do it..I haven't seen much so far so that's why I posted this.

One thing that makes me scratch my head is crafted and badge gear - Belt of Blasting is best in slot until Sunwell for Warlocks (per my understanding) so I guess that merits epic gems, but what about things like the new badge loot? I was looking at the Priest legs ( ) and trying to research them, and what I've found is that they are comparable to t6 while slightly worse (again if I'm wrong and they are much worse, my defense is I'm a Warlock who's trying to learn). But with DKP and Sunwell ahead of us, a Priest who picks those legs up may not upgrade past them before we are done with BT/Hyjal, meriting epic gems for them.

Also of course, the rarity/supply of the gems should matter, right? Do I let people who have gear that is slightly worse than t6 pick up epic gems if they request the gems we have stacks of,but not for the people who want Spinels? Is that fair?

There was a similar thread before, you may want to check that first. Encourage common sense, encourage your people to get their own spinels from the badge vendor if they can, encourage them not to use spinels unless there's no other alternative, and you will be all right. After the badge vendor and the new haste gems, it's unlikely that you will have a big shortage of any gems.

Priest badge legs are better than t6, better than Leggings of Eternity too actually. A typical priest would most likely want 2 empyrean sapphires for them though, it might be rare for a new-in-bt guild, won't be a problem after 2 weeks in bt.

As stated, there's an existing thread for this, so i'll just try to touch on some things that are new sicne then. Once the badge vendor for gems exists, you can fix a lot of the imbalance with it. Tell someone that any time they would like to buy a gem off said vendor to not buy the one they want, but rather whatever the guild has the least of, and then trade it to the bank for the one they want. For instance, if someone wants a steady seaspray emerald for pvp, which your guild bank doesn't support, you're almost certainly better off having them buy a spinel instead of an emerald off the vendor and making the exchange.

Make sure casters are using haste/spell damage or occasionally hit/sd if necessary in any yellow socket with a useful bonus instead of just spineling everything. They'll generally come out ahead doing so, but might not be used to there being a competetive yellow gem yet.

The simplest way to police people not wasting gems without researching every drop yourself is to tell people they're getting gems for 1 piece per slot until sunwell. If your resto shaman tells you he wants gems for his sun-touched leggings, you don't have to go figure out if they're the best offset piece to take in any of the t6 slots without risking your 4-set; you just give him the gems and if he decides later he made the wrong choice, he can get his own gems for the replacement.

Also, hi oddity?

Would anybody mind posting a link to the previous thread? I guess I fail at searching. (I did try, but the searches for "gem" came up empty)

Basically this. I cry every time I see a spinel in a helm with a yellow/blue socket.

You probably need 1 policy for spinels, another for pyrestones, and a 3rd for everything else, though.

A useful tool I plan to implement when the vendor opens is to require people who want yellow/green/blue for PvP to trade in a spinel from the badge vendor for x2 of the pvp gem of their choice.

Some way of motivating people to put badge spinels in the bank is all you need to stabilize your supplies, really. Every other gem should be fairly safe; your supplies of amethysts and pyrestones should only really crash when you run out of spinels and the backlog line gets long.

The way I handle gem distributions is firstly, only request a gem if you're going to be using the item for the foreseeable future. I set a limit on gems which nobody is allowed to go over which I keep record of, but also weigh attendance into the equation. So if someone raids only 50% of the time they won't get the max possible gems. Periodically I'll up the max number of gems someone can get more, but I always try to hold enough reserves in the bank so if any of the higher attendance players who aren't at the cap will be able to get gemmed out.

I think as with everything, the best way to handle it is a way your guild is happy with. I can see them as being a problem for the "we killed Lurker now lets go BT" guilds that won't see much trash and probably won't be able to mine in MH, but for any guild actually seriously clearing BT it's a non-issue. When my guild first moved into BT we set a whole bunch of confusing rules to deal with the gems, but ended up abandoning them two weeks later. There isn't THAT many sockets in non-tier6 loot and there are that many gems.

Other than Spinels there was enough gems of every color to keep everyone happy and with the recent addition of haste rating as a viable caster stat as well as the changes to the mana regen model (which makes stacking spirit actually useful) even that has become less of a problem.

Add the badge-for-gems vendor and any problems you might have been getting are completely out of the window again.

We bundle gems with loot obtained from MH/BT/SWP which they pay DKP for. Best in game items people could sign up on a queue for gems. Blue, green and yellow gems we allowed people to buy for 100G each for mains, which we now have changed to allow gearing of alts also. Same with Heart of Darkness.

Our idea of Sunmotes will be the same, if you buy a pattern you will get free Sunmotes to craft that item, when the bank have enough stock we will start letting people buy Sunmotes for DKP also.

I believe all the crafted items that involve sunmotes are boe. It seems a bit strange to effectively only allow blacksmiths, tailors etc to get their gloves at first when nothing about the pattern itself mandates that. It does seem reasonable to hand people sunmotes if they win a boss drop item they plan to exchange though if that's what you meant and i simply misunderstood.

Yes, you are absolutely right, what I meant was you will get Sunmotes if what you are going to craft is BoP, now I see that there are no BoP craftables. Sunfire Robe did not require any Sunmotes!

Thanks for pointing that out, will have to change that in our guild notes.