I've seen 2000-3000g quoted most often, depending on how patient you are buying the stuff you need on the AH.

I just leveled it yesterday, I leveled in incredibly inefficiently and it cost me between 4-5k. This was only about a day after I know someone else had powerleveled it. The price of low level gems/bars seems to be incredibly inflated at the moment, which is really what cost the money. The most expensive part is between about 150-300, that alone probably cost me 3000g due to bad RNG on green recipes and just a complete lack of materials on the AH.

I am sure if you waited for an optimal time you could probably cut a few thousand off. Since leveling it yesterday, selling/DEing items I made while leveling has got me about 1500g of it back, so think of 4-5k as pretty much the maximum it could cost.

Having recently done this let me make a few suggestions.

With the change to mining it is not as painful to gather your own mats. The real shortages are experienced when it comes to gems needed for recipes. As such I recommend switching to the Stone Statue recipes and running them till gray. Server pricing issues might make solid and heavy stone too expensive so again, mine it.

The real choke point is from 265 to 300. This is when you start running into gems whose frequency was never good. Large Opal, Blue Sapphire, Azerothian Diamonds, and Huge Emeralds, are needed in good quantity. You can prospect a lot of thorium for this; which on a side note can be profitable while not leveling JC on some servers just to flip gems for others leveling JC.

Once you make 300 it gets pretty easy, TBC greens are generally so cheap as to be free. At 350 you switch immediately to greens from Northrend and from there is is real simple to get to 375. Just a note, the "perfect cut" special for JC is not given by the trainer in Dalaran but instead by trainers in BT and HF.


At the end of the day JC is my second most profitable tradeskill behind Inscription of all things.

For someone wanting to level JC (or BS for that matter) the best way would be to roll mining first, gather all the mats you need then start leveling JC.
Mining is incredibly easy to level and it's rather efficient as the copper/iron/etc you get while leveling it you need it for JC/BS anyway.

This way it may take a bit longer, depending on how much it takes to mine all the stuff you need but even using AH to powerlevel may take a while if some crucial mats are in short supply.

If you are thinking about it now, I would start scouting the AH and look for mats to level your JC between 200-300 because that is the most painful part. Over the course of a week, you can probably get a decent stash of gems/ores to be able to get thru that phase, should you decide to hunker down and level it.

Agree with above, I've seen the gems needed for that phase of JC pretty cheap on the AH sometimes, but it always seems when you NEED them, they are insanely expensive. So buy then when you don't need them and outsmart yourself!

Does it seem to anyone else that the Leatherworking +resist bracer enchants are a little overpowered? They give LW's access to a resistance buff that's not reachable by any other profession, which means that any time a serious resist check is made (Sarth+3 for tanks is the obvious one currently) leatherworkers get a massive advantage in gearing. It wouldn't be quite so out of line if there were regular +resist enchants to bracers, but as it is the LW gets a double bonus - enchanting for a stat you can't ordinarily get in that slot AND the high value of said stat.

Even if other professions got a similar bonus (Resist enchants for rings, JC-only resist gems... no idea what you would have to do for BS. Mixology does provide resists if you use the chromatic flask, so Alchemy is in line already) it still wouldn't be even unless there's a bracer enchant available to everyone that gives a smaller amount of resists.

Design: Subtle Scarlet Ruby
Design: Shifting Twilight Opal

The above two designs seem to be still missing. None on my realm, no drops recorded on Thottbot or Wowhead, and they don't show up on the EU or US versions of the Armory (implying they've never dropped).

Those two JC designs never even showed up on the PTR; it's pretty safe to say they're not (yet) in the game. Here's hoping we'll see them for 3.1!

I did a little research on prospecting results (trying to understand the deconstruction spells a little better), and realized that most of the tables I found were wrong. Using the data available on wowhead, along with some historical snapshots, it appears that prospecting follows some fairly simple rules:

• Each ore has two gem groups, groupA and groupB
• One gem from GroupA will result from each propsecting attempt (100% of the time)
• A second identical gem from GroupA may result from prospecting atttempt (0-50% of the time, constant per ore)
• Each gem from GroupA is equally likely to result
• One gem from GroupB may result from each prospecting attempt (2.5-24% of the time, constant per ore)
• Each gem from GroupB is equally likely to result

The ore constants are:

Ore	GroupA	GroupB
Copper	0%	10%
Tin	15%	10%
Iron	3.33%	10%
Mithril	3%	10%
Thorium	3%	2.5%
Fel Iron	5%	6.75%
Adamantite	10%	20%
Cobalt	50%	7.5%
Saronite	10%	24%

Thorium appears to have had a change done silently at some point. Originally, it appears that the Star Ruby was in GroupA twice, resulting in it having twice the drop rate of the other GroupA gems. Blizzard seems to have fixed it a while ago, as the rate reported by Wowhead has been steadily decreasing over time, such that it now clearly follows the same pattern as the other ores.

Edit: beaten