Exactly. Hell, I'll start dumping my main through heroics come to that. I'd suspect--total WAG here--that the new gems will be ~15 emblems per. They need to be more expensive than the blue gems, and less expensive than the actual gear at that badge tier.

BC Epic Gems cost 15 Badges once they were added to vendors. Given that blue gems in both expansions have cost 10 of the Badge/Emblem obtained from Heroics, I suspect the precedent to continue.

It's tough to say how much the Heroic market will be affected until we know how effective prospecting will be, the cooldown and materials required for the transmutes, and the honor cost.

Edit: Got things confused. Blue gems weren't purchasable in BC.

When were blue gems buyable in TBC? Wowhead lists them as costing gold, and the only vendor selling them is at the Darkmoon Faire.

Darian probably misspoke, as far as I can remember rare gems were never buyable in TBC. We only had:

1. Uncommon gems from prospecting
2. Rare gems from prospecting and Brilliant Glass
3. Epic gems from raid nodes, rarely from Brilliant Glass, 15 BOJs each and various boss drops
4. PvP-Epic gems from arena points

I think he was referring to the Primal Nethers being 10 badges and Nether Vortexes being 15 along with the epic gems. Since both Frozen Orbs and rare gems are set at 10 emblems, with Runed Orbs costing 18 of what is soonish to be the easy-emblem, 15-20 is a reasonable assumption but may or may not tick. Could be 15, 18, or 20, but if I were a betting man (and I'm not), my money would be on 18 unless the price of the Orbs drops to 15 as well. Even at fifteen, it's not hard to depelete a stock of emblems. At 6(.66666666) epic gems per 100 emblems, regemming alone will eat at a player with dual-spec whether it's for raiding or PvP. If they actually have three (or god forbid four because they pay gold to respec between raids and PvP even with dual spec) gear sets...yeah. It's relatively safe to assume that they are members of raiding guilds that may ask or even require long-raiding members with no active use for emblems to donate epic gems [or runed orbs] to a guild bank/fund. I would expect epic gems to do what they did during BC: start with obscenely high prices that mellow out over a week or two as the serious raiding demand goes from 'must have nomnomnom' to 'occasionally need one'. Prices will no doubt remain high no matter how the tide of demand is stemmed with supply. Even raw gem prices aside, JCs will likely make a skinning early on the favorite gem adjectives and do well for themselves as things go on.

Wotlkwiki has most of the profession changes listed

A summarized list:

* Alchemy can use its transmutes to iterate through all epic gems. It's either:

"2 Eternals + 1 epic gem = 1 epic gem of a different color"
"3 number of the same rare gem = 1 epic gem"

Sky Sapphires (rare blue) turn into Majestic Zircons (epic blue), which can be converted into Ametrines (epic orange) or King's Ambers (epic yellow).

Forest Emeralds (rare green) turn into Eyes of Zul (epic green), which can be converted into Cardinal Rubies (epic red)

Twilight Opals (rare purple) turn into Dreadstones (epic purple)

As well, there's a recipe for the Flask of the North, which has been advertised as an arena-usable stat bonus, instead of the Endless Healing/Mana Potions.

* Blacksmithing has 6 new recipes. What's interesting is that one of the recipes uses the [Corroded Saronite Woundbringer], which is BOP to Blacksmiths. This could indicate that BS is getting some BOP item upgrades, or that you're simply going to have to provide raw mats. The recipes themselves sound like 3 chestpieces and 3 bracers, which are possibly chestpiece and bracer pairs for tanking, healing and DPS, each.

* Cooking has 6 new recipes, which look to be linked to the new world events

* Enchanting has 1 new pre-WOTLK recipe, while the 3 WOTLK ring enchants have been given an 8 item point upgrade to account for epic gems.

* Engineering has had its Pyro-Rockets, Parachute, Nitro Boosts, Arachnoweave and Armor Webbing all upgraded to account for epic gems.

There's also a new recipe for the advertised mechanical-healing (repairing?) item

Belt-Clipped Spynoculars have been changed to Brassbolt Rebreathers, allowing Engineers to breathe underwater. The mote-cloud-tracking functionality of the Spynoculars are supposed to be passed onto the Mote Extractor itself.

* Herbalism has had its Lifeblood ability upgraded, from 2000 healing to 3600 healing. It's also supposed to be off the GCD and scale with maximum health, although this is not apparent from the data-mined tooltip.

* Inscription has had its Master's Inscriptions upgraded to account for epic gems.

* Leatherworking has had its Fur Linings upgraded to account for epic gems. There are also 8 new recipes 4 for chestpieces and 4 for bracers (possibly a matching chest/bracer pair for leather casters, another for leather physical DPS, another pair for mail casters, and a last pair for mail physical DPS).

* Mining has had its Toughness ability upgraded to account for epic gems.

* Skinning has had its Master of Anatomy ability upgraded to account for epic gems.

* Tailoring has had its various Embroideries upgraded to account for epic gems. There are also 4 new recipes, 2 for chestpieces and 2 for bracers (possibly a matching chest/bracer pair for healing, and another pair for DPS)

Engineering details at the wiki site:

* Belt-Clipped Spynoculars - Now Brassbolt Rebreather - Permanently attaches a rebreather to your belt, allowing you to breath underwater. Only a skilled engineer can enjoy the benefits of a rebreather.
* Hand-Mounted Pyro Rocket - Permanently attaches a hand-mounted pyro rocket launcher to your gloves, allowing a skilled engineer to deal 1654 to 2020 Fire damage to an enemy at range. The rocket can only be fired once every minute.
* Flexweave Underlay - Permanently attaches a flexweave underlay to a cloak, increasing Agility by 23 and allowing you to turn the cloak into a parachute to fall slowly for 30 sec.
* Nitro Boosts - Permanently attaches overpowered nitro boosts to a pair of boots, increasing critical strike and hit rating by 12 and allowing you to greatly increase run speed for 5 sec.
* Springy Arachnoweave - Permanently attaches a springy arachnoweave to a cloak, increasing spell power by 27 and allowing you to turn the cloak into a parachute to fall slowly for 30 sec.
* Reticulated Armor Webbing - Permanently inserts reticulated armor webbing into plate gloves, increasing armor by 885.
* Goblin Beam Welder - Reagents: Saronite Bar x 6, Crystallized Fire x 3, Crystallized Water x 3, 3 sec

Nice upgrades to the tinkers...looks like the nitroboosts are back to the original pre-nerf duration in addition to the buff to the stats. Likewise the cloak enchants are pretty sexy now...although is the fall slow for 30s a typo? Or did they reduce the CD to that of the normal parachute cloak. Any details on the Hyperspeed buff yet?

Just got my character copied over with 9 stacks of Titanium Ore. Not a whole lot to go on, but some information is better than none. Prospecting yielded:

- 13 Epic gems (but felt a little lucky here. I had one double epic gem prospect for example). I'd guess this would eventually be approx the same drop rate as rare gems from Saronite.
- 15 Rare gems (Again, one double-proc here too so felt above average). This will probably tank the price of rare gems and Saronite Ore completely.
- 50 Uncommon gems.
- 14 Titanium Dust. There is a new repeatble JCing quest to turn in 10 x Titanium Dust for one Jewelcrafter's Token so there's now another source of these outside of the daily.

Epic gems are also available for 15 Badges of Heroism, or 10,000 Honor. The epic gem cuts are 5 tokens per pattern.

Obviously it's the PTR so everything is still subject to change.

Those badge of heroism and honor costs for the epic gems seem pretty low, I was expecting around 20 badges and 15,000 honor.

Anyone know what skill level is required to learn the epic gem cuts?

450 to learn any of the epic gem cuts. 5 tokens per cut.

Arison reported that the Epic Gem patterns required 450 skill.
Patch 3.2: Call of the Crusade
Edit: Delete as needed. Looks like about three of us tried to all reply with the same information at the same time.