Well the current crop of metas on the WotLK wowhead site are uniformly not of the "more X than Y color gems" variety. They are all simply minimum gem requirements of a particular color(s).

If that goes live, it seems a safe bet that it will be fairly simple to meet those requirements, esp. since you can have an extra two colorless sockets by virtue of being a blacksmith.

Are there other ways to obtain these Dragon's Eyes yet, or do JCs currently have to make the choice between profession progression and profession perks? It's a good thing that they have something to drop these tokens on other than recipes because the recipes are finite, but if it's something else irreplaceable that's sort of a rock and a hard place =/.

My understanding is that you do the JC daily and get a token. After you do enough dailies, you can buy a Dragon's Eye or recipe. Then you can do more dailies and buy more Eyes or more recipes.

The issue is a jewelcrafter will have to choose between their perk (awesome gems) vs their possible profit (making gems for other people).

It only matters in the short-run (when there are many valuable recipes to take as well as the powerful upgrades) and the long run (the potential of half a year spent doing dailies for the obsessive). I suspect it won't matter for the vast majority of WoW players - they will start getting patterns as they level up and they won't want to waste an epic gem on non-epic gear. Thirty dailies should be enough to begin a jewelcrafter on their path to profit, especially if they're in a consortium. One of the interesting things about the system is that it will only take a week to cover a perceived hole in the marketplace.

Zugzwang. The play to make is to wait for everyone else to make their decisions and take that into account. You lose a few days of selling in order to gain a few more days of selling at a competetive advantage. It might also be useful to keep a few tokens lying around so that if a new market niche opens up you can have one week free reign while everyone else plays catch-up. I expect new niches to be mostly the result of patched changes to existing metas rather than changes in game content or metagame strategy, but they still happen and can be capitalized on.

I hope there'll be other ways to get recipes... with the extreme numbers of gem cuts, only being able to get 1 per week (well, 5-8 days depending on what you're getting) seems awfully slow. I'm counting roughly 43? rare cuts on wowhead, so thats 7 months to get them all... assuming you do the daily every single day and skip all the meta gems.

In comparison in TBC I got all the rare cuts I was interested in inside a month (and I was pretty damn lazy, too), and the ones I wasn't interested in are all pretty cheap cuts.

I realise Blizzard are interested in differentiating crafters by having them know different recipes etc, however thats typically been more for epic recipes rather than rare ones... if I want to get my equipment gemmed and need to talk to 5 different people to do it, thats not diversification, thats pain in the ass.

I hope the recipes will also be available as random world drops. Well into the expansion they remained very nice and valuable drops when you found one while running an instance, it was always a nice surprise. Unlike most of the blue BoE weapons or armors, which in the later part of BC were worth more sharded than they were on the AH.

JCers also hate them as world drops because everyone and their dog rolls on them in a party.

People seem to be talking about this as if it's JC-specific. Isn't is supposed to be how they want to do recipe distribution for all professions in the future? It's a viable distribution method for professions like JC, enchanting, and inscription. I'm a little less sure how they could make it apply to things like tailoring, BS, and LW. There aren't usually very many non-BoP items that are in high demand, and the there are about two "sellable" pieces each in LW and tailoring (leg enchants). While Ench, JC, and Inscription can use this system to moderate market demand, tailor/LW/BS using this system would really only limit the rate at which the crafter themselves can make us of it. Unless those three professions start getting more end-game-relevant gear to make, which would tilt the game away from instances in a way that blizzard probably wouldn't like to do.

If they did something like primal nether/nether vortexes (before being able to buy with badges) they could easily do it with those professions as well. Just have the tailor/LW/BS make the "unenchanted" version and require a BoP item to be used on it, making the item BoP. It would make the crafters money and keep people from being able to simply farm gold for their gear.

How would that make the crafter any money? If you craft the "mundane" version of the item without the rare BoP drop, and put it on the AH, then anyone who gets the rare BoP drop gets the item- I don't see where money passes hands to go to the crafter. The crafter certainly can't charge much profit if any for the "mundane" version of the item, because it'd be trivial to craft for anyone ,the hard part being the BoP piece. So where is the profit coming from?

Personally, I think the primal nether system was close to perfect. The flaw was that whether you got a nether or not for a run was entirely dependent on your group composition. Instead of making the primal nethers rolled items, I'd have liked to see each boss drop a "nether shard". The nether shard would be a quest item type drop that everyone in group can loot, and you could combine some number of shards to make a nether. Now you always get the same number of nethers per run, and it isn't dependant on winning a roll, and the nethers become sort of a crafting resource.

The other existing system I like is the simple cooldown mechanic- shadowcloth, spellcloth, and primal mooncloth were all valuable because of the cooldowns required. I'd like to see that idea of a mechanic taken and worked further- instead of being a cooldown you use or lose every 4 days, have "crafting points" that are earned daily up to a limit. For example 5 crafting points per day, maximum of 50 saved at any time. Doing a cloth transmute might cost 10 crafting points. Making an item that would have previously cost a nether would instead cost 40 crafting points in addition to normal mats. Or even do both systems- allow the crafter to spend 40 crafting points OR a nether instead.