Regarding glyphs, it is also a good idea to watch what changes are coming when a patch goes in. The buffing/nerfing of glyphs is frequent. If you watch which changes are being made and are aware of how they will affect the classes (read these forums for a clue), you can exploit the rampant increase in demand that will come from certain glyphs on patch day. I personally don't have a scribe to take advantage of this, but I have bought up all the glyphs of a certain type during a patch and resold them all at a profit. I have also been on the other side of having to buy all new glyphs for my DK durring a patch and there being 0 on the AH.

With strong buffs for every spec and a reputation as a moneymaker, we have a lot of people leveling Jewelcrafting on my server.

Fortunately, a lot of these new JCs do not seem to have mining alts. As a result, prices for pre-wolk ore and gems have skyrocketed.

It's a little ironic that I make more gold selling pre-WOLK ore than I do prospecting Saronite. With all these new JCs undercutting one another it seems the best way to make gold in this market is to feed the frenzy.

Suggestions:

List your ore and gems in stack of 20 Powerleveling JCs will pay a little more for the convenience.
Weekends are your best times. This seems to be the most common time for powerlevelers, and they will pay incredible prices to get those last points.
Don't worry about undercutting. This is a seller's market. Your ore will sell eventually.
Prospect [Fel Iron Ore]. List [Adamantite Ore]. Lots of powerlevelers seem to ignore Fel Iron, even though it is a much better value for uncommon gems. However, they want to prospect [Adamantite Ore]themselves.
Vendor any BC blue gems you get Don't even bother trying to sell them.

And check the AH for BC blue gems listed under the vendor price. Since they really aren't needed for JC levelling any more, I'm assuming the Adamantite prospectors are just dumping them without paying attention to the vendor value.

I find a reliable way to make gold pretty fast is to combine activities that you can do, that are close together. The following is from the viewpoint of an herbalist, but the general concept works for many player types and styles. Granted, it's not going to work as well for some but it's better than not trying.

Doing the Sons of Holdir dailies can be combined with farming Lichbloom (sells for around 70G a stack on my server) and farming crystallized fire. Running into Icethorn also is nice and Frost Lotus. After the auction house smoke cleared, I found myself making about 300 to 500 gold per full dailies run up there, but that's also because I would grind Relics of Ulduar on the flame revenants by the forge (or as I like to call it, in keeping with what seems to be a nordic theme around there, "the fjorge"). You can overkill the dailies there but frankly you'd just end up making even more gold if you did that (you'd be able to sell the relics which seem to go for 25 to 30 gold per stack of 10 on my server). I don't recommend overkilling a dailies set because there are always other factions you can work something out profitable as a combo of running dailies and farming. Ebon Hold dailies and Saronite/Titanium (or herbing) is another example of combining money-making in an area.

General herb farming (or ore farming) in Sholozar Basin is always renumerative, especially if combined with some dailies in the area. It doesn't seem to matter how many farmers are there, if you school yourself to ignore them and simply look for the nodes, you find that your harvest rate is quite nice. I usually find those QQing about other farmers in Sholozar would do fine if they just focused on farming and less on typing strings of long-winded complaints, I never have a problem and yes, like everyone else I do run into days where there are sixteen nelf hunters farming there, it still doesn't seem to be a huge deal. As I'm also a miner, I keep a visual scan out for ore but mainly I'm interested in Titanium since Saronite seems to have leveled off as we knew it would (still worth snagging if you see it). Best point about Sholazar: it is compact with a huge amount of herb nodes, plus a nice variety of them, plus titanium. A level 80 can typically farm anything without much aggro but pulling the occassional mob is no big deal there and only takes a few added seconds to dispose of and loot.

My point being: one can combine activities and progress in various ways while still making money. I have run into people saying "I can't do that while I'm questing" and my typical answer is to cheerfully say "Er... why not?" The cleverness on executing this concept is finding out what you CAN do, what you WANT to do and then isolating the most compact field of motion and action that includes things you can obtain such as farmables, all combined.

Respawn on node groups in Sholazar is less than 10s. Meaning that the only impact farmers have on you is that, if there's one nearby, he might steal that specific node under your nose. Otherwise, you can't feel how many people are harvesting over the zone.

On my Server, the price for Saronite ore is stable at ~25g/stack. But on Weekends, there are always a few powersellers, who dump hundreds of Stacks of ore in the AH for about 19-20g/Stack!

Last WE I bought 200 Stacks myself. If you prospect the ore and use the green gems together with Crystallized Earth (1 Eternal Earth costs ~5g) to produce green rings/amulets, you can produce on average 5 rings/amulets per 25g spend.

These 5 green items disenchant into ~6-7 dust/lesser essences which sell for about 5-7g (dust) and 8-9g (essences) each in the AH.

The green gems alone, together with a few Eterneal Earth, are more than enough to self-finance the bought ore + Eternal Earth. The remaining 150-200 blue gems are pure profit!
The price of those blue gems dropped significantly in the last weeks, but is now stable by ~40-50g in average (red gems ~90g, green gems ~20g, rest in between). Because the money from the blue gems is pure profit, you are able to undercut every other seller of these gems in the AH.

I expect the price of these gems will stay stable for a loger timer, because the most people already spend their emblems and are now too lazy to run heroics every day, until Ulduar arrives.
With the beginning of Ulduar and Season6, the price of the gems will probably start to rise again, so its probably a good idea to safe some of these gems.

This method yields me 5-10k every week, depending on how many cheap ore I am able to buy during the WE.

I reached a breaking point with Inscription this past week. As recommended by this thread, I keep one of every Major glyph that I've discovered on the AH at all times. I don't bother with Minor glyphs or trainer glyphs. The Majors go for about 40g on average, with some of the really good ones like Vigor and Obliterate going for 70g. I sell 5 or 6 glyphs a day, and that's on a low pop server. The cheapest herbs are 30g a stack, and one stack results in 3 or 4 glyphs. Herbalism just isn't worth my time anymore.

When talking about profit, make sure to attribute it to the correct action. Prospecting a stack of saronite ore yields raw green and blue gems. Your profit here is the difference between market value of raw gems minus the cost of ore. Turning greens gems and eternal earth into dust is a different process, with its own profit calculation (market value of enchanting materials minus cost of raw gems plus eternals, assuming the rings have no market value of their own). Depending on prices you might have made the same profit in less time by buying raw green gems on the auction house.

800 prospects
1000 rings --> 1000 DE's

I guess that is worth about 8000 gold but, damn, that's tedious. On my server, I break even on the blue gems from prospecting saronite and the profit is in the green gems I can cut or convert into enchant mats. But I have limits to what I'll do for some fake gold. I've given up on this tactic and I'm looking for things that give a higher return for my time or are at least slightly more entertaining. Uncut green gems can be had for 75s which is worth it to me to skip the steps of prospecting and selling the blue gems.

Alchemy really isn't that big of a money maker anymore. On my server, flasks sometimes even sell for less than the herb costs. This has made selling herbs very profitable for me. And while some of the best selling alchemists buy whole stacks of my auctions, the average guy who just wants mats so a friend can make a flask for him is more than happy to buy the herbs split in the exact size he needs, even at a higher price. Why? Because it's more convenient.

You can sometimes get 30% or so more than you would otherwise get for listing the same herbs in full stacks.

It depends on your personal view.
When I started buying ore in the AH for prospecting a few weeks ago, the sole purpose was getting enough blue gems out of the ore, to make some profit.
With 3.08 the market for blue gems nearly crashed! The value of the gems dropped ~50%, while saronite ore dropped only ~25% (atleast on my server).
The margin of the buy ore -> sell blues method was very small now. On an unlucky day with very few and mostly green gems, you could actually make a loss. There were a lot of people in the AH, undercutting each other which made it difficult to sell a lot of gems in a short amount of time, atleast if you had to be profitable.
I stopped trading for 1-2 weeks and thought the golden times of moneymaking in wotlk were over.

Then i realized, that instead of seeing the green gems as garbage, seeing them togehter with eterneal earth as the base income and seeing the blue gems as pure profit, there is a relativley fast and nearly riskless way to make tons of money!

Sure, i could buy the green gems on the AH and skip the part with the saronite ore and the blue gems, but I think this way is not so good considering gold/time.
The prospecting of the ore is about 1/3 of the total production time for blue gems, dust and essences. If i skip the prospecting, my margin in the essences/dust section would increase, but my 100% win margin in the blue gem section would completely fall away.

It probably depends on server prices for saronite ore and raw green gems and their availability. I prefer buying saronite ore stacks at 20g instead of 1stack green gems at ~25-30g (on my server).

Shure, but you could use 4/6 of the green gems. There are also often 2 green gems when prospecting 5 ore.
Then there is always the possibility to trade gems with your guild mates who normally vendor the green gems!

They smaller your margin, but atleast for me I was always able to make a small profit with the dust and the essences alone.

Buying green gems out of the AH together with eterneal earth for dust/essences ist the enchanters point of view.
Buying saronite ore out of the AH for blue gems is the jewelcrafters point of view.

I just combined these two aspects. I am able to sell 2 different products (gems and enchanting mats) instead of only one, which allows me to sell more products at the same time instead of relisting tons of dust every day.

At the very least, if you can't sell the dark jade or shadow crystal (which is often what happens) the least you could do is cut them and sell them for 50s a piece to a vendor. I know its not much, but if you have 60-80 of them just sitting in your bag and can't get rid of them, 30-40G is better than nothing.

Not really, turning uncommon gems into rings/necklaces & DEing is always profitable.

(Disclaimer: I've rounded off slightly in a few places below, and taken prices from my server. Yours may obviously be different)

Consider 200 saronite ore, and value it at 25g a stack. We prospect the ore and cut the rare gems. Using cut gem prices from my server we get:

- Cut Scarlet Ruby: 95g, Cut Monarch Topaz: 50g, Cut Autumn's Glow: 45g
- Cut Twilight Opal: 45g, Cut Sky Sapphire: 25g, Cut Forest Emerald: 20g
- Average cut rare gem = 47g

We'd get 9.6 gems on average from 10 stacks, giving a return of ~430g (after AH fees) from the 250g cost of the ore. A profit of 180g on the rare gems alone.

Onto the uncommons. You'd get around 50 uncommon gems from 200 ore. Let's assume you could sell them on AH for 1g50 each (some more, some less) so you have ~70g here after AH fees. 4 types can be cut into rings. Let's say 12 get sold to a vendor for 6g, the other 38 get made into rings. 38 rings needs 76 Crystallised Earth. Eternal Earth at 8g each means you need to invest ~60g into Earths.

This makes 38 rings which DE into the following:

1 x Infinite Dust - 37.5%
2 x Infinite Dust - 37.5%
1 x Lesser Cosmic Essence - 11%
2 x Lesser Cosmic Essence - 11%
1 x Small Dream Shard - 3%

Assuming: 1 Infinite Dust = 4g50, 1 Lesser Cosmic Essence = 5g, 1 Small Dream Shard = 2g, we get:

42.75 Infinite Dust = 192g
12.5 Lesser Cosmic Essence = 62.5g
1.14 Dream Shards = 2.3g
Vendor Price of unused gems: 6g
Total: ~250g (after AH fees)

You "spent" 70g on not selling the rings, and 60g on Eternal Earths. Your profit here is 120g

If we just bought 200 ore, and sold the uncommon gems we would pay 250g, and get about 500g back (430 from cut rare gems, 70 from uncut uncommon gems) for a profit of 250g.

If you add the step of ring making and DEing, you pay out an extra 60g for Eternal Earths (total outlay 310g) but earn a total of 680g (430g from Rares, 250g from enchanting mats) for a profit of 370g.

Summary:

Prospecting and Cutting probably takes about the same time as ring-making and DEing does so the "Gold per hour", which is what we really care about, is much better from prospecting. Prospecting and cutting rare gems, and selling the uncommons, makes you 250g. If you just bought the uncommon gems & Eternal earths from AH and made rings makes you'd make about 120g in the same time frame.

The reason you do both is simply to diversify your income streams. You can't just solely prospect because you saturate the market with gems and you drive ore prices up, and gem prices down. Using the uncommon gems from prospecting as an additional revenue stream means you earn more gold per stack of Saronite ore. You therefore buy less ore and make less rare gems and you don't impact those markets in a negative fashion so heavily.

He was talking about Dark Jade and Shadow Crystals, for which there are no green JC designs like Sun Rock Ring for Sun Crystals etc.
I just cut the Dark Jade and vendor the cut ones. Shadow Crystals I cut into Balanced, and vendor the regular ones. The Perfect Balanced Shadow Crystals sell every now and then for 8g on average, so I always keep a couple listed.

Prices fluctuate quite a bit, so it pays off to time the AH. Eternal Earth and Shadow both go for 7-8g on Draka, and I pick up every single one listed below 6g. It may take a few days before cheap ones show up, but I keep a good stock. Saronite Ore can be picked up around 20g/stack, but often it's all 25g plus in AH.

Inifinite Dust sells immediately around 4.75g and has been stable, GCE have come down from 23g to 11g in the last two weeks. 3 Lesser CE sell for more than 1 Greater CE, go figure. I almost exclusive list LCEs now. There's also almost always Crystallized Earth cheaper than the equivalent in Eternal Earth. People can't do math I guess.

I wish. That would dramatically change the value equation but the average is 30g on my server and that's not factoring in AH fees and relisting. Saronite sells for 22-25g.

You can send mail while crafting the rings. Mailing should add very little overhead. You can also open mail while mid-DE. It gets interrupted when you auto-loot, but it still allows you to be doing both tasks at the same time.

Not to spend too much time on this point, but there are also mods that can speed up mail transactions, and you may also be able to use a guild bank to bypass mail entirely. In particular if your enchanter is on a different account and you dual box (or if it's actually a different person, like a guildmate), you can have both characters park at a guild bank and do things at the same time.

I wouldn't be too quick to throw away the dark jade and shadow crystals. At least check the current market each time. There are many JC non-miners that want to do Icy Prism. On my server, 20 dark jades/shadow crystals or chalcedonys can sell for up to 100g uncut.

Shadow crystals are still worth a reasonable amount, at least on my server.

The [Shifting Twilight Opal] pattern has not yet been implemented in the game, so survival hunters (and possibly druid tanks) still opt for [Perfect Shifting Shadow Crystal] over the alternatives.

It's amazing how the economies differ between servers.

With Frozen Orbs around 110g, not too many people do Icy Prisms on Draka, since you only make money if a Dragon's Eye drops, or a Scarlet Ruby plus another good gem. Maybe just to pick up a few skill points, but surely not to make money.

Just checked the AH, Dark Jade is worth just more than the vendor price. I picked up a stack for 7g to cut and vendor. Chalcedony can be made into Crystal Chalcedony Amulets and DEd, so they're in line with the other "useful" uncommon gems and go for around 20-30g per stack on Draka.

Time to plan for Ulduar. Following some earlier advice I recently went to transmute mastery (over potions mastery). Transmute mastery in Wrath is definitely better than transmute mastery in BC. Potion mastery on the otherhand seems to have dropped.

But we knew that.

Here are my predictions for Ulduar. Transmute mastery will be devalued because it is assumed new helms will come from the last or penultimate boss (Prince, Archimonde, Kael'thas, Kel'Thuzad, or the fact thus far we haven't seen T7 helm on vendors). Which means it will take quite a while before new helms from 10 man and 25 man start streaming in.

On the otherhand, with the changes to Spirit and regeneration as a whole, I 100% believe the demand for Mana potions to go up. And furthermore, with Ulduar raid encounters I believe demand for DPS-potions, such as haste pots, will also go up.

Short version is, I am expecting demand for potions to go up once Ulduar comes out; specifically dps or mana ones. And potion mastery should be assumed to increase your brewing by 20% or so. (BC numbers, unconfirmed for WotLK).