Remember that the economy varies from server to server.

Here are a few ways to tell if Jewelcrafting is profitable on your server. This can probably be adapted for other professions as well...

• Look at the AH gems section. Are there a lot of uncut rare gems? Do they sell for significantly less than the cut ones? If so, that's a sign that there are too many Jewelcrafters who have given up on a particular gem because it's difficult to sell. Remember; if it was easy to sell everybody would snatch up these underpriced gems and cut them for profit.
  
• Write down some names and prices for these auctions. Plan to check back later (say at the end of the evening). How often have the gems sold? Or were the original sellers undercut by two or three other JCs? You want for at least half of your auctions to sell during "prime time" hours during the evening you post it.
  
• Now look at the prices for cut rare gems from BOP recipes. Are they selling for much more than the trainer cuts? If the price difference is small (10G or so) then that's definitely a sign of a saturated market.
  
• Now look at the AH listings for recipes for BOP rare cuts. How cheap are they? Check back later (within the posted listing time). Are they selling? Here on Fizzcrank they're selling for under 800 Gold each. I would consider this a sign that experienced JCs consider these rare recipes unprofitable. And if the RARE ones are unprofitable then think how bad the trainer recipes are!
  
• How expensive are pre-WOLK materials used to powerlevel JC? If so, that's a sign of a lot of people powrleveling.
  
• Responding to an earlier comment, don't assume that the problem is limited to high population servers. I'm hearing complaints from people everywhere. Basically, JC is a victim of it's own success. We get flexible stat bonuses and a reputation as a moneymaker. Personally, I'm keeping JC for the stat bonuses, but I'm looking elsewhere for my gold.

I'm on Fizzcrank Alliance (medium pop server launched with WOLK) and the ratio of JC producers to consumers is way out of balance here. I'm considering leveling an alchemist alt, since the balance seems to be the other way here.


(Note in each case I'm talking about WOLK gems. You can ignore the BC ones.)

Two tips to live by if your heavy into AH.

1. Know the names of your competitors, if you have room put them on your friends list. I have several cases where some of my competitors suspiciously log on/off after each other consistently. I have few pairs of these. One pair is on my watch list as one of them always lists "high" compared to the other. This might be to pick up sales after the low side sells down or it might be because they are trying to whack the prices people scan into auctioneer.

2. Know who buys your stuff. It is not uncommon for some buyers to be my competitors. I am quite willing to exploit this activity by selling through a secondary; either on same account or not. You can usually play these people out a bit at a time, don't go overboard.

I have found that by knowing who I am up against and whom is buying my stuff helps a lot in setting pricing as well as knowing when I need to check my auctions in order to re-list as needed. I am not beyond canceling auctions and listing them again just to undercut one of my known competitors. Now this process only works on items with low deposit costs. I usually deal in Glyphs. There is never a good time to not sell these. My friend regularly keeps three hundred of them up at any one time. Even 48 hours usually never cost more than one silver to list.

As for server specific pricing. I haven't seen a change in Saronite. We do have way too many jewel crafters as I can profit more from uncut items than buying, cutting, and listing. Icy Prism has never been a good idea on my server. Dragon's Eyes are close to 200 on weekdays and under on weekend. Titansteel is drying up because nothing new has been introduced to use it.

What I am trying to determine going forward is, can we expect further expansion of the trade skill derived items? Specifically is there any point to keep JC tokens? I have bought all the "good" ones and gotten the dropped ones I found useful. Rare drops are out as the pattern sells for too much compared to possible payback. So now I am currently banking Titansteel results, arctic furs, and not spending JC tokens.

I bought like 60 stacks of Saronite ore earlier today from the AH for 18g/stack....We'll see how it goes when I prospect.

Gems really aren't up there in price....+19 spellpower was in the 80's last night...Not sure on the others.

Pure speculation on my part, but the most likely scenario is that future raids will make new recipes in every tradeskill available via rep or drops, which will in part require existing rare trade mats (arctic fur, titansteel, CD cloth, dragon's eyes etc,). That's the way they've done it in the past at any rate. Demand is relatively low for many of those right now so I agree that now is the time to stock up. Dragon's eyes especially - if there's BoE gear in addition to BoP gear, JC's are usually in the somewhat unique position of being able to craft goods for every class and every spec, whereas tailoring, leatherworking, and blacksmithing tend to be limited by their armor type.

I'm a JC since the early days of TBC when the main tank quit the guild and we didn't have any other JCs. I'm unoffically the guild's JC so I have to have almost every pattern under the sun to cut gems. It's been a mad race trying to find gems that make money and ones that the guild requires. I"m sure when uldur hits that I'll be swamped at login for each gem. I'll be stockpiling gems when it starts to hit PTR.


I went ahead and started the pattern that I found in the first post. I've been buying up ore on an alt at 23G/stack at max, prospecting, making blue gem cuts that sell quickly, and then make jewellery to DE.

Now auctioneer has shown that I've made about 200G converting mats that were lying around above and beyond what I've bought the stuff for. I was foolish and was doing the 2 EE into the ring instead of using gems. I wasted almost an entire 300G round doing that at first until I learned better. Mistake, but I learned from it.

What I'll do is make all the green gems into jewellery and ship them off to my DE alt. Then I'll head over to the AH and scan the blue gems that are up and what I can cut from them. I ship them off to the alt and he puts them up. Process takes about ohhhh 30min to prospect, cut, create, and DE including travel time. Putting up 350G of Dust that sells like hotcakes (i price it as close to the bottom rung person as possible with almost 1s difference). Stuff sells quick money comes in, I don't have to do jack.

Tomorrow I'll try it on an epic scale spending 1000G if I can to see what my ROI is on this process. I'll either get MORE money for my alts epic flying mount or I'll end up having to farm/daily for a few days to bring the funds back to where they were.

Why is that a mistake? The 2xEE rings have a higher disenchant value than the ones made from green gems. They are about the same profit per ring on my server, it's just a matter of which ones raw materials I can get for less that day. Prospecting and selling the blue gems adds a lot of clicking and shuffling around of inventory so I favor the 2xEE route.

This is invariably true. HOWEVER!

1. I took 2 stacks of EE and made them into rings then DE'd them
2. I took all those green gems I had got from prospecting and cut them into gems to sell.

In the end I had a bunch of rings to de and a ton of worthless gems that didn't make me a dang bit of money and I'll end up vendoring them all. Not as many as round 2 in which I had almost double the amount of enchanting mats for 2/3 the amount of prospecting.

Consequently the SMRT (like a FOX!) move would be:

1. Take stacks of green gems and stacks of Crystallized earth into jewellery and de
2. If I have more EE left over make the good rings out of them and de.
3. Mail excess gems to alt to hold over or put them in the bank for the next round.

I totally boned the first round by JUST making rings and cut GREEN (not blue) gems thereby eliminating a large pile of stuff to DE and make even more delicious gold.

Since I do this in the 45min that I get up in the morning to prepare for work this allows me to start making tons of stuff while I take a shower, make a meal, etc. I need this to be as expedient as possible. It's amazing how many stacks of ore you can prospect while you make coffee


Side note:

On my server:
stack of ore=24G
Stack of EE=160G (8/EE)
Dust=4G

I would have to pray that I get at least 4dust/ring if I did the EE straight up to break even. This isn't cost effective to me.

Only, I believe, if you have a logitch g15 or similar device that allows you to bind a key to doing multiple things at once. WoW won't let you do tasks like this over and over with one button. Probably for a good reason.


On a solid note I made 1000G this morning by doing what the OP did and my above explanation. I'm experiencing a run on EE so I'm going to have to wait till they come down. Some GENYUS decided to put them on the AH for 15/EE which is naughty naughty in my book.

I figure if i can do this once a day I can have enough for my epic flyer in no time!

PS:

One of the problem I'm running into is the lack of gems that I can make from certain blue gems. If you are deadset on going this route make sure you explore your market, see which ones are regularly selling high (auctioneer can tell you or a piece of paper tracking a few days). From there figure out how to get them, do your JC dailies and buy the recipes. I'm thinking of investing a ton of cash so I can make some of the better gems but it's a toss up. I could ask one of the other JC folks in the guild to make my gems for me and sell them. Never know. I'll end up stock piling them for when I do get them then slowly introducing them into the market.

PS2:

Watch when you put up your gems. I've been putting them up haphazardly and it's cutting into my margins. I'm going to let this entire batch run it's course, then sell all my gems at once. This way I undercut everyone ONCE instead of undercutting them, then they undercut me, then I double undercut them. I noticed i was losing 4-5 gold/gem when this happens and this isn't cost effective.

PS3 (i like the xbox360 myself):

Due to uldur coming soon I've decided that one out of every stack of gems when I have multiples I will put in the bank to hold. I.e. 3 monarchs and 2 rubies I put 1 of each in my bank and cut the rest, unless I only have one, in that case I make the gem for it. In this way I shall have a nice stock pile of 20 gems or so to save for the day when uldur opens up and I can flood the market with oodles of gems at a higher price. The market WILL go bezerk then with everyoen buying the gems to make so buy some now while the market is glutted with stuff and horde them for the rainy day of gold!

Around the time others here reported EE prices going through the roof, the same thing happened on my server. Weird ! Prices went from 7-8g to 15g and are now back to 7-8g.

Make sure to do the math before spending JC tokens on cuts. For example, Solid Sky Sapphires go on Draka for around 5g over the uncut stones. Listing one in AH already costs 2.7g, so you better make sure it sells.
Dragon's Eyes sell around 170g, so you basically spend 3x170=510g to get the design.
That means you have to sell over 100 Solid Sky Sapphires to just break even, maybe even more if you have to relist a lot when being undercut.

You have to take into account that when you buy a dragons eye and sell it, that's it forever - it's gone. This isn't the case with designs, prices of gems you have the patterns for can and will fluctuate (hello ulduar), and you have to keep that in perspective when deciding whether to buy a design or a dragons eye.

Yes, some of them can sell for around 3k on my server. The tanking ones tend to be the most popular, although your best bet is spamming trade chat for a while saying you'll sell any of them - wait for a buyer and then purchase what they want.