Out of simple curiosity, I went and did some counting. I have 14 (non-meta) gem slots on my current gear. I would like all of these to be epic gems shortly after the patch comes out. Assuming 10k honor/10 badges per gem, I currently have enough (combined) for 12 gems of 3 different varieties (Red, Blue, Orange). I also (being a PvE mage) only have one set of gear to gem. Hybrids will usually have another set (if this is an offspec set, to be honest, it may not get epic gemmed), those who PvP will have another set (again, if this is casual, it may not get epic gemmed).

Lets use some gross assumptions, then, for illustrative purposes: Assume each character needs 10 epic gems to fully re-gem. Assume each character has the ability to procure, through honor/badges, half of these gems. Thus, for a 25 man raiding guild with *no* extraneous characters, they will need 125 epic gems. How many guilds field 25-man raids on a server? Perhaps 10 guilds? That's 1250 gems needed from external sources JUST for these guilds to re-gem their main toons. Throwing in 10-man guilds, alts, second gear specs, larger guilds, you name it, and I would fully expect there to be demand for upwards of 5k epic gems before accounting for new gear from new raids. Not all at once, of course, and certain gems (Namely Red gems) more than others.

Short-term (one to two weeks after the patch) I would expect epic gem prices to be absolutely ridiculous. I would not be surprised at all to see Runed and Bold cardinal rubies going for 800 to 1000 gold on the first couple days after patch. For this period, demand will outstrip supply by a huge margin - even for those who can buy gems with badges and honor, not all of them are Jewelcrafters or have access to jewelcrafters with the designs for the gems they want.

Long-term is still pretty much anyone's guess. I highly doubt that badge-acquired gems will be a major source, especially as badges can be used to purchase t8 gear after the patch. For a lot of PvE raiders, honor also won't be a source for gems, as they have very limited sources of honor.

Also keep in mind not everyone plays PvP. I raid with 2 different characters for a total of 3 specs. Each spec has 10-13 gemslots that are in need of epic gems. I have no honor banked and have used all my conqueror badges on my alt for gearupgrades and on my main I used them all to buy runed orbs for my alt.

If I would have to rely on honor and badges I can buy maybe 10 gems from valorous badges on my main but thats about it. Ofcourse I'm a JCer with a ridiculous amount of Titanium ore stocked up but I'm pretty sure there are more people like me with virtually nothing saved up for epic gems.

I think half the people playing don't even know epic gems are coming in next patch (altough those people probably don't care about gemming their gear with epic gems either ).

Basicly demand and supply are about the same as in TBC so I think it's pretty safe to go by TBC standards as in 300-400% of current blue gem prizes at least for the first few weeks.

This. I think discussion in this thread highly overestimates the number of people on a server who actively keep updated on PTR patch notes. That casual majority is likely unaware of any changes other then what pops up on the WoW Launcher.

Now the casual majority won't for the most part be buying epic gems, but they are also unlikely to be banking emblems and honor to sell epic gems for profit.

There will be a quick influx of Epic Gems from banked Heroism and Valor emblems, however that will dry up quickly and the volume of Conquest emblems going towards epic gems will be much smaller. For anyone who's not a serious raider in Ulduar, there is a long list of Conquest and Valor gear, along with runed orbs that will be much more wanted as they begin to get their first conquest emblems.

What about the influx of people banking titanium ore? I know of people that have 200+ stacks. I doubt we'll be seeing 300-400g gem prices.

If you know people with 200+ stacks, it means they control a large portion of the supply of Titanium on your server. Either that, or you just have a lot more gold farmers than my server does. I'd say the average person who is "in the know", and is banking Ore, Honor, and Badges will supply roughly 40-50 gems in the first 2 weeks. This is completely overshadowed by the incredible demand there will be by the major raiding guilds of each server.

I have a question regarding titanium ore and patch 3.2.

After the first patch notes were released, I’ve been stacking titanium (+280 stacks right now). For several weeks, the price of titanium went really high in my server, and it was really hard to find a stack for less than 200g. However, this week the AH is literally loaded with titanium stacks with prices ranging 90-120g.

I don’t understand why such a change in a few days. Did I miss something in the patch notes?

Everyone is an "expert" here, but that's not the way the game works. Why the heck are runed orbs still 600-700g? Ever single conquest badge should be liquidated now because there is no way they are going to be worth nearly 40g come 3.2 Yet they aren't. People have gold. They will spend it. Gems will be expensive until there is an unlimited supply of them. And even then, they will be shockingly overpriced. It was true in TBC. It will be true now.

Most people are not profit maximizers. Many are gear maximizers however. Look for very stupid gem prices and fluctuations on the order of 200-500% early on. The wise will sell gems when high and hold when low. As a 100-stack Titanium Ore holder, that's my plan.

Possibly unrelated, but I have noticed an increase in the amount of lvl 1s in Org selling 50+ stacks of titanium ore and have poor english and math skills. I read something about a mining exploit too.

I have seen this several times, unfortunately. People are teleporting directly from node to node and mining them from underground somehow. If you have nameplates on, you'll see the nameplate appearing just barely above ground level, the node disappears, and the nameplate does too (without moving away). I first saw it about a week ago and saw it again yesterday, so it would appear Warden hasn't been updated to catch it yet.

This is definitely putting a disproportionate amount of ore in the hands of the exploiters, who may be willing to sell it more cheaply than most. But I don't think it will affect the overall supply on most servers, since the number of people farming it ensures that nodes are getting mined pretty much as fast as they can respawn, exploiters or no.

There are two mining hack variations. One is an extremely fast speed glitch where the character will be moving at ~500%+ speed but is still attackable. It's almost like a phase abuse, but occuring in areas that aren't phased. I managed to kill one of these in Wintergrasp.

The below-the-map miner is different. If anything, it seems like you can outrun it - I can still get a fair amount of ore out of Sholazar when one is there. However it's completely invisible and untargetable, but its name still shows up in the combat log.

As far as titanium stockpiling, it doesn't impact supply in and of itself. A server only produces X titanium over Y time, set up as a random outcome for saronite spawns. The only thing that changes is who has how much and in what form. If a lot of your titanium is being inhaled for Titansteel or sat on by speculators and gold sellers with the mining exploit, that will impact prices. But unlike Dire Maul and Arcane Crystals, there's no way to goose the server to increase titanium supplies. Halls of Stone is the only instance that will spawn titanium and this is nowhere near as quick and reliable as Dire Maul East.

The only real variable in total raw supply is how good your miners are at finding the spawned titanium and how much goes to one faction or another. If you want to increase the supply, I'd recommend trying to develop a good pattern for searching Icecrown or Storm Peaks. On most servers, Sholazar will probably be mined at 200% or more of capacity because it's relatively easy. All that more mining attempts there do is steal from each other and, on PvP, kill each other.

A large factor is the psychological evaluation of the item in question. Whether or not a player has the ability to sell the item at the prices they see on the AH, they'll assume it is worth that much regardless. As such, players who don't have an oversupply are often unwilling to compromise on the perceived value, even when prices begin to fall (SEE: that one player who keeps listing a BoE epic at 5000g long after prices dropped to less than 1000g). Moreover, many players who don't have large stocks will similarly hold when prices are low. If they can't sell to match their perceived value, they won't even try.

These people may have unrealistic expectations regarding the market, but they're still a part of it.

You get that your analysis has a small hole right? Node respawn is a function of node mining. The more people mining everything in site, the more titanium there is. Sure, it's the same fraction of saronite as always -- more or less -- but there is absolutely more titanium being mined on most servers now that it's valuable than there was, say, 2 months ago.

You can see this easily in the price of saronite, which the big miners can't give away at 18g on Stormrage, for example. It's down as low as 13g just so people can get rid of it.

That's not a hole. Once you hit the maximum respawn for a zone, adding additional miners doesn't do anything to the total production. They just get in each other's way.

The maximum number of miners you actually "need" in Sholazar to maximize respawn is probably 3, possibly even 2 if they're both paladins or DK's. Between the 300% speed mounts, the geographic size and placement of the nodes and one whack mining, Sholazar isn't difficult at all to saturate. Sending in six miners will not help production other than assuring one faction gets almost everything if they're mostly from one faction.

Icecrown and Storm Peaks are a different story because they are rightly disfavored as logistically difficult and unreliable for any given miner. Icecrown in particular because a lot of the nodes seem to wind up involving significant ground combat, acrobatics, or major risk of death from heavyweight/swarm mobs. There's only two like that in Sholazar; any miner knows which ones I'm talking about.

Overall production is obviously up since the prospecting was announced because you had a significant increase in miners out there trying, but it capped almost as soon as said announcement. The production *is* capped and I'm pretty sure it's within 10-20% of what Blizzard expects.

I maybe didn't say it very clearly in my post, but that was my point. Those using the mining exploits are getting more ore than they otherwise would (and therefore depriving other miners of it), but it's not going to affect the supply at all because of the over-abundance of miners pretty much around-the-clock. If there's any economic impact at all (and if so I think it's pretty minor), it's probably a small gain for those of us grabbing up ore off the AH, because the exploiters seem to be selling it cheaper than legitimate miners. But the small price dip over the past few days doesn't signal any big change or reason to worry.

Respect intended, it is a hole. You are talking about respawn in a given period of time where multiple miners are present. Let's talk about zone utilization. At a low value of titanium, a zone might be fully utilized 50% of the time -- no more respawns during that time no matter who comes. Now, with value so high, the miners (and exploiters) are pushing zone utilization to 90% or more on many realms. There is, in fact, much more titanium at the moment than there was 2 months ago.

This was just posted in the professions thread on this site. I'm at work, so I can't confirm this; can someone please? This isn't going to help those that were hoping to corner a certain design for the first few days.

My server has someone doing the mining hacks as well, which is unfortunate. I did end up picking up stacks at 120g per stack which in comparison to the AH is a steal (going for 200g per stack in the AH).

So, my question is for the math heads out here.

Assuming the following things: Titanium has been purchased for an average of 10g per piece (200g per stack). I want to pick up the highest volume items and sell them for appropriate amounts right ouf the gate.

Which cuts should I learn (i.e. in what order?) What should I be pricing those cuts at? (from what I gather, its the Str/Agi/Spellpower/Stam ones that are the most popular but I could be totally wrong?)

Also, I know that red cuts go for more, should I waste my JC tokens on alternate cuts or just sell the gems I get uncut in the AH? I.E are there alternate color cuts worth it beyond the red ones?

Zone spawns of ore are not limited. They are in fact infinite. More people mining = more ore. Try an insanely high pop server like Blackhand, where there were more than 80 miners in Scholazar the second month of WotLK. You could literally just fly between 3 nodes and one of them would appear right after you had mined the last one.

There are still a few dozen miners in Scholazar on Blackhand at all times, and you're estimating 3 being able to max out a zone?

This would seem like there is a minimum amount of nodes that should be up at a time, so lots of people mining would not max out a zone. But a few people mining would still have much less ore/time because there would be much more travel time.
Interestingly if this is how it works the best time to mine would be when the zone is packed with miners.

My exact thoughts. It seems likely that this is actually Blizzard's intention. From a business perspective, do you want to make the people that can only play during prime times happy, ie the vast majority of the people playing? Or do you want to make happy the small percentage of people that can play at absurd times?

The only way "maxing out a zone" would be possible this way is if there are more miners than the maximum number of nodes that can be active at one time, which seems highly unlikely. Also, it seems like it would be most efficient to have a something like a guild "raid" on a zone, where you get as many miners as you can, each with only a small portion of the map to farm.

You can see this principle in action in the Borean Tundra. The lake just west of the D.E.H.T.A camp is the only source in the zone for Tiger Lily, and the nodes are highly concentrated. Often my leveling herbalists will get stuck there, continually harvesting the herbs as they spawn as quickly as I can harvest them.

I can, however, recall farming that lake out entirely, though 5 minutes is usually enough for the vicious cycle to start up again. Because this case is related to one subtype of herb nodes rather than all herb nodes within a zone, it may not work exactly the same as zone-wide mechanics.

The best way to test would therefore be to gather enough miners together to cover all the nodes in a given zone. Through Gatherer or manual chat entries when mining you could get approximate spawn times and locations and use that data to discern exactly how the mechanic works. The only issue is gathering a sufficient number of interested miners, and maybe dealing with a GM when someone who doesn't appreciate Sholozar being monopolized reports you out of spite.

It should be noted, however, that while such a raid would max out the zone the personal yield for each individual miner would likely be far less than if there were just a half dozen or so flying their usual routes. We can't say for certain without a in-game test, but that's at least what intuition dictates.

That's not in line with what I believe Grayson is saying in the following post.

While he doesn't state how close the nodes are, I take this statement to mean that when mining a node, you saw another one pop up on your radar; in other words, nodes respawned faster than you could mine them. Maybe your experiences are different than mine, but I know I rarely can achieve that kind of personal yield.