I don't believe that this will be the case. The demand for those epic gems is minimal because of their unique status. Each person will need much more than one epic gem to fill out their gear. I'm not saying that every server is going to see 800g red gems, but the fishing epics aren't a good baseline for what regular epics will be selling for.

Supply and demand. Supply of Fishing Gems is fairly low. Demand is fairly low due to them being Unique. Demand is probably higher than supply, honestly, but most average AH browsers are finding a single epic gem not worth the differential (generally 4 more stats for ~500 more gold).

In 3.2 Supply will be high and Demand will be high.

Looking at epic fishing gems right now may be inaccurate, but if you looked at them shortly after they became available, that sounds pretty accurate. On my server I saw reds from 300-700G the first week. This inclines to the personal belief that epics in 3.2 will probably be worth it to anyone prospecting their 200G stack of titanium, however it's not wild profit land. 50% profit or more still isn't shabby.

We are unlikely to see the equivalent of 3k Glyph Books*, again due to supply. Glyph Books were rare, demand was high, price was high. Gems will be fairly common, demand is high, price will be moderate.

* - Oh, there will be 3k gems on the AH, I don't doubt, but there should be dozens more at a more normal rate.

Many misconceptions about mineral node spawns here. There is no "spawn time" for mining nodes.

Any given zone has X number of spawn points. Let's say 60. At any given time, 20 of those will have a saronite node on it. Titanium is a rare version of rich saronite as far as I'm concerned.

You mine a saronite vein, another pops up elsewhere. That's how it works.

As posted earlier, they may be in groups of 4, but that's not confirmed.

No it's not. Who makes titanium dust? JCs. Who wants to buy it? JCs. According to you, the people that are rushing to buy it are also the people rushing to sell it. How does that work? Now, you could handwavey-theorise a population of JCs who don't care about getting all the cuts and are therefore willing to sell their powder. They are not the ones that prospect in bulk, so the net effect will be minuscule. Powder will come on the market in a month or so, once the power-players have got all the recipes and start selling the powder on to the people who can't be bothered to bulk-buy and prospect. Powder will sell for at most 1/10 the cost of a damaged necklace, probably less as the supply will be higher and the demand will be dropping by then.


Where will you get your dust from? You'll have to outbid the other JCs to get the ore in the first place. If you have a stock of ore, or the clout to buy a bank full of ore, then you'll be better off buying recipes to diversify your own portfolio. If you're a bit player with half a dozen stacks of ore - in all honesty, who the hell cares?

I think selling Dust could easily be more profitable than buying a lot of patterns. It's 40 dust for one pattern. If Dust sells for 20g each (quite a cheap price I think, I can see a lot of JCers picking up some to get to 10 for that next token) then any pattern would have to make 800g over your existing patterns to be worth it. If you already have Inscribed/Glinting/Veiled patterns, then maybe you never get that 800g back from buying the Luminous pattern.

Maybe there's enough of a demand solely for Runed that you can get rid of all your red gems at top prices without having to buy Delicate/Bold until prices drop in a month or two's time, or until you've had time to do a few more daily's and get the patterns that way instead.

If Dust happens to be sellable at 40g per, you really have to have a good reason for trading in your dust for that third or fourth pattern of the same colour gem. I don't think there will be a lot of dust selling either, but I think from a profit perspective it's not as clear cut as you might think.

The flaw in your logic is that most of the cuts will not be worth getting. There is little benefit in getting all of the recipes that are currently available. There are only a handful of cuts that turn a decent profit. The bulk of the current JC alts exist to produce a handful of the more profitable cuts, prospect ore and make rings. They will be content to pick up the handful of useful cuts which will turn a profit and simply sell the powder on day 1 to the JC's that just have to have that Agi/MP5 cut, because you never know.


I'd argue that the people that are prospecting in bulk are more than content to stick to a few select cuts that turn a guaranteed and reliable profit than concern themselves with having every cut.

One other use for dust (tokens) that has not been brought up is dragons eye. If the stats on the new enchanted tear stay the same, it will be the gem of choice for Hunters as well as other classes that benifit from 2 or more stats. At +10 to a stat, for a hunter the only loss from a tear to a delicate cardinal ruby is crit and a very small amount of AP, as Int goes to straight AP as well as providing additional mana. These will also fill out Meta reqs., as well as socket bonuses. These are much better (currently on the PTR) than the +6 to all stats before, because you do not lose any stat points (previously you lost 2agi on top of the 8). This leads me to believe that these will be the way to fill out slot bonuses and metas, at least for some classes, and for others will put them very small percentages behind. The only problem will be getting dragons eyes, but 10 dust would do that as well.

Yeah, but you really think that the people that can't get the dusts themselves (the people that haven't stacked titanium) are the same people that already have so many tokens saved that the next most profitable recipe they can purchase is the Luminous orange? I don't think so. The ones that will need the dust are the ones that were caught off guard by this; they either haven't been doing their dailies or they didn't stock up anywhere near enough titanium. That being the case, unless they are complete morons (which I guess is a possibility), they'll be spending those tokens they got from purchased dusts on patterns like Runed/Bold/Delicate/Rigid, which will be easy to make that 800g back from.

Sure, they could wait four days and get the pattern, not having to front any gold (in fact they would make about 50g), but then they lose out on the initial rush of everyone looking to regem the gear. They would probably still make more than 800g from this, but it would just take significantly more time.

Now, I concede your argument for the people that have stocked up on titanium and/or saved up tokens. Those people already have the profitable recipes that they could want, in which case it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to jump in on the temporary large demand for tokens. I would still contend that almost any recipe you can pick up will EVENTUALLY return on an 800g investment, but maximising profits would come from selling those dusts at a premium the day 3.2 launches, and picking up that less profitable recipe four days later.

So I think some of you profit maximizers are also looking a key member of the market: the Completionist. He wants many, many recipes, potentially even some "bad ones". He certainly wants the top 40. He already does things that make no sense like buying 200g Damaged Necklaces -- they've never stopped selling on our realm. He's going to spend 800g worth of powder for a pattern with little chance of making money. His friend bought an Ulduar recipe the other day for 1500g which he has almost no chance of breaking even on. That friend -- the Greater Fool -- somehow believes he just tapped into a gold mine, when in fact he has done the opposite. (That guy, when 3.1 came out, bought 10 glyph books for 6000g, he "made" 4000g profit selling the one good glyph he got for 100g apiece and thinks he came out ahead.)

The Completionist and the Greater Fool are both on your server. In meaningful numbers. They will suck up the supply of dust, ore, etc. at some price many of you will wonder about the "logic" of. There is no logic.

I'd say there's an awfully large number of people who don't get it, can't do math, don't care, whatever. The notion you won't be able to sell Titanium Dust for a completely illogical value is wrong: you will be able to. For how long? Who knows. Arguably at 60g, the average glyph book is still overpriced as you can get a glyph no one would ever buy and the "expensive" glyphs are selling for 4g each in pretty small quantities.

Sholazar has exactly 389 spawn points, not all of which have been recorded as yielding Titanium or Rich Saronite. I will pay a large amount of money for a video of someone finding ~ 100 ore deposits in one pass of Sholazar.

This "theory" is contrary to emperical evidence of what the world actually looks like and how damn aggrevating it is to deal with mining hackers or multiple competing high speed mounts. If your theory was correct, individual take would not nosedive as it does with competition and the production of any teleport hack script would be stratospheric.

No one should see a barren zone under a high %/1-in-4 constant respawn model and yet, that is exactly what happens. If there is a dynamic spawn, it's a hell of a lot smarter and actively hiding respawns from heavy mining activity than anyone has suggested - or it has a delay to meter production.

With regard to the first point, I agree that those people will exist. There may be quite a few of them. If there are, you could easily see dusts going for 40g each, which is 1600g per pattern.

On the second point, as an example the Luminous pattern is only profitable at all if it allows you to sell gems you would otherwise be unable to sell. Let's say you have 30 Epic Orange gems ready to go on patch day. Maybe you can sell 15 Inscribed, 15 Glinting, and 1600g worth of dusts. Or you can sell 10 Inscribed, 10 Glinting and 10 Luminous. In the latter case the Luminous pattern hasn't generated you any money at all, as you could just have sold those gems as other cuts for the same profit. In fact buying the Luminous pattern loses you 1600g in Dusts you could have sold.

There is logic to being a completionist, it just is rarely justifiable in the short term. I became a completionist on my scribe strictly for marketing reasons, for example. If I can offer "every glyph" for a flat cost, that is more enticing. It certainly draws attention.

I also take issue with the idea that a 60g glyph book would be worthless. I think some people on this board have problems with the idea of a "sunk cost." It is inconsequential to post glyphs on the AH (60 copper deposit). Assuming a 4g sale is 50% profit, it would take approximately 30 expired auctions before any glyph would become entirely unprofitable to make. I think you can probably sell many of those glyphs "no one would ever buy" before they lose all profitability. Having a glyph book cost 60g means you have to sell 30+ of that glyph EVER to make a profit. This seems to be a no-brainer, to me.

I'm not sure that this transfers to JC, though. For one, the deposits are much higher. Investing in only the best cuts seems to be the best option.

If your server has every glyph on the AH selling for less than 5g, you have either a moronic collection of scribes, or highly rational consumer base (possibly both). I suspect hyperbole on the part of the person that posted that this was the case on his server, and if it wasn't that case seems pretty aberrant.

Postscript: Out of morbid curiousity, I just check both factions' AHs on Stormrage, and the inscription market is as healthy as the ones on Maelstrom are. I understand that anecdotal evidence is viewed with caution anyways because it is not empirical, but please don't use pure fabrications to make your point (even though your point happens to be mine too.)

If you could always use that ink to make another glyph that always sold, then you'd have wasted that 60g. This of course is not at all the case in inscription, because the supply is effectively limitless compared to demand. JC would be analogous to this if you were buying raw gems from a huge supplier and cutting them, but most of the discussion now is centered on cutting self-provided gems, where supply is limited. You have to get the dusts' worth in profit as completely extra from the new cut in order for buying it to be cost-effective.

This is making it more trivial than it actually is. Why wouldn't you have simply sold 30 inscribed in the first place? Why anyone ever bothered picking up any recipies beyond one of each type if they could've as well sold 60 bolds instead of 20 bolds, 20 delicates, and 20 fractureds? It depends on your supply again, and the demand. The case is, if you're selling two types of cut gems you're selling less gems than you'd be selling if you were selling three types, assuming your raw materials supply can cope with it. You can sell 15 Inscribed and 15 Glinting. Or you can sell 15 Inscribed, 15 Glinting, and 15 Luminous. Unless you stock and sell in a vacuum. A paladin healer won't be buying your glinting gem. A rogue won't be buying your luminous gem. Yet, the market consists of both rogues and paladins, not an infinite amount of paladins.

I know I'm being blunt, but it's really expandable: even if you take into account the fact that the whole server's demand may (or may not be) larger than your supply, it's saturated by different people, you've got competition, and so forth, in the end selling multiple types of gems is simply going to sell more: whether it's worth 1600g and on how long a run, is a different question.

Especially on the rare gems side of it the supply of saronite ore and cheap raw rare gems is definitely more than what I personally could sell with just a few simple patterns everyone and their dogs have already. True, the case that makes titanium and epic gems different, is that the supply of titanium is marginal in compared to that of saronite, and you may well end up in a situation where you simply don't have the raw materials to create a product to sell with. If you don't hit that point though, there are benefits into having more products.


I'll ninja-edit on this. My experiences differ, and the above is the reason. Definately, it's fairly pointless to invest into dump cuts nobody's going to buy. Whether it's interesting to invest in more than just runed cardinal ruby is a different story. What's the best cut? Is it runed because it sells more? Or would you be better off buying fractured or delicate which sell less but encounter possibly less competition? How large is your raw materials supply in compared to gem demand? Are you just hit-and-running the market or are you sticking?

Especially if you prospect saronite for "profits" and you're sticking with 2-3 "best" patterns you're doing your own head in.

I fabricated nothing to make the point. There are 2808 glyphs on the Stormrage AH right now. Exactly 28 of them are selling for more than 4g. Of those, it's likely none will sell.

We have a moronic collection of scribes and a somewhat rational customer base. But the fact remains, inscription is a flat out non-moneymaker on this server -- and we are not the only one. So respect intended, that's our situation.

As for that "60g glyph book" maybe we're dealing in different universes, but let's say the glyph is.... Glyph of Garotte (insert your worthless glyph here)... Something no one will ever glyph. You will not sell 30 of them. In fact, making them is a waste of ink and vellum, to be honest. It's useless. Now, of the 60 some-odd new glyphs that came out with 3.1, I think most people actually in inscription will agree there are many "zero sellers". Many. I'm no longer show which were the new and which were the terrible old, but the bad glyphs are plentiful.

I have every glyph recipe. Average book price? More than 60g. I am not close to breakeven and will never get there. It's fine. I wasn't making gold doing it and on most mature realms with long-time players who are "into" professions, inscription is not about making money per se. Jewelcrafting by contrast often is. But even with the ability to take out the lotto aspect of glyph book buying, people will overpay for recipes. There is no doubt. Current damage necklace prices? 300g. Dragon's Eye? 90g. Enough said.

I'd add Seer's but that's kind of it, the changes to frostbolt somewhat mean mages are going to reduce haste stacking in their PvP kits too so the odd shattered and forceful are out.

Of for sure, it totally is. I don't disagree with anything you've said at all. I did preface my argument with a "Maybe'. Maybe it's not worth getting a Luminous pattern, maybe it is. It totally dependants on your supply, demand for the patterns you do have, your competition, prices, etc. Maybe you can corner a specific cut on release day and make 30g more profit per gem on that cut than you would on others. There's a wide variety of factors.

I was mostly aiming my point at the guy who said "No-one will be selling Titanium Dust on patch day". There are reasons that some JCers might decide to sell dust on patch day. Those reasons are logical, and they may also be profitable. There's no way to predict if that will be true, but it might be.

There is certainly a cut-off point where buying the next pattern becomes a loss compared to selling the Dust you would use to buy the pattern. Whether that cut-off comes at buying 'Glowing Dreadstone' or whether it comes at buying 'Tenuous Dreadstone' is something we'll all have to figure out for ourselves.

I'd definitely add Enduring to that list. I sell Enduring Forest Emeralds every day and I don't see any reason for that to change with epic gems.

Valorous Dreadnaught kit has 242 defense rating; Conqueror's Siegebreaker kit has 257. It's tiny amounts, but generally defense is only really desireable while making your way towards the cap: above the cap it becomes less desirable than other tanking stats. Whilst gear progresses, and people might hold back buying epic gems for only their higher end gear (eg. naxx-gear on alts gets rare quality gems, and so forth), the demand for defense rating might see a decline (this obviously depends on itemization too). Back in TBC, a lot of people gemmed defense during the first tier or two of raids, but hardly anyone gemmed it in Sunwell grade anymore. This may change depending on how items are designed, though.

I think Enduring Eye of Zul will be in reasonable demand. The T9 tanking items as shown on the PTR have a fair bit of yellow sockets with a decent +Stam socket bonus. I think those yellow slots will be filled with Enduring Eye of Zul by the majority of tanks. I could see Steady (+resil/+stam) being another good cut to sell, but I suspect the demand for the other cuts will be minor. A purple gem will usually be better than a green for activating a blue socket bonus or fulfilling a meta-gem requirement.

@Medici

Apparently I checked the AHs on Stormreaver thinking I was rolling on Stormrage. Just looked at your server's alliance side AH. Apologies are in order for accusing you of fabrication, but you should certainly understand that this isn't even close to any experience I've had before with inscription on any server. It appears you have three severe knuckledraggers that are... umm... single-handedly (I know that doesnt work) ruining one of the two best money making professions.

Above the cap, the only better tanking stats are stamina (duh) and dodge rating. I myself will be using def/sta gems in yellow sockets when the socket stamina bonus is high enough. This is a potential problem though, since with epic gems, a socket bonus is worth less than with old gems.