You already need to be level 55 to learn grand master mining

The downside is of course Death Knights: Free 100% speed land mount, increased mounted movement speed and a nice set of blue quality items. I have seen more than a few guilds on my server that consist solely of two DKs and their AH activity screams "gold farmer".

I'm not sure what Blizzard can do to address this without hurting normal players, but I would really like to see them do something.

Can someone confirm that the change is level 60 (and not 65, which would make more sense to me)? I only glanced at the patch notes while downloading this morning, so don't remember clearly.

Anyway, the reason why this is at least a superficial fix to the mining hack is it buys blizzard time. It takes a non-consequential amount of time to level from 55-60 (even for a death knight). That time sink should discourage some from hacking altogether (razor thin margins means any time wasted is unprofitable), and will buy GMs time to notice and act on offending behavior.

I'm not saying it'll curtail the behavior entirely, but it should do something. And it at least shows that Blizz is working on a fix.

Titanium Ore is going crazy on my realm. I checked last night and there were only a few stacks up for 9g a piece (180g per stack). I snatched them up and then put up my 35 stacks at 15g/piece. When I checked by a couple of hours later, all but 5 had sold, and I was still the only person selling.

Timing is everything I guess.

Anyone have a plan on what you'll be charging for Epic cuts? Standard tip seems to be 5g on my server, but maybe I should ask for more on these specific ones?

It's going crazy on every realm I guess. But yeah, timing is everything and with patch coming tomorrow we might see all kind of AH behavior. I expect that lot of people will unload their stocks they planned to sell as soon as realms go live. It might influence price of titanium for a short time, but as some posters already said it won't last long, price will go up when initial rush passes.
As for price of epic cuts, it depends. You might see limited people having certain cuts in first few days so you might ask for more. Again, it's about timing.

It would now be a good time to post those awkward blue gems people are going to need for socket bonuses because the JC gems are no longer prismatic.

Especially because you can use [Nightmare Tear] to fill your meta needs on blue sockets.

I presume your intended link was to the +10 stats, unique-equipped gem which is still a prismatic (and in fact the +10 version is new).

Touche

I do however know a significant portion of JC raiders who are lazy enough not to get the cuts for the purpose of accumulating wealth. How many JC's do you know picked up JC for raiding and never really followed through with dailies or if they did, sold the Dragon's Eyes and did not pickup patterns?

Really curious now; how much are the epic gems going for on the US servers?

Currently they aren't selling at all.

I'm just kicking backing and watching the show at the moment

Changed my mind about picking up cuts when I saw like 20 JC at the Dalaran trainer and decided to wait it out for today at least to let the dust settle.

Most of my guildies have enough honor/badges for gems that they need and they will probably be sourcing in house for the cuts. I assume this is going to be common practice for most raiding guilds and since those tend to the the early buyers, sales are going pretty slow at the moment.

What I am doing is sitting at AH, refreshing the pages and grabbing cheap uncut gems. I've managed to pick up 20 Cardinal Rubies so far for 160g-ish when Titanium Ore is still at 350g a stack. Its too good a bargain to pass up.

At this rate, I won't be surprised if my time is better invested this way instead of blindly getting cuts in the hopes of selling a few gems before I get undercut.

Edited to add: Cut Epics are now on AH for anywhere from 450g to 700g in case anyone is interested.

Day 0:

Epic gems are selling for around 300G uncut on my server. Blue gems are selling double over normal price (monarchs at 40G, sky saphires for 30G, etc). I dumped titanium powder for 50G/each and have sold a few.

The servers are unstable and not likely to come back on for some time.

The current trends over the weekend are enchanting mats for all these new loot pinata instances. People are coming out with gobs of gear in the 10mans as they are a cake walk. Abyss crystals are plummeting in price as the new 5 man drops them like rain. Expect that to take a hit.

Overall i made 3k in about an hr emptying out my bank. I expect that to increase by tomorrow selling all my old blue gems to make way for new epic gems.

Prices are holding up at 300g on Dragonblight for uncut. 400-600g for cut. Couple guilds have already downed the first boss.

Forecast: Dump your abyss crystals before people start farming the living daylights out of the 5 man. The first bosses and the 5 man drop weapons.

There's no real market in epic gems at the moment. Stuff is listed, but it's widely mispriced - as in 500g Eye of Zul, 210g *cut* Bold Cardinal Ruby - and not moving whatsoever. Titanium also isn't moving based on the widely varying prices for a relatively small number of listings and undercutting in trade chat. Hard to say how much of this is no market and how much of it is the instability in the servers making it very irritating to even list material on the AH.

I agree that Abyss Crystals will become absolutely worthless. The 5-man non-heroic takes fifteen minutes to do. It's only not being spammed right now because it takes longer to zone everyone into the instance than to kill everything.

I dumped a ton of banked up materials since servers came up. Eternal Air, Eternal Shadow, Blue Quality gems (Twilight Opals especially, because of meta requirements) sold a few stacks of titanium ore for 300-350g, tons of GCEs for 20g. All in all I pulled in roughly 4500g.

Over the next week or two I expect the prices of epic gems to rise back up some. They've gotten as low as 250g.

This is almost spot on to the PTR observed ratio of 1 epic, 1 rare, 6 uncommen gems and 3 Dust per Titanium stack.

It's too late to make money off the mechanic for 3.2, but I found confirmation today that this is still correct. A Bag of Fishing Treasures which I obtained pre-patch had a Waterlogged Recipe (new with patch) in it when opened post-patch.

I have 30 Icy Prisms stocked for that reason and will give you a short post on the results once the EU servers are up.

Titanium ore has the exact same drop table as Saronite ore, except that in addition you have a 1/4 chance of an epic gem and 3/4 chance of a dust.

I looted my 14 previously unopened prisms and got what appeared to be a normal looking distribution of rare gems as was expected, plus the 11th had a Zircon.

I really doubt there will be a huge increase in people using purple gems to hit Meta Requirements. Most will use the +10 stats one and leave it with that.

The socketbonusses are about the same as they were and with the extra stats our epic gems have gotten the difference is just to big to valid using the correct color gem in most cases.
I am one of those people who always had to get the socketbonus even if it was a tiny dps loss but with the difference becoming so big now even I am gonna switch to socketing red gems only.