Day 1 Overview - JC Market

Invested over 10,000g in titanium ore. Prospected everything:

~350 Dust
~120 Epic gems
~140 Blue Gems
~A TON of uncommon gems

As planned, I picked up obscure recipes in hopes of being the only competitor. Had enough tokens to purchase 18 epic recipes.

All notable sales were in the obscure gems market:

3xStormy (329g)
3xSteady (329g)
And many more.

Premium cuts did not yield as much profit due to undercutting. I suspect prices won't fall much once stocks are depleted. Guildies liquidated hundreds of badges on cardinals, only to dump them at the AH for 200g each or less.

Looted 6700g from the mailbox this morning, with the large majority of my epic gems still uncut and unsold. Things to note:

- Rare gems still selling like hotcakes
- Uncut rares selling VERY well
- Grab eternal earth while you can, Cosmics Essence and Infinity Dust selling above average prices. Will convert all uncommon gems into DE mats.

All in all, fantastic investment, whoever said otherwise can now eat their own words.

You do realize you need to make back at least 400g in to cover each recipe before you can call it a profit, right? At least on my servers (actually, I am rounding down, on my primary server Dragonblight it's closer to 500g).

For the life of me, I can't figure this one out but... Cobalt Ore, Cobalt Bar are selling for absolutely batshit insane prices. I am talking 300-400% markup. This was not part of my plan, but it so happened I had 30 stacks of Cobalt Bars on hand (was planning to use them for something else) and they're gone.

My best guess is people are powerleveling Blacksmithing combined with people spending so much time farming Titanium no one is farming Cobalt.

In a sense, I'm marking the recipes as a loss. I do want to be able to cut the gems myself for convenience sake. I'll call it a profit when I make more than I invested, simple as that.

I do believe some of the new engineering recipes use cobalt? For one, the new MC hat requires 8 Bars. Jeeves requires 30 Cobalt Bolts as well (but I doubt that makes a difference right now, considering the INSANE mats required).

Now that the AH is actually working again, epic gems are looking in the 200-250 range uncut (with price wars hammering down cuts to that range sometimes as well). Several listings at several times that, but those obviously aren't selling. Much, much larger supply than demand, even for reds.

Still have lots of people trying to sell Eye of Zul for 30-50x what Forest Emeralds went for. End result has been zero sold through the AH since the patch went live.

More Icy prisms stats, 52 openings gave me:
7 purple gems
6 dragon eyes
137 blues
[sample size 52 Icy prisms]

Long time reader, first time poster here...thanks to everyone for all the great information!

I prospected 90 stacks (360 prospects, 1800 ore) yesterday after the servers came up stable, and yielded the following:

~108 Epic Gems
~97 Blue Quality Gems
~400 Green Quality Gems
~270 Titanium Powder

Competition on Arthas has been brutal. Non cut gems around 175g as of this morning, with cuts varying in price from 175g - 300g. I seem to be doing well with offering JC services with tips varying from 50g - 150g based on number of gems cut. It seems a LOT of people were saving for the patch on Arthas. It's hard to tell if much is even selling right now. I'm considering holding off on putting any gems up on the AH for a few days to see how it settles.

Blue quality gems are selling slightly better than before, perhaps a 5-10g markup from what we saw last week. I have done pretty well selling cut blue quality gems for a decent price. I will probably push most of my stock of blue quality gems out through the weekend and hold on to epics for another time.

Titanium ore is stable around 220g per stack, with no real fluctuation since Monday evening.

Happy selling!

That's low, but it's not that far outside what alchemists will be able to do. 60g Scarlet Ruby + 20g Eternal Fire + 40g transmute = 120g market price. They can certainly produce one per day at a competitive advantage to anyone who must sell at 200+.

What you're seeing in the mass honor dumps is a combination of people seeing "free" money and a deliberate price war.

For casters the +10 all stats gem sucks, and casters won't be using the Agi/+critdmg meta, since we don't need Agi. So every caster will be needing 2 blue gems, for a lot of casters Purified gems (+sp/+spirit) are the best option. However the Purified Twilight Opal cut is rare world drop, so the first two cuts I bought on my JC were Runed Cardinal Ruby and Purified Dreadstone, because there were no Purified Twilight Opals on the auction house, and I don't have the cut on my JC.

Yeah. It's mostly dumping badges and honor right now, so it's just a wait until that ends. Also on the news, the prices of rare gems have indeed taken a bit of a shift upwards.

Alright, so it is quite clear to all of us what is happening with the JC market. Everyone is Honor and badge dumping for gems and absolutely flooding the market. How do we capitialize on this?

The obvious thing to do is to start buying up these uncuts for later use, but in order to determine that this is a viable long-term strategy we need to attempt to pin down a fair price for the epic gems. This is probably near impossible, but if we even have a loose guideline we can come out of the badge/honor dump with a metric ton of cheap epic gems.

The only problem aside from that is the weekend player factor. I suspect we are going to see another surge of raw mats on the market once the weekend players get on and then we should see some stability within 2 weeks after that.

Thoughts?

Just updating
24 Icy Prisms gave me:
4 different epic gems
63 rare gems
notably - no Dragon's Eyes

Well, you can work off the opportunity cost or expected value of a method of produicing a gem:

Stack of Titanium = ~ 1 epic gem (random color)
Transmute = Rare gem + Eternal + cooldown
Honor = 10,000 Honor
Badges = 20 pure/10 mixed color (yes, this makes no sense)

The one that's not going to be used much once initial stockpiles are exhausted is badges - Even 10 Conquest takes a couple hours to do and have far more valuable applications. 20 Conquest = Runed Orb, not Zircon. And there's gear. So it's really unlikely that a lot of people will be producing gems this way. Opportunity cost is much too large.

Honor - Figure this takes an hour and a half of spamming Strand of the Ancients (or possibly less of Alterac Valley if your battlegroup races and you win a lot). You can compare that to other methods of gold farming and determine at what price it becomes not worth doing.

Transmute - This is easier, as you can use the cost of raw mats and guesstimate what the alchy wants to make for pushing a button. This is basically free money to him and, as I've gone over before, he doesn't need to value his transmute at that much to be widely profitable and guarantee sale from undercutting other methods.

Stack of Titanium - This is the messy one. You have no idea which epic gem you are going to get, and some are basically worthless. This is the only source of Eye of Zul on the AH, and probably most of the Zircons that people are actually trying to sell versus use themselves. You can look at how cheap blue and green rares were for an idea of what these are worth compared to the "good" colors.

So, in my opinion, it comes down to honor and transmutes versus titanium for the long term. I can't value honor and transmutes with a straight face for more than 200g for reds. And they get to pick. Prospecting doesn't get to pick and so I would say there is huge downside risk in paying too much for titanium. Titanium powder is going to sharply decline in value once recipies are picked up and you can't control what epic you get. That puts you at a large pricing disadvantage to the others because you need to cover failures and they don't. Since they will undercut you all day, you need to instead take that into account at the raw materials phase.

I'm sure you can develop a model for this, but I really can't see how there is any money to be made speculating on 300g+ prices for red gems, let alone any others. At that point, playing battlegrounds yields 200g an hour and absolutely everyone will do it until prices (quickly) crash in liquidation.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, trying to evaluate honor and badge sources with opportunity costs will not yield accurate and precise indicators for epic gem prices. Opportunity costs of badges and honor require so many unit conversions that they no longer feel like comparable numbers. No one goes to the AH, sees a Majestic Zircon, and thinks "is this in line with 1/6th of a pair of Valor bracers?" Nor are prices set based on how long it took to farm materials. Market prices seem highly correlated with ore prices. This makes sense because there is only one step, both in logic and in the game, between ore, which has a precisely defined value in gold, and the gems themselves.

Why not? People clearly think they can make money doing just this. You didn't have 20 people standing on the honor vendor and plastering the AH with hundreds of cheap gems for nothing. WoW players may be stupid, but they are nowhere near stupid enough to miss out on something that makes hundreds of gold per hour if that's what epic gems go for. Hence why they are going for considerably less.

The honor production situation is not helped at all by the fact the new Arena season didn't launch simultaniously. No new gear = one thing to dump honor on.

Badgers are not relevant because they're so clearly better used on Runed Orbs and T8.5 gear once pre-patch Heroism stockpiles are exhausted.

This is not true at all at the moment. You have the good epic gems listed at 150g or less raw, which is less than titanium stacks were going for *before* the patch. When you adjust for the actual outcomes of a prospect (odds of getting unmarketable gem), there is no relation at all between titanium ore and what the epic gem sells for. Note I said "sells" as opposed to listed at. You still have large numbers of long-term listings at prices that clearly will never move - and more telling, you have intermediate and even clear cut-rate prices below those that have attracted absolutely zero arbitrage.

This isn't remotely like Saronite which (a) is infinite and (b) always sold in the 12.5g-24g band, which is in all cases much, much cheaper than Scarlet Rubies. When your raw material is costing more than your finished product, you don't have a corrolation; you have a bad idea.

EDIT: If anything, it makes much more sense to value epic gems off the honor factor rather than titanium because at normal rates of production on a server, honor earned exceeds titanium ore mined by at least two orders of magnitude if you value both in epic gems theoretically inserted into the economy. Not only can anyone earn honor (zero barrier to entry), there's no competition to it. You have 60 people que BG's for 90 minutes, you generate 600,000 honor. Factor in that they can introduce exactly what is most valuable at the moment and you're not even on the same planet with a mining-prospecting model.

Needless to say, I think the supply has far outreached the demand as far as epic gems have gone. Prices are continuing to fall as there is just complete saturation of gems (of all colours even, not just the 'premium' ones) and buyers are starting to wane. On Ner'zhul, a very JC heavy server (although what server isn't?) even some of the more obscure cuts have proven easy to get ahold of less than 48 hours after 3.2.

The long-term cash in on epic gems is pretty much going to end up like the superior gem market has I think. Technically supplies of epic gems are less, but really you will continue to see a large influx of them from honor and transmutes. Not to mention that it will be simple to use honor to regem new pieces of gear in the future, meaning the only contribution such gems will have to the server economy is if the player pays a fee to get them cut.

Ironically, the Dragon's Eye market seems big right now. Genrally I see at least 20-50 of them up on the AH, and this morning when I did my JC daily on my Mage alt to get one, it was the only one posted on the AH. I didn't post it for a large markup (as more will likely appear as more people log on and do their daily), but the supply has definately been strained thanks to 3.2. It could be something worth looking into.

The thing is, plenty of people who believe they have no use for honor keep ending up at the honor cap, due to playing Wintergrasp just to enable the continent-wide buff for leveling alts, or to enable access to VoA. A bunch of these people are likely to think of this as "free epic gems", no? And so I'm not sure the chronic oversupply will ever end -- these people won't decide it's "not worth doing" based on value of gems, because value of gems doesn't enter into the reason they're doing it. I suspect demand will go down more than supply will.

This might change when a new arena season starts, if a pile of new honor-without-arena-rating gear shows up on the honor vendors. I predict a temporary dip in supply and a spike in demand, as "spare honor we got for free" is spent on things that need gems rather than on producing gems. Blizzard told us we'd have a two-week warning when the new arena season starts, yes? So, this is something we can prepare for.

That is if you are "farming" honor though. A lot of people just do the WG quests each week and maybe a few holiday BGs here and there. Extra honor is just a by-product of their normal routine and honor is not the only reward. In that context, the return on investment there is actually significantly higher and it will provide a very steady supply of gems.

We have a situation here with both PvP and PvE (daily dungeons) where the casual player will significantly add to the supply of gems. And many of these people are not yet using these gems themselves because the cost/benefit ratio is not there for them. Eventually they will start to consume these gems as well which will even out the supply/demand, but the market is going to get pretty saturated first.

We're saying the same thing. The population of people doing honor specifically to buy gems will absolutely explode if it looks like the market price is moving towards where it *is* hundreds of gold per hour to do. That's exactly what you'd expect in a situation where there's no barrier to entry. So you get a bubble at warp speed and prices collapse. You've already seen it happen once; there's no reason to believe it won't happen again if prices start moving that way.

There's just no way to create a titanium-ore based pricing model when you have this unlimited parallel source.

Cyclone horde side has an active xrealm AV group going that nets 1700 honor per win, with games taking between 10 and 12 minutes. They lose very rarely. It's definitely not the most exciting way to farm honor, but it is the most efficient I've found. At this rate it doesn't take much more than an hour to get 10k, and can take less if you end up getting a lot of HKs along the way.

The amount of honor earned for casuals doing pvp (read me) is no where near 10k per hour. I do not pvp much, as my Hunter is strictly built for PVE. In this case, I will do WG once or twice a weekto do the weekly quests, but that is only because I am a JC, who has figured out the honor cost of epic gems. I have honor saved up that I have not spent yet, as I have 20 of each epic gem waiting for prices to go up. The glut on the market is most likely due to people who had months upon months of farming nax/os/voa for one piece of gear, or nothing else to do, as well as helping freinds alts run heroics. Once you had bought heirlooms, there was nothing else. As a latecomer to Wrath, I had over 200 emblems of heroism saved on accident. We will no longer see this amount server wide, as all badges can be better spent on gear/orbs, and anyone farming heroics for gems is most likely a JC doing it with a rational econoomic model. The Honor market is the same way, with people having nothing to spend it on. This will dry up as well, and as people get more badge gear (conquest) or new gear from raids this will be soaked up quickly. Only serious PVP'ers are able to earn large quantities or Honor at a fast clip, and these will likely stay near the Honor cap to be ready for a new arena season.

Also, with the dungeon being opened one boss at a time, people will not get large amounts of gear until week 5, when you will see large guilds running 4 full instances, for a total of 20 pieces from ten man, and 30 pieces from 25 man. This along with massive amount of badges stretches out the timeline that people will gear up, and puts a new horizon of 5 weeks as to when most players will realy be willing to part with large amounts of gold for gear gemming.

With all this being said I believe that patience is truly a virtue, with the exception of unloading Titanium Ore at 300-350 a stack seems like a no brainer.

It should be noted that this explosion of stock at the start of the patch has set a precedent in terms of pricing. Players, particularly casual ones, are likely to see the current values as a standard by which all future prices are evaluated. This will make increasing prices, even if demand begins to exceed supply, a difficult, slow process.

Also contributing are the number of people who are practicing patience. It's not remotely unlikely that almost every server has speculators with significant stocks of epic gems that can't be moved without suffering a loss on investment. As prices begin to rise more and more of these speculators will put some of their stock back into the market, stabilizing prices and potentially pushing them down again.

Until these speculators have cashed in their assets, either at a loss or slowly over time to maintain profit, the market prices are not likely to climb significantly.

Are abyssal crystal being sold for the same price pre 3.2 - post 3.2, even with a normal-dungeon dropping epics? Taking into consideration that consumers are upgrading their gear increasing the need for enchants (of even better quality in hope of increasing the margin between their old gear piece and new gear piece), i wouldn't be surprised