Skajin

The thing that made me the most money over the last 2 days was actually meta gems.
For one I sold tons of cut gems, but I also sold about 150 raw gems to ppl levelling their JC so they could cut epic gems. Since I had no competition there I didnt exactly give them away cheaply.

Epic gem business has been very underwhelming so far on our server too, I actually ended up selling about half my titanium for ~350g instead of prospecting it.

 

Talgog

Yeah, that's certainly well above what you're reliably going to recover from it on prospects unless you are selling dust at huge markups.

At the moment, it looks like the hot potato landed squarely on prospectors who got their legs cut off by the badge/honor spam. Miners make money, speculators on raw titanium sales make money, prospectors get clobbered.

 

Duilliath

Dropped to roughly 60% on my server (50g vs 80g earlier). Not exactly unexpected, as there's a flurry of people running heroics and that new instance.

An thenn tehy wuz al ded. Srsly. (Exodus 1)

 

Karrub

Consider the scope of things when discussing a hideous drop in gem prices. Assuming the goldfarmers/hacks have been effectively abolished for now, the time of cheap titanium is going to be over. No server was left untouched by the flood of ni hao titanium ore, and the price of ni hao titanium ore was low not because of any market fundamentals, but because of the fact that they simply don't care. The same reason makes them push saronite ore below vendor prices on auction house. Their business is mind-numbingly straightforward: they collect, spam trade, if they don't sell, they drop prices in 15 minutes, spam trade more, rinse and repeat until their stock's gone, and go for more. Regular players will consider effort and such put into mining titanium, and for what I've gathered, well, not many people find it awfully profitable per effort to mine saronite for 10g a stack just to get the odd cheesy titanium 100g a stack on top. Believe it or not, prospecting ore was at least an equally large an initial stock factor as honor and badges. Titanium ore prices have already tripled, and show no signs of weakening.

I'd also be fairly skeptic on estimating that heroics will cause a gem flood on the market: I'd wager it's going to be on the contrary. Those people who hammer their heads through heroic and another do it for the gear. They go for tier 8s. They get their hands on those, are out of badges, possibly don't even PvP (even less do so in order to get a 10k honor gem after a few frusturating defeats on the daily PvP quest). They look in, sell some stuff they've gathered, spend the gold they've done on dailies, and cash out their gold. There isn't going to be a flock of people spam farming heroic instances for badges to turn into gems: the first reason is the fact that you can't farm them independently. Farming X to produce Y through a vendor isn't the way most people farm, a lot of people simply farm Z because it's valuable on the auction house. It's worth noticing that nowadays you can spend a lot of time farming Q too, daily quests, which simply produce gold and add no products to the economy in exchange.

Additionally, the scope of demand isn't just a spot demand. You're looking at probably two more arena seasons and a full wide raid instance to come. Some people have regemmed, yes. Some people are still going to be going for Ulduar epics, on their mains or alternates, or alternates to come, and may plan on regemming these: especially if the gem prices fall at around 100-150, this will be a very attractive a choice. I'm sure a lot of servers had an initial downpour of gems when ulduar was released: a lot of folk were expecting to make a quick fortune on cutting rares for new raid content loot. It didn't happen. The gem prices took a quick dive, climbed back up to the 80-100g per ruby range, and only fell down after the heavy flood of gold farmers hit the mining market. I used to have forward contracts with real mining people for saronite: they'd CoD me what they farm. At one point, that became an unnecessity, since I could just buy 300 stacks off a ni hao.

The current situation underpins the fact that it's a marathon not a sprint. Sprint in hard and load your gems for cheap, sure. That's quick, marginal profits, if not decifit on some cases. I'm personally more afraid I'll run out of reliable source of cheap titanium ore to gain new gems from on the long run. Meanwhile, I'm just waiting for the market to stabilize a bit, while making my money off edges. The sales vary: rares have been surprisingly good (so I'll admit I was a bit off here, but; initially rares seemed like a killer, but last night people were starting to buy saronite off on trade, and, today morning rares were sinking already. On epics, the variance is large. Jagged's gone for 380. Wicked's peaked at 520. Sovereign at 330. Durable at 440. On the contrary, Runed at 240. Solid at 190. I'm not very surprised on how things have started out, and I'm expecting for certain prices to float downwards once more people get the cuts, and other prices to slowly climb once the hasty folk exits the market.

 

KasumiRevy

There are a few things to consider about the current ore/gem market.

Bad Speculative sellers - The people that gambled early before 3.2 hit and setup to make a profit on day one. More often then not these people took a loss, not a profit. Enough people had the same concept, jewel crafting has been making money for a long time, and many want on board. So we have an abundance of these people. They unload the goods early, trying to make that quick money. Some time passes and they are undercut by someone with the exact same plan as them. Big stockpile. The problem here is the prices are thought to be 'highest' at this point and will only go down in value. As the undercutting continues they get nervous and start to dump hoping to prevent a loss.

Who is buying gems right now - People with no patience, have money, and no jewel crafting access. Dedicated players had enough emblems or honor to gem their gear day one. This group is small. It's your target group.

The people selling epic gems through honor and emblems - They want money when they assume the prices will be highest on day one. They have much less investment in these gems then the jewel crafting players therefore they undercut with more zeal.

Ore pricing - Remember in burning crusade you did not get epic gems prospecting. So this is actually unknown water the economy is treading in, compound this fact with the honor/emblem/transmute access. Ore is going to be overpriced. Squeezing the jewel crafting player that much more.

Cutting - This is where you would make the money. Not the gems themselves but the cuts. Luckily I think the number of people that stockpiled ore to get dust to learn all recipes as soon as they could is relatively small because of how large the investment was.

Put all this together I think this is what we are going to see: Market is going to drop until we have a fair amount of epic gems out of the speculative players bank slots. Ore will begin to drop, due to being overpriced and risk laden. Then ore will reach a threshold where it is profitable, when this occurs smart jewel crafting players are going to strike. The time this occurs is directly related to the stockpiles. At this point cutting gems is going to be less profitable then it is currently. I think 6-12 weeks is probably where we are going to see these changes occur.

 

lazorbeam

Day 4 Patch 3.2

Gem sale profits have netted me about 12k, and ~40% of my stock is still unsold. Rare gems selling like hotcakes. Some of the hot epic sellers are:

Stormy (20 spell pen blue)
Solid
Steady
Potent
Luminous
Dazzling
Thick
Rigid
Purified

They aren't great cuts but I'm usually the only seller. I set a hefty price and people have no choice but to pay. I'm holding onto red gems right now, as badgers have dumped a ton on the AH. I know a guildie that purchased 20 Rubies, had them all cut to delicate and put them up at the AH, only to watch undercutting price down delicates to 100g.

I've picked up some very cheap eternal earth at the AH and converted all my crappy green gems to Infinite Dust/Cosmic Essence.

In other news:

- I finally sold my Teebu's Blazing Longsword (4000g). I secretly wish I had kept it.
- I've been the only Mechanical Toad seller at the AH now for about a month. Selling 2-5 a day at 219.99g a pop. That's a 1000% ROI / 200g margin. You engineers out there should keep an eye out for the extremely rare pattern.

Can anyone comment on the current state of milling high-end herbs for cards? I've been out of that market for months now and would like to re-enter, provided it's profitable. I need to turn up the gold-making jets in anticipation of TCG card purchases / new pets / multiple alts epic flying etc.

 

xytyne

As far as non-epic gem sales go, note that a lot of the excellent gear from the new 5-man has gem slots - people are walking out with 3-4 pieces of gear that needs to be gemmed, and epics may not seem worth it.

 

lazorbeam

Forgot to mention, there is a red gem which is yielding fantastic profits: Flash Cardinal Ruby. I'm the only seller and netting 400g per cut.

 

gaerthe

I think this is a key point.

In TBC, epic gems first came out of T6 raids. They were only available as "hand me downs" from top-tier guilds who didn't need them. The supply was (very) low for a long time, while demand was high. This allowed the price to be set high for a long time. By the time vendor epic gems were available, prices had been set high for months.

Compare this to now - epic gems are available at the vendor, and everyone has cashed in their (mostly) useless old emblems* for them. Prices are being set low now due to high supply/low demand. There will be a lot of inertia to overcome before prices can climb up any significant amount.

* Emblems of heroism/valor/conquest are mostly useless now, especially when compared with what you could buy in TBC with your emblems. When vendor epic gems were released in TBC, the same emblems were used to purchase T6 equivalent gear.

 

Brekk

NO NO NO. Stop confusing the needs of high-end raiding types (the people posting on EJ) with the general WoW population which is much larger and drives the economy. Day 1 of the patch being live proved exactly what people in this thread have said before, the vast majority of people outside of serious raiding guilds had no idea that patch was going live, and knew very little about it beforehand, it is a very small percentage of the population that go to websites outside of WoW daily and read every patch change closely to look for any profitable changes.

It is very reasonable to assume that more casual people in guilds that only raid 10 mans or pug to do 25 mans still may want certain valor items they haven't got yet, and most certainly haven't gotten all the Conquest items they want.

The extremely low prices of epic gems at the moment will be their own solution, with values that low, more casual people will use Emblems of Conquest to buy either gear, or Runed Orbs. Runed Orbs themselves are going to have a massive crash, I can't see them being worth over 100g each, even then you're talking 600g for orbs plus another 400-600 for the rest of the materials to make one of the Ulduar crafted items. 1200g for a 226 item isn't absurd by any means, but when gear out of the new 10man regular is better and in the case of belts there are competing Conquest buy-able 226 ones there is little reason to spend the gold on one of the crafted ones.

Also, don't forget now that there's suddenly a massive supply of Conquest emblems many people, will be picking up pieces of Deadly PVP gear to finish out sets.

 

Shaewyn

I have to emphasize this - I ran the daily heroic yesterday, and was frankly astonished to find that 3 of the 5 people were unhappy that the quest rewarded Emblems of Triumph. They viewed conquest emblems as being more valuable.

I think that (in my case in particular), assuming that the market would be rational was a mistake. Many (most?) players do not play the market for long-term profit, instead looking for "what gets me better gear" or "how can I make a quick buck". I expected 800+ gold gems for a couple days - and, looking at my server, gems started at the 700-800 mark, but were only listed there for an hour or less before vicious undercutting began. Perhaps the biggest sign of the "quick-buck" player is the ridiculous undercutting taking place - when gems are listed at 400 gold, they list at 150 gold for whatever reason. Then more people list at 150g... I picked up a handful of Cardinal Rubies at sub-100g prices yesterday. That, frankly, is ridiculous. Runed Scarlet Rubies were going for about that price not even a month ago.

 

Talgog

Two things here:

1. Have you had any experience with real financial markets? John Maynard Keynes said that "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" and that was decades before our most recent RL speculation disasters.

2. Who says that 150g raw gem prices are the least irrational? The only justification I saw in this thread for why raw gems - including bad ones - should go for 300-400 or more raw was a bunch of groupthink on "Well, that was how it worked in Burning Crusade." This was in turn used to justify the enormous premiums being paid - and apparently, still being paid in a lot of cases - for titanium ore. If anything, the fact that the titanium speculators weren't the ones getting killed is an interesting commentary on who the "stupid" ones are. 350g/stack titanium is a wealth incinerator.

If you try hard enough to talk yourself into losing money, you'll eventually succeed.

 

Starfire

It takes me 30 minutes to get ~150g doing dailies. It takes me about 60 minutes with a competent group to get 1 gem via dungeons. Therefore does that mean I should assume 1 gem is worth 300g?

Just saying.

That's not my logic. I think 150g-200g is a fair price for certain epic gems. Why? Because the 3 primary ways of acquiring epic gems is the same as the 3 primary ways of acquiring blue gems. Rare gems held in the 50-100g range for a very long time.

Titanium ore is rarer than Saronite ore and I expect this to counter-balancing honor coupled with the fact the most-desired epic gems cost twice the amount of Heroism badges as rare gems. I don't really take into account Icy Prisms or Transmutes because those are limited to one per a day. And mining seems to have a stupid-low chance for the epic gem.

Also, there is an opportunity cost involves in transmuting. Let's take the case of Cardinal Ruby. You shouldn't simply assume the cost is the Scarlet Ruby + Eternal Fire, there is also the opportunity cost of doing another transmute with a cheaper material to gain an expensive material. For example on my server, pre 3.2, I can always make 20g profit from an eternal-to-eternal transmute using AH prices and this has held for months. (Post 3.2 in the past 4 days, doing this specific transmute is valued at roughly 40g; but I suspect demand for Eternal Fire will drop sharply and the price will normalize).

Furthermore, the badges have a higher opportunity cost now. The gear is more valuable/desirable and there are other ways to sell your badges (for example, you can run your Heroics, get Conquest and either sell Runed Orbs or trade down to Valor and sell the BoE bracers).

 

gaerthe

Perhaps I wasn't clear in my post, let me try again.

I'm Joe Casual. The patch just hit this week.

I have 75 emblems of heroism (heroics), 60 emblems of valor (Naxx25 pugs), and 10 emblems of conquest (Emalon). I can buy gems, runed orbs, or decent-to-good (ilevel 200-226) gear. In the future I will get emblems of triumph that I can use to buy good-to-great (ilevel 232) gear. If I want gems, I can buy them now to use. If I want quick gold, I can get gems and sell them. Assuming I'm geared up decently in T7.5 from running Naxx pugs, what do I do with my emblems? I probably decide to cash them in to sell. There's not much else to do with heroism and valor tokens.

Contrast this with TBC, where if I wanted gems, I had to buy leftovers from high-end guilds who were clearing T6. This resulted in a low supply, high demand situation. When the gem vendor showed up in 2.4(?), I could also use any emblems I had to get good-to-great gear with the same type of emblems. As a result, I am more likely to use my emblems to buy T6 equivalent gear, something that I have no access to since I don't run BT/MH, maybe not even SSC/TK. I'd rather use the emblems to get huge gear upgrades than make some gold on the AH.

None of this thinking required viewing outside web site, knowledge of what was coming in advance of the patch, or even any knowledge of item ilevel. I just went to the gear vendor and went "holy @!$# that gear is great!"

What does this mean? I don't think we'll ever see epic gem prices return to raw TBC levels, much less inflation adjusted values. I think the market has crashed, and it's down for good. Blizzard has made epic gems easily available to everyone.

 

Bregonn

The epic gem market will be more comparable to the enchanting market than to the pre-3.2 rare gem market. Basically, bring your own mats and find a crafter with the recipe you want. This is because supply has greatly democratized.

The pre-3.2 gem supply was largely driven by a small number of jewelcrafters prospecting large amounts of ore. They will not be able to do that anymore, due to the rarity of titanium. On the other hand, players can easily get raw gems via alchemy and honor. Once the initial influx of TotC gear has subsided players will be back to their usual demand of 1-2 top level gems per week. That means 1 alchemist can supply 3-5 players. That's about the same number of player he'll on average be supplying with pots and flasks.

Furthermore there will probably not many players farming honor to sell gems, but a great amount will use honor to buy gems for themselves, either because they're capped anyway (if they're primarily PvP players) or because they don't value PvP gear as much as they do their PvE gear (if they're primarily PvE players).

Prices will then be decided by the incentive the average player needs to make him sell any surplus instead of letting it go to waste (or, on the demand side, the incentive he needs to make him supply himself instead of buying off the AH). My guess is that below 100g (50g over the price of rare gems) alchemists will begin to stop bothering, while over 200g PvP'ers will start to supply. Add to that a 20-50g AH and cutting markup and you're looking at 120-250g AH price for cut gems.

 

MetallicaRulez0

I think many of you are exactly right about why the prices for gems are so low. The people looking to make a quick buck have driven the price down drastically, and now that the prices have settled a bit, most people are unwilling to go any higher. The price of Titanium is also very surprising to me. I was one of the early ones to start stocking on Ore, and it looks like that could end up being a disaster for me.

Unfortunately I was hit by a keylogger on Tuesday and am still waiting on my account to be restored. I just pray I can dump this Titanium Ore before the price settles again.

 

Shaewyn

No, I don't have particular experience with real financial markets - I realize that I don't have the expertise nor training to do pretty much anything but lose money. However, I am willing to play around with WoW's economy, which is part of my point - there are many, many people who are playing the WoW economy for their own reasons - which may not necessarily include profit. Real-world economics can't necessarily be applied to a fantasy-world economy, where, for example, I might choose to sell at a tremendous loss in order to grief people for my own amusement.

As for the 150g raw gem prices? Yeah, that's not particularly irrational. Unfortunate for people who stocked up on titanium at 400g a stack, but not that bad. I found two things irrational: I found (and quickly bought) 4 cardinal rubies listed at 70g each. Considering Scarlet rubies were going for 80-90g before the patch, valuing epic gems less than rare gems seems odd. I suspect someone trying to make a quick buck, and in doing so, losing out on a couple hundred gold.

The other thing I find irrational is how much people undercut. Undercutting by 5-10%? Sure. Undercutting an apparently reasonable price by 60%? (And I've seen this not just on gems, but on stuff like titansteel epics or the epic tailoring cloaks).


As for using rationalilty/irrationality to justify losing money? Of course! That's the whole basis of the casino industry, right?

 

Miarose

I am curious if anyone else has also been keeping an eye on the spellweave and moonshroud market. They had dropped considerably after many people made their boots and belts. Slowly I'm seeing the market rise up again, as people are starting to realize the materials that are needed for the new bracer patterns.

The cloth are surely to peak back up around 100-120g, on my server at least, like they did before when belts were the hot commodity, but I am commonly seeing them for as low as 60g.

 

Starfire

I suspect the lack of available Crusader Orbs is throttling the value of Moonshroud and Spellweave (Titansteel too). So in the coming weeks, the value might rise -- but I am not necessarily predicting by a lot since I am sure people have huge stockpiles.

 

MetallicaRulez0

I can't speak for the whole tailored cloth market on Stormrage, but I know I've seen people spamming in trade trying to sell Spellweave and Ebonweave at 50g each. Just a few weeks ago I was selling those 2 at around 100g each. Seems like quite a steal to me.

 

Trouble

I'm not sure where all the Titanium ore speculation hate is coming from. Sure, epic gems aren't ridiculously high priced. However, rare gems (at least here) have been selling like hot cakes, both cut and uncut. I've been able to sell rares at up to twice normal prices, and definitely at least twice the volume. Titanium Powder has also been a hit. I was able to liquidate all of my Powder (about 25 stacks) at 600g a stack. The powder alone paid for half the value of the Titanium Ore. I can see you getting shafted if you went into the market with Titanium above 150, but if you stuck at anything under 150 you're probably seeing a handsome profit. I know it varies across servers, but at 150 I've easily been able to double my investment. Perhaps other servers are significantly worse though.

 

Jagiya

I've noticed several posts in this thread stating that Rare gem prices have gone through the roof - what's the cause for this? The only market I really see for them now are the Alchemy Transmutations; and with the amount of Titanium farming / Prospecting / Prisms going on before and after the patch, there's a wild abundance of them. On my server, you can barely find a rare gem selling for more than 10g, whilst the un-cut Scarlet Rubies are still hovering around the 40g mark. (As opposed to ~70g pre-patch) The best I've seen are Bold/Runed Scarlet Rubies selling for around 50g, which is still less than before.

I've been desperately scanning the AH several times daily in hopes that the prices will suddenly match what I'm hearing about on other servers, but so far it seems to me that the market is dead. I'm thinking about buying out the whole market and re-listing in an attempt to kick the price back up, but at this stage I can't justify the risk. Has anyone else experienced this "anomoly?"

 

MetallicaRulez0

I have been selling Bold and Delicate Scarlet Rubies at 80-90g all day long. I bet I've sold about 30 of them. For reference, pre-patch they were going for around 50-60g. I really have no idea why they're selling so well or for so much, but I'm certainly not complaining.

 

Ranjurm

Supply for cut rare gems is low right now despite a huge supply of raw materials. Most JCes have moved to epic gems desperately fighting for that market while almost no one tends to the rare market. I've been making respectable of money off of this market in the last few days and wasn't going to post it since that would lead to it's collapse sooner but now the cat's out of the bag might as well figure out the forces behind it.

Some of the people who were in rare market pre 3.2 will come back once the epic market settles down a bit cutting the profits and prices in the current rare market. But the one big factor that will prevent it from completely collasping is that new players aren't entering this market at an appreciable rate. New JCes will not be spending tokens on rare cuts when there are seeming better epic ones to be bought.

 

Starfire

Well. Not all rare gems went up. Scarlet Rubies for example. But on Dragonblight, Forest Emeralds were holding at a 600% markup.

It's my observation/guess Transmutes were propping them up. Although that seems highly unlikely considering the 20 hour cooldown. But my data shows while Scarlet Rubies stayed about the same, every other gem was selling between double and triple their pre 3.2 prices, EXCEPT for Forest Emeralds which were selling for 5-6x their pre-3.2 prices. The Eye of Zul transmute was the only transmute which required 3 gems, while all the others required only 1 gem.

My best guess is older servers with large population and numerous high-level alts might be consuming rare gems for transmute. Personally, I have 3 Alchemist and I know of at least three guildies who also have 3 Alchemists (and a couple with at least 2).

Keep in mind however, when I am saying Forest Emeralds were/are selling for 5-6x their pre-3.2 price, it only means they're selling for around 30g, while Scarlet Rubies are still around 60g.