Doesn't that seem incredibly backwards though? The supply of these rare gems is at an all-time high, whilst the demand is at an all time low. If anything, the market behaviour on my server seems natural, whilst the inflated mark-ups I keep reading about appear tremendously surreal. I stockpiled 40 of each gem for daily Transmutation purposes, and I've been trying to offload the rest ever since, but the opportunity for profit is far lower than I'd like. I risk either selling them all now at a dismal cost, or waiting in hopes that the prices go back up. Considering the demand though, I can't see why the prices will ever increase again. We've got more people Prospecting and creating Prisms than ever - I can only see the situation going down from here. Supply will increase to the point where the un-cut gems simply won't be sellable, and the cut Rare gems will replace Uncommon gems as the, "I'll just buy whatever I can find on the AH for my level 78 alts' new blue robe i got from Halls of Stone" gem.

I guess a part of it can be attributed to a very "dirty" market on Blackrock. No-one matches market prices, every new sale is an undercut. On one single page of any item listed, you can pretty much see an item being reduced to half of it's originally listed price within hours of it's listing due to fierce undercutting.

Lots of people cutting, lots of people cashing out rapid crashes markets. The rare gem market I believe is going to be "lost for good" as a source of high profits (beyond the 5-6g margins, after house cuts and deposit costs, possible relisting costs), but I do firmly believe the epic gem market will eventually recover and rise a little (reds probably to 250-300, rest a little below). A lot of people have invested into new gear, and heroic farming over the weekend was furious: not because they'd farm badges for gems, but because of tier 8s. Casuals and alternates were all over the shop for these, and I reckon a lot ended up being AH gem customers, judging by the type of people picking up my products.


As a sidenote, I remember someone asking George Soros if the stock market was rational. He didn't answer, he just laughed. The reason why the World of Warcraft market is probably even more irrational than a real life market is that the consequence of failure is different, and insolvency is essentially impossible. People will act fast and consider less for these reasons.

On crusader orbs and cloth: the problem is that most raiders will require badges of triumph to get tier gear, which means unlike runed orbs, badges won't be available for sinking in to orbs very fast (even the top end guilds will have to badge out quite a bit of tier: heroic tier won't be dropping that much). Additionally, the fact that the gates open slow, and the recipes drain a considerable amount of orbs, means that it'll still be good few weeks until anyone will have enough orbs to craft anything, and even then it'll be little, and happen slowly: it's only 5 bosses on contrary to 14. I wouldn't expect dramatic shifts in the prices of cloth.

I'm personally now at the point where my accounting's on positive for the titanium incident. I had unloaded my rare gem stocks pre-patch, and stocked up about 460 stacks of titanium ore at variable prices between 80 and 150 gold. I didn't sell any of the dust: quite a good source of income has proven out to be not selling cut epic gems (even if they do regularily sell for 150-350 gold, the peaks of 500 per gem seem to have gone now), but to sell cuts. They hate me for it, but a lot of people will pay 50g a cut due to the fact that I was over the weekend an easily available cutter with more or less any recipe they'd want (energized forest emerald I didn't have, huh). People would actually whisper spam me according to my AH listings asking for cuts for gems they'd obtained through badges or honor. I ended up bundling it: I was promising people that I'd cut their whole bunch for anything between 250 and 500 gold (yeah, depending on customer, really). Indeed, especially the resident PvP population has had a bunch of customers. The fact that people have loaded out significant amounts of badges and honor into gems means there's been a lot of gems out there waiting to be cut, with people in a hurry to get them into gear. I've still got about 300 epic gems to go, so I'll expect some 60-80k profits by the end of the day for the whole mess, depending how long cutting things remains "really" profitable.

On rare gems, there was a brief moment when they were hilariously expensive as in 50 through 70 range and above 100 for scarlets, but by now the parity seems to have struck in with opportunists undercutting by big chunks, and the prices are back to pre-patch barely 20 gold a gem. I mean, it's still profits as you can end up buying raw gems for 10g each (except scarlets, of course), but marginalized, in a way.

Crusader Orbs cannot be bought for badges.

As to why the rare gems spiked: it's almost certainly due to a surge of Alchemists picking up a selection so they can get the Cardinal Ruby transmute. Forest Emeralds would go up the most because they were the cheapest to begin with. The trend should mostly be over now.

I stand corrected. They were at a point on PTR. Even more a reason not to accept the cloth market to move an inch.

There will also be people picking up new gear that they don't think justifies epic gems. Between the new heroic and Conquest badges in all heroics/raids, a lot of offspec gear is going to be appearing. And call me cheap, but I don't bother with epic gems in gear I wear significantly less than half the time, especially when it's not that amazing quality anyway. There's more than enough people who think like that who'll have a set or three of gear for other roles.

If the Forest Emerald / Sapphire market hasn't crashed for you yet, I suggest you unload those 2 gems before they do crash. Prices are back down in the 7-15g range for these. I suppose supply has finally caught up.

Either way, I'm up from 18kg to 52kg since the patch hit. Most of my gems are sold but I'm left with a very large stock of rare gems of all sorts. I've been prospecting tons of saronite ore - in its current state it is incredibly profitable.

Little tip: If you're out of the Jewelry DE'ing market, find buyers willing to take green gems COD for 30-35g a stack. I found someone buying Shadow Crystal / Dark Jade at 30g and the other colors for 35g. Every time I check the AH for saronite, titanium, powder, damaged necklaces amongst others, I pick up whatever uncommon gems I can find under my buyers' price.

But I think we need to set our sights to the future. JC'ing won't be this profitable, eventually the average player will be decked out & gemmed up. I'm just not too sure where to move to once this happens.

I believe it's a combination of this and the large number of epics flowing out of the new instances. The cheaper players won't spend the big bucks to pay for epic gems for that gear, but using green gems probably pushes too far into cheap territory for them, so they settle on the rare gems. On my server, the rare gem market has almost returned to normal levels, but last week, I was selling gems of all colors for about 150-250% of normal prices.

It seems that there is a combination of factors pushing rare gems up. First off, there's a huge influx of excellent new gear into the casual/non-raider market from the new 5 man. Some of these people are gemming with epics, sure. But the majority of using rare gems. It's probably the equivalent or greater demand than a new arena season. Second, it seems a decent number of the gem cutters I used to compete with have forsaken rares for epics, despite the majority of the market remaining in rares. I'm sure they'll figure it out at some point, but for the moment the market disparity works in my favor. Third, there is some demand for raw gems being generated by transmutes. These gems are "taken out" of the rare market once transmuted and no longer directly compete with it. This reduces the overall availability of rares.

Long term, as mentioned by Ranjurm, the barrier to entry to JC is effectively a lot higher. People have 3-4x as many patterns to choose from now and the new ones are more expensive. This makes it more difficult for new JCs to compete with established JCs, at least in total volume. Long term, however, most of my personal profit will most likely remain in rare gems. A lot of the profit comes from the whole prospect/cut rares/DE uncommons. Each part of the puzzle adds additional profit percentage. Unless Titanium Ore can be gotten at a reasonable price and in quantity, the profit from epic gems just won't really be there. The only chance for decent profit is sourcing gems directly from people looking to offload honor and badges.

The thing to remember with alchemy transmutes is the ruby quest.

In my experience, many, many players who don't frequent forums are extremely motivated by quest text. And so, many alchemists feel that they have to do five epic gem transmutes as soon as they possibly can, so that they can complete the quest and learn to transmute rubies.

This is going to create a large pool of not-quite-rational demand for non-ruby gems for a short period of time, which will taper off as people finish the quests. Should be seeing a spike in the value of the related eternals as well due to this, and on our server I do believe this is exactly what we're seeing. It's already been about a week, so the fastest alchemists are already "done". It won't be much longer before the rest are. So the prices should be collapsing back to normal now, if this is a significant factor.

Frozen Orbs have gone way down in price (no one uses them to craft, and the number of heroics being run compared to pre-3.2 is greatly increased). I found that a very good way to make solid money from blue gems is to buy out a bunch of Frozen Orbs and just make Icy Prisms.

On US-Aegwynn, Orbs have gone down from ~80g to ~40g, and unless I get 3 sky sapphires, I will always break even or make multiple times my investment depending if I get autumns' glow/rubies/dragon's eyes/epic gems. I have 2 450 JCs so the steady cash just keeps coming in at about 200-500g a day for doing absolutely nothing.

TLDR: If Frozen Orbs are cheap and blue gems are very expensive, it's a pretty wise investment.

Legions of "friends and family" players getting epics from the new 5-man and putting rare gems in them. They're not going to fork out for epic gems, and (handwave) there's probably still at least as many non-raiders as raiders. Really. The sheer size and scale of Naxxramas does put a lot of people off. If you play a couple of hours a week, you're not going to finish even Naxx - and even those people are now getting an influx of purples that need gemming.

It would be interesting to see if there's a market for shorter 10-mans - something the size of UBRS or ZA, with a reset timer somewhere from 1 to 3 days.

Looks like blue gem profitability is here to stay.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> End of Arena Season 6 Coming Soon

And thus begins the reaping of the enchanting market's.

The raid lockouts take care of that now, but the class of people songster refers to weren't completing, or perhaps even trying, Naxxramas up until a week ago. His point that these people are seeing an influx of epics from the new instance stands.

The increase in blue gem prices is in cut gems, not uncut gems, so it's certainly nothing to do with transmuting. Demand for them has simply gone up, that's all. Alts is another possibility: more toons running the daily heroics for badges but not being willing to buy epic gems.

Hundreds of thousands of Jewelcrafters suddenly needing to stick 2 blue gems in their gear after months of avoiding them like the plague.

Demand has certainly increased, and people can now rationalize spending a more than they did pre-patch on a rare gem that has slightly lower stats than an epic version that runs ~200g. "Wow, 130 less gold and all I lose is 3sp and 2 spirit? Sounds like a deal" type of thing.

Odd enough my server seems to be acting up. Rares are now back to marginally profitable (it seems that the mining hacks have gotten very much less, since saronite's back to 16g a stack on AH), yellow and orange cuts generally selling around 20, greens and blues less, reds 60-70, purples in between. On the other hand, epics have settled around 200 to 350 gold each, with blues and greens yet being a bit below 200. Fair enough, this is all still good profit if you looked at the pre-patch titanium ore prices. It's been a profitable stunt all in all.

What's caught me a bit off though, is the sudden climb in prices of enchanting materials. It's become really difficult to obtain reasonably cheap dusts and essences, I'm guessing this has to do with the disappearing of the mining hacks causing a reduction in eternal earth supply. Which is rather unfortunate, because the enchant scrolls market is a decent one. Has anyone else noticed the level 1 orc warriors dramatically reduce in quantity or totally extinct?

(a) I'm talking about blue quality gems, as should have been obvious from the thread.

(b) Why on Earth would other JCs buy blue (colour) gems off me rather than cutting their own?

In which case the rares are a lot more than marginally profitable. By your figures a rare gem sells for 25g on average (20g for orange/yellow, 10g for green/blue, 60g for red and say 40g for purple), while the ore is 16g a stack. That's 56% profit on whatever you put in, even without turning the green quality gems into DE mats.

On my server, doing the green ring / DE thing nets around 10g extra profit per stack of ore.

double post, sorry

Fair. It's still so small numbers that prospecting stacks and stacks of saronite to make up for it, cutting, relisting, and all that feels like a lot of effort in compared to say scroll markets or epic gems. Maybe it's the fact that you need a lot of quantity in sales and purchases to push the same profit in terms of gold coins. It used to be better!

It's a bit of a tangent I know, but a lot of people have levelled JC recently (either for the prismatic PvE buff, or because it's the profession flavour of the... well, recent times). Not many people have a large selection of recipies though, so you'll probably be cutting older non-epic stuff for a few JC'ers. I assume Meta's will be a small crafter segment, given metas are still 5 tokens vs new epic's 4.

My Paladin has been a JC since TBC, he's always had access to JC Prismatics so I never needed to use JC tokens to buy the Sovereign (+str,+sta) cut, My Priest swapped from tailoring to JC before Purified Twilight Opals were released. I never needed the pattern (which is also a rare world drop) because of JC Prismatics.

Now my JC tokens are much better spent towards epic cuts so its no longer worth acquiring the blue quality Sovereign cut, and I ended up buying the Purified epic cut to handle my priest's blue gem needs.

There is a massive sudden influx of gear right now. Repeatable 5man with epics, Heroic 5 man with uld10 level gear, access to conquest/valor gear from emblem vendors, and a new raid zone. The volume of enchanting materials being consumed, and their demand has sky rocketed.