The new cataclysm patch broke a lot of addons that we’ve grown accustomed to using. The beloved Skillet+LSWS+KTQ mix is broken and QuickAuctions 3 was ruined!

Luckily for us QuickAuctions has been reincarnated under a different name and Gnomeworks (made by the creator of Lil’ Sparkys Work Shop) has a nice tradeskill window in Alpha that’s coming along nicely.

Here are some gold making addon options you have and which ones I’ve picked to incorporate into my gold making system.

QuickAuctions 3 to ZeroAuctions

A well known member of the gold making community, Zerotorescue, was kind enough to take over development of QuickAuctions3 but it is now under the new name ZeroAuctions.

Nothing has really changed with the interface or settings which is sweet because QuickAuctions had a pretty steep learning curve the first couple times you used it.

Zero also made it possible to import your old QuickAuctions groups and settings, instructions can be found in the readme txt in the downloaded file folder on how to accomplish this.

Another Alternative to Zeroauctions

If for some reason you want to try something new, Auction Profit Master has the capibility to mass post and cancel auctions as well, I haven’t had an opportunity to use this addon yet but I’ll be doing a thorough comparison post soon.

Button Macro to Mass Cancel Auctions

As a side note, in the old QuickAuctions 3 you could press one button and it would cancel all auctions you’ve been undercut on. This now requires a hardware event for each auction and can be pretty tedious.

The fastest way I’ve found is to make a macro “/click StaticPopup1Button1″  and bind it to your mousewheel up and down, you can then just scroll away and it’ll go through all the cancels very fast.

Skillet+ LSWS to Gnomeworks

This has been the biggest transition I’ve had to deal with, I had a very good gold making routine down with KTQ/Skillet and LSWS and have been devastated trying to replicate this. Luckily the addon Gnomeworks has come far enough in its development to be useable now.

When you first open up Gnomeworks it will remind you of how skillet looked, Kevtool Queue (KTQ) has been updated to work with this addon so when you type in something like “/ktq queue 2 glyphs” this is what happens:

All your material requirements are in the lower right hand side and you can expand the queue of each item to see what reagents you still need for each. A big difference you’ll notice is there is no longer a “buy all reagents” button on the ink vendor screen, what you have to do now is go to the vendor and then right click on the ink you’re trying to convert in the reagent box in the lower right box.

Once you have your queue set up you can bind a macro to go through each item you have queued up. In order to do this you need to type /macro and click “New”, then under Enter Macro Name:   type “GWProcess”. Thats it! no command line is needed as Gnomeworks will automatically do the rest, just drag it onto your action bar and start mashing away.

Gnomeworks is still going through heavily development, you can see by the download page I linked earlier that tweaks and changes are being made almost about everyday which is exciting as it shows the author if very keen on making this the best crafting addon!

Alternative to Gnomeworks – Advanced Trade Skill Window (ATSW)

While Gnomeworks is a great addon so far, it is still under heavy development and can be frustrating to use. ATSW is a very polished and finished addon which I had the chance to try out today. I was hesitant to ever use it in the past since I couldn’t use KTQ with it which is my bread and butter of cutting down my crafting costs to minutes. However Zero comes “to the rescue” again with his own version of KTQ that is compatible with ATSW!

Here’s what ATSW looks like after I put in my “/ktq queue 4 glyphs” (actually with Zero’s KTQ you could do just  /ktq q 2 glyphs):

If you want to make a macro for ATSW to go through the queue without clicking the button, the macro is “/click ATSWQueueStartStopButton”. You can see all your reagents if you click the “reagents” button and it’ll even give you an option to buy out all materials needed if you have the appropriate vendor window open.

I haven’t had enough time to use both addons yet to tell you my preference, but I’m really hoping to stick with Gnomeworks as I’m sure the annoying things about it will get fixed and it seems to have much more potential with showing costs/profits, allowing you to buy out all reageants from the Auction house automatically! very innovative stuff that author is doing.

Which addon are you guys using? how are you mass producing glyphs or other profession items? I’d like to hear in the comments below.

I recently stumbled on a new site that looks very promising to mine auction house data and statistics from.

The site is called The Undermine Journal and it only opened up recently, about a week ago. This site is pretty similar to another one in the past I talked about and is now out of operation – www.wowoah.com

The Undermine Journal is currently in alpha but after browsing it for a short time there seems to be a lot of interesting features and ways of presenting the data that can help you determine market trends, see all the markets your competitors are in and see at a glance what the highest profit items are to make.

Market and Price Trends

I really like the way they present price data history. The data starts on July 1st and is updated every hour. What this allows you to do is look back on the chart and analyze big dips and spikes, see if there is a common pattern on which day or time it happens and see if you can profit from this knowledge.

Not only does it display the price, but the quantity available, so you can see when the market is over supplied and under supplied.

Snapshots of Most Profitable Items

If you browse through the professions under the search bar this will provide your servers current prices for each of the items.

An example above is the jewelcrafting snapshot, I picked the red gems section to show the breakdown. What this shows is at the top right the current price of an uncut cardinal ruby and we can see going down the list what the current cut prices are for each of the cuts. Although flashing cardinal ruby has the highest profit margin it may not be a good seller, but still nice information to have.

Competitor Analysis

There is so much involved with the competitor analysis, just type in a persons name into search and it’ll give you a large breakdown.

My favourite feature is showing a history of when your competitor posts! This will show you when your competitor plays, wakes up, gets home from school/work so you can time your postings right after this time!

Another great feature is that it shows all the items your competitor is posting, a pie chart of all the types of markets they are involved in (20% gems, 25% enchanting, 10% trade materials etc..) so you can see any markets you may be missing and get in on that profit too.

Unfortunately they aren’t covering a lot of servers at the moment but I can see a lot of potential if they open this up. This will be a tool I’ll use a lot to time flipping items from looking at pricing trends and also research my main competitors.

This Stormwind AH trick has been around for a while but whenever I mention it to my alliance friends who’re into gold making they are surprised you can do it.

There is a certain spot you can stand in Stormwind ontop of boxes where you can interact with the auction house NPC and check your mail without moving. You cannot have the mailbox open at the same time as the auction house however.

Step 1 – Stand here

Step 2 – Make a macro to target the Auctioneer

/cleartarget
/targetexact Auctioneer Jaxon
/cleartarget [dead] [noexists]

Step 3 – Bind a button to interact with the Auctioneer

Once you have Auctioneer Jaxon selected with the previous macro, you will need to press another button to “interact” to open the AH

Press Esc —> Key Bindings —> Scroll down to Targeting Functions and click Interact with Target (bind it to a key)

And there you have it, access to the AH and mail box without moving a step.

Credit goes out to Tella, I learned this trick from her blog in this post a while ago, even though I don’t play alliance.

So just spreading the word, I wish something similar existed on the horde side but the closest thing you can come to is the 2 second distance of the mailbox to auction house in Silvermoon and Undercity.

Anaalius actually made a great post where he timed the distance between the mailbox and auction house for each faction, as well as how long it’d take for you to get your first fresh toon to the main city.

Are you making the most profit you could be from your current professions?

Hitting the gold cap has given me a new found energy to really go for more gold, and as I sat back looking at my total income strategy I was pretty surprised at the state of my DK alt with Jewelcrafting and Enchanting.

With his Jewelcrafting I have only bought 11 cuts out of a possible 120 cuts that can be purchased. A majority of those 120 cuts may not sell too well and I held off from buying additional cuts until I hit 10k (to finish the project) but when I finally reached that mark on April 20th I should of started to buy more afterwards, I definitely had the capital to do it.

Also with Enchanting I finished leveling it on May 4th but have only focused on selling the scrolls I created during the leveling process. This is a huge income potential I am missing out on only because I was content with the amount of gold I was making from inscription and the few cuts with JC I had.

Maximizing Profit from Jewelcrafting and Enchanting

In order to get the most from these professions I’m going to need to buy the rest of the cuts and recipes. This will take a fair amount of upfront capital and there is a bit of a risk associated with this as we are in the late stages of the expansion, but I’m confident the costs can be recuperated before Cataclysm arrives.

Buying Jewelcrafting Recipe Cuts

I’ve made a previous post on how to decide which jewelcrafting recipes to buy based on the most profitable jewelcrafting cuts, and I’ve used the same method to continue buying more to complete my list. I use the site www.wowpopular.com to see what the most popular cuts are then compare the raw gem cost to the current market price for the completed cut.

I’ve gone ahead and purchased an additional 4 cuts, I would of bought more but the average price of titanium powder is 28g on my server and after I bought all those up the next highest was 50g each which is too high for me.

I bought the following cuts:

Runed Cardinal Ruby – Ranked 2nd most popular cut
Bold Cardinal Ruby – 5th most popular
Delicate Scarlet Ruby – 12th most popular
Brilliant King’s Amber – 17th most popular

If you were wondering why I didn’t have the Runed Cardinal Ruby earlier given it’s the 2nd most popular cut on wowpopular.com, every time I checked up on the prices on my server of the cut it was usually lower than the cost of an uncut cardinal ruby but I figured it was time to have the most popular cuts known.

I have a further 14 cuts on my buy list once the market gets more titanium powders, lower priced titanium ore to prospect, and as I complete more jewelcrafting dailies.

It cost 3,420g to purchase the recipes as I had a few titanium powders sitting around already. On average I sell each cut I bought around twice a day for 20g profit. At that rate it’ll take me 21 days to recuperate the costs of the recipes and after that I’ll be making a profit. (3,420/4 = 855g each; Selling 2/day at 20g profit = 40g; 855/40g = 21 days)

Buying Enchanting Recipes

Next up is to buy up enchanting recipes to start crafting scrolls. What I’ve seen so far in this market while trying to sell my first couple scrolls is that competitors love to undercut constantly given there aren’t any deposit fees to post.

I went ahead and checked out Vanessa Sellers in Dalaran, turns out I only knew 2 of the scrolls she offers for sale and they are pretty cheap to buy. A dream shard sells for around 8g on my server and it takes either 4 or 10 to buy each recipes = 32g – 80g to purchase each recipe (opposed to 840g – 1,120g per jewelcrafting cut)

So I bought up 160 dream shards for 891g and proceeded to buy up the following enchanting recipes:
Formula: Enchant 2H Weapon – Massacre
Formula: Enchant Bracer – Major Stamina
Formula: Enchant Staff – Greater Spellpower
Formula: Enchant Weapon – Accuracy
Formula: Enchant Weapon – Berserking
Formula: Enchant Weapon – Black Magic
Formula: Enchant Weapon – Lifeward
Formula: Enchant Weapon – Mighty Spellpower
Formula: Enchant Weapon – Superior Potency
Formula: Enchant Boots – Greater Assault
Formula: Enchant Boots – Tuskarr’s Vitality
Formula: Enchant Bracer – Superior Spellpower
Formula: Enchant Bracers – Greater Assault
Formula: Enchant Chest – Exceptional Resilience
Formula: Enchant Chest – Powerful Stats
Formula: Enchant Cloak – Greater Speed
Formula: Enchant Cloak – Mighty Armor
Formula: Enchant Cloak – Shadow Armor
Formula: Enchant Cloak – Titanweave
Formula: Enchant Cloak – Wisdom
Formula: Enchant Gloves – Armsman

I skipped out on buying the following recipes, either because they seemed obviously bad or the comments on wowhead.com said it wasn’t used:
Formula: Enchant Weapon – Giant Slayer
Formula: Enchant Weapon – Icebreaker
Formula: Enchant Weapon – Scourgebane

Project: Track Which Profession Makes the Most

Now that I am starting to bring my other professions to their maximum earning potential, I can compare how much profit can be had from each if you put in the maximum effort. I currently have engineering, inscription, jewelcrafting and enchanting; with plans to get the other crafting professions as well.

How I’ll do this is track how much time I spend on each seperate profession – buying materials, crafting, posting and canceling/reposting and so forth. From this we can gather which profession makes the most gold for the least amount of effort.

I already started tracking as of yesterday and this will be included in my weekly gold progress updates, how much time is spent on each profession and how much profit each earns.

If you are involved in any market on the auction house you have to deal with competition, some competition is more aggressive than others by the rate at which they cancel and undercut your items.

Many times these competitors, and hopefully you, have a friends list of all their regular competition so they can monitor when they log off and on to see a pattern so that they can immediately undercut your auctions once you log off.

I developed a posting strategy for the glyph market to deal with undercutters I discussed in a previous article on how to push others out of the market, this article however will deal with how you can manipulate your competitors psychologically if they do happen to attempt to communicate.

At times, you’ll have a competitor message you, to either try and bargain a “truce” with you, set up a cartel, to flame you on how you’re doing it wrong, or just to get to know you a little more. It is satisfying to get any one of these tells since it shows that you are having a pretty big impact on the market and you’ve been on your competitors heels long enough that he feels he needs to do something about it.

I had a competitor message me a few days ago and I was just going to ignore the tells but as I thought more I figured there was a strategic way I could reply to the tells to discourage my competitor from continuing to compete in my markets.

Methods to Discourage Competition

Here is how the conversation started in my case:

Log on posting alt #1

Competitior: “Hey, I just wanted to let you know you’re fallback price is a little low, you’re undercutting my 75g auctions with your 48g ones, you should raise it ^_^”

There’s a few ways you can deal with this:

#1 – ignore him – Probably always a good way to deal with competitors, they get no response and they’ll either think they’re dealing with a bot or just feel disheartened that they can’t make you change your ways through tells.

#2 – flame him back (insult etc.) – This is the worst thing you can do, not only is it kinda immature to insult people but this will fire up your competitor and it’ll become more of a You vs. Him (or her) that your competitor will no longer care as much for profits rather than just to “beat” you.

#3 – co-operate, be nice, make a truce – this works very rarely, being nice could give you a good advantage as you may get some sympathy from the competitior, but truces and cartels rarely work (They’ll just post everything on a different alt you don’t know about)

#4 – Act dumb and portray that you play a LOT and don’t care too much about how much profit you make – This I find is the most annoying kind of person to compete against. How do you undercut someone who’s willing to craft at cost, is always online to undercut and thinks “I gather my materials so I get them for free”. Be this person!

My response to the tell was to enact strategy #4:

Me: “Meh, I already hit the gold cap and I don’t care too much about gold anymore, playing the auction house is just fun for me”

Me: “I might just bring down the market to 8g per glyph for a few weeks for fun”    (I shouldn’t have said this, it told him my new cut off price and was setting up a Me vs. Him situation)

I logged off at that point,  2 days after I starting posting all my glyphs at 8g he sent me a tell

Competitor: “Now why’d you have to go and do that?, you’ll run out of inks and can’t stay profitable given our herb prices”

Me: “I’ll be fine, I have all my bank tabs full of inks and I farm my herbs for free anyways”

Competitor: “You should learn about opportunity cost, herbs aren’t free when you gather them”  (lol I know )

Me: “Also I think people deserve some cheaper glyphs, I feel good about doing something nice for people”

I logged off again, last communication.

Haven’t seen him online for 4 days now, thinking about going back up to my 48g cap. This was just an example though to show that how you communicate with your competitors can have an influence on if they stay in your market, leave, or want to have a straight up war with you just to beat you.

I have sold the majority of the frozen orbs I’ve had stockpiled to flip for profit back at the start of patch 3.3.3

I still have an additional 100 left and whenever the price goes above 20g each I sell them off, but recently I reevaluated if I am getting the maximum value from each frozen orb.

The top items to convert frozen orbs for profit has usually been:

1. Eternal Fire

2. Eternal Life – Usually the first couple days of the darkmoon faire when everyone is buying out the Eternal Lifes

3. Selling the Frozen orb itself when it goes above the value of  1 & 2

However when moving my mouse across all of the items to check their current market price here is what I noticed:

These market prices are averaged out over hundreds of recently seen items. So I decided to test this out and see if they actually sell at a decent rate.

Sales Results

On the first day I posted 1, then 2, then 5 and so on

I sold 10 frozen orbs for an average of 132g which equals 1,320g. If I had sold them individually or converted them to Eternal Fires I would have made only 888.80g, so I made a profit of 431g.

If you have already sold out of all your frozen orbs, check your AH prices and see if runed orbs are going for over 100g each. If they are and you can buy frozen orbs for less than 20g each give this experiment a try and let me know how it goes.

Keep in mind that these don’t sell in large quantities, I am on a medium population server and could sell around 5-8 of these a day (I only had 3-4 other runed orb posts to compete with each time) but if no one else is really taking advantage of this give it a try.

WoW.com posted a great wow resource page the other week, in which we have been honored with a place in the economic section.

As you can see there are a total of 7 “economy” blogs they have listed, but there are plenty around and I wanted to shine the light on a few of the up and comers or ones that were missed from wow.com’s list.

Before I list all of these blogs, please note these are the ones that I currently read and I won’t be including gold blogs that haven’t posted in the last 3 weeks.

WoW Gold Making Blogs

• Warcraft Econ – particularly like their “Hall of Fame” interview posts where they interview players who’ve hit the gold cap and how they did it.
• Stokpile – A great site I just discovered a few days ago actually and beginning to go through their old stuff. He’s just recently his his 3rd gold cap!
• WoW.com’s Gold Capped – This is WoW.coms gold making column written by Basil from Outdps.com (a hunter blog) He seems very knowledgeable in what he’s talking about and I definitely check out all the articles written here to see if I can make use of it in my gold making routine.
• JMTC – Just my two copper, been around forever and he consistently posts something new everyday.
• Anaalius’s Hunt for Gold – Someone who frequents our gold making channel and is very open with his gold making activities. I enjoy his stuff as he’s in the same markets as me.
• Phase3Profit – Just came back from a long hiatus. Some of the stuff has poor grammar because I believe english is their second language but they get the point across and it looks like they are back to a regular posting schedule.
• Bobreazes’ WoW Gold Tips – He just recently dived into the inscription market so you can see how he’s going about setting up his business, a lot of good older posts too.
• SRSBusiness – Interesting gold making articles here.
• Golden Corner
• WoWStability
• One Copper
• HitTheCap – No longer active but check out their posts, I think Tella is almost at a million gold now. She is just focusing on the gold making at this point and found the blogging side to be too time consuming.
• Cold’s Gold Factory
• GOBLINEERING
• CAFFEINE, SMOKES AND AUCTION HOUSE FEES
• Kaliope’s Crafting Blog
• Knight Trafficking
• CMill-ions

Honorable Mention

• Tobold’s Blog – Not really gold making related (although he used to touch on the topic). His blog is about the MMORPG industry in general and I like the “voice” he has on his blog, very genuine and nothing held back. Recommended add to your daily reads.

If I’m missing anything please feel free to input your suggestion in the comments or let me know the WoW gold making sites and blogs you read often. I will remove any links to sites unrelated or that have not been updated in the last 10 days.

Recently I’ve noticed the amount of time I devote to making gold has dropped dramatically. From 4 hours a day to 1 hour and 40 minutes.

This is due to a few factors, milling time has been reduced to 1 second, I only craft glyphs above a 9g threshold now (around 175 glyphs/day) and I’ve done all the necessary setting up with QA3, Snatch and Auctioneer to automate every aspect of figuring out what to craft, sourcing cheap materials, crafting, and posting.

Here’s a breakdown of my current gold making routine (patch 3.3.3):

6:30pm

1. Log on JC – collect expired/successful auctions, do a /auc getall scan and snatch search for cheap gems/ore/green gems/eternal earth. Buy up anything that is below my “buy” price that I listed in my JC spreadsheet.

Craft gems using my KTQ macros to fill up anything I’m low on inventory on, post using quick auctions.

6:50pm

2. Log on my 3 Inscription posting alts, collect expired/successful auctions, open auction house, then log off. This updates my altoholic inventory levels so KTQ knows what I’m low on inventor on and what to craft to bring it to my desired /ktq queue #

7:00pm

3. Log on Inscription crafter, do another /auc getall scan to update prices and do a Resale search to buy up any low priced items to flip for profit.

Use auctionator and click on the “Inscription” shopping list that has all the herbs I normally buy. Buy up all adders/icethorn/lichbloom for under 1g20s per unit. I also buy up Tiger lily and lower end Northrend herbs if they are 50-60% of the price of the higher end herbs.

Do a “glypher” scan, this will scan only glyphs on the auction house and update my KTQ “threshold” number. I set my threshold to only craft glyphs currently selling for higher than 9g. This number may be updated from my /auc getall scan but it has just become a habit and it only takes 2 minutes.

Start milling, watch a youtube vid, talk on forums/chat etc.

Craft 175 glyphs, vellums, runescrolls, offhands. Mail items to alts to post using Quick Auctions auto mailer.

7:45pm

4. Log on each posting alt, collect glyphs sent to them, post. I used to do a cancel/repost cycle at this stage but it would take 35 minutes to do that. With just posting the newly crafted glyphs it only takes 10 minutes.

What I’ve done is since I post 5x every glyph above my threshold, I now have 15x of each glyph in my inventory. This means that if I post at 48 hour intervals, and only once a night, I will get back the expired glyphs in my mail 2 days later but will always have a fresh batch to post without having to do any canceling. Day 1 – post 5x, Day 2 – post 2nd batch 5x, Day 3-  post 3rd batch (receive back expired Day 1 glyphs), Day 4 – Post Day 1 expired batch and recieve back expired Day 2 batch – craft anything that has been sold.

7:55pm

5. Do JC daily quest – takes 15 minutes.

Finish – 8:10pm

That is a total of 1 hour and 40 minutes devoted to gold making and I pull in around 3,500g doing that + 300g “worth” of a JC token doing the daily. Which translates into 2,280g/hour.

This is much different than my previous routine where I spent around 4 hours a night just doing gold making activities.

Could I make more gold if I spent more time? yes. But the activities I accomplish in this condensed time are the highest gold/hour methods that are available to me and are the best use of my time. I am currently holding off on any expenditures until I hit the gold cap, but if I was participating in PvP/PvE and buying the latest gear/gems/consumables I believe my gold income would be greater than my expenses.

How much time do you spend gold making?

I wanted to share with you guys an addon I’ve been playing around with a bit that exports your World of Warcraft beancounter sales data to excel. This is a little more advanced than the average player may want for their efforts, since beancounter already has a tab in game where you can type in items, sort etc.. I like to mess around with my data in excel because there are many more things you can do with it in the long run.

Exporting Data to Excel

Go download the addon Bag Export via wowinterface. Enable it at your character screen and then in game type /bage success This will parse all your successful auctions on that character and show a text field come up with it all highlighted sperated by commas, just ctrl + copy this data. This is your beancounter sales forever from that character.

Now you can paste this into excel, and repeat this step for each alt you have, the process takes only a minute to do per character.

Formatting Beancounter Data in Excel

When you look at this data it is a little messy, the first field is the item # which you don’t really need since the item name is right beside it. However the prices are all in copper amounts and the date is in Unix format which doesn’t help us at all

Convert Copper to Gold

To display the copper as a gold amount just right click on the first cell and format cell.  In the custom option under category type in 0″.”0000;-0″.”00;0″.”00 This will now show all numbers in gold amount.  180000  would =  18.0000

Convert Unix Time to Normal Date

That last field stores the data in unix time, example: 1266456030 really means February 18, 2010 who woulda thought?? That unix time is based on the time after the date 1/1/1970 so insert this formula in the cells to the right. =CELL/(60*60*24)+”1/1/1970″ Cell being a reference to where the Unix time numbers are (J2 or whatever) Copy and paste this all the way down so it converts all the numbers into date, left side being the Unix time and right side being the formula time. Make sure after this is done that you go into format cells > date   to now show it in whichever date formation you want (02/18/2010  or February 18, 2010)

?Example of My Sales Data

Here’s what it should look like after you have it all finished (click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

This was only done on my flipping character (and data for March 11 isn’t complete since it just took the data from this morning) but you can see all the flips I’ve done in the last 2 days, I’ve been doing a lot of Jewelcrafting flipping to experiment with snatch and what could be bought and sold. Someone listed 3 of the Parrot cages for 3g and I already sold 2 for 140g average.

and there you have it, you’ll now have all your sales for every character in an excel sheet that you can manipulate and look at for patterns or do other fun stuff with. One thing I was thinking that would be useful, since you can do  /bage complete  which will give you all the items you’ve bought with that character. You can have 1 sheet being all your sales data and another sheet with all the buying data and you can do some calculations to find out your profit margins on flips, which items sell for the most, graphs of your best selling days, graph of days you find your materials at the cheapest.

The DK 10k project is coming along nicely, I hit 450 jewelcrafting a couple days ago in patch 3.3.2. I have found that I could do the Jewelcrafting daily at level 65 and have been able to pick up 4 tokens so far so it’s time to choose my first jewelcrafting recipe!

It is tough to make this decision, if you pick up the most popular gems you have to deal with a ton of competition that is doing the same but if you pick a lower demand gem you may not get that many sales.

Here’s how I went about choosing a JC gem recipe to make the most gold.

Search the WoW Popular Gem List

Your first area of research should be the site www.wowpopular.com, if you go to the gem section you can select gems by epic/rare/meta and  it is automatically sorted from most to least popular.

As I was going through this list and making my popularity ranking for each gem I noticed that a lot of rare gems were beating out epic gems. While I can see why a lot of people still use rare gems (to gem up alts, to gem while leveling or they just hit 80 and are low on funds) the numbers still seemed a bit too high on the amount of rare gems that beat out epic gems.

I’ve come to the conclusion that since wowpopular bases the most popular gems on their scan of every character on the armory, a lot of these characters may not be inactive due to people either quitting the game or putting that level 80 aside and leveling anew. This means that when everyone used only rare gems combined with the people who currently use them now it is adding up to skew the data with the old inactive toons.

Nevertheless rare gems are still popular are Wingman pointed out in his post best selling rare gems.

Do Some Market Research on your Servers Auction House

I cannot tell you which gems are the most profitable to make on your server, there are different mixes on every server to do with competition and gem prices. The popularity of gems however are uniform across all servers since there is a “right” way to gem your characters that most people read up on and socket.

What you can do though is follow the same method I have in choosing my first recipe to profit from and insert your servers data. In the future we will be releasing a way to automatically dump all of your auction house data into a spreadsheet but that is currently still in the works.

Make a spreadsheet and insert your servers jc gem prices

Here’s a screenshot of the spreadsheet I threw together. Rank is based on wowpopular data and the jewelcrafting recipe profit numbers are derived from the current cost of the jc cut – raw gem price. (Click Image to Enlarge)

(Click Image to Enlarge)

As you can see Rare gems and epic gems can both be profitable. I highlighted bold and underline the highest profit gems in each category.

I want to go for the highest profit gems and you can notice that a lot of the epic gems in the lower ranks (they are blank because they are below 40 ranking) have very high profit margins but I’m worried how well these would sell.

Recipes that stand out on this list are Rigid Autumn’s Glow, Smooth Autumn’s Glow, Bold Cardinal Ruby, Reckless Ametrine, Purified Dreadstone and Bright Cardinal Ruby.

And the Winning JC Recipe is…

I decided to pick up Rigid Autumn’s Glow. My DK is very low on funds from just finishing powerleveling jewelcrafting (fully funded on his own starting from scratch within 40 hours time) and I wanted to pick up a gem that would be low cost to make but gives me a decent return while having a high popularity.

It only costs 11g to pick up an Autumn’s Glow and I can craft it into a 50g gem, not too shabby.

I will let you know how my Jewelcrafting sales go and my journey to hit 10k from scratch with the DK.