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.
Popularity: 5% [?]
I like this method, think I’ll copy it for use on my own server.
I just picked up JC a while ago and scored a few handfulls of Damaged Necklaces for 100-150g, so pretty excited about that.
Think I will also give a bit of priority to gems my characters will use, but I guess that comes from the ‘duh’ column
I vote for solid sky sapphire. Profit may be less on each gem, but the volume is out of this world. Most newly dinged 80 druids/warriors/paladins/deathknights will fit their gear out with them until their gear is good enough to warrant epic gems.
On the flipside, raregem market is mostly for “nubs” – better players know to use epic gems. This being the case, most “nubs” don’t want to gem hit – they want to do more damage!
Your server may vary, of course
+16 hit is very important ill admit, i stacked it on my dk and was proved good.
JC who’s been following your site for around a month and have applied all your techniques to my JC business. In that time I’ve made 20k gold. Given the hours I work and time devoted to raiding I could never make the money-per-day or per-hour you do, but be prepared to make a lot of money with this profession.
2 Things:
1) be prepared for MASSIVE price fluctuations. It’s amazing how many people will undercut your gems by 20-30g, as if they don’t even bother to look or undervalue simple because they’d rather be rid of it. And a gem like Rigid AG can go for 85g when u first post it and within 40 mins drop to 6g40s, its ridiculous at times.
2) don’t let anyone tell you the rare gem market is for nubs. way way way more people invest in rares than epics and the price per 20 ore stack prospects on saronite compared to titanium gives higher return ratios imo. this is of course keeping in mind that a small percentage of people are very hardcore raiders and/or arena folk. The rest are people who just wanna put a pretty red gem in a pretty red slot, and aren’t looking to spend 220g 4 times in one night to do it. Again this is just from my experience up to this point.
Don’t ignore the epic gem market by any means, but don’t rely on it either.
Yea I’m already experiencing this right now, actually the whole gem market has tanked in the last 2 days, I’m hoping it is just temporary and picks back up on the weekend.
I’m going to try and go for a more popular cut next time as it seems this one cut has been the lowest price for a while and I’ve only had 2 sales so far in 2 days.
On my server as far as rare cuts go, Scarlet Ruby’s are bringing me the most profit. A 19sp 16str or 16agi seem to go almost instantly 90% of the time after I post them. And for me it does seem the weekend is the better time to sell (possibly because customers who are looking at rares are more casual and as such are on more on the weekend). This is a double edged knife though because it also means there are more JC’s undercutting to compete with which has forced me to practice only posting 3 of any cut at any given time on the AH to limit my deposit losses.
All that being said I get anywhere from 65g-110g per gem for each of those cuts, and If I get lucky and there’s no 24stam gems on, have sold dozens of those for as much as 90g each. There seems to be a lot of luck involved lol
wanted to share one more thing you may or may not already be practicing (I didn’t remember until I already posted the last post). I get a LOT of uncommon gems from prospecting saronite. At first I was just cutting and selling them to vendors to avoid supplying competitors with mats, while hoarding enough to do my Icy Prism everyday. But I’ve found “Perfect” uncommon cuts like Bold Bloodstone and Delicate Bloodstone sell for 15-20g each, and are definately worth the 15silver deposit. Granted they don’t sell as often as the rares, but I try to keep a stock of 5 each on the AH as much as I can.
Is there a some kind of excel sheet to calculate prospecting of ores?
I’m working on one right now Sky
Hmm, the blue quality gems on my server is a completely dead market – they simply do not sell. I personally found that meta gems had the most potential for instant profit. Get the Chaotic Skyflare Diamond recipe first, the trick is to buy the actual mats for these. which are an Eternal Air, a Bloodstone and a Chalcedony, then get either an alchemy alt (transmute master ofc :p) or a friend to craft the uncut Skyflare Diamond. On my server the mats for these sell for about 25-30g and on popular raid nights the “chaotic skyflare diamond” sells for 90-120g they literally sell like hotcakes on raid nights, throw in the extra procs from transmute mastery and it has a huge profit potential. The popular Earthsiege Diamond recipies also work well, namely the top 5 metas listed here: http://www.wowpopular.com/Gems/Meta
Be aware demand for these meta gems peaks considerably on the main raid nights. I’ve made thousands just flipping these 5 meta gems, when people oversupply at offpeak and completely crash the price to 40-50g, I just buy them all out and relist them at peak times for 100-150g. Be aware that the total weekly supply seems to be less than the demand on my server so they’re easy to flip..other servers may be the inverse of this.
Purified Dreadstone is also a very good recipe for starting off. It’s highly in demand from both healers, locks and mages. It sells extremely well after raid times (generally I sell around 8-10 per night), it also tends to be alot cheaper to acquire than red, blue or yellow epic gems. It only requires a twilight opal and an eternal shadow to transmute with alchemy – these mats are cheap as chips. It costs 10 badges to buy the uncut gem from heroism badge vendor (easily racked up doing daily HCs). Also not many JCs have the recipe so undercutting is much less aggressive.
There isn’t much demand for any of the other cut purple epic gems, so the supply of raw Dreadstones is considerably more than the amount of the raw gem being bought which in turn pushes the price down. I typically buy the Dreadstones for 100-120g and sell the cut gem for 180-200g.