I wanted to share with you an email question I received and my response. Feel free to email me at any time – Will@wowconfidential.com if you have any questions of your own or just submit a comment on a relevant post and I’ll be sure to get back to you. Forums will be coming soon!
Q:
Hey,
Im a reader from your site WoW Confidential. Just like to say i love it, you have done a very good job with the website.
I just have a question, and im sure you have heard simlar things before.
I have trouble making gold, i have max jewelcrafting and mining (will be getting my first epic recipe tomorrow) and i have real trouble making gold. I read all your posts on the website and i always seem to fail at making a profit, i have around 4.1k gold and just wondering if you could give me any tips? Am i starting to late into the expansion?
Many Thanks
(Players name kept confidential)
A:
I’m glad you enjoy the site, means a lot to hear it.
There is always gold to be made in the game but it is definitely tougher now that we are in a pre-expansion recession where there will be a gradual decline of people playing, with the summer coming and people getting bored of the current expansion.
Less players = less sales and so many people have already figured out the ins and outs of their professions that it’s tough for a new player to get started.
Have you read my articles about how I went about picking my jewelcrafting recipes? My DK (for the 10K project) has about the same amount of gold that you do now but has about 10 cuts that I’ve learned.
Getting cuts should be your big priority right now. Ensure you do your JC daily every day, buy up Titanium Powder/Damaged Necklaces at good prices (on my server titanium powder under 25g or Damaged necklaces under 250g are good deals)
If you run out of money, go out and mine! mining can be a great gold earner to get some gold investment towards new JC cuts. Don’t just focus on Northrend ores, lower level ores such as thorium, mithril and even copper ores can sell for a lot. Write up a little spreadsheet and if you decide to go mining for gold input the current values of those ores. If you notice that a certain ore is very undersupplied or overpriced on the AH go mine that for an hour and you should rake in 500-800g/hour.
Make sure when you’re doing your cuts that you also Cancel and repost any cuts that you get undercut on. Focus on doing this during peak playing time to get as many sales as possible. I cancel around 2-3 times during peak time every hour.
Good luck with your profits.
End
Now I bring the question to those Jewelcrafters amongst us, what advice would you give a starting Jewelcrafter? Post your response in the comments below.
The best advice I can give as a JC is to make sure you have as many cuts posted on the ah as possible. Posting 15 cuts of the same gem is pointless. They’ll be undercut before they’ve all sold. Try to get atleast 2 copies of all the best priced cuts up on the ah. Just think “if someone’s planning to buy a gem that I can make, I want to be sure they’re buying mine.”
It’s also a good idea to keep a close eye on the market to know the average prices for uncut gems. For example, on my server I will post any scarlet ruby that’s selling for over 50g, and any forest emerald that’s selling for over 10g.
Always research new cuts before buying one. Check the AH for prices of different cuts, and take into consideration what gems you generally obtain. If you find a new scarlet ruby cut that sells for 10g more than your minimum, but you are usually struggling to get enough scarlet rubys to create the cuts you already have, go for something else. There’s no point getting a cut you can’t make. Use a bit of common sense aswel. Some gems will be priced very high on the AH that are totally useless. An example is the AP + mp5 gem. How many classes do you know that would buy that? Go for what you know will be popular.
Hope that helps
Mortanak
“It’s also a good idea to keep a close eye on the market to know the average prices for uncut gems”
Seems obvious, but this is great advice. I do the same thing for my enchanting mats. Even if its just a .txt file, figure out what you are willing to pay for each mat and save that info. Then buyout everything below your threshold. Not only are you getting cheap mats to use later, but it means your competition is paying more for the mats to make the same things you are. I always see people spamming to COD them mats for cheap prices, I was surprised to see this actually worked, so long as you keep a cashe of gold ready for that stuff, people actually will sell it to you just because its so easy and fast.
Sometimes if something is selling pretty high, its more than worth it to buy some mats, but don’t buy too many, the market may drop back down by the time you can sell ‘em.
I levelled my DK with skinning & mining and recently swapped skinning for jewelcrafting. Since hitting 350 about 2 weeks ago I’ve made approx 9000g profit and I’m sure I could make more with more effort.
For better or worse I took the decision not to buy any rare/epic cuts using the daily tokens. The cut gem market seems very competitive on my server and this late in the expansion I’m not fussed about trying to collect the recipes. Bear in mind 1 daily token = 1 dragon’s eye = 100g so it’s a real investment to pick up recipes.
So here’s what I do.
1. Do the daily, buy dragon’s eyes, that’s approx 100g a day.
2. Scan the auction house for uncut rare gems e.g. Forest Emeralds. If you see any for less than 4.5g, buy them, cut them (any trainer-learned recipe) and vendor them for instant profit. You’ll be surprised how many of these you find.
3. Get the 4 recipes at skill 350 (2 rings, 2 necks) which use 2 crystallized earth and 1 uncommon gem. These vendor for 3.14g so if you can get the mats for less that’s instant profit. There is an option to disenchant instead of vendor but the numbers don’t seem worth the extra work to me, ymmv. My personal limits are max 0.3g per crystallized earth and max 1g per uncommon gem, that gives ~1.5g profit per item. Use different price limits depending how you value your time.
4. Prospecting Saronite Ore. If you pay a maximum of 60s per saronite ore this price ensures you are guaranteed to make a (very small) profit even if you simply vendor everything when you are finished i.e. you can’t really lose, except for the time spent processing everything. If you want you can auction all the products from prospecting, though there is risk due to undercutting, relisting fees, etc. I tend to take a conservative approach. I cut and vendor green/purple uncommon gems along with orange/yellow/purple/green rare gems. I make and vendor green items using the red/yellow/orange/blue gems as per item 3 above. That leaves only two types of gem, blue and red rare gems, which I auction. Using my conservative, mainly vendored scheme makes ~4g profit per stack of saronite ore bought at a max price of 12g per stack (60s per ore as mentioned earlier) and is fairly risk-free. Depending on the rare gem market on your server (for me red is 30-40g, others are 4-8g generally) and if you’re prepared to battle for market share in the auction house there is the potential for more proits. Up to you how much risk and effort you want to take on.
I’m only skill 447 so not quite ready to prospect titanium ore but that’s what I’ll be looking into next to see how the numbers work out.
This ones an excellent post
I don’t understand how you can afford (based on posting costs) to cancel and repost gems several times an hour. I would think the majority of your profits would have gotten eaten up in that.
Depends on the item. I don’t know what the posting fees are for anything JC. As an enchanter, my stuffs all free, since the items have no vendor value.
Outside of the obviousness of listing them for short amounts of time, what else can you do though?
Think of it as gold per hour not gold per item. That much cancelling is done by players who have enough stock to flog it all constantly. It’s better to sell 100 items by being the lowest, then getting undercut on 70 of them, waiting until they expire and posting them again anyway only later, because in the time the 100 have sold, you’ve restocked and put more back on ah.
One thing I do to lower my posting/canceling deposit losses is that I’ve actually created sub-categories in my gem groups using QA3. You can’t treat JC like Inscription, where you can keep a stock of 5 of each glyph up on the AH all the time and never worry about deposit losses because Rares have a deposit of 67s for 12 hrs, and Epics have a 1g30s or something like that for 12 hrs. I used beancounter to go through my stock one day and see which cuts where making me the most reliable money, and which were giving me a loss. My Rares are divided into 3 grps:
3 Rare Posting: these include the high demand gems like 24+Stam, 16Str/Agi 16 Hit, Resil, defense, intellect etc. 3 of these cuts get posted from my stock all the time.
2 Rare Posting: these are ones that still sell but not as often and are mostly the combo gems. Only 2 of any of these cuts ever get put up
1 Rare Posting: These are cuts that hardly every sell. I may sell 1 of these a week in some cases. Gems like Opaque Forrest Emerald or Seers or Tense. And of course only one of these will ever be up from my stock.
Doing it this way has cut down on my deposit losses quite a bit. I also have 2 separate epic grps. 1 for Cardinals and King’s Amber cuts, where I’ve made my threshold much higher since the base gems cost much more, and another grp for all other epics, which are quite a bit cheaper and my threshold is set accordingly. Just a small thing but it has helped me make more money and hope it helps!
Something that I do is use half of the technique where you buy up gems like Sun crystal, Huge Citrine, Bloodstone, and Chalcedony but instead of selling the crafted gem I use my Enchanting to DE them into mats. 120g of gems bought usually yield about 1000g and i get it pretty quick.
Also, if you do Wintergrasp each week you will get gobs of honor and that can be used to buy epic gems for 10,000 honor per gem. I usually get enough for 2 or 3 so once a week i automatically get 300g just for doing a silly bg C:
Buying in bulk is something that should be considered. I bought 10 Cardinal Rubies for 1000g and selling the cuts for close to 160g. It’s slower, but not a bad profit margin.
Hope this help
My personal experience with JC recently is that it’s just not pulling in numbers anymore. I used to be able to make 1-2k a day just buying uncut gems and reselling, due to having enough different cuts. Now I’m lucky if I make a few hundred, and I’ve been focusing more on my glyph sales as of late. Not to be absolutely negative, but you might just be at a point on your server where it’s not really worth doing, especially if you’re on a low-medium pop server. There are the slower methods, like buying cheap uncommon gems and vendoring jewelery, but the big market, buying uncut and cutting, has seriously tanked in my experience. You might be beating a dead horse here :-\
I guess it’s due to near summer …
Since about 2 weeks it got pretty hard to make gold with gems. Sadly I already lost about 20% of my gold
On my server:
It seems there are a lot of farmers using ground-hacks.
Got many replies from friends that they are seeing ores dispawning at locations without phase shifting (is that the correct english word?) like wintergrasp etc. I do not mean the locations where you can see others depending on their questprogress (like icecrown) only. And if they are casting some aoe they’ll see entries in combatlog. Once I saw a lvl 70 rogue’s head sticking to the ground and going down then in icecrown. Checking the armory I saw he’s at maxskill mining and herbalism.
So raw gems are selling at the same price or even higher as cut gems (e.g. raw cardinal ruby 170g, cut ones average 150-175g)! Only the rare gems has a low chance for some profit. But many competitors as well for raw rare gems.
There are a lot of competitors at jewelcrafting and I expect they aren’t sleeping. Observed that the last week (reduced overtime hours from work) and saw them online almost every 2 hours
Some of them kept prices up some weeks before but now started to cut prices. They are posting cut cardinal gems für 170g or less now and before they did this for 200 or more.
Titanium ore is selling at 15+g each so not worth to buy (using your excel sheets resp. prospecting submittals) because it would be a losing bargain.
Saronite ore is selling at 75s-80s each. Sometimes 60-65s each (from farmers? Names look like). So it’s hard to get enough for prospecting or not worth buying as well.
Additional I’m using market watcher and it shows falling trends at all gems.
So I tried to enter the glyph market with an alt (laready knows all glyphs but wasn’t used for goldmaking due to competitors) but there are about 10 AH campers using quickAuctions I expect undercutting each other by 1 copper every 30min. Pointless.
Even the jewelcrafting-skilling-mats market is “under attack”. I could make some profit there for a long time, but that’s getting very hard now too.
My hope is, that’s the delayed price drop related to patch 3.3.3 and will not be forever…
My advice to new jewelcrafters is to find what sells for the most on your realm and buy the highest profit cuts first, stop yourself at 4 of each colour both for epic and rare gems.
I Have 3 bank alts for gems atm, Bank alt one handles all red/orange gems and earthsieges, Bank alt 2 sells blue/purple and skyflares. Finally Bank alt 3 sells yellow/green gems and shadow crystals.
I have 5 of each cut I know on the ah at all times, this is because there is little to no competition on my realm, and I post once at 6, check for undercuts at 7 and then go raiding, then finally check at 10:30 for undercuts after raid.
Also remember the rare and meta gem markets are far from dead, so don`t ignore them, and also if you notice one gem selling in heaps, double stock it, eg: I sell 5 of most epic gems a night, but sell 10 stam gems a night.
So an update from my earlier comment. I gave this a try last night, posting 2 of each “blue quality” gem I could cut (about 12) and one of each “purple quality” gem I could cut (about 6) using QA3 and then canceling anything I had been undercut on every 20-30 minutes and re-posting. In a 3 hour period I sold 4 “purple quality” gems and no “blue quality” gems. The market is so tight that on the 4 gems I only made a total of about 160g, not subtracting the posting fees (probably around 15g total). On my server there is only about 30-40g per gem profit to be made on “purple quality” gems. If you spend 150-175g per uncut “purple quality” gem, your profit is only about 22% on your investment. Not nearly as good as glyphs, enchants, disenchanting, or prospecting. And it takes a lot more time. If you only have 1 account you’ll never actually play your mains since you need to camp the AH. It only works well with a 2nd account it seems.