I picked up jewelcrafting as my primary profession to make gold with for my journey to hit 10,000g as fast as possible with a DK starting from scratch on a new server.
I expected this to be a piece of cake since I heard so many people touting how it was the best way to make gold and you can instantly cut raw epic gems for 100g mark ups!
Boy, was I in for a disappointment.
I said to myself, maybe its my server? I switched from the high population server Tichondrius to a medium population server closer to my home (way better latency). I knew the implications of a smaller server would mean lower sales but I figured that it would be a challenge to make tons of gold here and then people can’t claim “Your strategies only work on high pop servers!”
Well, regardless or not if it’s just my server economy for most cuts being a 10g mark up from the average costs of raw gems, I invested 40 hours getting this DK from lvl 55 – 450 Jewelcrafting skill and I am determined to find some way to profit from this profession.
It suddenly dawned upon me when I was chatting with resident Jewelcrafting expert Wingman, author of the making gold with jewelcrafting guide, about my troubles, and he said something that changed the course of my profits:
You profit with jewelcrafting when you buy your uncut gems, not when you sell them
This whole time I’ve been focused on buying gems at the average market value and find cuts to craft that are 20g or more higher than market value. The problem with this approach is that other players are doing the exact same thing, they have stock piles of gems and are ready to pounce on any cut that is currently going for this high a profit margin.
So I switched my strategy, I figured my profit would come in the form of the discount I can achieve by sourcing my gems as low as possible, then I wouldn’t have to fight so hard only making cuts that are high profit, they’d only have to be 5-10g higher than the average cost of gems and I’d be happy. So far it has been working out great and I’ll give you a detailed post of my results in the next DK 10K update this week.
Here’s a little spreadsheet I whipped together to figure out my “buying price” of each gem based on the minimum profit I wanted per gem and the average market price. The “Sell Price” is the lowest I’m willing to sell a gem at (if no other auctions are up, I’ll gladly post the gem as high as I can for more profit). A reader of WoWConfidential - @Benregn – tweeted me, asking if I could include a copy of my spreadsheet for download (feel free to tweet me at any time @WoWConfidential with questions or just to say hi), so from now on I’ll include them for you to download and use, be warned though that they can be messy, and a little complicated 
@WoWConfidential Could you upload some of your Excel spreadsheets. Would be useful to see how you do it, up close.
Market: The average price that auctioneer sees this epic gem at.
Buy Price: Market Price – (Discount + Listing cost/2) *This basically says I want to buy my gems at my inputted discount while taking into consideration the losses from auction house cut and listing cost (divided by 2 because the cost listed here is the 48 hour list cost, I didn’t change the numbers for the difference between rare/epic listing cost)
Sell Price: (Material cost + Auction House cut) X 1.15 * Give me a 15% profit on my gems, amount shown in profit column.
AH Cut: The auction house takes 5% of all sales, so I consider this in my profit and buy price.
List Cost: The values here are 2 X the amount of the 12 hour listing cost of epic gems. I should lower the amount for rare cuts as it’s only 1g 35s for X2 listing costs.(I factor in 2 expires to lower risk)
% Discount: The discount I want from the average price of gems, if you set this amount too low you’ll hardly get enough gems to cut, but too high and your profit margins will be low.
Profit: Sell Price – Buy Price – Auction House cut.
You can download a copy of my jewelcrafting material profit calculator here. Don’t change any of the calculation fields unless you know what you’re doing. You just need to put in your servers average cost per raw cut in the Market field by using the “Market Price” number in the auctioneer tooltip, if you don’t have auctioneer or need a refresher course on how to get these numbers go check out the auctioneer guide series.
It may sound easy for me to say “Hey just get uncut gems for 35% discount and you make lots of gold!!” well obviously it is more work to do this and I have several methods I’m utilizing to source my raw gems. I will detail my methods in a post either tomorrow or the next day.
One last thing I wanted to mention, you may notice on the sidebar there is a “Subscribe to our newsletter” area where you can input your email. I know a lot of you don’t use our RSS feed but may still like to get updates of when new posts are on the site. Well now there’s a weekly E-mail newsletter you can sign up to!
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This newsletter will have a summary of our top posts of the week, and extra stuff that isn’t put on the blog like gold making news I’ve found from around the web and other bonuses only our email subscribers receive.
That wraps up the article. Patch 3.3.3 should be released this Tuesday so I hope you’ve all stocked up on your frozen orbs (for under 15g). I am eager to share with you how my investments pan out and how close my predictions were of patch 3.3.3 economy changes. You can find a list of everything I bought in the middle of this post: Buying and selling for patch 3.3.3.
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My only issue with this is that you’re not making money off Jewelcrafting, you’re making money off reselling gems. You could make most of the same profit (minus the small cut gem mark up) by reselling the raw gems on the AH.
I think you are going about the spreadsheet incorrectly. When it comes to gem profits you should be aiming at a markup level first THEN setting your price for buying a gem based on that price based on the day’s market price. Learning cuts for JC is expensive and as such the JC’s are allowed to dictate the ammount they profit from a cut to a certain degree. This also makes all the value of different cuts enequal. You are “allowed” to ask for more money on more uncommon cuts (ie +20 expertise). Not to mention with my said method, you have a certain level of resilience against undercutters and the like since you are adjusting the price of the cut and not the price of the gems.
JMTC really
also, i have no idea where you are getting your formula for ah cut. Please explain
I expect the formula is meant like
(BuyPrice + wanted profit + ah cut)* ah cut
But that’s incorrect because adding the ah cut to to sellprice (to redeem that costs) will raise the ah cut once more.
Correct would be
(BuyPrice + BuyPrice * Profit) * 5.2632
You may wonder about the percentage. That’s caused by rounding accuracy & increasing ah cut again when trying to redeem.
But you can check it easily: set profit to zero, use my formula to calculate the ah cut, add the result to your buyprice to get your sellprice, imagine a sale and multiply your sellprice with 0.95 (that’s what you will get from AH) and the reslut should be identically with your buyprice
PS: “Profit” in my formula is a percentage so you also could calculate (buyprice * 1.15) * 5.2632 for a 15% profit
Since you try and source your uncut gems cheap from alchemists I was wondering if a post about how sweet Alchemy is would be upcoming? With no procs on my lvl 70’s+ I make 5 epics gems a day. Each one is over 100g profit and every other week I make 1000+ haste potions and sell them for over 300% profit without counting procs(Which on 1000 is around 275 pots).Also all the meta gems you want which proc as well and titanium bars.It’s the perfect support for your Jewelcrafter.
It really is a great profession that is still flying under the radar.
To be honest, making a 15% profit on a raw gem that costs 8g is simply not worth doing. You spend a lot of time monkeying with spreadsheets, trying to find a source that will sell you the gem for less, etc. etc., and in the end you walk away with 1.2g profit per sale. That’s ridiculous! Cut gems take up inventory space, so you will likely need to cut a few at a time, or use the mail as intermediate storage, all inconvinient. Get the PvP cuts, I make over 30g per sale on a 5g raw gem on rare gem PvP cuts, that’s really the only blue gems worth doing imho (ymmv on your server ofc).
Also, most farmers are based out of Stormwind, so I suggest to place your gem buying alt there and be online during Chinese prime-time. I am able to buy Ametrine for 82g and Cardinal Rubys for 125g straight from the farmers, just have to cultivate relationships. I am about to drop my Ruby buy price though as a lot of people are cashing out there honor flooding the market with them.