jewelcrafting
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The OverAchiever: Mountain O' Mounts from professions
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. Today, we are convinced that archaeology's RNG won't apply to us. There are a number of interesting (and by interesting, perhaps I mean "occasionally very expensive and likely to drive you insane via RNG-laden accessibility") mounts available from professions, though for some of them, you'll have to be a practitioner in good standing before you'll ever be able to learn them. Regrettably, I am the bearer of some very bad news this week concerning the Vial of the Sands for all those of you who like circumventing the highest costs in the game. Also read: Combining The Ambassador and Mountain O' Mounts Mountain O' Mounts in Outland Mountain O' Mounts in Northrend Mountain O' Mounts in 5-man dungeons Mountain O' Mounts in raids Mountain O' Mounts from achievements Mountain O' Mounts from PvP
Patch 4.2 PTR: Uncut green gems vendor price reduced
Blizzard has already reduced the vendor price for cut green gems (presumably to reduce jewelcrafters' propensity for vendoring the majority of every prospected stack of ore). While they left the uncut gems at 5g, it became much more profitable to shuffle all possible colors of gems into enchanting mats and blue jewlery. Well, the latest testing from the patch 4.2 PTR has reduced the price of uncut gems, too. On the live realms, they vendor for 100g a stack, leaving a decent vendor floor price for ore. Once this change goes live, they will be worth 50s each or 10g a stack. This should indeed have the desired effect of causing fewer of these to end up vendored for inflationary vendor money, with the potentially undesirable effect of making mining less profitable. Assuming you're transmuting, disenchanting, or otherwise making good use of 5 of the 6 colors of uncommon gems, this will likely not change your life much. You will make 10g instead of 100g when you vendor a stack of the borderline useless Zephyrite, but most of your money will be coming from the other activities. Also, you can still occasionally sell these to other jewelcrafters for their daily. Bottom line, though, is that the new "floor" price of Elementium Ore and Obsidium Ore is basically gone now. There are no more guaranteed sales, and if you flood a market (like enchanting mats) by processing thousands of stacks of ore, you can't count on any vendor based fallback to at least get you your money back. The news is already rolling out for the upcoming WoW Patch 4.2! Preview the new Firelands raid, marvel at the new legendary staff, and get the inside scoop on new quest hubs -- plus new Tier 12 armor!
Patch 4.2 brings quality-of-life changes for jewelcrafting
One of the things I'm looking forward to the most in patch 4.2 is the addition of a couple of nice things for jewelcrafters. First, cut gems will now stack. I can't tell you how happy this makes me -- while most people never carry more than a gem or two of the same type, as someone who sells them, I frequently have to make five or more trips between the mail and auction house in order to repost my expired auctions. Now if Blizzard would just make blue rings stack, I'd be a happy camper. The other thing that reeks of awesome is the brand spanking new JC bag. Every expansion seems to bring with it new profession bags, and Blizzard seems to randomly leave certain ones out. This time, we get the Luxurious Silk Gem Bag. Combined with the ability to stack cut gems, we're in business. These will both be particularly welcome changes once epic gems are launched, eventually doubling the number of different types of items gem sellers keep in their bags. Personally, I'm hoping that this change is in preparation for the imminent launch of epic gems in 4.2; however, I've logged into the PTR and prospected some pyrite each build and as yet have not seen anything new. The news is already rolling out for the upcoming WoW Patch 4.2! Preview the new Firelands raid, marvel at the new legendary staff, and get the inside scoop on new quest hubs -- plus new Tier 12 armor!
Cooldown removed on Icy Prism
An undocumented change that probably occurred in patch 4.1 is that the Icy Prism, a source for rare and epic Wrath of the Lich King-era gems, no longer has a cooldown. The highest stat gems that can be inserted into gear with an ilevel lower than 300 (which means all pre-Cataclysm gear) are Wrath gems, and this is likely now the cheapest way to get them. The main way currently to get Wrath gems is to prospect Wrath ores, usually Saronite. Prospecting a stack will yield an average of about one blue-quality gem, and while other ores may look more attractive, I've had trouble finding them in volume. Now that the cooldown has been removed, any jewelcrafter can make an Icy Prism with nothing more than a Frozen Orb and a couple of cheap Wrath green gems. Each prism will yield a couple of blue-quality gems, rarely a Dragon's Eye, and even more rarely, an epic gem. The Dragon's Eyes don't look like they'll be usable for much, but considering the price of Frozen Orbs, the blue and epic gems certainly look like they're worth making the prisms for. One thing to note: The prisms are unique, so you need to open one before you can make another. If, like me, you had stockpiled almost a thousand Frozen Orbs in Wrath just in case they ever became worth anything, this means a lot of clicking. WoW Patch 4.1 is live, and WoW Insider has all the latest news for you -- from guides of the revamped Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub to new valor point mechanics and new archaeology items.
Gold Capped: Can you ever have too many alchemists?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! I got an email from Kaefera that got me thinking: I have recently been leveling 9x level 75 characters on my server, to completely abuse professions and make some serious cash. I'm currently giving each of them alchemy, I have 4 transmute specced alchemists so far, currently growing at a rate of an alchemist a week. My question to you is more of a suggestion, what would you suggest to grab as a secondary profession on each of them? I would like something similar to my Truegold, where I can log on once a day on each character, craft/do whatever in 5 minutes, then move to the next. So this is something I've heard before, but more in Wrath of the Lich King, when alchemist cooldowns represented a very serious amount of gold per day. The reasoning was (and is) that if you level a bunch of alchemists, you can log in once a day to each character to use their cooldowns and make disgusting amounts of gold with virtually no effort. The question is, does this still work well enough to justify the investment?
Gold Capped: How to do the jewelcrafting shuffle
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! You've bought your ore at a discount, you've prospected it all, and now you're trying to decide how to make your money back. Like in Wrath of the Lich King, we have the ability to process all of these raw gems in some way in order to make more money. This is usually called a "shuffle"; it amounts to common sense and knowing what the gems can be used for. Let's start with the basics. Each of the three modern ores prospects slightly differently. Obsidium Ore prospects into six green-quality gems per stack and a residual number of blue-quality gems. Elementium Ore prospects four green-quality gems per stack and one blue-quality gem. Pyrite Ore prospects into four green-quality gems, one and a half blue-quality gems, and an average of eight Volatile Earths per stack.
Gold Capped: Ore-splosion
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! The auction house is starting to have to stack all the ore they're listing for sale out back of the warehouse. Elementium Ore and Obsidium Ore have, in the last few days, been listed in quantities most people would consider unimaginable at prices that make auctioneers cackle. Until they realize that everyone has gotten this amount of stock. Level ones have been cropping up like mushrooms and listing hundreds of stacks of ore per night on every server I've checked into. I'm not the only one who has written about this. Everyone loves cheap Cataclysm ore. It means cheap blacksmithing goods, cheap gems, cheap enchanting mats, and cheap engineering items. It also has the unique benefit of having the highest price floor of any ore ever introduced to the game. Obsidium prospects into 6 green quality raw gems and an average of 0.3 rare gems per stack, and elementium into 4 green and 1 blue. This means that if you do nothing but cut and vendor the greens for 9g, the "floor" for obsidium is 54g, and elementium is 36g. Then you have the rares. This floor is the bare minimum of what the ore is worth, but it's used for so many things. What else can we do with all of it?
Gold Capped: WoW Prospector for profitable prospecting
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, hate mail, or guild applications! Prospecting is something jewelcrafters can do to turn ore into raw gems. It takes 8 seconds of pure casting time to prospect a stack of ore, as well as whatever time it takes you to look all the gems out of the four loot windows that entails. It can't be legally automated, so that makes prospecting the semi-porous membrane between the ore and raw gem markets. Without this barrier, the relationship between the prices of ore and raw gems would be more like the ore and bars in which unless you have a small market with no active miner auctioneers, the price of bars isn't usually much more than the ore that went into making it. As it is, you may often find the price of ore is much lower than the gems you get from prospecting it are worth, even if you just sell them raw on the auction house. The reason for this is that mining ore is hard enough, and many times, miners will just throw their wares into the AH and rely on the market to snap up any ore below the price where prospecting is profitable. Also, unless these miners happen to be (or have) jewelcrafters, they may not exactly know what their ore represents in terms of raw gem money. Enter Wow Prospector, which allows you to input the price per ore and for the raw gems, then output whether it's worth prospecting.
Lichborne: Professions for level 85 death knights
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. Join World of Warcraft's first hero class as we head into a new expansion and shed the new kid on the block label. With your death knight at level 85 and all kitted out for raids, there's one more step you can take to make your death knight the best he can be: Learn some professions. A profession can provide self-buffs that nudge your DPS or suvivability up to the next level. It can grab you a lot of extra gold on the auction house (or drain all your gold, depending on which profession you take and how you choose to level it). Finally, it can provide you with some cool toys. This week, we'll take a look at WoW's professions to see which ones are tops for a death knight.
Arcane Brilliance: Professions for Cataclysm mages
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Except last week, when the holidays aggroed us. But rest easy, we managed to sheep the holidays, so now we can all go ahead and nuke down the rest of the year. As long as nobody breaks it early, our sheep shouldn't expire on the holidays for about 12 more months, give or take. So you're a mage. You have a job, and that job is taking something that was previously intact and converting it into much smaller, bloodier, often frozen chunks of that same thing. You manufacture shattered mobs, and you take pride in your work. But you may also have a side project or two. Maybe you thought to yourself, "Self, perhaps when we aren't making warlocks explode, maybe we should spend our time sewing trousers. Or baking cupcakes. Or making necklaces." Well, your self is right. You should be using your downtime in between vicious warlock kills to learn a side trade. They offer bonuses in the form of cool gear, extra money, and bonus stats, plus a bit of catharsis to help you decompress form all that murder. But which professions should you choose? That's easy: anything but mining. What's that? You'd like a bit more detail? Oh, fine.
Patch 4.0.6 PTR: New DPS meta-gems and requirement fixes
Good news for people who've been sick to death of Cataclysm's terrible meta-gem requirements (read: everyone): Blizzard has made its promised changes to Chaotic and Relentless gem types in patch 4.0.6, making both require three red gems. But that's not all! There are also three brand new meta-gems coming with the new patch, giving DPS classes a boost to their main stat and 3% increased crit damage. Good changes all around. The full text of the announcement is below. Check out the full 4.0.6 PTR patch notes (so far) here. Jewelcrafting Meta gems with the Chaotic and Relentless prefixes now have a requirement of 3 red gems. New meta gems have been added: Agile Shadowspirit Diamond (Agility/3% critical damage), Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond (Strength/3% critical damage), and Burning Shadowspirit Diamond (Intellect/3% critical damage). These new recipes are unbound and can drop from any Cataclysm creature. The new meta gems have a requirement of 3 red gems equipped. source World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.
Gold Capped: Early Cataclysm economy tweaks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on making money in game, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold-blogosphere post is Warcraft Econ's Pyrite prospecting results. Normally, when Blizzard makes a change to the economy, it's not enough news to justify its own blue post. When I sat down and tried to decide what to write about this week, I realized that the most important information I could get out to you guys is news of all the economic tweaks that have come down the pipeline that are shaping these first few weeks of Cataclysm. First up: Pyrite Ore is now prospectable at 500 skill, down from 525. This is a very expensive mineral on most realms, so it hasn't been prospected as much as, say, Elementium Ore. That said, based on the limited number of prospects we've seen numbers for, it looks like it may be dropping as many green-quality gems as Obsidium Ore, as many rare gems as Elementium Ore, and an additional one to three Volatile Earths. My napkin math indicated that if the additional expense for five pyrite is more than two earths, it may not be worth prospecting.
Insider Trader: Jewelcrafting in the first week of Cataclysm
Insider Trader is a column about professions by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped about how to make money using the auction house. Email Basil your questions. Jewelcrafting in Cataclysm remains one of the most interesting professions in the game, providing resources that everyone needs, as well as offering one of the most flexible (and thereby most appealing to min-maxers) personal performance perks of any profession. Let's take a tour around the profession window, starting with the core ability that everyone thinks of when they think jewelcrafting: gem cutting.
Spiritual Guidance: Professions for healing priests in Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests and is trying to find a good recipe for Lamingtons. Is everyone excited? How about anxious or intimidated? Cataclysm comes out tonight at midnight, and by tomorrow afternoon, everything will be different. Before you know it, there will be level 85 priests running about your respective realms and spam requests in trade chat for Inferno Rubies. Everyone's priorities are about to change -- but for now, we're still in the calm before the storm. In this calm, I though I'd focus on professions for priests. There have been a lot of small changes to professions that I think we need to give some attention before we get further invested in them. Plus, the start of the expansion is when professions get the most use, what with all that new, easily accessible gear. Let's get started.
Countdown to Cataclysm: Profession updates and changes
This article is part of our Countdown to Cataclysm series -- preparing you for Cataclysm launch one day at a time. Cataclysm is going to change the world of professions -- so without any further ado, here are the most important changes. General The skill cap for all professions is now 525. There is a lot of content locked behind a phased area you can not unlock until you're level 84. The new elemental trade goods are called Volatiles. Herbing and mining now provide experience. Archeology will be trainable. Guilds can see links for all members' available professions.
Insider Trader: No more low-level crafting alts
Insider Trader is a column about professions by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped about how to make money using the auction house. Email Basil your questions. It's been pointed out before that I happen to use the very laziest of profession and auction alts: a level 65 death knight. Death knights start at 55 and can be facerolled to 65 with the least investment of time of any class. In my reply to that comment on the original post, you'll see my method: I never level anything except the character I plan on playing in the endgame. I'm a busy man, and among all the activities that can be done in World of Warcraft, I prioritize leveling just under patching my client and just above reputation grinding. Well, it's a good thing that my poor, facerolling DK has been grinding the dungeons for the last week, because one of the trade skills I've maxed on him is undergoing a pretty serious change: All enchanting recipes that require a skill of over 510 are apparently not available from the normal trainers in major cities. That's not the end of it, either -- blacksmithing, leatherworking, and jewelcrafting are all capped out at 500 skill at the city trainers. Special thanks to my Hunting Party Podcast co-host Darkbrew for confirming these values for me in the beta, and thanks to Kaliope for writing a post that pointed me in the right direction.
Patch 4.0.1 gem changes detailed
With the new stat changes from patch 4.0.1, many jewelcrafting gems are changing or being removed entirely. Blizzard has posted a comprehensive, official list of the changes for players, to make the change a little bit easier for all of us. In addition, the stats that are going away have their conversion stats, showing you what to expect when you log on later today. Bashiok -- Gem Changes in 4.0.1 As previously announced, we're changing many of the stats in the game. Some stats are being removed entirely, while others are being redefined. These stat changes will affect gems as well, as we've made a series of basic changes to them, including color changes and stat conversions. Gems are being changed as follows: Color Changes Hit is now blue. This makes blue gems interesting for all specs and classes. Mastery and Dodge are now yellow. This change ensures good yellow gem choices continue to exist for tanking. The addition of Mastery to yellow increases the color's value to all specs. Intellect is now red. Red needs to be a great choice for casters, and a universally good color for all specs. If after the patch you have gems that have changed color, they may no longer match the socket they're in, and the socket bonuses will no longer be applied. Some stats are being converted into others as detailed below: Stat Conversion Attack Power is converted to Agility. Spell Power is converted to Intellect. Mana/5 is converted to Spirit. Defense is converted to Dodge, and sometimes Parry. Armor Penetration is generally converted to Critical Strike. source I love these new gem colors, especially because my main is a tank. Having mastery as a yellow gem and hit as a blue gem make for some very interesting gem builds, especially in response to all the stamina-stacking for tanks that has been going on for the entirety of Wrath of the Lich King. This is it! Patch 4.0.1 begins the slide into December's upcoming expansion. It's a whole new game from here on out. Get oriented with our roundup of everything there is to know about patch 4.0.1 and how it changes the game until the launch of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.
Gold Capped: WoW Prospector and mailbag
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail, as well as check out the long awaited 11th episode of Call to Auction! I got an email from the creator of WoW Prospector asking me to cover it. After he assured me that his servers are housed in a fire proof room lined with asbestos and at least 300 meters from any residential zones, I agreed, mainly because it's an incredibly useful tool that has saved me a bunch of spreadsheet time. Essentially, the tool will tell you how much money you stand to make prospecting various ores, given the price of ore and what you can sell the raw gems for. Here's a screenshot of it in action:
Cataclysm Beta: Professions and trade skills
Step aside, class changes. Back off, world revamp. Now it's time to put what everyone really wants to see into the spotlight: trade skills. MMO-Champion, which is having some difficulty staying up and stable this evening, has what you're looking for amongst its Cataclysm information. Blacksmithing Tailoring Jewelcrafting Alchemy Enchanting Leatherworking First Aid Mining Fishing Herbalism Inscription Engineering Cooking Skinning Okay, trade skills aren't the most exciting thing in the world, but these previews give us a glimpse at what sort of stats we'll be dealing with on our gear in this expansion. Just look at the Elementium Poleaxe, Bio-Optic Killshades and the new gems. If those MMO-Champion pages aren't your style, there's also a good unofficial trade skill compilation on the Cataclysm forums. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From goblins and worgens to mastery and guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.
Gold Capped: Meta gem deep dive
Want to get Gold Capped? Every week, Basil "Euripides" Berntsen takes a short break from building a raiding guild on Drenden (US-A) to write up a guide that will help you make gold. Check out the Call to Auction podcast, and feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! I've talked before about meta gems, however I feel they deserve more than a paragraph buried in the middle of a jewelcrafting post. Like many of the best businesses, metas are purchased by all end game players and many leveling players. They provide a hefty bonus to PvE and PvP, come in a variety of flavors and (most importantly) get purchased every time someone upgrades their helm.
