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Gold Capped: Is prospecting still worth it?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Fox Van Allen and Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aim to show you how to make money on the auction house. Feed Fox's ego by emailing him or tweeting him at @foxvanallen. The jewelcrafting shuffle used to be an incredibly lucrative way to make money. It was simple: You went to the Auction House, bought out the stock of ore, and then hit your prospecting key as fast as you could. You'd craft what was profitable to craft; you'd vendor the raw gems that weren't otherwise useful. And because the vendor value of the raw gems was almost always more than the value of the Elementium or Obsidium Ore prospected to get those gems, we had a no-lose situation. A jewelcrafter's risk was 0; the profit potential limited only by the amount of time you had to waste doing the "shuffle." Of course, that was prior to patch 4.2. After the patch, each green gem (for example, Zephyrite) saw its vendor value slashed to a mere 50 silver. The days of the jewelcrafting shuffle were over. But still, the days of profitable jewelcrafting still live on. This past week, my Gold Capped tag-team partner Basil opined that patch 4.3 will bring epic gems. He's probably right, but that doesn't mean you have to bide your time, stockpiling Pyrite Ore until patch 4.3 to make some serious money as a JC. Let's take a second look at the old jewelcrafting shuffle and see if we can still find profit hiding in the jewelcrafting profession.
Gold Capped: How to generate Celestial Essences
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! Enchanting Cataclysm gear takes Hypnotic Dust, Celestial Essences, Heavenly Shards, and Maelstrom Crystals. I've spent the last week making and selling scrolls, and this has led to the discovery that these materials are not currently being used in the ratio they're being made. Celestial Essences are, by far, the bottleneck. This is not a scientific fact, but I sell a lot of scrolls, and that means that my materials use is probably a representative sample of my market's actual materials use. If you simply look at all the enchants at ilvl 300 and up, the ratio of materials used will be different than if you look at a sample of actual market data. Actual market data will include the fact that some enchants sell better than others. One could, however, take a look at Wowpopular.com's enchant list and weigh each recipe by the number of stars they give it to get a general idea. That said, let's look at the best and cheapest ways to make Celestials.
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.
