Jewelcrafting--A Case Study

In the previous entry, I talked about the theory behind jewelcrafting—it was more theory than anything else, but let's test that theory, shall we? Let's look at an actual example. Jewelcrafting takes much higher amounts of money to start with, but the principles remain the same whether you can afford 20 stacks or 2,000 stacks. The time to sell of course and the risk goes up the more you buy.

First, we invest in the market and buy ore. I bought 274 stacks for about 100 gold a stack or 27,400 k in costs for this example. That's a sizable amount but again you can do more or less depending on how your auction house is.

After watching the history channel and breaking the ore, I yield 37 red gems x300 gold each =11,100 gold. 

I transmute the carns into inferno rubies. This should yield 61 red gems (x300 gold each=18,300). During this process I procs 10 times for 71 gems total, adding another 3,000 gold. Included is one lucky 5 proc! This brings my total estimated bring it at 32,300 gold!

 

The profit rate is about 17 percent or for every 5 gold invested, we get 6 back. That's not too bad. Of course, we gained both common and uncommon gems of other colors too. These are all pure profit.

If we count in 70 oranges and 66 purples (at 15 each is 2,040).  This is a real low number--you'll probably get more than that.  I like to pad my margins some, just in case.

When I actually started selling, I didn't get quite what I had wanted, but they were flying off my virtual shelves.  That's one of the reason I like really big margins.  Of course this left me with a slew of common gems.  The theory says we make enchanting materials and then DE them.

 The jewelry itself is easy enough to make, but sending them all to your enchanter would be...tedious.  Thankfully, TSM has an automailer.  You just choose the item types you want send, add them to a list, and then the addon will send away.



The first screen shot shows you how to add them.  It is just like adding glyphs to your list.  The second screenshot shows the addon whisking the materials away to my enchanter.

I also decided to take a gamble and make some pvp jewerly.  I had quite a bit of volatile water around that I wanted to get rid of and amberjewels, so why not.  They always disenchant into 1-2 shards with the guild perk, so it seemed like a way to convert stuff I didn't want into stuff I could sell. 

 

On a whim, I put a few rings up and sold them for even greater profit!  The rings were going for almost 250 gold per.

Our  macro trick doesn't work with all the different jewelry names.  Doing it by hand would be tedious.  I don't want to spend my time looking around in my bags!  So I use the addon Panda to find the stuff I want to disenchant and make it easy clicking.

 I disenchant the jewelry and then scour the market.  There's plenty of profit to be made.

918 hypnotic dust x 1 gold = 918

69 greater celestial essence x80 gold=5,520

39 heavenly shards x 100 gold =3,900

This brings our enchanting total to 10,338! That's a combined grand total of 44,678 gold!

 Why sell the raw materials when we have an enchanter?  I want sure things, so I look for Int enchants mostly.

 Of course there's always more. Look at 50 Int to cloak. 9 gold in dust and 4 essences (320 gold) somehow equal 625 gold?

Int to offhand...4 essences of 320 gold and 6 dust is somehow 630 gold? These are almost 100 percent mark ups!

I found mighty stats and earthen vitality to boots to be great as well.  They took fewer mats and the later was a great way to move dust.

If we consider that most of the pricy enchanting mats will sell as enchants for double their price, we can project profit as high as 54k range...just over double our initial estimates.  Jewelcrafting is very profitable and even if we don't hit some of the higher ranges we were hoping for, it certainly offers great yields.

Darkmoon Decks--Success!

This is a quick update on the darkmoon fair.  As you can see I made a fair number of decks this go around.  At the end of the fair, I was down to 122.  The screenshot pictured to the right shows that I've made back some of it off glyphs already.

I wanted to see how much I really gained from the fair, so to make the math easy,  I put all my decks up at the same time.  Tradeskill master is tellimg me my worth is almost 350k....that's 200k higher than I had at my peak.  I don't think I'll actually make 200k profit on all those decks.  Prices are inflated and I'll have all next month to sell those cards without any new decks entering the market.  New 85's will have to buy from me and like minded individuals if they wish to get into the new 5 mans and lfr faster.



A few days after I took those screenshots, I had already made another 40k back.  I still have a huge stockpile of ink and cards left to sell too.  I am well ahead of where I started and with even mediocre sales, I'll certainly come up ahead.  So there you have it, inscription at work is still viable.  I've started working on a case study for gems as well, which as I've discussed in early entries much more friendly than inscription--it is easier to sell red gems than it is to complete decks.  

Jewelcrafting Overview

I am going to talk about the basics of jewelcrafting.

The first thing about jewelcrafting that is important is realizing that only your red gems really matter. When I was doing jewelcrafting actively, my reds would carry my entire inventory.

Why are reds so good? Every healer and every dps wants all or nearly all red gems. They are optimal. The only exception is when you can get a +20 bonus to your primary stat from a socket bonus.

Thus there are three cuts that are really good. +40 Int (brilliant), +40 Agi (delicate), and +40 Str (bold). Brilliant is the most important because every healer and every caster dps wants it. That means all 3 mage specs, all 3 warlock, 2 shaman specs, 1 paladin, 2 druid, and all 3 priests—or 14 specs. Delicate has 3 hunter, 3 rogue, 2 druid, and 1 shaman or 9 specs. Bold only has 2 dk, 2 warrior, and 1 paladin or 5 specs. It takes 9 days to get all three main cuts.

Purples and oranges still sell for those socket bonuses. Unfortunately, it is less clear cut what you want. Haste/Int (reckless) is really good, but some classes might want spirit/int or master/int or even hit/int. Of course hybrid str and agi gems are all good. I would get one of each color and then alternate until I built a good list.

I've had an awful time selling greens, yellows, and blues. Sometimes you can sell the tank oriented cuts here. Pure stamina, stamina/dodge, stamina/mastery, and pure mastery are all cuts that might sell. These often go for next to nothing and sometimes aren't even worth posting.

All the same things we've done with glyphs can be down with gems. I would make a different group for red (your high sellers) and then orange and yellow. Finally, I'd make one for blues, greens, and yellows.

So let's talk about how to get gems. You can make a macro, just like we did for milling herbs, merely change mill with prospect. If your server prices are favorable, then you can buy it and prospect through it. It is more costly to relist gems though. I recommend only posting 1-3 at a time and then posting more when you are undercut. The jewelcrafting market has huge undercutters and you'll only optimize your profit while watching it constantly. Constant vigilance is exhausting though.

You'll get common and rare gems. Let's talk about commons first because there's really not much to say about rares.

Carnelians are your bread and butter. These are great because with an alchemist you can transmute 3 of them and 3 heartblossom into an inferno ruby. There's no cool down on it and you get a 15 percent proc rate with a transmuter spec. If your prices are favorable, you can even buy the carnelians raw and transmute them. If you end up like me, keeping red gems in stock is your greatest challenge.

Jaspers (green), nightstones (purple), and zephrites (blue) are used in the daily. Zephrites can only be used on the daily—there's no other use besides leveling your skill up on them. I have stacks and stacks of these I can't get rid of.

Jaspers and nightstones can allow you to make jewelry as do hessonites (orange) and alicities (yellow), you can make jewelry. You'll rarely get a blue piece and always a green if you didn't get a blue. The greens are utterly worthless, but you can disenchant them into dust or if your are lucky essences. The blues might sell for several hundred gold each! If your server economy is depressed, you can turn them into heavenly shards. Furthermore, if your guild has the perk that allows for extra mats, this really generates large amounts of materials. If you are adventurous you can use this to full your enchanting business. (I'd highly recommend some enchants like 50 int to cloak, 40 int to offhand, the drop bracer enchants, or 15 stat enchants to chest.)

When I was doing this actively ore was only 30 to 40 gold a stack (but reds were only 50 each). These days I see ore for as high as 150 to 200 gold a stack and reds for 300 gold. I haven't dabbled it much lately, but I believe this could be extremely profitable, though it almost demands an enchanter and alchemist to make it really work. If you lack an alchemist, you can make carnelian spikes, which commonly de into 2-3 essences. This isn't ideal by any means, but it gives you a way to use them efficiently.

This was just a brief overview of how to make money with jewelcrafting. Hopefully this helps that are learning the trade.  Jewelcrafting requires heavy watching of the market, but you can quickly entry into it since it only takes 3 days to get the best cut.  It is very casual friendly.  In theory you could even manually put your auctions up or use a mod like auctionator--it would require little work.

Inscription in MoP

“Back in May of 2010, we began tossing around ideas about how to improve Inscription. But at that time, Mists of Pandaria was still in the early stages of character talent development. As that was hashed out, it directly affected how we were then able to approach potential Inscription and glyph changes. As a matter of fact, at one point during the discussions, glyphs were going to be removed altogether. That then evolved into the idea of Prime glyphs being removed, Major glyphs being adjusted such that their added bonuses did not affect talents, and Minor glyphs being revamped so they felt more interesting.

Have no fear, I have been assured that Inscription and glyph discovery are being actively discussed in preparation for upcoming changes with Mists of Pandaria. This comes with one albeit relieving caveat: Glyphs that are now learned solely through the Book of Glyph Mastery are planned to be available through the Northrend and Minor research dailies."

Here's the link

Link to the source information 

Just an entry ago, I talked about this, but I'll rehash it because we have talk about it from a blue Blizzard source.

I am pretty shocked that they'd think about removing glyphs all together. Not completely I suppose, but still that would be a really radical step. That would leave inscription as a very empty profession. Even without prime glyphs, we'd probably see at least 150 glyphs cut off the list. That's a massive number. The ones added for the new class won't make up for it.

The second part has them talk about all glyphs being gained through research. I am actually okay with this. The time barrier will still be immense for new competition. Goblins are still likely to outlast their foes interest. I am really happy with this actually. Of course, I'd prefer they never made any changes at all because the northrend ones are hard to farm. The worse case was if they had the books simply dropping off everything 78 to 85. It would flood the market with them and eventually, we'd go back to 15 gold glyph books instead of 500 gold ones.

The other thing is Blizzard talks about redoing minor glyphs. I wholeheartedly agree. There's some really good modern minors...like treant and shadow. Both are great sellers. Then, you have the paladin glyphs—half mana off spells that don't matter. I'd love to see paladins get one that puts their avenging wings on them 24/7. Druids could get glyphs that alter their bear and cat forms. Heck, there's a host of visual effects that could be added. Rain clouds for druids, frost circles for mages, maybe auras for hunter and warlock pets—or even different clothes for the former. None of them would have the slightest gameplay effect, but all would be high in demand. Blizzard would have happier players because they could make their characters more unique. Of course, glyph sellers would make a pile of gold on the exchange.

That's all for now, but these are certainly interesting times. (I did manage to complete three more tsuanmi decks though, bringing my total decks up to 30 this fair.)

Darkmoon Fair viablity?

With love is in the air, going on, there's a couple great opportunities to make tons of money. The larger one is the love bird mount. In theory, it might sell for quite a bit later on. I am not as confidant as the cross faction pets though, since they inherently are harder to get. The second items are the charm bracelets. I see people buying them for over 100 gold, though I think they manually have to sell them. I've not explored it too much, but I have to admit, it is a pain to farm four of them each day.

I've been really busy with the Darkmoon Fair. I originally had about a dozen decks to sell, but one thing lead to another and I found good prices on both whiptail and cinderbloom. I lost track, but I think I bought around 600 stacks of it and 16 stacks of life to boot. Talk about tedious, but three movies, later it was all milled. The ink isn't so bad because at least you can go do something else while your character creates it.

All those herbs brought me 81 darkmoon cards. It certainly is a respectable haul. I finished 2 earthquake decks, 2 volcano, 2 tsunami, and 7 hurricanes. I had almost depleted my volcano cards before from making decks, so I already had a number of those. I am just a few cards short (mostly the ace of waves) of making a few more tsunami decks, so I'll be watching the AH hard for that card. I actually bought too much life, but there's always used for it.

 

I'd guess conservatively 2.5 k for the earthquake decks, 9k for volcano and tsunami, and 5k for hurricanes, for a grand total of 76k. That's about a return of 1 to 2 from gold spent to gold earned. 

As shown in the screenshot to the right t, I have a huge stockpile of ink again. (It also shows the original 14 decks I had made before hand.) Glyphs will trickle in money for the next month without any more milling. It might be time to start making fortune cards again even.

In conclusion, the darkmoon fair is still profitable. It would have been much greater if the darkmoon cards were still demanding double digits. The danger of course is, once Mists of Pandaria arrives, the darkmoon cards are worthless, though by then, the new cards will give us greater options to earn wealth.

Prediction about Prime Glyphs

One of the great things about taking all these screenshots is the ability to look back accurately. I was looking at my old screen from a week ago Tuesday. I had 145.5k. Today I have 172.4k. That's 26.9k in 9 days days. That's alittle under 3k a day with about half an hour a day spent on average—our nearly 6k an hour of work. Plus, I have a bank brimming with ink and quite about of infernal ink to use.

Interesting my total glyph worth had dropped to 35k and then jumped up to 70k. I also noted that one of my new competitors (can in this expansion) probably had been buying cheap glyphs out. On one hand, I regret they are gaining inventory at cheap price. On the other, they are doing all the work and I am coming in and undercutting them, so that's good too. We aren't a cartel...we didn't talk about it, but we are more like gas stations both matching each other's (in our case) inflated rates.

In an early entry, I talked about the barriers to entry in the glyph market. That's why this type of behavior is occurring. I know I've seen blue Blizzard posts talking about how unhappy they are with the glyph books from Northrend. They could very easily make these all researchable. I would actually be okay with the change. The complainers would simply have to spend more time researching (and hopefully get bored during the long research times. Unlike say the gem market, where only a few cuts matter, there's usually at least 9 glyphs for every spec that are best. There's some overlap especially with minors and majors, but primes are almost always unique to a spec. I would never try this with gems because there's just too much competition. You can certainly make money with gems, but that is by activating fighting the opposition. It is too broad based to actually form a cartel.

The second threat to the inscription market is the possibility that Blizzard would remove prime glyphs. There was some talk about how they were unhappy with prime glyphs. This makes sense. The average person doesn't know where lava burst or lightening bolt does more damage. This person relies on some outside source to figure out which is a bigger portion of their damage. Worse yet, if this hypothetical person doesn't have any real way of knowing and can easily make the wrong choice. If encounters are balanced around making the right choice...then the person is doomed for failure. (I remember seeing a resto druid without Nature's Swiftness or Swiftmend during Wrath. I pitted them because they were trying to operate without a full tool kit. )

Deep down, Blizzard wants us to have difficult, but succeed. That's why you see content being nerfed down and stacking buffs like the ones for ICC and Dragonsoul. The current model of inscription really doesn't fit this model. (This is also why you don't see long grinds of experience or even the ability to meaningful progress your character outside a few small venues—mostly quests, then dungeons, then heroic dungeons, then raids (with crafted gear and rep gear tucked in the list) and then a more narrow route for pvp...just sometimes crafted, then a two week hazing while you build up resilience from the honor gear in battle grounds or Tol Barad, followed by arena or rate battle grounds. World pvp might be fun, but it isn't productive and isn't present on most servers. If you look at older games like Everquest, there were a myriad of ways to progress your character through solo quests and older items that were simply broken. (Clerics in that game used the same main hand weapon for something like a decade straight, because the click effect was so valuable!)

It is my prediction that Blizzard will do what they have hinted at and eliminate prime glyphs. Glyphs were divided between prime and major in Cata because Blizzard didn't like how prime simpily override major for pvers. There was no meaningful decision making process. Just like their changes to the talent trees were ultimately failures and Blizzard simply wants to scrap them with Mists of Pandaria, I believe that prime glyphs will be eliminated.  This simplifies the bulky glyph system and makes it more accessible to the average person.  Their inability to fix the issue with Northrend books seems to be less of an issue because the new system will have fewer glyphs in it.  Also, with fewer glyphs, the barriers to entry lessen into inscription.  These are all goals Blizzard surely has.

Perhaps I sound paranoid, but I believe Blizzard doesn't like us gold mongers.  The removal of epic gems from ore is an example of this type of behavior.  Of course, this just lead for the prices on red gems to increase (on my server they went from 50 to 300 to 500 gold each!).  Similar things happened with not allowing epic gem transmutes.  After all, Blizzard has a good reason to loathe us.  When people flip things in the AH or the like, essentially, we are making it harder for the average player to make money.  They would much rather we do dailies to make cash and actually experience the content, rather than buying and item and reselling it for twice the amount.  Anyway, I am digressing.

If you agree or disagree, I would love to hear your comments.

How Blizzard could decimate gold sellers

I've never been a fan of Eve online, but I've had some friends that played.  The one thing I liked about the game I had heard about from other friends.  Essentially, the economy was really complex and vibrate.  Anyway, my friend that played it was telling me, people could buy and sell game time as an in game item.

That was rather interesting to me when I thought about the applications in Warcraft.  Say, someone wanted to buy gold.  They buy a month's time to the game...and then sold it for 15k in the AH.  What are the consequences?

First off, illegal gold selling would virtually disappear.  It makes me think of Prohibition in the United States in the 1930's.  The United States Government desperately tried to stop alcohol and the organized crime it spawned.  Eventually, this was a dismal failure and instead Prohibition was repealed and the government just taxed it.

When applied to gold and game time, players that want to buy gold suddenly have a safe way to do so.  Why risk getting your account banned when you could buy it safely.  That's a huge plus for the portion of the population that would consider buying gold in the first place.  No risk!  At the same time, players who have plenty of gold could buy the game cards and play for free.  Both sides get something they want.  All players benefit from players no spamming trade chat!

Best of all, for Blizzard, they get all the gold buying revenue in their pockets instead of some going to third party companies.  With no reason to hack accounts since people aren't buying gold, their customer service burden is lightened.  If people were afraid of their credit cards getting hacked and buying tons of cards, then maybe the cards are only sold in your local game stop or what not.

Everyone wins.  It isn't that different than what the Guardian Cub was.  There's essentially one big difference.  I myself bought a guardian cub.  Then I was done.  Even if they allowed all the pets and mounts to be droppable, once you have them all, then you are done.  For game time though, I'd keep buying every month.  Repeatability would make it a long term solution to both keep demand high.