When to Sell Gems in WoW

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When to Sell Every Type of Cut

When following the "baron" plan, there will come a time when you want to list multiple cuts of the same gem, even if these cuts are not the most profitable. 

The fact is you should be at least doubling your gold investment on ore (sometimes up to quadrupling it), so the more ore you go through, the more money you can make.  

The problem with selling only the most profitable gems, sometimes it takes a long time to finish off your supply of gems. Here is an example: 

·         You prospect 200 stacks of Elementium Ore. You wind up with 50 Ember Topaz.  

·         Let's say you worked out the math, and you ended up paying about 50 gold per uncut Ember Topaz, and the market price on your server is 65g. 

·         You check the Auction House, and on your server the Deadly Ember Topaz is selling for 100 gold, the Potent Ember Topaz is 90 gold, and the Inscribed Ember Topaz is going for 80 gold. 

·         If you only sell Deadly Ember Topaz, it could take you 2 weeks to sell all 50 Ember Topaz (if only 5 sell on your server a day, and you are selling them all). It could even take a month! 

·         However, if you sell all 3 types of Topaz, you end up selling your Topaz 3x as fast. 

·         Even if your profit margin is smaller, just selling more Topaz gives you more profits, since you can always prospect more ore and get more gems which you can then sell again. 

The take-home lesson is that profit is not just a function of mark-up per item, but the mark-up times the amount of gems you sell. The Baron approach does take more management and requires you to get more recipes, but the profit potentials are much higher. 

You could easily be selling 90 gems a day (5 gems of each cut * 3 cuts per gem type * 6 types of gems) and 15 different meta gems per day on a busy server, making 20-50g profit on gems and 75g on meta gems (if you transmute them yourself) and wind up pulling in 4,000+ gold per day just from Jewelcrafting. 

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Pro Tip - Selling Uncut Gems

On your server, based on luck of the prospectors or demand, 1-3 of the gem types will become by default less valuable than the others. This gem type(s) will be the gem of choice for those trying to level up Jewelcrafting. 

At some point, you will inevitably have to level up off of rare gems on your way to 525 (or 600, or whatever the level cap may be by the time you read this). Players will be looking to do this off the cheapest gems around, even if it means cutting at a loss. 

In other words, would-be Jewelcrafters trying to level up their skills end up buying the cheapest uncut rare gems on the market so that they can cut them in order to level up their skills. They will do this that there will be way more cut gems of that type that can ever sell (unless its only for a few gold). 

The cheapest gem market will be saturated to the point where the uncut version actually becomes more valuable than the cut version. This happened with blue and green gems in WoTLK and can happen again. Always be on the lookout when the market looks saturated - sometimes the uncut gems sells for the most.  

On future updates and expansions

Whenever epic gems come out in Cataclysm, the same process applies. The red gems most likely always be the most valuable. People like to do more max damage in 1 swing (red gems all boost this), even if other gems provide more overall dps. Only players who raid care about DPS and things like +hit. Raiders are a minority population and not as profitable of an audience. 

However, whenever an update or expansion comes out that introduces a new tier of gems, sell all your old ones - they are now worthless. For example, as soon as Cataclysm epic gems come out, Inferno Rubies will lose a lot of value. 

Conclusion

Do this for a few months and you will have 100,000+ gold. It is as simple as that. Without having several alts all with different professions, there is simply no easier and fool-proof way out there to hit the gold cap without farming endlessly for hours on end.

---> Next: World of Warcraft Alchemy Gold Guide 

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