WoW Jewelcrafting Gold Guide

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Jewelcrafting

While I do love Alchemy, I find that Jewelcrafting is by far the most profitable way of making gold in the entire game. It is so ridiculously easy to make gold as a Jewelcrafter, that as a Jewelcrafter you will never have to farm or do another daily ever again (aside from your Jewelcrafting daily, that is).

There are two ways you can make gold as a Jewelcrafter: you can either go the easy/lazy route (my preferred method) or the "baron" route. Naturally, the easy way earns you very easy gold, whereas the baron route is a lot harder to pull-off, requires a larger gold and time investment, but has a much higher profit potential.

Lazy Method for Earning Gold

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If you are like me, you really do not want to invest much more than 10 minutes a day making gold. Also, aside from bragging rights, most players have no interest in hitting the gold cap.

Rather, most players (myself included) only desire as much gold as is required to buy every enchant, loot piece, mount, gem, potion, that they need, along with paying for all their repairs. The "lazy" method is perfect for any player that can relate to these statements.

The lazy method maximizes gold earned per hour while minimizing any risk (never lose money with this approach) or skill required to pull it off. This lets you get back to raiding and PvP sooner so you spend less time worrying about your gold.

There are two methods for earning easy gold as Jewelcrafting: the daily quest and cutting gems.

Jewelcrafting Daily

This is such easy money it is not even fair to the other professions. In Cataclysm, you can use the token you earn from your Jewelcrafting daily quest to purchase a Chimera's Eye. This is the same as the Dragon's Eye, which can be purchased for 1 token from the Dalaran-issued Jewelcrafting daily quest).

When WoTLK first came out, the Dragon's Eyes each sold for 400 gold a piece. Over time, this slowly (and I mean very slowly) drifted down to about 70 gold. For the first month WoTLK was out, you could earn at least 350g per Dragon's Eye on most servers. For the next several months, the Dragon's Eye sold for 200-250g.

It drifted around 150-200g for the next few months, and it was not until about a year after WoTLK's release that it finally settled down to about 70-100g a piece.

Why are these so valuable? Well, Jewelcrafters need tokens to purchase gem-cutting patterns as well as purchase their own Dragon's Eyes (for their profession-specific perks). Random recipes all needed Dragon's Eyes, so the price was at a premium since Jewelcrafters did not want to part with their tokens.

The same thing will occur (or may already be occurring by the time you read this) in Cataclysm with the Chimera's Eye. It will continue to occur with each new expansion (barring some massive re-work of the system in a future expansion).

Unlike the people that waste their tokens buying useless recipes, you will be smarter than that and not mistakenly think that buying every recipe is going to somehow save you money. You also will not put in crummy gear (wait until you actually get some epics!) and instead sell your Chimera's Eyes for a premium.

Here is some basic math:

Each time you do a daily, you earn 1 token which you can buy a Chimera Eye with. These can then be sold for an average of 350 gold a piece around Cataclysm release. This price will remain elevated for the first 6 months post release, and still will be 70g or more for the entire lifespan of Cataclysm.

If you can dedicate just 10 minutes a day to the daily (they are all very easy) and sell all your Chimera's Eyes, you can earn 350 g a day, which adds up to 10,500 gold over the course of a month (350g * 30). Over the following 5 months, if you keep doing 1 per day and selling your Chimera Eye for 200g a piece, you can earn 30,000 gold (150 days * 200 gold).

All of this gold can be earned doing 1 simple daily and selling the resulting Chimera's Eye instead of hoarding tokens and buying stupid recipes that you will never use.

If you are not a Jewelcrafter, you should be, just for this daily alone. It is so simple and you can never lose money on the deal - you just complete the quick daily and then sell the results. This daily alone can pay all your bills.

Cutting Gems

As I alluded to earlier, most Jewelcrafters make the mistake of getting too many recipes. The truth is, you only need a few key recipes to earn massive amounts of gold. Here are the major gems:

·         Bold: +Strength (red)

·         Delicate: +Agility (red)

·         Brilliant: +Intellect (red)

·         Smooth: +Crit (yellow)

·         Fractured: +Mastery (yellow)

·         Quick: +Haste (yellow)

·         Stormy: +Spell Pen (blue)

·         Sparkling: +Spirit (blue)

·         Rigid: +Hit (blue)

Any of these 9 primary stat-types can be valuable, as well as any of the other color gems that happen to mix the three. Red gems will continue to be the most valuable in Cataclysm (Intellect essentially replaces spell-power), so keep that in mind.

However, now a lot of the other gems are becoming more valuable. Moving +hit and increasing the value of spirit will significantly increase the value of blue gems. They are not likely to become as valuable as +str, but the price will certainly increase in Cataclysm (or it already has if you are reading this guide post-Cataclysm).

Now that you know which gems tend to be valuable, let's talk about how to make money from those gems.

Lazy Method of Making Gold By Cutting Gems

The fact is, there are a lot of different gem types that you can go for. However, I find it is much easier to make gold from Jewelcrafting by cutting a few specific gems.

Rather than trying to cut every type of gem, just pick 1 or 2 gems and focus on them exclusively. In particular, I like to cut the red gems. Here is how it works:

·         Pull up the Auction House, and search for Inferno Ruby.

·         Note the price of uncut Inferno Rubies.

·         Note the price of Bold, Delicate, and Brilliant Rubies. All of these gems sell multiple times per day (probably as many as a dozen times)

·         If the going rate is 20g or more between the uncut Inferno Ruby and one of these three popular types, buy up as many gems as you can, and undercut the current price by 1 gold.

·         Search all 3 major types of gems this way.

·         If there is not a single gem type up, buy the gem and mark the price up by 40-50g (someone will buy it, people are impatient).

Note that there a few things you do want to do to make this work:

·         Do buy large quantities of Inferno Rubies if the price dips below market value. Sometimes a farmer might toss up 1-2 dozen Inferno Rubies at once at a massive undercut. Snatch them all up and list them slowly on the AH over the next few weeks.

·         Only list a few gems at a time of a given type. Only investing a small amount of gold into gems minimizes your risk in case the market crashes.

·         Undercut on gems - make sure yours sell first. If you are doing the lazy approach, you do not want to have to worry about managing tons of auctions.

·         Speaking of "tons" of auctions, I do not recommend having more than 10 gem auctions running at a time. This keeps it truly hands off.

·         Try to focus on one gem type that you seem to have success with. I find the Bold and Delicate rubies work best. This way, you can only worry about getting a few recipes so you can start selling your Chimera Eye's on the Auction House.

There are also a few things you want to avoid when making gold by cutting gems:

·         Avoid buying gems when the mark-up price is not above 20g. Too risky given the cost it takes to sell a gem on the auction house. Also not really worth the time to just earn a couple gold.  

·         Avoid listing up more than 5 of a given gem. Perceived scarcity only serves to increase demand (and thereby price). If someone sees 30 gems all cut on the auction house for a high price, they are likely to wait for it to drop. 

·         Do not bother cutting gems if there are more than 20 of a given cut gem for sale. In other words, if there are already 20 Bold Inferno Rubies on the auction house, do not enter that market. This high supply will only serve to drive the price down (high supply always lowers price).  

·         Only cut the top tier of gems to sell. Green gems are not worth cutting and selling. Once epic gems in Cataclysm are available, blue gems will not be worth cutting and selling. 

Note about Recipes:

For the first few weeks that Cataclysm is out, the hardcore Jewelcrafters will all be trying to get their skills to 525. It will be hard to make money via cutting at this point, since so many people will be cutting blue gems for skill-ups.

However, the red gems are usually profitable no matter what.

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