As expected by everyone, the prices of Maelstrom Crystals have plummeted with the release of the quasi-farmable ZA/ZG heroic duo. Prices on Auchindoun have a floor of ~400g but it can creep up to 850g depending on availability. As is often the case however, just because material prices have gone down, that does not mean the prices of finished products need follow. At least not yet.

If you have a max-level enchanter, I suggest looking at the high-end scroll market.

I am talking about big-ticket items like Landslide, Windwalker, and Power Torrent. I am also talking about things like the wrist enchants. The weapon enchant patterns take around 2000g to purchase with Maelstroms at 400g, which is a reasonably expensive barrier to entry, keeping competition low. But just because Maelstroms are 400g does not mean you have to price them accordingly. Landslide might not be going for 26,000g anymore, but a “reasonable” 6,000g is still a particularly ridiculous margin now that Maelstroms are low. This is a sweet-spot time in terms of high-end enchants, insofar that everyone knows Maelstroms are less valuable than before (although still nothing to scoff at) but before the greater server groupthink expects weapon enchants to be cheap.

And as I mentioned in New Crafting Paradigm and/or Using the AH as your Bank, do not forget to put your leftover supplies on AH while waiting for the scrolls themselves to sell. I had four Maelstrom Crystals left over after making a Windwalker scroll and I simply undercut someone in the mid-level of crystal prices. Next day? 

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Flipping 400g Maelstrom Crystals for 650g might not be particularly glamorous, but that 250g is damn far more than I have ever made trying to sell things like the buff potions that I am tempted to just vendor out of spite at this point. Mythical and Mysterious? Sell well. Other potions? Not so much.

One final thing that I will drill into your head at every available opportunity: I highly recommend never crafting something that you could not eventually use. This applies more to the high-end scroll market or other markets that require steep up-front costs than, say, cut gems or potions. My first Maelstrom Gambit was actually a scroll of Windwalker that I can up and enchant my tank’s weapon with right now if I felt like it. Merely knowing that fact gives me the psychological freedom to price it more aggressively (e.g. at the upper end of the price curve) without worrying about what happens if my gambit “fails.” Worst case scenario: I (likely) have the cheapest Windwalker scroll available anywhere. Conversely, if you make a Power Torrent scroll and have no spellcasting toons, you might end up getting into undercutting wars with someone in a race to the bottom, or maybe discover there appears to be no market for the scroll above the cost of mats. Stranger things have happened, but this sort of uncertainty period is precisely what we will be capitalizing on.

…because “Gemmass” just sounded lame.

Jewelcrafting has been one of my go-to professions since I started playing the AH in TBC, but this latest patch has been the biggest jump in profits I have seen outside the introduction of epic gems (in both prior expansions). This was my haul on Friday, for example:

Here is the local Undermine Journal graph for Inferno Rubies in the last week:

The new average in the above graph is ~90g. There are some obvious reasons for this surge, such as the shiny new epics from ZA/ZG and some additional sockets on the crafted gear. Then we had the near collapse of the Obsidium Shuffle when the botters seemingly abandoned mining ore on even the possibility that the vendor floor would drop, constraining the supply of gems – suddenly I am turning around and selling Obsidium Ore I was too bored to prospect for 150g a stack. The third factor? More people coming back, or at least having a nominal reason (e.g. new content) to log back on more often.

I generally try not to spend time on the “whys” of market upticks like we see with gems, because a player simply undercutting whatever gem cut is currently selling higher than the cost of the uncut gem will achieve 90% of the success with 0% of the effort. Indeed, that is exactly what I have been doing lately as Auctionator makes it particularly easy.

Props to Alto for being the one that pointed out the More tab in Auctionator last month that was staring me in the face for half a year without ever having clicked on it. Basically, click the More tab, press Check for Undercuts, wait a bit, and then spam-click Cancel Auction Track & Field-style. I used to get fancy with undercutting prices, but the gem market is sufficiently busy that you are liable to be undercut within a few hours no matter the price – it is faster to just let Auctionator undercut by the standard 10s anyway.

Like all upswings, the gem market will be correcting itself before too much longer. DPS queues went from the Wrath-like 8 minutes on patch day to the depressingly standard 35 minutes tonight, for example, which is a sign to me that all those people “coming back” are leaving out the same revolving door they came in on. Ore bots are also returning, correctly reasoning that guaranteed 30g sales is better than the hit-or-miss herb sales.

While the market is going to correct itself, one thing will remain different going forward: we are approaching the sweet-spot of sockets in gear. There are only 40 items (8 of which are relics) with sockets in the ilevel 318-339 range. In comparison, there are 51 items with sockets that drop out of ZA/ZG alone. Percentage-wise, the number of pre-raid items with sockets rose 18.4% (225 –> 276) in 4.1. If Blizzard sticks to the word circa September 2010, coming along in Patch 4.2 will be the ability of Blacksmiths, Tailors, and Leatherworkers to craft Bloodthirsty Gladiator gear, which is currently only bought with Honor points. So not only will ZA/ZG become more fashionable (and possible) to farm by solo-queueing in LFD and Valor gear hitting the Justice vendors, you can probably expect a second renaissance on the PvP side of things. And a lot of those PvP items have sockets that will need to be filled by somebody.

Bottom line: if you haven’t been selling sackfuls of gems since the patch, you have been missing out. And if you don’t start soon, it will only be worse for you/better for your competition.

Not a whole lot to talk about in the gold space, at the moment. Patch 4.1 may or may not be next week, and that will surely shake things up quite a bit, but you already knew that. In the meantime, enjoy these Trade Chat finds:

The text version of the first picture is I bought Maldo’s Sword Cane and Chelley’s Staff of Dark Mending for 11,000g apiece and then turned and listed them for 28k and 29k. Sadly, they did not sell instantly like the tanking shoulders, but I relisted them tonight for a more reasonable 21k and 22k – I have every confidence of moving them before next Tuesday, but even if I do not, 11k for a 359 weapon is certainly something I would be willing to pay to buy from a vendor, if there were such a thing.

The second picture is of a guy whispering me about my 21k Darkmoon Card: Tsunami. Turns out he bought a Tsunami deck for 16.5k, but didn’t realize that he had to wait until the Darkmoon Faire was in town to get the trinket. His deal? He would trade me his deck + 2 Maelstrom Crystals + 1000g for my completed trinket. All because he did not feel like waiting two weeks. Hey, I don’t blame him, I hate waiting too. So I sealed the deal, put the deck in the bank, and pulled out Darkmoon Card: Tsunami #2 and listed that one for the same 21k. Got to keep the shelves stocked to keep the customers happy, you know?

Uber trade deals like these could be flukes, sure. It certainly is not some sort of residual business or source of daily income. But the thing about lightning not striking twice is that few people think to set up a lightning rod… which simply means more potential lightning for you.

A few weeks ago, you may recall that I made a completely unnecessary personal purchase of Fury of Angerforge, ostensively to twink out one of my almost-85 alts. Even after both the DK and Warrior hit 85, I held off, as increasingly it is becoming apparent that my love of certain classes revolves around individual abilities and not the total package. For example, the first time I saw a warrior Heroic Leaping from the AH to the bank, I knew I wanted to level mine up. As a paladin, I have mobility-envy all the time anyway, but the ability to just kind of get goofy on a minute cooldown? Sign me up. Hell, I would have race-changed to Worgen (or goblin even!) had that race been able to be paladins.

Anyway, as it turns out, you spend a lot of time rooted in PvP, as a warrior. And without a healbot, you die rather quickly. I probably spend an equivalent amount of time Feared on the paladin, but the uselessness I feel is greater rooted as a warrior than Feared as a paladin.

In between the purchase of the trinket for 28,500g and my figuring out whether the warrior was for me, I was listing the Angerforge trinket on the AH for 45,000g. I had zero expectation that the trinket would sell for this amount. The principal here is simple. Sequestered away in my bank, the value of the trinket is effectively zero – I wasn’t planning on selling it, but I was not using it either, despite having spent ~7% of my liquid bank for the option; I consider the initial 28.5k to be sunk costs. Meanwhile, if there even existed a 0.1% chance it would sell for 45,000g (a return of 16,500g), that would be worth the periodic 10g deposit every few days. Worst case scenario? I equip it on one of my toons a month or two from now and am out ~150g over the course of the month, which is minuscule compared to the kind of gold I write off as business expenses, e.g. canceling and reposting cut gems.

Then, I got this surprise:

Using the AH as your bank is not always feasible, of course. For example, there is no real point in keeping stacks of 400g Hypnotic Dust in there. Okay, well there actually might be a point in doing that, but not in the sense I am talking about today. Epic BoE items work amazingly well for this principal, as the supply is understandbly limited. Some crafted epics work as well, like Tsunami Decks.

In any case, when choosing your price, the important thing is not chosing a price based on what you would consider a good return on the “initial investment.” That term is in air quotes because (presumably) you did not buy the item for its investment properties, but rather for your own future use. Rather, choose a price at which you would feel good about losing the future utility of the item. This isn’t about opportunity cost, this is about pricing items that you had not planned on selling at all. Angerforge at 28.5k was at the upper end of the bang-for-my-buck scale. Flipping it for 35,000g might have been a reasonable return for some people, but an anemic 19% return on five-digit investment is not good enough for me. Nearly double that percentage though? Now we’re talking.

Let me use a more pedestrian example: Inferno Rubies. I have a bunch of cut gems up on the AH at any given time, but I always try to maintain at least 10 uncut Inferno Rubies in my bank. Why? Because the absolute last thing I want to happen is to get a new piece of PvP gear or whatever, not have any Inferno Rubies to socket into it, go to the AH, and suddenly see that Inferno Rubies happen to be at 150g or something ridiculous. The personal value of the 11th Infero Ruby in my bank is signifigantly less than the first 10 – I would sell the 11th for whatever the market price happens to be at the moment, but the other ten would have to be at least double that for me to sacrifice the feeling of safety that having them conveys.

So, what I suggest is for you to head to your bank, take a gander at all of the varied sort of sellable knick-nacks or epics or stockpiled goods, and simply put them up on the AH for a price you feel is high enough for you to have justified selling them at to begin with (instead of warhousing them for the indefinite future) and see what happens. Most, if not all, will come back to you and you’ll be out the deposit cost. Sometimes though, you will be that one guy out there with an item that someone else just cannot wait until tomorrow to purchase at a fraction of the cost. Being out there is always better than not.

Either way, enjoy the extra bank space.

Nearly every blogger has talked about the data-mined gem vendor changes (including myself), but there have been a few people questioning the potential veracity of the change itself. This is from Stede over at Venture LLT:

Is this bad news?  Not really.  Blizzard gets about 2-3 weeks to test a patch build on the PTR.  To understand how a drop in the vendor price would work its way through the WoW economy over a much longer span of time, they have to take it to the extreme.  The good news is that 75s won’t make it ever make it onto live servers.  The not so good news is that Blizzard is seems to be openly considering dropping the vendor price of cut uncommon gems.  My best guess, the vendor price will likely be about half of what it is now – that’s ~4.5 gold.

Other people have pointed out, repeatedly, that this is data-mined information, and “remember epic gem cooldowns in Wrath?!” Well, of course. The issue is that this vendor price change was long overdue:

It never made any sense that the uncommon gem cut and vendored for more than the rare gem, let alone how uncommon gems vendored for the same as the epic gems of the previous expansion. While this high vendor price provided a fairly stable floor price in ore despite the flooding of bots, an unintended consequence is that it never made any sense to sell cut/perfect uncommon gems on the AH (e.g. Bold Carnelian, Perfect Solid Zephyrite). As Wrath frequently demonstrated, there was a fairly stable, low-volume market of parsimonious gemmers that were okay saving 5-10g by putting +12 Strength into an empty slot instead of +16 Strength.

This market has undoubtedly been underserved by this artificially high price in Cataclysm, so I would not necessarily despair when it comes to ore prices. It makes prospecting riskier from an absolute standpoint, but there will be people making gold out there by selling cut uncommon gems competitively without having to worry about the rather obscene deposit cost (which is a function of an item’s vendor cost).