In An Age

Are there really people still talking about epic gems? Apparently so. Let me make it really easy for you: epic gems will be released when all the profession bonuses are updated.

The stat bonuses from any one profession is around ~80 extra stats above what you could otherwise attain. As you can see from the pictures above, a Bold Chimera’s Eye grants +67 Strength vs a Bold Inferno Ruby with +40 Strength. (67 * 3) – (40 * 3) = 81. Mixology from Alchemy increases your flask strength by +80 stats, Synapse Springs gives a 480 stat bonus for 10 seconds every minute which is a ~16.66% uptime that averages into 80 stats, and the wrist enchants such as Major Strength were expressly added into the game to counteract imbalance that came with Leatherworkers having Embossments, such as +130 Strength, when everyone else had to settle for +50 Hit or +50 Haste (nevermind how much better primary stats already are from secondary ones this expansion).

If epic gems were added to the game, the profession bonus for JCs would diminish from 81 to 51, assuming that epic gems are +50. Simultaneously, the profession bonus for Blacksmithing (two extra sockets for +40 gems currently) would outpace everyone else as they are able to fit in two extra epic gems. Clearly, this would be bad design. The imbalance was fixed in Wrath in patch 3.2 by increasing the stats on the JC-only gems, keeping them proportionally as good as the other professions, which were similarly boosted to account for Blacksmiths.

Yes, I know 4.2 sounds like 3.2 + 1, but it does not work that way at all. If you will recall, 3.2 was released as the third tier of raiding. Meanwhile, 4.2 is merely the second tier of raiding this expansion. We cannot rely on patch numbers anymore given Blizzard’s new policy vis-a-vis “smaller, faster patches” (which I find unlikely will continue past 4.2, else we should have been hearing about 4.3 already, yes?), but it is safe to say that whatever patch will contain the third tier of raiding will also contain epic gems. But even more specific, epic gems will be in whatever patch includes updated profession bonuses. It has to, by design.

So until you start hearing about a stronger Mixology, Embossments, or Chimera’s Eye cuts on some PTR, feel free to continue speculating on Pyrite and/or making bank on rare gem cuts.

One of the downsides to a small-pop server is that there are fewer things to spend your gold on. More people equals more AH competition, of course, but it also means more volume of BoE epics and other goodies. Having already hit my goal, I am more interested in perhaps seeing another Fury of Angerforge or basically new BoE epics instead of the tired 353 and boring 359 crafted pieces. After another day with nothing new, I lamented in Trade chat one night “WTB more interesting BoE epics” in an effort to shake something out of the tree.

The problem with shaking the tree is that sometimes hairy things actually fall out.

Vitreous Beak of Julak-Doom is a BoE epic drop from an elite mob in Twilight Highlands, and basically requires a raid group to kill unless you want to fight for half an hour. As you can see from Trade Chat however, the item itself is allegidly hot, e.g. the result of a “ninja.” The question then becomes: do you care?

Scenario 1: You find Virteous Beak on the AH for 7500g buyout.

Scenario 2: You haggle someone selling Virteous Beak in Trade Chat down to 7500g.

Scenario 3: You win Virteous Beak in a raid, but don’t equip it right away because you lack the enchanting mats to put Hurricane/Power Torrent on it. Two weeks later, your raid team collapses. You sell the Beak for 17,000g on the AH.

Scenario 4: You low-ball someone selling Virteous Beak on Trade Chat in spite of a random person going on about how the seller is a ninja (in a non-Master Looter situation).

Scenario 5: You buy 105 stacks of Elementium Ore for 24g/stack from someone who is clearly a bot.

Among the five scenarios, which ones are ethical and which ones are unethical? I think we could all agree that Scenario 1 is pretty straight-forward ethically… but does the difference between 1 & 4 really come down to ignorance? As long as you do not know the sweat shop conditions of the Malyasian plant that manufactured the shirt you are wearing, it is ethical to purchase said shirt? And what does it say to us as AH barons to flagrantly purchase bot-gathered Ore off the AH (or even barter directly with said botters!) when our actions directly affect the gold-selling trade?

Would you have bought the Vitreous Beak from the guy for 7500g (assuming you had a caster who could use it)? Would you have bought it and then resold it for, say, 17500g? Does any of this sort of thing phase you in-game when it comes up vis-a-vis ninja/bot-farmed goods? How goblin is goblin?

Let me know in the comments below.

As I may have mentioned before, every single time I log into WoW, the first thing I do is collect the sales from my JC business, cancel any undercuts from the day before (I list for 24 hours, but I don’t log in exactly at the same time every night), relist unsold goods, and then see what is profitable to craft based on that day’s prices. Just because three Purified Demonseyes sold during the night does not mean I will cut three more – if the price of uncut Demonseyes is higher than what Purified ones are going for, I will toss up 3 more uncut Demonseyes instead. If uncut Demonseyes are lower than some arbitrary number that feels good to me, usually ~20g, I will buy them all out to restock my supply.

Otherwise I allow the other JCs to do the legwork of clearing out the garbage when certain cuts tank the market, as opposed to being the fully-engaged goblin who buys out the entire market of thirty 15g-20g Pussiant Dream Emeralds in the hopes of reseting the price. To me, 15g-20g means the gem is not selling, and thirty of them means the price has not yet hit the floor. This sort of dovetails nicely into a reader email I received:

[…] My problem that I am currently having is that while I hear that JC is a fantastic profession, I can’t seem to find what is so lucrative about it at the current moment.  I am aware of the 4.2 lull that might be hitting along with some people, so gems are not in as high demand, but my server (Blackrock… where everything is worth pennies) seems to have no demand for cut gems at all.  I scour over my Undermine Journal on the jewelcrafting page, and the scene is pretty stark.  Almost nothing seems to be moving right now.

 

Should I be cutting my losses at this point and stockpiling rare gems for 4.2, or am I missing something here?

The unspoken preface to every gold blog post out there is the same as the ending to any fast food restaurant commercial: “Local participation may vary.” Surely, I said to myself, things could not be that bad on other servers. Assuming that this gentleman is a proud member of the Alliance (as all gentlemen are wont to be), I walked doe-eyed into… a mental landmine.

The TUJ image on the left is from Blackrock Alliance, the imagine on the right from Auchindoun Alliance. So… yeah. I can see how – perhaps – someone might be questioning the lucrivity lucrativeness of the JC profession in the face of those post-apocalyptic figures. Bold Inferno Rubies selling for 25g apiece? Gazing deeper into the economic abyss reveals, if not why, at least how it is Blackrock maintains such absurdly low prices.

The above is number of auctions posted for Bold Inferno Rubies in the last 96 hours, or four days. You can see me on the right, plodding along with my 3 Bolds per cycle, just as described. Conversely, we have this Athenae character on Blackrock posting an average of 32 Bold cuts every twelve hours. At around 25g apiece. From my prior experimenting with TUJ, we all know that TUJ counts canceled auctions as “sales,” so it is possible some portion of that number represents vaporware. Regardless… that is pretty absurd. Where were all these Inferno Rubies coming from?

Well, good sir, if you were curious as to the cause of this market collapse, look no further than what appears to be the bank alt Stillfurious. Four-hundred and fifty-seven uncut Inferno Rubies in the last 96 hours. Stillfurious only auctions gems, and ironically, red gems like Inferno Rubies apparently makes up only 18.7% of the colors of warez he has available; granted, he posts in the neighborhood of 800+ gems a day. I remain baffled as to where all these goddamn Inferno Rubies are coming from, though, especially considering Heartblossom is 100g/stack, Carnelians are at 9g apiece, and Elementium Ore is at an eminently reasonable 26g/stack, but still relatively cost-ineffective in terms of 26g Inferno Rubies. Then again, TUJ is indicating there to be over 8,000 auctions of Elementium Ore at various times in the last few days…

So I suppose the answer to the implicit question of “what is so lucrative with JC?” is… well, it is clearly not lucrative at all on your server, unfortunately. Or, at least, not any of the Inferno Ruby cuts. Some random smattering of other cuts like Defender’s Demonseye appear to be going for 75g apiece with uncut gems at 9g. The formal question of “should I cut my losses and stockpile for 4.2?” would be a definite maybe.

Here is the thing. I named this blog Player Vs Auction House because my first choice was taken I reject the notion of PvP combat via the AH. Does PvP happen? Yes. Would crushing Stillfurious beneath your righteous boot-heel for making the cut gem market less profitable than selling Linen Cloth (no, seriously) feel good? Sure. Does it really accomplish anything in the end? Probably not. Stockpiling gems for 4.2 is not a bad idea at all, but it depends entirely on whether this supply glut is going to be maintained into the future. If it is, you may be kinda screwed by stockpiling. That is not to say that you should abandon JC entirely though.

It may be tough to read without clicking on it, but according to TUJ an Elementium Moebius Band worth 3299g only actually costs you 644g and some change to craft on the same server with those 25g Inferno Rubies. Blue 346 gear may not be as in season as it was a few months ago (and perhaps even less so moving into 4.2), but if your server is sufficiently large to support 8,000/day Elementium Ore stockpiles and 25g Inferno Rubies that depress prices for weeks, then it’s likely enough newly dinged 85 toons are available for you to hawk your warez upon. Even “fire sale” prices like 1000g each is still nearly a 400g profit margin. It is risky this late in the tier with new patterns coming out and not being able to fall back on cut gems, but it is an option if you do not have another profession to easily fall back upon.

Good luck.

After being stuck at ~435k for what felt like forever, I finally cleared the hump and sped past the 500,000g finish line this weekend.

My normal revenue is around 3k a day with just gems, but it is amazing what you can pull out of your hat when you know you can (finally) go back to not caring about hitting arbitrary goals if you just get that last little bit. That last little bit came partly from not re-investing my capital for a whole weekend (and there were some nice deals like fifty stacks of 30g/stack Azshara’s Veil that will probably pop back up to 80g-100g in the next few weeks), and also cashing out some investment material like ~14 bars of Truegold. I had a few Darkmoon trinkets up on the AH too, and it was sorely tempting to fire sale them on Trade for 10k when I knew they will go for 16k-18k eventually.

The interview with WarcraftEcon is done and will be posted sometime in the coming weeks. In the process of writing the interview, I happened to look at the MySales data that has been captured since Cataclysm:

Minus the BoE epic flipping (Fury of Angerforge, etc), my top 5 revenue streams this expansion:

1. Darkmoon Trinkets (169k)
2. Flask of Draconic Mind (33.8k)
3. Volatile Air (28.3k)
4. Inferno Ink (21.5k)
5. Enchant Weapon – Landslide (20.6k)

One thing that floored me right away was the Volatile Air. Obviously MySales does not differentiate stack sizes as it states I only sold “40” when I have basically been selling 13-16 Air stacks * 40, but damn. Hope you guys have been doing your daily transmute in Uldum on a regular basis! The Inferno Ink was another head-scratcher up until I realized that my average Volcano sale was 20,000g when that card has been below 10k for months now – in the heady days of the new expansion, I must have been pushing inks out like crazy. Oh, wait… I was. Finally, I am happy to see that the Maelstrom Gambit so far has been paying out some healthy dividends.

Incidentally, still have not sold the Windwalk scroll from before and Power Torrent is barely profitable. If there is one piece of sage advice I can offer people though, it would be this: bet on 2H Strength classes. In my experience, either more people have 2H Strength classes or 2H Strength classes are more willing to pay their dues. Or maybe it is harder (or easier!) to gear. Or something.

One of my favorite Enchanting niches back in Wrath was the “Everyone actually needs this all the time” niche. It does not make any sense logically, but for as much Enchanting competition there is on the AH, everyone independently assumes the (max level) starting enchants are covered. In Wrath, for example, the +28 spellpower to gloves was something every single spellcaster would want for every set of gloves they ever got. Moreover, the mats were ridiculously easy, leading to some pretty crazy profit margins as I was able to consistently sell them for 120g+ despite it costing barely 15g to make.

Welcome to Cataclysm:

Pictured above is +15 Stats to chest for 180g, +50 Mastery to gloves for 195g, +50 Haste to bracers for 144g, and +50 Haste to gloves for 249g. These four are just a representative sample, not an exhaustive list, although Mighty Stats in particular is the de facto enchant for basically everyone. So unless Greater Celestial Essences are selling north of 270g apiece on your server, chances are that you can make a serious margin peddling bread and butter enchants that will always have a deep pool that consists of anyone who gets gear above ilevel 318.

One unforeseen complication of the Maelstrom Gambit I was talking about a few weeks ago that I wish I had foreseen is the dearth of non-dust enchanting materials. No, seriously, I am talking about Heavenly Shards consistently at 100g each. Greater Celestial Essence is also high, but less so because it is part of the Shuffle. It makes sense that there might be fewer people running “normal” heroics and thus less shards coming in, but I also think the other half is simply the sort of Gambit I am engaging in. Power Torrent, for example, takes 8 Heavenly Shards each. All it would take is a few people doing some high-end scrolls to chew through the entire AH supply, just like what happens to Volatile prices anytime a JC takes a gamble on the crafted rings/necks. As for the Gambit itself…

Not anything hugely impressive. If you math it out, that is a revenue stream of 16,419g minus 6,000g for the Maelstrom Crystals to purchase the patterns (haven’t sold Windwalk scrolls yet), leaving 10,419g split among the five scrolls, or 2083g per scroll. Based on TUJ’s current numbers, Landslide would cost 2257g to craft while is Power Torrent 1947g and Windwalk 2563g. In all likelihood, I ultimately broke even on the Gambit on Week 2 after learning the patterns. Going forward, this will be an additional revenue stream, although obviously I was aiming for a bit of a killing before prices reach their future lows. We shall see.

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.