Here's why Gems will gold cap you faster than Glyphs:
- If you managed to get all the jewelcrafting recipes then you are going to have atleast a dozen gem cuts which sell for 60-120 more gold than the raw gems cost to make them.
- Players go through gems more frequently then glyphs.
- The meta gems can make even more profit individually than the epic gem cuts.
- Players will sell you tons of gems in trade as well as via COD because they are so easy to get.
- It's difficult for other jewelcrafters to get all the recipes and so you will often have decent competition for more common cuts but very little competition for rarer ones.
- The brilliant glass will make you gold every single day with very little effort.
- If you managed to get all the rare cuts as well as the epic ones you are going to make an additional 1k gold per day from these extra cuts.
- Having an alchemist to support your craft (transmuting meta gems and epic gems) allows you to make even more profit from your cuts.
- You can quickly and efficiently manage your gem business just like glyphs thanks QA3. A single gem sale will average out to about the same profit as 5-10 glyphs.
22 comments: on "9 Reasons Why Gems will Gold Cap You Faster than Glyphs"
Kring said... February 21, 2010 at 8:22 AM
Don't make brilliant glass anymore. The Frozen Orb will be too valuable. :)
Goth said... February 21, 2010 at 9:27 AM
I make a tidy profit from gems, but the auction house cut must be discounted for every sale and more importantly every relist. You will pay dearly trying to force an unpopular cut through the system and this is why I believe that glyphs in the long run are more profitable if you cancel / relist frequently.
Markco said... February 21, 2010 at 10:40 AM
Goth I make literally twice my money on gems compared to glyphs and I'm trying to sell hundreds of glyphs vs a couple dozen gems.
Darth Solo said... February 21, 2010 at 10:56 AM
I hope you mean Icy Prism and not Brilliant Glass.
At any rate, JC for me isn't a huge money-maker. It seems to risky considering the price of the raw gems is very close to that of cut gems, AH deposits are very high and there's a lot of competition who's not afraid to undercut to the ground. And then again, maybe I fail at JC.
Liam said... February 21, 2010 at 12:17 PM
i Agree, i have tryed my hand in both market's and Jewelcrafting is the profession that help me get gold capped most of all !
xoxo anaalius
Aloix said... February 21, 2010 at 12:49 PM
I also have stopped making Icy Prisms. And, obviously posting 12hr auctions and not cancelling but just letting them run out is the cheapest / only option.
If you really know your market intimately for some cuts you can post a 24hr safely. It all depends, obviously.
Shadowcraft said... February 21, 2010 at 1:24 PM
Did you mean Brilliant Glass? Because that's the BC one, I know some of the green gems sell for ridiculous prices on my server, but I don't think making Brilliant Glass is worth it since no one cares about the blue ones.
Craig R said... February 21, 2010 at 3:35 PM
this is true these days, but back when glyphs were new, it was totally the opposite.
I goldcapped in 2 weeks off selling a good 10,000 40g glyphs, mostly between wrath launch and 3.1's end.
Unit9 said... February 21, 2010 at 3:40 PM
3 Reasons Why This And Most Of The Rest Of Your Tips Never Work On My High-Population Server.
1. So many people are already attempting the brilliant glass/ technique that they've driven the cost of the mats up to being beyond the cost of a potential epic gem.
2. The cost of uncut epic gems is higher than the cost of cut gems.
3. As soon as you ask ANYONE on my server to send you their mats by COD they get suspicious and start looking at the AH to see how they can get a higher profit (such as frozen orbs selling for 500% their normal price today thanks to the coming patch change).
Forgive me, Marcko, as I really really appreciate all the effort you put in to this blog, the podcast, etc, and I really enjoy the podcast (last one was very funny). but I don't think many of your tips work and they certainly don't work for me. In fact I think it's obvious that your tips only work on servers with very stupid people who are easily conned into selling their wares for less than their market worth.
Markco said... February 21, 2010 at 4:02 PM
Unit9 this is the way to gripe :)
Well written and a good argument. Let me assure you that it is possible to use every strategy I post, but you cannot simply follow it once and assume you did it correctly. There are market cycles, random market events, and a host of other things that can temporarily throw a strategy out of whack. Also keep in mind that you may not meet the prerequisites which I often assume someone has.
Don't worry though, if you go on the forums and speak some of your ideas to the people there they will help you discover what you need to do. I really appreciate your criticisms, thank you and keep participating! Also never be afraid to improvise and improve on what I suggest you try!
Anonymous said... February 21, 2010 at 4:52 PM
I've done both JC and Glyph - and I'm sticking to glyphs. Now I'm not actually trying to hit the gold cap, if I was striving for that - I'd obviously do both. In any case,
I find glyphs to be a lot more dependable way of making money, and a lot less of a hassle in my opinion.
A few things that I find annoying about the JC game:
1. With constant restocking of mats my gold amount is fluctuating a lot and I don't know how well I'm doing.
2. Buying uncut gems cheap requires effort, be it either using emblems/honor or buying from the trade channel.
Inscription on the other hand only involves buying Adder's Tongue in masses when it's cheap on the AH (often enough), milling and crafting which I can do while I'm waiting for the daily random and reposting a few times a day.
Sure, milling can be boring, but it's the kind of brainless work that I can do while reading a forum or something so I prefer that to keeping an eye on good deals from the trade channel.
I usually make between 1.4 and 2.7k a day depending on how actively I'm reposting/restocking. Will take forever to get to the gold cap with that, but it's sufficient for my needs.
Anonymous said... February 21, 2010 at 5:21 PM
Well personally, jewelcrafting is not working at all... I can see how it can be profitable for jewelcrafters with all the recipes, but when you just start into this market and have 8-9 epic cuts, it's a total hassle. Also, trying to get more cuts costs insanely much (~1200g to get the mats required for 4 tokens). Maybe it could be an idea of a next topic, "How to get properly started in jewelcrafting markets" :)
Argon said... February 21, 2010 at 7:51 PM
On my server cut gems are only about 20 gold more than uncut gems, and it is a pretty cutthroat market so it is hard to sell anything. Gems cost a gold or so to list, and the AH fee will be about 10 gold, so margins are pretty thin.
Unknown said... February 21, 2010 at 9:18 PM
Any advice for someone who has to deal with 2 people who, more or less, sit at the auction house all day and night, and cut by 25s, making it very difficult to break into the market?
Anonymous said... February 22, 2010 at 2:08 AM
Hi Tom,
what I do against this kind of person is quite simple... Destroy the market temporary.
I buy my cardinal rubies at 125-150g each and everything else at 80-100g each, so even if I sell cardinal rubies 160g and others gems at 130g, I still make profit ... BUT, they don't. What happened to me was simple, they first started to buy my gems... Seeing I kept posting again at the same price, they stopped and I got some blackmails saying I was killing their market, then 1-2 days after they were gone and I had started to sell back at the normal price. You might give it a try =)
Anonymous said... February 22, 2010 at 2:49 AM
I have to agree with Unit9. I play alliance, on one of the oldest servers. High population with many intelligent businessmen and a fairly good percentage of educated clients. There is no existing gold making tip that it's not done by at least several people. Margins are low, patience it's a virtue. The best gold making strategy is : acknowledge the high, intelligent competition, don't flood, keep low margins, try to spot that part of the market which is the least exploited in the present by your competitors and act there. Switch when it gets crowded. Again attention and patience.
On the other hand, got fed up losing so badly in pvp alliance side, and I rolled a horde hunter. And I needed gold, of course. So I was experimenting with the horde AH. Oh boy ! It is a AH businessman haven. Low material costs, high prices on everything crafted, the margins are so visibly high that I wonder how can anyone not profit in this market.
So there you have it !
Anobaith said... February 22, 2010 at 8:40 AM
I'm currently making more money on Glyphs, but I think that's because of my toon level. Both the scribe and the JC are 65 and at 450 Inscr and 438 JC- for the scribe that stills leaves (pretty much) every recipe available to me, but (unless I'm misunderstanding something) it's pretty tough for a level 65 JC to get the high level recipes needed to make a lot of money due to the level of mobs that drop the item required for the JC daily.
So, I'm pretty much stuck with just the standard recipes for JC. I know I could get him up to 80, but I've already got two 80s and limited playtime means that's not feasible, which is a shame.
Anonymous said... February 22, 2010 at 9:03 AM
1. False. On servers where there is actually competition (like mine), you will see a 20-30 gold profit per epic gem cut, and often you won't be able to sell at all because the margins are so close.
2. False. I am heavily into both gems and glyphs. I sell 1500-2000 glyphs per week but only few hundred gems if I'm lucky. Again this is a server with heavy competition.
3. True.
4. False. Competition means you will be paying close to AH prices from trade chat. On my server you might be able to get gems 10g cheaper from trade.
5. False. I make more money from the common, popular recipes than from the unpopular ones. My server has many very good PVE so the average skill level is higher than most, bringing higher sales of the epic gems that are actually worth using.
6. Untrue. This has negative expected value.
7. True.
8. True, but just barely. Alchemists on my server either sell the gems for themselves, or charge very high fees for transmutes because they are not retards like they apparently are on your server.
9. True, but this is true of any profession. Your profit math is correct but misleading and I'll explain why.
I visited Onyxia, by the way. The profit margins are completely ridiculous and not at all indicative of most servers.
On a real server, you will make more actual net profit with inscription than with jewelcrafting. I make about 1500 gold per day from inscription with an average sell price of 6.5g per glyph. My cost is about 1.8g per glyph. So my margin is about 260% profit. 1500g * 7 = 10500 per week, of which 7580 is profit.
I might have 20000g of gross JC profit per week and my profit margin will be about 30g on a 180g uncut gem, or about 17%. So my net profit is only 3400g. Half of what I get from inscription.
Of course on fantasy servers like yours you might get different prices.
Anonymous said... February 22, 2010 at 12:57 PM
Tom,
The best bet for dealing with that situation is to find a new market that those 2 peopler aren't in.
Markco said... February 22, 2010 at 3:11 PM
@anonymous - if you make more money with glyphs than gems it's because you don't have all the appropriate recipes for gems but do for glyphs. You may not be looking into meta gems, rare gems or nightmare tears as well. You may also not have any farmers working for you which really helps you maintain a strong market presence. Just because glyphs are easier doesn't mean a properly run JC is worse.
Hinenuitepo said... February 22, 2010 at 3:50 PM
JC has been my main source of profit for some time, but I'm in no danger of goldcapping any time soon. Part of this is the 90,000 gold I've spent recently (60,000 of which was PS for my sword), but the other reason is as many mention - profit margins.
You have to know your market, and do what works best there.
Just a tiny example is that frozen orbs had already tripled in price on my server before Marcko's original post.
I only make about 30g on average for cuts as well, but it doesn't take long to list 20 or so a day. I do nightmare tears, metas, and so on. Rares are a garbage market on my server. Even good and rare cuts don't sell well. I may list for 30g less than my competitor (under 20g), or have the only one on the market, and it still expires more often than not.
Operating capital must be high, a bad weekend can really hurt, and sometimes supplies of uncuts is very tough, but overall the market is still good for a number of operators to make 5-10k a week easily, even with high-pop and reasonably savvy competition/saturation.
Rob Dejournett said... February 26, 2010 at 12:04 AM
completely agree w/ those who say inscription > JC; JC is much more work (daily quest for months, gems that never sell, etc). Its always a challenge to find enough gems to make a steady profit. Sure there are 1 or 2 gems you can cut and make 50g profit, but try to find 100s of those gems, you would need some really good sources. You coudl stand in trade and do the "WTB" thing, but I always have better things to do than go hunting for buyers. Inscription is interaction-less, which allows a huge profit for time investment. If i could only find 10 gems at a decent price, that'd be one thing, but i can't. And so many cuts just never sell. I'm sitting on very popular rare cuts and even those dont really sell. IDK what the deal is.
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