Stacking gems - but not during crafting

Woo Hoo - Cut gems now stack. With this I will be holding more per cut of each gem.

But not during crafting.  Bother.  During crafting,  you still use one slot per gem.  My guess is that this will be fixed by Blizzard "soon"; for an arbitrary definition of soon.

There is an addon I use to help with stacking and sorting - genie, and it works well with crafting bags.

/genie bag work (to sort & stack your bag)
/genie bank work (to sort & stack your bank)

and for GM's, you can sort & stack a guild bank tab by clicking on the genie icon on your minimap.

I am not naturally the 'tidiest' crafter, but genie allows me to fake it.

Fortune Cookie as preferred stat food

Personally I don't like making fortune cards for sales to suckers.  I will make them to order, and sell them.  I will use them as bribes.  I just have difficulty recommending that someone tries to get rich on them (because they won't). 

However, they do make a good +90 stat food.  My objections are smaller here.

On our server, you can make a fortune card for 7.5g just from AH bought inks (cheaper if you mill your own).  Turning these into fortune cookies costs an additional copper and a global cooldown (or even less if you have a chef's hat).

In comparison, a raw deapsea sagefish tail costs 18g, which can then be turned into +90 int food; being the preferred buff food of many casters.  Same buff as the fortune card, but 10g more expensive.

I know that many guilds now put down feasts, but by no means all.  I know that some players have been using fortune cookies hoping to get 'that card', but consoling themselves with buff food.

During raid startup times, we should bring it to the attention of new raid leaders and caster toons alike : You have a choice of best stat foods; and on many realms the cheapest food is a fortune cookie.  Buff raiders get lucky.  (groan : I am not sure I could say it, but many of you could)

Gem Cutting

I am tinkering in the JC market for gems.  What I have noticed is that for the majority of my gem cuts, I sell more Northrend cut gems, and at a higher margin.  I have even re-specialised my under utilized Alchemist to transmuter to make Epic Northrend gems.

As an example : Blue gems : Cata rares vs Northrend Epics

http://theunderminejournal.com/?realm=A-Caelestrasz&search=ocean+sapphire

	Item	Avail	Price	Chg	% Chg	Mean	Std Dev	L 95% CI H	Seen
	Ocean Sapphire	26	16.74	-33.16	-66.45%	17.27	10.80		< 1h
	Rigid Ocean Sapphire	10	9.95	-2.90	-22.57%	18.81	9.68		< 1h
	Solid Ocean Sapphire	38	16.32	-3.58	-17.99%	22.49	11.62		< 1h
	Sparkling Ocean Sapphire	8	19.95	10.10	102.54%	28.52	36.91		< 1h
	Stormy Ocean Sapphire	15	23.99	-6.67	-21.75%	50.24	23.55		< 1h

The competition for sales is large, and profit margins over selling raw gems thin to non-existant.  Undercutting is as bad as for glyphs (which probably means that you might get some purchase with an early morning posting).

http://theunderminejournal.com/?realm=A-Caelestrasz&search=majestic+zircon

	Item	Avail	Price	Chg	% Chg	Mean	Std Dev	L 95% CI H	Seen
	Majestic Zircon	2	83.60	14.75	21.42%	76.07	10.76		< 1h
	Rigid Majestic Zircon	0	300.00	0.00	0%	318.00	57.18		1d, 2h
	Solid Majestic Zircon	4	162.00	-1.00	-0.61%	182.27	59.71		< 1h
	Sparkling Majestic Zircon	1	300.00	0.00	0%	288.02	34.10		< 1h
	Sparkling Majestic Zircon	0	50.00	50.00	Infinity	0.00	0.00		2m, 5d
	Stormy Majestic Zircon	2	300.00	0.00	0%	300.00	0.00		< 1h

The competition for sales is very small, and profit margins over selling raw gems very large.  Sure there are not many buyers (twinks and levelling toons), but even fewer sellers.  There is also a shortage of raw gems on the AH, which I supplement with my transmuting Alchemist, and occasionally with a lucky icy prism.


The same type of comparison occurs for other gem colours, with Red coloured gems being a possible exception.

There will be a spike in demand for Cata Rares as raiders refresh their armor with the new raids. Apart from that, I could care less (but not by much) for the Cata Rare market, but as the majority of the effort for crafting and posting Cata gems is already covered by my Northrend Epics, I am selling all the gems above thresholds (with different thresholds based on what raw gem is involved).

Gems are not a huge market for me; too much competition and both of my glyph selling toons (horde and alliance) have a higher average daily profit.  That said, they still are a nice market to be in.

I would tell you to update your addons but ...

There is a patch day coming real soon now.  I have no idea how badly (if at all) this patch will affect existing addons.  However, it is time to think about how you are going to update your addons, or how you might live without them.  We have had issues in the past.

It appears that Wowstead, wowpedia, Arena Junkies  and Curse, Curseforge,  MMO champion are all down, as well as many other websites.

Historically I have used curse, as a convenient way to update the majority of my addons.  However, there is another repository of addons at www.wowinterface.com. (Yes to Johny up the back - I know you write your own addons, or at least ring up the authors and get them via carrier pidgeon - I like a central repository that makes it easy - and anyway curseforge is down too.)

The most usefull page I have found for a status update is at www.curseforge.com, at the time of this (updated) post contains

Emergency Maintenance
CurseForge is down for emergency maintenance, we apologize for the inconvenience.
Update 18:30 UTC / 1:30 pm CST: Faulty hardware has been replaced, we are in the process of verifying data and expect to be back online in the next 60 minutes.
Update 19:40 UTC / 2:30 pm CST: The data verification is taking longer than expected. We have no new ETA at this time. Update 23:45 UTC / 6:45 pm CST: Unfortunately, the data verification and restoration process is taking much longer than initially expected. Our current estimate is 6 hours to complete the process.
Update 06:30 UTC / 1:30 am CST: Data verification is 55% complete. As we cannot accurately estimate the time it will take to complete, we cannot give any further time estimates until this process is complete.
Update 20:45 UTC / 3:45 pm CDT: Data verification is still underway, but progressing very slowly. We will post another update once we get close to the end of this step of the process.

Snowfall inks

Back in the dying days of cataclysm - snowfall inks were ... considered vendor trash by most (other) bloggers.  I had decided to stockpile them - being slightly contrarian in nature. It has stood me in good stead - at least where snowfall inks were concerned.

However, I didn't pick the real value in snowfall inks - northrend inscription research.  At the moment, snowfall are still needed. 

JTMC covers some details of glyphs changes, but this almost irrelevant to me.  There will be changes to glyphs, so some glyphs will sell better for a time.  I will learn the lot, and post any above my threshold, as usual.  (Though I will have to make 1/2 an effort to send new glyphs to my horde toon).

However, assuming that the new glyph is northrend research based (it is on the PTR), there should be a run on snowfall ink and/or northrend herbs (capped by the cost of 10 blackfallow -> 1 snowfall).  It won't be a huge run as only dedicated scribes will bother learning it.

If the glyph is 'book' based, then the availablility will be much lower (i.e. higher prices); trainier based and the glyph will be junk value.  However, I don't see any reason why it would change from it's PTR research basis.

Tonight, I checked on my snowfall stocks. 

Separating your sales

How do you know which professions are profitable - preferably at a glance.

I have every tradeskill @ 525, some I use regularly, some I barely use at all. That's OK, I am a collector of recipes (even recipes that I have no intention of ever using - BOP low level gear anyone?).  One of these days I will level another couple of toons and get 3 gathering skills.

I am no Breevok with the ability or inclination to closely track sales.  I find it difficult to know what actually sells well.  Yes, I have Beancounter, but it still doesn't do it for me.

A very simple method that works for me is to have a stable of alts - each selling a niche.  My selling alts are low level, ususally not the toon that does the original crafting.

When a selling toon wants something made (or mats stockpiled) - it is responsible for the gold for that transaction, to the nearest 'round' number.

When I follow this process, I can see at a glance which professions (or parts of professions) sell well, and which perform poorly - for my playstyle.  If it does well - it has gold.  If it does poorly - it runs out of gold.

The one period I didn’t do this - I got into trouble.  I kept buying herbs and inks- taking gold from profitable markets, and ploughing them into glyphs (after all - this blog is 80% glyphs - I could not possibly lose money - ... oh well - maybe I could).  I never became 'poor', but did manage to carry too much inventory , and to send good money after bad.

I was already well on the roads to recovery before my significant competition moved on, simply by concentrating on what was selling well, and finding alternatives to what was selling poorly.  The fact that a very deep undercutter has since moved on helps.

If you only have your finger in one AH pile, it doesn't matter so much.  If you play with multiple markets, or even sections within a market, it is worth segregating it with selling alts and keeping your gold separate.

Updated blogroll - slow news day

The servers are down - so much for a 1 hour rolling restart.

While I am working on a new 'shiny tool' for another profession (heaven forbid - It's not inscription), it's still in the "I'm gonna do this" rather than an actually usefull "I've done this".  Oh well, one day.

I am however tired of reading my old bloglist with Avion/Rift/Star Wars/Lord of the Rings/Some other game I don't have, so I did a great purge and bloglist recreation.  The chances are good that I have offended someone unintentionally (or otherwise). The last time I did this, I left of a few blogs that I really wanted to read.

If you think I would be interested in reading your (or someone else's) blog on an ongoing basis, please leave a comment.

To make it to this bloglist, I am after the some of the following things:

• 3 months of blogging; 
• Most posts about WoW;
• Gold making posts, with an emphasis on the how;
• WoW stuff that I didn't know and wanted to.
• WoW stuff that I want other people to know.
• I like places that teach/encourage good healing & tanking.

For those newer to blogging, please persevere.  Every WoW blog started with a post.  Feel free to mention your WoW related website, and I will look at it again in a little while.

A good pug group?

On Friday night, and again on Sunday night, I pugged a group as healer for ZA.  I had read up on the fights, but otherwise didn't have a clue.  I had heard that the fights were tough. 

On Friday night we didnt get the third boss down. 
Got the first boss down, then the tank immediately quit.  Second tank joined, complained about low DPS during second boss (failed attempt) and quit.  We got another tank that immediately went AFK.  Booted him got a second group.
Struggled our way though the second boss, and ended up with only one other DPS and myself remaining in group. 
Finally got another group together and we tried the third boss (with whelps) twice.  There was soo much damage being thrown around, most toons on very low health, and me with no mana.  One of the DPS took 25% of the total group damage, only just below the tank.  His DPS may have been the best of the group, but I could not keep him up as well as the tank.  I apparently didn't have the mana management to the satisfaction of the group.  To be honest - with that group, I agreed, and left. Feeling somewhat downhearted, and swearing off PUGs.

However, Sunday night, I thought I would try again, fail again.  There is something to be said for the banging your head against a brick wall method of progression.  Got up to the whelp boss and wiped once.  Wiped again on a bad trash pull.  There were a few indvidual deaths in the rest of the run, no one left party, and it went well.  Total run time : 90 minutes.  I was astounded and very pleased. 

Oh, and as an aside, apparently I don't pug many 5 man dungeons.

Kaye Toogie

Kaye Toogie is a vendor for difficult to get engineering pet recipees - 3 different dragonlings - 2 pets and a level 50 trinket.  These are limited supply options.  According to the undermine journal the pet recipes are sufficiently available, but the trinket recipe is in very rare supply; with prices across servers ranging from a few hundred to 10,000g.  The servers with undermine journal recipe prices at a few hundred do not have any supply.

You get to her via the Engineer Wormhole generator, but it is very rare.  Apparently you can't camp her either - as she is only active for the first hour after your teleport.

Admittidly, I don't use my generator every cooldown, but tonight is the first time I have managed to get the Underground option. Woo Hoo.

She was sold out.  Sob sob.

Why should Blizzard introduce epic cata gems?

There is speculation about when Blizzard will release Epic gems and how they will be released, but very little about why they would do so.

Answer the why, and I think you may get clues as to when.

For the record, I was not a jewelcrafter when they released epic gems in Northrend, and my first toon reached level 70 weeks before Northrend was made available.

At this point, Cataclysm is harder than Wrath was at the end.  Even ICC had been nerfed into the ground, to the point that even a very slow progression player like myself had a shot at the lich king (for the record, I got him down to around 30% the last weekend before Cata hit).

Today, dungeons and raids are tuned to be hard.  I have no doubt that when 4.2 hits; the new raids will be just as hard, and will strongly encourage toons to be properly geared, enchanted and gemmed.  However, if Rare gems is what we have, then Rare gems will be 'properly gemmed'.

I don't think that anyone is really expecting patch 4.2 to start off easy.

Releasing new gem types (or even enchants) does not make the new raids (or newly released dungeons) easier.  When they are released, any new progression content will be tuned to expect them. Epic gems will provide yet another nerf to older content. However, we will all be excited about the new shiny gems, without percieving the nerf.

Blizzard have already stated that they are nerfing the existing raids.  I suspect this will be sufficient for their purposes.  I suspect we will see Epic gems and new enchants when Blizzard want to give existing content a nerf.

For the record : I do not think that Epic gems will be released on patch 4.2

This is pure speculation.  I still have a small stockpile of pyrite ore, and a few unspent JC tokens just in case.

Surplus ink become darkmoon cards, and early morning posting.

The darkmoon faire is coming up.

After much self doubt, I converted my surplus blackfallow ink into inferno inks, and then into cards.  The idea of turning 10 blackfallow (notionally 60g) into 1 inferno (notionally 40g) is something I struggled with. 

However, as I was only pricing 10 blackfallow at 50g (in either glyphs or as inks), and could not 'ship them'.  I also can create inks at around 4g each based on a whiptail price of 2.75 each.  (I maintain a somewhat confusing spreadsheet on google docs).  It was time for them to go, in whatever form I could sell them.

As such, I am (mostly) raising my glyph pricing and reducing my undercut, but still posting on both AH's.  I am also - occasionally - posting glyphs in the morning, when other sellers are not on.

Have no fear, I will again be milling inks and continue to craft and sell glyphs, but have been exploring my other crafting skills.