One of the things you learn as a writer is that it’s not always a good thing if everyone agrees with you.  You have to stir up a little controversy from time to time.  It seems that people kind of like getting mad.  Makes them feel alive – gets their blood flowing.

Or some nonsense like that.  Anyway, on the last podcast (episode 12) we spent a little time talking about how there is this kind of , um, (having a hard time being nice here) odd opinion floating around that Jewelcrafting is the best profession to make money.  In our book it’s absolutely the biggest waste of time when it comes to trying to make gold there is.  We would farm before we tried to make gold with JC – we would get more per hour out of it.  But there are those who continue with this nubbish idea that JC is the way to go.

We agree that IF you use professions the way most people do that might be the case.  Our problem is that we just don’t do that with any profession.  Perhaps Blizz intended for people to become Tailors and hang out little signs in trade chat selling spellthread and whatnots from their one man shop.

Well if that’s what they intended they shouldn’t have given us an auction house.  That changes all the rules for those of us with a certain mindset.  So, because the AH exists we never have hung out a little sign and just went right to the WalMart type setting.

Now, there is a role in any economy for the small specialty store.  They actually thrive in the shadow of wally world, but they have to charge more for a very different type of thing.  Higher quality, rare stuff, things like that will work great.  The problem with WoW is that those things don’t really exist.  And even if they do you should sell those on the ah too.  So the sole proprietorship is just a lumbering dinosaur compared to our ah juggernaught.

Well, someone took offense at our position – read this:

Well I never thought id disagree with you guys…but saying JCing doesnt make you money?!
I have saved up 160k now on Nathrezim and the majority of that was from JCing. I had 71k pre wotlk which was a fortune back then. I would say JC easily provides the best & most constant time to gold ratio
If you bulk buy the ore and spend time crafting items with the green quality gems to DE, the value of the DE mats almost covers the cost of the ore, leaving whatever rare quality gems you get to be pure profit.
2000g spent on ore + a few stacks of eternal earths is worth nearer 4000g after 2-3 hours propsecting,cutting,DEing and AHing.
According to my achievment stats for wealth I make around 2000g per day which aint bad for about 5 hours played per day.
IDK maybe the gem market on your server is screwy. I know on Horde Nathrezim the prices have been dropping for a while but theres still def great gold making opportunity there.
Entertaining podcast though :)

That’s from a long-time listener and reader, Radjim.  Without whacking on Radjim too hard, we do want to take this opportunity to point out exactly why this is the kind of thinking that keeps most people dead broke or struggling to buy that mammoth mount OR making a lot of money doing the right thing accidentally.

That’s what’s happening to Radjim.  He THINKS he’s making  money from JC, but what he’s really making money from is something completely different.  See if you can guess what it is while we outline the rest of the story here.

I wanted to see if there was some unique circumstance on the Nathrezim server, so I logged in a Blood Elf and ran into Silvermoon to take a look for myself at just how Radj might be doing what he says.  What I found was no different than dozens of other servers.  And frankly, I don’t see how anyone ever makes any gold from JC at all.

Cobalt ore was 28g and stack, Saronite 18g.  This means that (at best) each DE item from those green quality gems is costing you 17g to make (12g for the gems, 5g for the Eternal Earth).  I could only find 2 items you could craft for DE that use up any green gems: Blood Sun Necklace and Jade Dagger Pendant – both of which DE down to a single Dream Shard.

You can make the Shadowmight ring and Stoneguard band, but I get those made all the time for free, no need to take JC to get those for DE since they use Eternals and not gems.  Besides, it’s silly to make things to DE when there are hundreds of world drops out there no one wants.  More on this further down.

The dream Shards are going for 19g giving you a 2g profit.  As far as the Blue quality gems, you’ll be paying around 15-20g for each one by buying the ore to prospect for them.  I didn’t go into cut gems at all since tehre are so many varieties, but what I found was that for even the ones everyone likes there were four full pages at the AH.  I guarantee you if there are four pages of something you are not making much profit.

So with more than 47 Brilliant Autumn’s Glow available, you’re better off selling the uncut gems – but there were 35 Autmun’s Glow on there uncut as well.  The deposit for listing that gem is 2g.  List it for a week and it just cost you 8g to try to sell it.  For most blue quality gems that means there is no profit left and the thing just cost you more than it will sell for unless you price it to sell first time out by undecutting like 25%.

Anyway, we figured best case scenario is that if you did get a good spread of all different types of blue gems (and assuming every single one of them sold for 100% market value in less than 4 listings) you could make about 10g per stack of ore averaged from the extra gems.  In order to get that kind of spread you have to use both Saronite and Cobalt which menas your raw cost is an average of 25g.  So now we’re at best case scenario you can spend 25g and make 12 IF you combine JC with Enchanting.

But it really never works out that way.  The surplus of gems in every markeplace places too much downward pressure on price.  That price will always stabilize at a break even point, or even a little below.  The other factor is that there isn’t an infinite supply of underpriced ore to buy.  It would be better to buy the underpriced ore and reprice it.  You would make far more money per unit of time with a lot less risk.

On the same AH we found more than 475 items priced around 9g or less that would DE to about the same dusts and essences as the rings from JC.  There were only about 100 total Eternals available for market price or below to make the rings.  This means we could only make 50 rings to DE, where we could buy almost 500 items to DE.

Web Winder Gloves at 9g and Muradin Shoulders of Intellect for 8g would net us an easy 17g average each after DE.  That’s a lot better than our maybe 12g the other way.  Plus, it’s a single step.  No more prospecting, buying another mat, crafting all that goop, then DE’ing and listing all this different stuff.  Just buy the thing, DE it and list the mats.

You see, Radjim is actually making all that gold from Enchanting.  Jewelcrafting is actually getting in the way – of his brain and his time.  We would be better off on that server running his crafting for DE gambit and selling blues by using Tailoring.  There were stacks of Frostweave for sale in that ah for less than 5g.  You could turn a 100% profit snagging all that cheap cloth and making Duskweave Belts for DE.  Much better than the JC ring process.

But here’s the thing this really taught me – even this discussion is a waste of time for those people who use our techniques on a daily basis.  The one thing I know is that in our AH Mastery System I never purchase ore to use for anything but resale.  I don’t purchase ore for anything but resale because the numbers never advise me to do so.  The numbers never advise me to do so because the numbers never lie – and I always believe them.

The numbers never lie because for the last 4 years Gavin and I have been refining a foolproof Auction House system that removes all of this silly research and looking at all the specifics.  There simply is not enough profit (in a safe enough way) to ever sell a single gem of any kind on any ah on any realm in the world – period.  The numbers say so.  The only way you can make a real dime of profit selling any gem is to do so in trade chat, and that is a waste of my time.  And to make that work it needs to be some rare variety that everyone wants and no one can find – those don’t exist any more.

But just to showcase what we mean let’s continue this analysis so that all of you can see how we developed both our system and our philosophy that leads us to such brash statements.  There were only 27 stacks of ore available on the ah with which you might possibly make 12g.  Everything else was priced too high.  Those stacks would have cost you 675g and made you (possibly) 324 gold.  I burp more gold than that.

Those 475 greens for DE could have been bid or bought for an average of 4g each, for a total of 1,900g spent and an almost guaranteed profit of at least 100%, but let’s just call it 50% for a total of 950g.  Then when we did a scan for resale items we could have had another 250 items to resale that would have cost us 1,200g and made us a profit of 467g.  Then there were the vendor items with a 125g profit.  There were the other crafted item mats for Tailoring might have made us 225g, and some odds and ends we normally pick up as well.

Oh, and we also did a scan for prospecting mats – the results were about the same as always.  Our numbers only recommended purchasing 15 stacks.  That means that in order to guarantee a 25% profit margin there were only 15 stacks we could buy in the entire auction house that met our criteria.  Guess what?  Not a single one of those stacks was Saronite or Cobalt.  Most were Copper and Tin.  We knew this already of course.

You can only make money from JC by supplying all those dozens of Jewelcrafters and the even more dozens more that are leveling JC.  Don’t join them – beat the pants off them.  Over the last three years we’ve watched every single sale for thousands of item types and developed it into a foolproof system that works every single time no matter what sells well on your server – and YES on one or two servers that might actually be Jewelcrafting, but you’ll never do it the way everyone else does.

Radjim is doing the right thing and he didn’t even know it.  With a lot broader market perspective he could be making far more gold.  And Radj – 2k gold a day from JC?  Lie better next time dude, we’re not buying it.  The one thing that’s certain is that it’s DE that’s making him the vast majority of his real and easiest profits, just like we’ve always said.

If it was us on that AH we would have spent around 4,150g in 10 minutes.  Turned it all into things that really sell well in about 20 minutes and logged out for two days.  When we logged back in it’s virtually a guarantee that about half of it would have sold, and 90% of it by the end of the week.  So which sounds better to you – spending 675g to make 325g a couple of times a week?  Or would you rather spend 4,000 to make 2,000?  It’s a no brainer when I tell you that spending the 675 will probably only make you about 250g or so because the numbers just don’t back it up in the long run.

So it turns out that our good friend Radjim does it our way all along – DE for profit folks.  Everything else is to make your toon stronger.  Use professions to buff your toons, not to craft thigns to sell – UNLESS the numbers tell you to.  And the only way to make sure you’ve got the right numbers is to do it Gavin’s way – it’s really the only way to Dominate!