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Are gem prices set to recover?

By on May 20, 2009 in Jewelcrafting

Gem Bag

Wes ford has mentioned two weeks ago that his gem market had finally hit a healthy level for him.

For me, it has just reached the point where it becomes just almost worth my time to re-dabble a bit into the gem industry. Despite having no new recipes for Jewelcrafting from Ulduar, and having a niggly little unique-equipped stormjewel edging in, gems looks set for a modest but visible upswing.

If we look at the charts for Scarlet Rubies and Monarch Topazes over the past 3 months, it has been a rather volatile but consistent falling of prices.

Scarlet Ruby
Monarch Topaz

Recently, however, it seems that things will be picking up.

Currently, there are only 3 possible sources of obtaining rare quality gems.
1) Prospecting Saronite Ore
2) Trading in Honor
3) Trading in Emblems

In the current environment however, I predict these 3 sources will start drying up.
Barely anyone is mining saronite anymore, and even if they do, most purchases now are less of that of prospecting for rare gems, but more to do with smelting into bars. Furthermore, getting rid of the uncommon quality gems that arises as by-products can be very time and inventory consuming.

In 3.1, Blizzard has hugely buffed the inventories of the honor pvp vendors, a list of which I had went into on my personal blog that outlined the pvp gear purchasable
The TL;DR version is that, it will cost 212,000 honor to purchase the Hateful Class Set, and on top of that an additional 244,800 honor to even out the kinks in the gear.
That amounts to at least 456,800 from gear, which is 6 times the honor cap.
For the people who pvp, they will be turning their honor points into gear instead of gems for a very long time.

Now that ulduar is out, far less people are also entering heroics and Naxx-10, which means that the direct supply of Emblems of Heroism will drop drastically. And even if people still do heroics, they do it for the EoH that they require for entry level PvE gear, instead of turning them in for gems. As for Valor tokens, the ilvl 213 bracers still sell better each than as compared to 6 scarlet rubies. As for Conquest tokens, anyone turning conquest tokens into gems at this moment has just made a terrible terrible mistake.

With Supply of gems dropping, its inevitable that prices of gems will start to go up. However, we’ll actually also see demand increasing! A few weeks into Ulduar and Season 6, people have already started grabbing nice shiny new gear with sockets, and they’ve begun replacing their gear on a more frequent basis.

Thus, it is very very likely, that you’ll see Gem prices on the rebound soon!

In full disclosure, the gold-making author happens to have a glacial bag stuffed full with entire 20-stack gems waiting to be sold

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  • taco

    The gold farmers still you mine and herb for their income. This is because it is a guaranteed return of their time in a day (given that most of them are required to come up with xxx gold per day).

    4. Icy Prism
    5. Mining
    6. AH :)

    Prices for gems have dropped on my server but so has the price for ores so it evens out. It’ still very profitable but this is server dependent and on how many designs you have.

  • http://wowenomics.wordpress.com/ Jederus

    Can’t say I’ve seen an ‘across the board’ increase in gem prices yet but I have seen more servers rise slightly in price than I have observed a decrease in price as late. This alone, however, gives substance to your post when one factors in the deflation factor. Will keep a closer eye now. Thanks for the info.

  • valfather

    According to this blue post Jewelcrafting is getting a significant nerf in 3.2:

    "In the next major content patch we will be removing the prismatic quality of the jewelcrafter-only Dragon’s Eye gems. Like other gems, they will have to match the socket color to receive a socket bonus. When this change occurs, players with qualifying jewelcrafting skill will be provided a yet to be determined amount of Dalaran Jewelecrafter Tokens as compensation."

    This could cause some current jewelcrafters to drop the profession (and thus less cut gems on the market) and less people taking up jewelcrafting in the future, leading to a price increase.

  • http://magerlydifferent.blogspot.com Cathy

    I’ve been kinda neglecting my JC since I wasn’t finding it very profitable but I’ll certainly take another look at it.

    My husband is still getting approximately 500g per day for glyphs but has to stay on top of it to make it work. It certainly has dropped in the 3 weeks or so from 2k per day but still pretty nice income.

    Even on my new level 40 mage I’ve earned 1980g from the AH and almost all of that from herbs and perhaps a few greens. Mid level herbs are definately doing well.

  • http://www.warcraftecon.net Sherry Faith

    Recently I’ve been seeing a mild recovery in a lot more markets, not just inclusive of gems. I think that would account for price increeases in several constant demand, volatile supply items, such as the herbs from which you profit from!

    For valfather, that is quite true, I actually kept JC more for PvE purposes than for gold making as there are more lucrative professions. *cough* inscription

    To Jed and Taco, I suspect the servers with a more pronounced price increase would have more advanced stages of pvp and ulduar progression so as to have an increase in gear. Perhaps that might explain your server observations?