Prospecting Titanium Ore in 3.2

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1. goth August 29, 2009 11:50 PM

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   Prices for Titanium ore will have to drop significantly before this becomes profitable. From your numbers you are paying 296 gold per stack and this would have to drop under 175 gold to make a average profit. My question is why are Jc’s buying this ore at current pricing when epic gems are selling for 200gold or less when epic drops per stack are barely 1 to 1?

2. Zerohour August 30, 2009 12:05 AM

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   3.2 Prospecting Titanium vs. Other methods and 3.1 system

   Prospecting Titanium is definitely a low return game and everyone serious about making insane gold in this game should avoid it like the plague. Until the prices return to a more normal figure and even at those prices there’s too much chance in the equation, even for my taste. My server’s prices are a tad more overpriced on ores and underpriced on the finished product than this demonstration and I determined this through just my own personal calculator weeks ago and the margins haven’t budged. There’s simply too many things that can go wrong with it when you go with the odds of 25% to where you could be finding yourself fighting a zero sum game and just breaking even.

   The disparity in prices further makes it very unforgiving and almost charity work for people with too much gold and time on their hands. I will however let my competitors go this route because they eventually leave the market entirely once they find out the truth.

   If you recall my post prior to and after 3.2 was released, I chose to play the epic gem sales market another route, which has been extremely successful. I’ve since added another xmuter this weekend so we’ll see how that works out and I intend to add a fourth next weekend. If I have all three of them firing off daily, I will come close to if not MORE than your demonstration here and it cost me about 50g buy-in to do it. I am able to retain the mats for the raw rares at insanely low prices (thank you demand curve) and guarantee myself a margin that is typically 900% even better when I get a proc or two. I can afford to absolutely undercut the titanium prospectors into oblivion at this return since they are this close to the vest. Canceling a 3g auction when undercut means nothing because I’m still heavily profitable. Additionally, everyone xmutes reds anymore and the real juice is in the off colors (as was said by Warcraftecon in a prior article).

   As I predicted, the 3.1 method is still working fantastically. Rare quality gems are still going gangbusters on my server as they should be on most servers as well. Everyone seems to have ignored or abandoned this tried and true method and the prices are holding well. Using the old 3.1 method I consistently pull in thousands of profits weekly when I choose to cut up a large load of saronite – which I do sporadically anymore.

3. Zed August 30, 2009 3:11 AM

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   i switched the prices up here for my own server prices and figured i would loose 700g if i would try to do the same thing : (

   titanium ore stacks are 300g and all the epic gem cuts are roughly 150-170 tops.
   uncut gems are going for 100-130g each. I think we have too many pvpers on our server…

4. Argon August 30, 2009 9:17 AM

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   Once you’ve established a reasonable capital base, I think “return on time” is a better measure of the effectiveness of various moneymaking strategies. It would be interesting in the future to see how long it takes you (in terms of sitting at the keyboard) to make this amount of money. That would also make it somewhat useful to actually carry out the experiment, as it seems like you’d be better off using Wowhead numbers to estimate the value of a stack of titanium ore. You can set up a spreadsheet to calculate the expected value automatically.

5. Zerohour August 30, 2009 9:30 AM

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   Argon has an interesting point. I would hypothesize that a Return on Time element would prove that you spent a similar amount of time at the keyboard prospecting and relisting your gems as you would saronite, which is still going to give you a much better bang for your buck. Given all alchemists have the opportunity to make one of any color per day (and there are a bunch on every server) you cannot flood and will have to spend time relisting because the prices are still volatile.

   The good news, however, is that epic gems are actually selling. This is a far cry from the rotten tomatoes I threw at it a month ago. Since everyone has blown their honor and badge supplies on them they are now a little more settled in price.

6. Warcraftecon August 30, 2009 7:23 PM

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   Some really nice discussion going on here. I will try and do a prospecting saronite in 3.2 article as well as track down an updated Titanium/Saronite spreadsheet.

7. David August 31, 2009 3:29 AM

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   I prospect ore to get titanium powder for new gem cuts. If you add in the future profits from a new gem cut then it may be worthwhile to prospect ore. It just feels wrong to buy 10 titanium powders for 400g.

8. Zerohour August 31, 2009 12:42 PM

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   Personally speaking, I would say the new gold making methods of choice for anything having to do with gems for this patch are going to be:

   1) 3.1 JC/DE Saronite
   2) A small army of alchemists with transmute mastery

   Everything else is too large an investment with too much risk in place for the time required. Sure the example shows ~1300g, but I just noticed this nugget there in the accounting:

   99 [Titanium Powder] 30g/ea (2970)

   Bye, bye, profits! Everyone prospecting Titanium is also doing it for the powder for the extra tokens, or at least they should be. But, check the price of dragon’s eyes and Nightmare Tears. 5 Infinite dust (retail about 3g per most of the time) and you have a gem needed by most of the classes in the game to fulfill a meta gem requirement. Tears go for around 180-230g on my server. You might push the margin up a little bit but you would also flood given this quantity of dust you received. Otherwise, if you need designs, the Titanium prospecting method should have the nails put in the coffin. Where’s an MIT mathematician when you need them?

9. Zerohour September 2, 2009 1:44 PM

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   I wanted to update my findings, as I decided to throw 5k at this as well, which was 16 stacks @ ~320g per stack (high dollar on my server). My results were:

   Autumn’s Glow 2
   Forest Emerald 2
   Monarch Topaz 6
   Scarlet Ruby 4
   Sky Sapphire 1
   Twilight Opal 2

   Ametrine 2
   Cardinal Ruby 4
   Dreadstone 0
   Eye of Zul 1
   King’s Amber 8
   Majestic Zircon 4

   Uncommon Useful Gems 54
   Uncommon Junk Gems 37

   Titanium Powder 41

   I do not sell the Titanium Powder now, I keep that to learn more patterns to add value to future prospects/transmutes/etc. Once this is complete I will probably sell it.

   To keep this simple, I threw together my own spreadsheet where the average sales price of an epic gem is 175g per. Some sell for 200+, some sell at 150g. The difference is hitting the market properly and posting those cuts that have a need (WoWPopular.com people). I have the luxury of 3 alchemists, the 4th begins tomorrow (after I did these numbers you’ll see why):

   Total value of rares after transmute /w cut: 2,975g (175×17, assuming not ONE proc)
   Total value of epics /w cut: 3,325g (175×19, got lucky on prospect rate with several doubles)
   Total value of DE’ables: 323g (plugged in value of dust that I routinely get on AH)
   Total value of Junk Gems: 18.5g (minimum, I tend to cut and vendor jade and shadows)

   Total investment: 5,120 gold
   Total anticipated value: 6,641 gold
   Gross Margin: 1,521 gold
   Return on Investment: 29.7%
   Time invested: 10 minutes

   So here’s what I’m doing – My Saronite Ore JC/DE efforts will be used to make quick gold on the people still buying the rare cuts, 100% of the rares I get will be cut for sale. This market still thrives and with ToC and the new arena season, there are hundreds of these people on each server. This is also a proven method of making gold and has a 100% reliability with me of making excellent profits.

   I will use Titanium Ore prospecting to go JC/DE/Xmute. The rares I receive from prospects will go to fuel my xmuters. Since all of them are Xmute masters, I have a chance of doubles on each meaning much higher return. This isn’t going to be get rich quick, but I think I’ve solved the problem for myself with these high market prices of giving additional income off Titanium Prospecting whereas everyone else is going to complain about the high prices which haven’t gone down at all in a month. Eventually I’ll have all the cuts I need and can profit more on the powders.

   Whatcha think Warcraftecon?