A little knowledge can be dangerous

So let me set the scene. Ore is normally 60-70g/stack. Then we get a deluge of cheap ore at 20g/stack. Combine this with an inexperienced JC (that happened to be a guildie) who wanted to get rich quick.

A guildie advertised in trade and guild chat how he wanted to sell Inferno rubies for 30g each. Now I bought them all because cut infernos are still selling for 100-110g and hey who doesn’t like free gold?

This guy kept talking about his ore adventure and it was fascinating to hear his tale. For example he was vendoring all his uncommon gems because he had read about it somewhere out there on the interwebz but realised that he was not making a lot of gold doing this.

One can expect that following a big amount of cheap ore coming into the market prices may start to come down but watching this player’s adventure was very very interesting. I intervened with the inferno rubies but decided it would be fun to try and get into the mindset of someone new to making gold. So I did not intervene again even when Nightstone were being vendored *wipes tear from eye*

A day passed and this player was still talking about how they were stuck with loads of gems that would not sell. He only has JC/Alchemy and no alts as far as I can tell.

Now when I read in gchat this player had made 9k in two days I was intrigued. I was glad this player managed to make some decent gold however when I asked how much they spent on ore they replied 7k!

So basically he spent 7k on 7000 ore (350 stacks), prospected it all and only made 2k profit? I was just like Wow. With a 7k investment he should have easily been able to make 15k+ back even just doing a basic shuffle and selling raw gems.

The thing is this player panicked. He had so much ore and just wanted to get rid of it. Even though perhaps to me and others he should have calmed down, kept prices a little higher, not vendored gems and basically chilled out and sold his items over a week rather than a couple of days. When you invest nearly all the gold you have into a market you panic it is just normal I guess. If I invested all my gold into something I might panic as well.

So what can we learn from this inexperienced JC? While it can be hugely helpful to look back at  older blog posts and listen to older podcasts please remember to check things still work out and engage your brain. This player was 110% confident you could buy elementium ore and make a profit just from vendoring the uncommon gems.

You might ask why I did not intervene and help this player, well  I think I wanted them to go through the experience and maybe they would learn and develop.

Would you have intervened?

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Mining Thorium is better than Elementium?

Mining Thorium in Un’Goro Crater & Silithus

This idea of multi-zone farming. 

My DK is very very fast i can do a loop of Un'Goro and then do a loop of Silithus. Both zones are packed with thorium and have rare spawns.

What can I do to make gold with the items I get from mining thorium ore?

Sell raw ore (check your AH prices sometimes ore will sell for more and faster than bars)

Sell bars (I prefer to sell in singles or stacks of 10)

Sell Arcanite (in singles)

Sell Arcanite rods (post 2/3 for 24hrs)

Add Rugged leather and craft Enchanted Thorium Blades and Disenchant.

If you don’t have an Alchemist ask a friend (make sure they are transmute spec) to make the Arcanite for you.

In one hour of mining I got the following mats

Total for 1 hour of farming  

742 thorium ore

24 arcane crystal

11 large opal

4 large sapphire

5 Azerothian diamond

8 huge emerald

9 star ruby

12 truesilver ore

23 mithril ore

904 dense stone

Take off 24 ore needed to craft the arcanite bars we are left with

742- 24 = 718 ore

Minimum of 24 arcanite bars

EU TUJ mean Arcanite bars are 100g

2400g from Arcanite bars

EU TUJ mean thorium bar is 2.76g

718 x 2.76 = 1981g

So before any extra procs from being a transmute spec alchemist or crafting you are looking at 4381g using TUJ average data.

An example from my last batch was 40 “casts” turned into 49 Arcanite bars. It normally averages around 15-20% bonus materials.

You can also keep an eye out for rare spawns and depending on loot this can really boost your gold earnings.

Dense stone turn into dense grinding stone which I used in crafting Arcanite rods. Generally you will be getting way more dense stone than you can use so either post it on AH (around 90s/stack here) but if you are literally drowning in dense stone just vendor it.

The gems you get sell really well to people levelling JC.

I’m really considering stockpiling a bunch of Arcanite bars for MoP. I really think Blizz will allow the transmog of legendary weapons. I stockpiled a load of bars pre 4.3 and they went from 30-40g to 100g which was awesome. I really like Arcanite bars because of the extra procs. An Arcanite stockpile is not that risky because you can always move them into Arcanite rods and even if Blizz does’nt allow legendary transmog lots of people will still go out there and collect them.

Plug in the numbers for your realm and work out how much gold you could make, leave your gold per hour numbers in the comments.

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Prospecting: Iron Ore

Obsidium, Elementium and Pyrite are not the only ore you can prospect for profit.

It took me a week to buy one hundred stacks of iron ore. You can farm lots of Iron ore in Ferales.

Source: wowhead

This is the resulting amount of uncommon gems after the prospecting. It will take some time to sell all these but with lots of people switching from their mains to levelling alts and professions I hope to sell them all over the next two weeks.

Results of Prospecting 2000 Iron Ore:

158 jade

144 lesser moonstone

139 citrine

22 star ruby

18 aquamarine

Using Tuj EU mean data

Jade 12.77

Lesser moonstone 2.96

Citrine 12.12

Star ruby 8.73

Aquamarine 8.58

Cost of Iron ore mean 38.58g/stack x 100 stacks = 3858g

Jade = 2017.66

L.Moon = 426.24

Citrine = 1684.68

Star ruby = 192.06

Aquamarine = 154.44

Total value = 4475.08

Potential profit = 617.08 Not great profit

Using my realm data

Took me a week to buy 100 stacks because I only bought ore that was below 14g/stack.

Cost is 14 x 100 = 1400g

Jade = 2370

L.Moon = 403.2

Citrine = 695

Star Ruby = 129.8

Aquamarine = 113.4

Total value = 3711.4

Potential profit = 2311.4 Nice profit from 1400g investment.

What you might want to look into doing :

Farm iron ore, sell it raw

Farm iron ore, prospect ore, sell gems

Buy iron ore, prospect ore, sell gems

Keep an eye out on the price of iron ore and these gems. Use this Auctionator shopping list to get a snapshot of what is going on in this market on your realm.

*** iron ore_Gems

Iron ore

Jade

Lesser moonstone

Citrine

Star ruby

Aquamarine

If you go to TUJ -> Enhancements -> Jewelcrafting scroll down to the bottom and you will see a Prospecting Value table which can give you a good idea whether this is worth doing on your realm.