Saturday, May 16, 2009

A Small Jewelcrafting Rant

Specifically I would like to voice my official complaint about the skill Prospecting. Basically, it doesn't work for poo and I'm fed up with it. I have very limited time to play. Mostly I get to login, do a few dailies and then I'm off for the remainder of the day. Sometimes I'm so busy with my new mommyhood that I have to spread those few dailies out between nap times just to complete them.

To sum it up: I don't have 3 trillion hours to hunt for ore that doesn't have gems worth a turd in them.

Beorr was kind enough to go out and spend his free time mining and sent me 5 stacks of ore. Every 5 pieces of ore can be prospected to look for gem so I had 20 chances to get a nice blue quality gem to be cut and given to guildies to use.

Not counting the shiny Scarlet Ruby that Beorr must of obtained mining, out of my 20 prospects I got 2 blue quality gems. 2 sapphires. That's it. Sure that equals a 10% return on my prospecting attempts but I'm saying that's not good enough. The entire process is too random.

I'm not able to keep up with the guild's needs for gems. I have a ton of sapphires and opals in the bank but never any ruby or topaz gems to share. What did I get. More damn sapphires that no one wants. It's very frustrating.

I think my main cause of frustration is that I'm not able to farm for my items like other professions are. I can't go, "oh I'm out of rubies, time to go find some ruby gem nodes to mine". No I have to cross my fingers and toes and hope that the gems that pop out of the prospecting is the ones I require.

Not to mention I'm absolutely swimming in green quality uncut gems that no one wants. They don't even sell well on the auction house.

I need a way to turn all these cruddy green quality gems into blues I can actually use. Yes, I am aware of the Icy Prism pattern but as I mentioned, I'm not exactly going into dungeons any longer. I am woefully short of Frozen Orbs required. Even so I think there's probably better uses out there for Frozen Orbs since the Icy Prism just gives me a random assortment of gems and a good chance of more crud I don't need.

What I need is way to just take a bunch of the cruddy Bloodstone gems and fuse them together into a Scarlet Ruby. That way I know what I'm getting when I'm short on gems and can make one from spare materials in a pinch. I have a bag full and several slots in the guild vault dedicated to collecting these low quality gems we don't use. Why not let me use them towards something I do need!

Thus ended my rant. I just had to get this jewelcrafting dilemma off my chest. I'm doing what I can to keep the vaults stocked and thanks to Beorr for helping make this easier on me by sharing your ore! It's just so frustrating to have 14 Sky Sapphires in stock and ready to cut but everyone is asking for Monarch Topaz and Scarlet Rubies. Ugh!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find prospecting very patchy but am lucky enough to work shifts which means I can go mining in the day time and pick up around 200 saronite in one trip. Over 200 I will find that, on average, I get 1 blue gem per stack of ore. I will usually end up with a few of each colour. Of course what happens as I am prospecting is that some stacks will yield 3 blue gems, others none. It would be nice if there was a way to combine green gems to make blues.

At the moment I turn my green gems into rings and necklaces which I can dis-enchant for Infinite Dust.

SaladFork said...

You can combine 4 of the 6 uncommon gems with some crystallized earth into mid-70 jewelery using Jewelcrafting (all the recipes are on the trainer). You can then disenchant these into Infinite Dust, Lesser Cosmic Essence, and Small Dream Shard. Including opportunity cost, you still profit. The other two uncommon gems (Dark Jade and Shadow Crystal) can be cut and vendored (50s per cut, 1g per perfect cut).

Kestrel said...

Forks has it right with respect to green-quality gems. You should be able to find Eternal Earth for ~7g or less; each will make 5 pieces of jewelry for disenchanting.

In addition, any gems your guild doesn't need should be sold in the AH. I highly recommend AuctionLite for this (available at Curse.com) over Auctioneer: It makes the process almost automatic by automatically undercutting the lowest-priced offering currently on the AH. Put them up only for 12 hours; otherwise, you'll be undercut too much and they'll languish for 36 hours. If it doesn't sell in 12, it won't sell.

With this strategy, and a large buy of ore once a week or so (by large, I mean 40 stacks or more; roughly, 1K gold), my jeweler and my enchanter--neither of whom is 80--have raised my total gold to 20K, allowing me to buy things like the Inscribed Loop of the Kirin Tor for my priest without a second thought.

Santyn said...

I agree with you 100% on this one. I have loads of green quality gems that are only used for the JC daily.

After much whining from players, Blizz did include a recipe in TBC for this, Brilliant Glass, but it didn't come until late TBC (patch 2.4 I think).

I think they were going for the same thing with Icy Prism, but making it require a Frozen Orb has made it prohibitively expensive to use. Lets hope they listen to players again and give us a use for our low quality gems.

Alerexis said...

You can purchase rare gems now(i.e. a Scarlet Ruby).

Captain O'Neal in Stormwind will sell you one for 10,000 honor.

Or Arcanist Ivrenne in Dalaran will sell you one for 10 Emblems of Heroism

Dax said...

I take all those low quality gems that had around in stacks, bought some eternal earth, as I didnt have enough from mining. Created low level items and had an enchanter de them. Infinite dust and cosmic essence definately sells.

Dax