Jewelcrafting Guide, part 2

Okay, so here's part 2 of my jewelcrafting guide. First of all, let me say this: Jewelcrafting lets you cut gems, and make jewelry. I will be focusing on the gems, because it is the best way to make money from the profession.

Pretty simple rules for Jewelcrafting. First, get to 350+ as soon as possible. (Search my blog, I linked to a good guide some time ago. Or Google it.) Once you are at 350, the fun begins. But first, I have bad news: trained cuts and vendor recipe cuts don't sell for a huge deal. Sure, they sell, and you don't have anything else to do with your raw gems, except for sell uncut ones to other jewelcrafters. So, you can make some money by selling those unremarkable gems.

Now, the REAL Jewelcrafting moneymaker comes from cutting gems from dropped recipes. Unfortunately, that means you have to be lucky enough to get one, or have the stomach to buy one. These things can cost from 200 to 500 gold, depending on the recipe. Now, unlike some professions that have lots of cooldowns, in Jewelcrafting only cutting a Meta gem causes a cooldown, and it's only for one hour, and doesn't keep you from cutting non-Meta gems. So, once you get a good recipe (or recipes), you'll be able to buy an uncut blue gem or purple gem, cut it, and resell it at quite a nice profit. Try that with alchemy transmutes!

Jewelcrafting is fairly cheap to level up, but yes, it does require some investment in the end. It takes money to make money, people! But any time someone upgrades their gear with something with sockets (which is most good gear), they need new gems for it. There is ALWAYS a market for good gems, and if you bite the bullet and buy/find a great recipe, you'll rake it in.

Now, which recipes? First of all, in the course of your adventuring in Outlands, you're going to get rep with various factions, and some of them sell recipes! Here are a few to watch for.

• Design: Insightful Earthstorm Diamond (Sha'tar Friendly)
  
• Design: Blood of Amber (Sha'tar Revered)
• Design: Falling Star (Lower City Revered)

These are all bind on pickup. So, you can make them for yourself, but not to sell. Still, it's nice to have a gem or two hardly anyone ever sees!

Quick primer on gems. Which color gems can have which stats:

• Red: strength, agility, +damage and healing, +healing, attack power, dodge, parry
• Blue: stamina, spirit, mana per 5, spell penetration
• Yellow: intellect, hit, crit, spell crit, defense, resilience, spell hit

Now that we have that established. The most common gems you'll be cutting will be blue quality gems. The different types of raw, uncut blue gems are:

• Noble Topaz (orange)
• Dawnstone (yellow)
• Living ruby (red)
• Star of Elune (blue)
• Nightseye (purple)
• Talasite (green)

Keep in mind, a green quality RAW gem can be cut into a blue quality CUT gem! But they generally have a higher quality counterpart, which is cut from a blue quality raw gem.

You can also craft meta gems from Earthstorm Diamonds and Skyfire Diamonds, which are made by Alchemists. But these are expensive to make, and not as efficient or as easily sold as the blue ones, in my opinion.

For a complete list of ALL gems, with stats on mouseover, go here.
And for a handy graph of what gems have what stats, go here.

Now, market value will vary some, but some gems are clearly useful for many classes, and so are worth more. General rule of thumb seems to be gems with multiple stat bonuses are better than ones that focus on a single stat (with the exception stamina). I've decided to turn that into a third post, due out soon. Really, the problem is that with all the different classes, builds, and gear sets, almost EVERY gem has a place, and a certain degree of demand. But I will try to go over the most commonly bought ones.