This. The cost of even the PVP gear was absurd, seeing as it's aimed at people who just got to 85 and don't have buckets of cash lying around.

I think the main advice for Blizzard is not treat crafting as just something raiders do to get stat bonuses. Some players get a lot of joy out of crafting, and items like the Embersilk Dress and Engineering items can add a lot of richness to the game, even if they don't provide bonus stats.

Thing is, I feel LK had a great solution to this problem already. Allow people to buy epic gems with excess JP. That way, everyone can eventually get themselves gemmed out, but they still have to do a little work to get there.

Don't forget the PvPers. They should be able to get the uncut ones not the crappy pre-cut ones.

I concur! I really don't understand how you can say that enchants are "appropriately expensive" when you simply cannot afford enchants that are virtually a requirement of the levels of output that people expect. Caster DPS, for example,requires Power Torrent, and that enchant is going for over 2K on my server. The mats are insanely expensive, and that is largely due to shortages in the Celestial Essence market, caused by the fact that nothing drops in the HoT 5-mans but epics that all DE into Maelstrom Crystals.

And I have to echo what was said about the gems. Everyone except warrior and pally tanks use red gems almost exclusively, resulting in hyper-inflated prices for those stones. The epics? As was said, they shouldn't be running 3K, but on Earthen Ring-US, it's not unheard of for uncut Queens Garnets to still be pulling 6K+

I see people saying that enchants are selling for 2K gold and inferno rubies are costing more than 300g and this is ridiculous... are you not participating in the economy?

If inferno rubies are that expensive, then perhaps you should get some ore and prospect it? Or transmute carnelians? If you don't have a JC or an alchemist, maybe you can go mine some ore and sell it for it should be selling at 6g each to support inferno rubies at 300g. it means that you can hop on your miner, mine some ore and sell it for decent money. Or you hop on your herbalist and farm up some heartblossom?

If enchants are so very expensive, do you not see an opportunity in the enchanting trade to make some money? Perhaps if you have a BS you can farm/buy cheap ore into stormforged shoulders and DE them for heavenly shards?

High prices on goods only seem high until you can figure out your niche in your server's economy. Once you do, the high prices no longer seem so high. Prices will always seem unreasonably high if your only means of income are dailies.

I just want to add that while this comment applies to virtually everything, it especially applies to skinning and leatherworking.

Farming skins sucks. It sucks a fucking load of suckyness. Good god, I hate it. However, the price of a piece of leather relative to metal and cloth is absurd. It's stupid pricy. Thus, leatherworking gear is also stupid pricy. Its FAR more expensive than cloth and metal stuff. This is only going to get worse in Mists with ANOTHER leather class.


PLEASE. Make the amount of skins per-recipe drastically reduced. It's something like 100 mobs = 1 item, PLUS other mats. I really don't want to spend 10k gold on a blue 377 BoE, or over an hour farming for it.

Inferno rubies are only so expensive because -everything else- that JC's cut is pretty much -not- needed at the moment. Nearly every gem slot on gear is -red- which means that there is no debate about what to socket. People use if we're lucky 2 non red gems for their meta activation and some dps metas don't even require that!

So yeah 250-300g is expensive per gem, unless you consider that every other gem is worthless ... so it just -seems- more expensive, where as if the price per gem were spread out more evenly amongst other colors it wouldn't seem that bad. It's just not, because the one gem people want -- has a lower drop rate than any other color which is in turn pretty much worthless. {Not all realms are the same there are a few orange gems worth anything and 1 purple one worth anything, but everything else is like 3-5g each. With the deposit from the ah taking their cut it's almost better profit to just vendor them all..}

So while I enjoy the raw stat boost on my gear + free set bonus for using my best gem, I feel like Blizzard really did JC's a disservice by making so many red gems on gear.

Twill, do you realize that your desires are nearly the exact opposite of what skinners want? Someone who pays for their flasks or epic gems or 30k BoEs or legendary daggers or VotS by skinning would prefer much higher demand for skins

The prices are driven by the players, not Blizzard. Could blizzard do something to lower the prices via making epic gems available to buy with VP? I'm sure they could try, but I really doubt it would knock the AH price down to dramatically. The BoE valor bracers and boots still sell for around 5k give or take, people would be expecting a similar number for the epic gems they purchase with their Valor Points. As for rare gems, well, they would be sold for JP I'm guessing and again, the price would not drop as much as you would expect.

Gems, glyphs, flasks, and enchants are PURELY player driven markets. Whether you go into a non-heroic 5 man to solo mobs and farm celestial essences, run around twilight highlands grabbing ore and herbs to prospect, mill, or uhhh.. potionize.. it is all something done by a player. The only way for the market price to be lowered is for you to invest a lot of time into farming up insane amounts of the product you want to see drop in price and list it on the AH for what you believe is a reasonable price. You will need to do this daily, for months, until finally you run to the AH one day and notice your stock being the most expensive auction listed.

Now this isn't so true with epic gems as it is with every other material seeing as any player can only receive a maximum of 8 epic gems per week without buying any, and letting them become a rare prospect from pyrium would be nice, however, the argument does hold true for enchants which seems to the focus of the comment. I deck out all my 85s in BiS enchants and make a little extra cash by farming green level items at the start of each patch. I'll also camp the AH and buy any ilvl 272+ weapon that is listed at 10g or less. Is it amazingly awesome and fun to do this? No, not really, however I do have the option to pay the 1 - 2k gold per enchant should I feel its not worth my time to save the gold.

@Linda

"Twill, do you realize that your desires are nearly the exact opposite of what skinners want? Someone who pays for their flasks or epic gems or 30k BoEs or legendary daggers or VotS by skinning would prefer much higher demand for skins
"

1- I'm a skinner. I have skinning. I don't do it, because it sucks. I would do it, but it SUCKS.

2- In general, no. Your assumption that there is a high demand is false. Instead, with prices so high, people GIVE UP AND GO WITHOUT. I would have LOVED to buy my Resto shaman a full set of PvP 377 blues. Unfortunately, the cost of one is the same as the cot of the entire cloth set. So, I WENT WITHOUT. It's only better to have a low supply if the demand maintains. In this case, most people just say "fuck it" and don't get in to the market at all.

TL;DR -

I've looked into this. Skinning sucks. Don't think that a small amount of economics will make it seem okay. It's not, and should be better. Far, far, far better. If skins were easier to get per-mob, the skinner would end up selling more. The net profit would go up.


Read this. Think of the current skinning market as a "price floor" because the supply isn't where it should be. It's like there is a skin embargo or something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_%28economics%29

@ Chance

The reason epic gems cost a lot is because YOU CANNOT FARM THEM. They come from a raid instance in a limited amount. If a red uncut epic gem was available for 1000 JP, it would cut the price in half immediately, and reduce it even more.

One man's opinion incoming...

I think the fundamental change that needs to happen with professions has little to do with what has come before. The problem with professions is that the model of receiving 95% useless fodder for leveling and 5% useful patterns at endgame is frustrating and tired. WoW has been around a long time, and at this point much of it's player-base simply wants to inhabit the world, play the game how they want to play it, and feel rewarded for that. At this point, crafting needs a major overhaul if it is to be seen as anything more than a gold sink that you must pay to be raiding optimal, or have a few toys.

I submit the idea that the crafting system could be overhauled to provide a more dynamic crafting environment, using the mats that are currently available. Instead of training specific recipes, you would learn how to combine the materials at your disposal to achieve different results depending on the combination of materials used. This system could still be min-maxed, meaning it would still be profitable on the AH, but those of us who might want to make crafting a more exploratory experience would still have avenues to make crafting more interesting and enjoyable.

As a jewelcrafter, I can say that the price of inferno rubies is entirely determined by the players. They prospect the same as everything other gem, but because infernos are BiS, their prices get jacked up. All other useful gems sell for around half that. And I can also say that I don't really find crafting infernos that profitable either. I can buy an uncut ruby for 130g and sell it for 140g, or I can cut a 20g emerald and sell it for 50g.