Crafted PvP Comparison

As you may or may not be aware, when patch 4.2 rolls around all the old crafted PvP recipes will be going from their current ilevel 339 states to a much beefier 358. The material costs will also be the same, but just keep in mind that already crafted gear will not be upgraded. In other words, do not pre-craft this gear.

What interests me in this interim period though, is the question about whether or not the current crop of Honor Point gear is worth purchasing in the days before 4.2 compared to what you can get crafted post-4.2. Obviously the Conquest Point epics will be purchasable after 4.2 with Honor and be much better than either, but as someone who enjoys getting their BG on the Honor cap is still 4000. For example, I have a warrior in the current crop of crafted PvP blues with about 2500 Honor accumulated. Would it be more "efficient" to hit the 4k Honor cap and stop playing altogether? Or would there be some benefit in buying the current Bloodthirsty Gladiator pieces while still aiming at capping out before June 28th?

A couple quick notes about the above picture. First, the stat gains along the bottom of the page does reflect my adding of gems into those eight sockets. Basically there are three Bolds, two Resplendent, and two Rigid gems in there along with the meta. Secondly, I am only comparing the five "tier" pieces at the moment because I have no idea how to add items to item sets on Wowhead, only how to remove them. Finally, if you want to look at the comparison yourself or perhaps change the gems around, you can use this link here.

What we can see about this at first glance is current Bloodthirsty Gladiator gear > 4.2 crafted gear, even without considering glove and 4-piece bonuses. Wowhead's comparisons are not 100% accurate though, as the Bloodthirsty set does not have a 400+ resilience gain over the crafted gear - the discrepancy is likely from the crafted gear's 2-piece +400 resilience bonus not being properly coded into Wowhead. Taking that into account and then manually plugging in the full Bloodthirsty Gladiator set, we get a comparison like this:

	4.2 Crafted	Bloodthirsty Glad	Difference
Stamina	3,311	3,135	176
Strength	2,206	2,314	-108
Mastery	225	153	72
Armor	19,644	19,301	343
Resilience	1,873	1,930	-57
Critical strike	--	449	-449
Expertise	393	257	136
Haste	336	173	163
Hit	519	238	281

Note: the Difference column is focusing on the crafted gear. Looking at it in this perspective, Bloodthirsty Gladiator looks less obviously better. Indeed, the crafted gear has +146 stat points and +176 Stamina vs +108 Strength... and the existence of a metagem, a glove bonus, and a 4-piece bonus. Generally speaking, primary stats like Strength are valued at least 2:1 against combat ratings like Mastery, so the tradeoff becomes nearly ~2k HP against +3% crit damage and whatever goodies are on your gloves and 4pc bonus. Bloodthirsty Gladiator gear retains the advantage.

In an interesting twist, the crafted PvP accessories are unequivocally better than the current Honor ones:

The take-away from this is three-fold. (1) You should still be banking some mats to pump out the upgraded PvP gear for when servers come back up. New players and alts will still be hitting level 85 after 4.2 all the time and want something to cover their nakedness (or 'sploit them into ZA/ZG queues). (2) The Bloodthirsty Gladiator non-accessory pieces are still worth getting, assuming buying them does not impact your ability to cap out on Honor by the 27th. Speaking of which, people with Bloodthirsty Glad gear will not be buying your non-accessory crafted PvP gear post-4.2. In other words, the markets do not overlap. Sorry, crafters. (3) If you have a JC toon, expect a rather nice post-patch payday. Your rings and necklaces will straight-up replace any non-epic piece of PvP gear. The healer pieces merely requiring Amberjewel and a smattering of Volatiles is especially win.

P.S. If you are a JC still making those 346 rings, you might want to stop. Resilience is a dead stat for PvE, of course, but you have to start asking yourself whether ~90 stats makes this comparison make sense:

     VS

When To Expect Epic Gems

Are there really people still talking about epic gems? Apparently so. Let me make it really easy for you: epic gems will be released when all the profession bonuses are updated.

The stat bonuses from any one profession is around ~80 extra stats above what you could otherwise attain. As you can see from the pictures above, a Bold Chimera's Eye grants +67 Strength vs a Bold Inferno Ruby with +40 Strength. (67 * 3) - (40 * 3) = 81. Mixology from Alchemy increases your flask strength by +80 stats, Synapse Springs gives a 480 stat bonus for 10 seconds every minute which is a ~16.66% uptime that averages into 80 stats, and the wrist enchants such as Major Strength were expressly added into the game to counteract imbalance that came with Leatherworkers having Embossments, such as +130 Strength, when everyone else had to settle for +50 Hit or +50 Haste (nevermind how much better primary stats already are from secondary ones this expansion).

If epic gems were added to the game, the profession bonus for JCs would diminish from 81 to 51, assuming that epic gems are +50. Simultaneously, the profession bonus for Blacksmithing (two extra sockets for +40 gems currently) would outpace everyone else as they are able to fit in two extra epic gems. Clearly, this would be bad design. The imbalance was fixed in Wrath in patch 3.2 by increasing the stats on the JC-only gems, keeping them proportionally as good as the other professions, which were similarly boosted to account for Blacksmiths.

Yes, I know 4.2 sounds like 3.2 + 1, but it does not work that way at all. If you will recall, 3.2 was released as the third tier of raiding. Meanwhile, 4.2 is merely the second tier of raiding this expansion. We cannot rely on patch numbers anymore given Blizzard's new policy vis-a-vis "smaller, faster patches" (which I find unlikely will continue past 4.2, else we should have been hearing about 4.3 already, yes?), but it is safe to say that whatever patch will contain the third tier of raiding will also contain epic gems. But even more specific, epic gems will be in whatever patch includes updated profession bonuses. It has to, by design.

So until you start hearing about a stronger Mixology, Embossments, or Chimera's Eye cuts on some PTR, feel free to continue speculating on Pyrite and/or making bank on rare gem cuts.

A Tale of Two Economies

As I may have mentioned before, every single time I log into WoW, the first thing I do is collect the sales from my JC business, cancel any undercuts from the day before (I list for 24 hours, but I don't log in exactly at the same time every night), relist unsold goods, and then see what is profitable to craft based on that day's prices. Just because three Purified Demonseyes sold during the night does not mean I will cut three more - if the price of uncut Demonseyes is higher than what Purified ones are going for, I will toss up 3 more uncut Demonseyes instead. If uncut Demonseyes are lower than some arbitrary number that feels good to me, usually ~20g, I will buy them all out to restock my supply.

Otherwise I allow the other JCs to do the legwork of clearing out the garbage when certain cuts tank the market, as opposed to being the fully-engaged goblin who buys out the entire market of thirty 15g-20g Pussiant Dream Emeralds in the hopes of reseting the price. To me, 15g-20g means the gem is not selling, and thirty of them means the price has not yet hit the floor. This sort of dovetails nicely into a reader email I received:

[...] My problem that I am currently having is that while I hear that JC is a fantastic profession, I can't seem to find what is so lucrative about it at the current moment.  I am aware of the 4.2 lull that might be hitting along with some people, so gems are not in as high demand, but my server (Blackrock... where everything is worth pennies) seems to have no demand for cut gems at all.  I scour over my Undermine Journal on the jewelcrafting page, and the scene is pretty stark.  Almost nothing seems to be moving right now.

 

Should I be cutting my losses at this point and stockpiling rare gems for 4.2, or am I missing something here?

The unspoken preface to every gold blog post out there is the same as the ending to any fast food restaurant commercial: "Local participation may vary." Surely, I said to myself, things could not be that bad on other servers. Assuming that this gentleman is a proud member of the Alliance (as all gentlemen are wont to be), I walked doe-eyed into... a mental landmine.

The TUJ image on the left is from Blackrock Alliance, the imagine on the right from Auchindoun Alliance. So... yeah. I can see how - perhaps - someone might be questioning the lucrivity lucrativeness of the JC profession in the face of those post-apocalyptic figures. Bold Inferno Rubies selling for 25g apiece? Gazing deeper into the economic abyss reveals, if not why, at least how it is Blackrock maintains such absurdly low prices.

The above is number of auctions posted for Bold Inferno Rubies in the last 96 hours, or four days. You can see me on the right, plodding along with my 3 Bolds per cycle, just as described. Conversely, we have this Athenae character on Blackrock posting an average of 32 Bold cuts every twelve hours. At around 25g apiece. From my prior experimenting with TUJ, we all know that TUJ counts canceled auctions as "sales," so it is possible some portion of that number represents vaporware. Regardless... that is pretty absurd. Where were all these Inferno Rubies coming from?

Well, good sir, if you were curious as to the cause of this market collapse, look no further than what appears to be the bank alt Stillfurious. Four-hundred and fifty-seven uncut Inferno Rubies in the last 96 hours. Stillfurious only auctions gems, and ironically, red gems like Inferno Rubies apparently makes up only 18.7% of the colors of warez he has available; granted, he posts in the neighborhood of 800+ gems a day. I remain baffled as to where all these goddamn Inferno Rubies are coming from, though, especially considering Heartblossom is 100g/stack, Carnelians are at 9g apiece, and Elementium Ore is at an eminently reasonable 26g/stack, but still relatively cost-ineffective in terms of 26g Inferno Rubies. Then again, TUJ is indicating there to be over 8,000 auctions of Elementium Ore at various times in the last few days...

So I suppose the answer to the implicit question of "what is so lucrative with JC?" is... well, it is clearly not lucrative at all on your server, unfortunately. Or, at least, not any of the Inferno Ruby cuts. Some random smattering of other cuts like Defender's Demonseye appear to be going for 75g apiece with uncut gems at 9g. The formal question of "should I cut my losses and stockpile for 4.2?" would be a definite maybe.

Here is the thing. I named this blog Player Vs Auction House because my first choice was taken I reject the notion of PvP combat via the AH. Does PvP happen? Yes. Would crushing Stillfurious beneath your righteous boot-heel for making the cut gem market less profitable than selling Linen Cloth (no, seriously) feel good? Sure. Does it really accomplish anything in the end? Probably not. Stockpiling gems for 4.2 is not a bad idea at all, but it depends entirely on whether this supply glut is going to be maintained into the future. If it is, you may be kinda screwed by stockpiling. That is not to say that you should abandon JC entirely though.

It may be tough to read without clicking on it, but according to TUJ an Elementium Moebius Band worth 3299g only actually costs you 644g and some change to craft on the same server with those 25g Inferno Rubies. Blue 346 gear may not be as in season as it was a few months ago (and perhaps even less so moving into 4.2), but if your server is sufficiently large to support 8,000/day Elementium Ore stockpiles and 25g Inferno Rubies that depress prices for weeks, then it's likely enough newly dinged 85 toons are available for you to hawk your warez upon. Even "fire sale" prices like 1000g each is still nearly a 400g profit margin. It is risky this late in the tier with new patterns coming out and not being able to fall back on cut gems, but it is an option if you do not have another profession to easily fall back upon.

Good luck.

Gemocalypse

...because "Gemmass" just sounded lame.

Jewelcrafting has been one of my go-to professions since I started playing the AH in TBC, but this latest patch has been the biggest jump in profits I have seen outside the introduction of epic gems (in both prior expansions). This was my haul on Friday, for example:

Here is the local Undermine Journal graph for Inferno Rubies in the last week:

The new average in the above graph is ~90g. There are some obvious reasons for this surge, such as the shiny new epics from ZA/ZG and some additional sockets on the crafted gear. Then we had the near collapse of the Obsidium Shuffle when the botters seemingly abandoned mining ore on even the possibility that the vendor floor would drop, constraining the supply of gems - suddenly I am turning around and selling Obsidium Ore I was too bored to prospect for 150g a stack. The third factor? More people coming back, or at least having a nominal reason (e.g. new content) to log back on more often.

I generally try not to spend time on the "whys" of market upticks like we see with gems, because a player simply undercutting whatever gem cut is currently selling higher than the cost of the uncut gem will achieve 90% of the success with 0% of the effort. Indeed, that is exactly what I have been doing lately as Auctionator makes it particularly easy.

Props to Alto for being the one that pointed out the More tab in Auctionator last month that was staring me in the face for half a year without ever having clicked on it. Basically, click the More tab, press Check for Undercuts, wait a bit, and then spam-click Cancel Auction Track & Field-style. I used to get fancy with undercutting prices, but the gem market is sufficiently busy that you are liable to be undercut within a few hours no matter the price - it is faster to just let Auctionator undercut by the standard 10s anyway.

Like all upswings, the gem market will be correcting itself before too much longer. DPS queues went from the Wrath-like 8 minutes on patch day to the depressingly standard 35 minutes tonight, for example, which is a sign to me that all those people "coming back" are leaving out the same revolving door they came in on. Ore bots are also returning, correctly reasoning that guaranteed 30g sales is better than the hit-or-miss herb sales.

While the market is going to correct itself, one thing will remain different going forward: we are approaching the sweet-spot of sockets in gear. There are only 40 items (8 of which are relics) with sockets in the ilevel 318-339 range. In comparison, there are 51 items with sockets that drop out of ZA/ZG alone. Percentage-wise, the number of pre-raid items with sockets rose 18.4% (225 --> 276) in 4.1. If Blizzard sticks to the word circa September 2010, coming along in Patch 4.2 will be the ability of Blacksmiths, Tailors, and Leatherworkers to craft Bloodthirsty Gladiator gear, which is currently only bought with Honor points. So not only will ZA/ZG become more fashionable (and possible) to farm by solo-queueing in LFD and Valor gear hitting the Justice vendors, you can probably expect a second renaissance on the PvP side of things. And a lot of those PvP items have sockets that will need to be filled by somebody.

Bottom line: if you haven't been selling sackfuls of gems since the patch, you have been missing out. And if you don't start soon, it will only be worse for you/better for your competition.

Data-Mine Shaft

Nearly every blogger has talked about the data-mined gem vendor changes (including myself), but there have been a few people questioning the potential veracity of the change itself. This is from Stede over at Venture LLT:

Is this bad news?  Not really.  Blizzard gets about 2-3 weeks to test a patch build on the PTR.  To understand how a drop in the vendor price would work its way through the WoW economy over a much longer span of time, they have to take it to the extreme.  The good news is that 75s won't make it ever make it onto live servers.  The not so good news is that Blizzard is seems to be openly considering dropping the vendor price of cut uncommon gems.  My best guess, the vendor price will likely be about half of what it is now - that's ~4.5 gold.

Other people have pointed out, repeatedly, that this is data-mined information, and "remember epic gem cooldowns in Wrath?!" Well, of course. The issue is that this vendor price change was long overdue:

Gem	Uncut Vendor	Cut Vendor
Blood Garnet	25s	25s
Living Ruby	3g	3g
Crimson Spinel	5g	6g
Bloodstone	25s	50s / 1g
Scarlet Ruby	3g	4.5g
Cardinal Ruby	5g	9g
Carnelian	5g	9g
Inferno Ruby	3g	3.75g
???	???	???

It never made any sense that the uncommon gem cut and vendored for more than the rare gem, let alone how uncommon gems vendored for the same as the epic gems of the previous expansion. While this high vendor price provided a fairly stable floor price in ore despite the flooding of bots, an unintended consequence is that it never made any sense to sell cut/perfect uncommon gems on the AH (e.g. Bold Carnelian, Perfect Solid Zephyrite). As Wrath frequently demonstrated, there was a fairly stable, low-volume market of parsimonious gemmers that were okay saving 5-10g by putting +12 Strength into an empty slot instead of +16 Strength.

This market has undoubtedly been underserved by this artificially high price in Cataclysm, so I would not necessarily despair when it comes to ore prices. It makes prospecting riskier from an absolute standpoint, but there will be people making gold out there by selling cut uncommon gems competitively without having to worry about the rather obscene deposit cost (which is a function of an item's vendor cost).

Cataclysm JC Rings and Necklaces

[Note: Other blogs have talked about this topic already, a fact I was only made aware of about 10 minutes ago. However, I think I'm bringing a bit more beef and original research to the table, so just hang with me till the end]

There is a general sense on the WoW forums - something I read regularly as a sort of barometer for AH behavior "in the wild" as it were - that the crafted JC rings and necklaces are terrible, a waste of time, "should be epic 359s" and so on. For the most part, such lamentations are besides the point. Whether something is objectively good or not has no bearing on its marketability, as any Mysterious Fortune Card or cigarette seller can tell you. These JC items being remarkably amazing would certainly help things along, of course, but it is not strictly necessary.

But are they actually any good?

The short answer: Sure.

The long answer: Ehh... some of them, yes.

Elitest Jerks, and the People that Love Them

The website is http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php and if you are at all serious about the PvE aspect of World of Warcraft, you should already have it bookmarked. Why? Because this is where all the the mathematical modeling magic takes place. Why are you stacking Strength as a Retribution paladin? Why do you hear about Enhancement shaman running around with spellpower weapons?* Why is that Unholy Death Knight wielding two 1H weapons and dealing 2,000 DPS more than you?* Because Elitest Jerks (hereafter EJ) said so. Fire mage rotations, Resto druid stat weights, and more can be had for free from people who enjoy simulators and spreadsheet more than you. The format is not always conducive to to finding summaries of the information you care about, but when they do summarize, they do it better than anyone else.

Whether or not you have the site bookmarked, you have probably heard the EJ haters. Maybe you even indulged in it a bit yourself. "If you aren't getting the socket bonuses, you're doing it wrong." "No thanks, I'm going to spec the way I want to." Sure, no problem. I mean, unless you care about maximizing your character's potential, there is no wrong way to spec. If your intention in picking one talent or enchant or gem over another was to improve performance, then there are, in fact, ways of doing it wrong.

Why bring the EJ forums up at all? Simple: the site is a really, really good market indicator.

I alluded to the Defender's Demonseye in my Transitive Property Farming post, for example. The Wrath version of that gem was complete garbage because Parry as a stat suffered diminishing returns faster than Dodge, so you were almost always better off using anything else in red sockets. That was Wrath. In Cataclysm, Parry and Dodge suffer diminishing returns at the same rate so balancing the two stats (11%/11% is better than 12%/10%) becomes very important. I did not know about the Defender's Demonseye before I was looking for something to put into a red socket for Protection paladins, and it was the EJ forums which indicated that the gem was useful at all. So, I bought the pattern, socketed my gear, and decided to toss a few extra on the AH for 150g since Purified Demonseyes were being tanked down to 60g. There was no competition for Defender's Demonseye. I listed some more for 175g. They all sold, usually to the same tank. Raised to 250g each. Still sold. It has been more than 30 days since Cataclysm has shipped and the hardcore JCs will have had gotten 10 cuts by now... and yet I have the Defender's Demonseye market all to myself. The tanks have done their EJ research, but apparently the (other) JCs have not.

Sometimes the EJ advice is not particularly useful to Auctioneers. "Stack Strength gems." Yeah, okay, there are 40 Bold Inferno Rubies going for less than the uncut gem at the moment. But if you dig a little deeper, you may surprise yourself. In browsing weapon enchant scrolls on the AH, I noticed Berserking still up there at 600g. That seems a bit silly, I thought. I tossed a few up and they sold. It was not until I looked at the stat weights for Retribution paladins that I realized that Haste was worth 0.27 per point whereas AP was worth 0.69. In other words, Berserking provides more DPS than Hurricane for Ret paladins by about 150 DPS (based simply on 400 AP vs 450 haste, not uptime considerations). The upcoming patch 4.0.6 will probably shake things up, but until it does, I will continue buying Abyss Crystals at 15g apiece and pumping out Berserking scrolls at 400g margins to the people doing their homework.

Do you have to understand why something sells before you sell it? Nope. But understanding the why of things helps you get an idea of how deep a market might be and when you may want to hop off the train before it hops the rails.

*Not after 4.0.6, of course.

Alchemy and JC Synergy

How have I been making gold so far this expansion? Several ways, but my favorite is the Alchemy/JC cycle.

I originally picked Alchemy and Jewelcrafting for my main back in TBC because I did not want to rely on the AH to supply the metagems I wanted to cut and sell. The metagem transmutes back then required nine gems and four Primals and were on the Alchemy daily transmute besides. These days, the synergy between these two professions has only deepened and become refined into almost a pure cycle.

What is the cycle? You start with buying Obsidium or Elementium Ore off the AH - in my experience Obsidium Ore is preferable for our purposes, and the bot farmers have driven it down to 70g a stack on my server. Once the ore has been obtained, you prospect all of it with a goal of getting the uncommon Cataclysm gems. As mentioned in other articles, each one of these gems vendors for 5g by itself, or 9g if you cut it into anything at all. Rather than vendoring, we are going to use Alchemy transmutes to bake in some additional profit.

As with all things, you are going to want to check your own realm's AH prices to judge which direction you take the next step. The first thing I recommend is the Transmute: Shadowspirit Diamond. This transmute takes three of every type of uncommon gem, including Nightstones, which are likely to be at or around 100g apiece due to their use in leveling JC and the daily. Fortunately, the Shadowspirit transmute makes two metagems before any transmute mastery procs. Once you have these metagems you can either sell them uncut or cut them yourself if you have snagged any patterns by now.

The second option you have is to utilize the other gem transmutes to turn three uncommon gems of the same color + a few herbs into a rare gem of that same color (e.g. Transmute: Inferno Ruby). The uncut rare gem market right now is a state of flux given the lack of socketable gear for the majority of players combined with a lack of JCs with the appropriate cuts. What this means is that you are not likely to be able to make much of a profit off of selling uncut gems - this state will naturally correct itself over time to resemble what we all remember from epic gems at the end of Wrath. The good news is that cut gems are probably going for 100g+ minimum, turning those three somewhat useless carnelians into, say, Brilliant Inferno Rubies which will sell for 7-9 times as much as the vendor price.

As a sort of thought experiment, imagine that 10 stacks of Obsidium Ore at 70g a stack gives you enough uncommon gems for a single Shadowspirit transmute and two other rare gem transmutes. If you are able to sell the Shadowspirits (cut or uncut) for only 350g apiece, you come out even before considering the rare gem transmutes (cut or uncut), not to mention any rare gems gained by prospecting and/or excess uncommon gems in quantities below three. Odds are good that you will be gaining more than that, widening your possible margin and allowing you to maintain a profit in case Obsidium Ore prices higher on your server.

Better Living Through Alchemy

There are two transmutes you need to be doing whenever possible, if you have not been already:

Transmute: Living Elements - Volatile Life x15 (in Uldum)
Transmute: Inferno Ruby - Carnelian x3, Heartblossom x3

Like a lot of people, I imagined that Transmute: Truegold was going to be the king of the cooldowns. Maybe it is on your server, but on mine Volatile Air fluctuates between 65g-85g apiece which shoots the minimum price of Truegold to somewhere around ~1300g in mats in order to break even, let alone make a profit. If you can sell your cooldown to someone else at more than 800g, then by all means do that instead.

As far as Inferno Rubies go, you do not even necessarily need to have a JC character depending on the price of Carnelians in the AH, although obviously prospecting Obsidium/Elementium Ore itself brings the greatest returns. For example, Carnelians are around 45g on my realm's AH, Heartblossom is 150g a stack, and Inferno Rubies fly off the shelves at 195g. Pressing a button with no cooldown and collecting 37.5g an hour later for each time I pressed it? Yes, please.

I would normally caution the flooding of items like Inferno Rubies, but there is little actual downside at this stage of the game. The stat consolidation post-Shattering has made stacking primary stats like Strength and Intellect even more of a no-brainer to most class/specs, so you can expect heavy demand for Inferno Rubies (and the epic equivalent later on) for pretty much the entire expansion. The best thing is that your market for Inferno Rubies includes not just people looking to socket their newly grinded Justice Point gear, but also the JCs trying to recoup their ~1500g cuts (since they could have sold the JC tokens for Chimera Eyes) under heavy competition.

JC + D/E = Profit

This is somewhat a continuation of my prior post on the Elementium Shuffle, but today I will be focusing on the relationship between Jewelcrafting and Enchanting.

All of these cuts are learned from the JC trainer. The Jasper Ring and Alicite Pendant give skill-ups until 485, while the Hessonite Band and the Nightstone Choker give skill-ups until 505. Note: you need 475 Enchanting to disenchant the last two jewelry listed above. Now, according to Wowhead the disenchanting percentages of the above jewelry is ~75% Lesser Celestial Essence and ~25% Hypnotic Dust. In my experience disenchanting however, the Jasper and Alicite jewelry broke down into Hypnotic Dust more readily than indicated. Carnelian Spikes is one recipe not mentioned above, as it takes Carnelian x3 plus three Jeweler's Settings when you could use those same three Carnelians (plus some Heartblossom) to transmute into an Inferno Ruby. Wowhead does indicate the fist weapon disenchants into 1-3 Hypnotic Dust ~84% of the time though, so if you do not have access to an Alchemist it may be the way to go with your extra red gems.

Some final thoughts:

1) Although I am calling this the Elementium Shuffle, Obsidium Ore works just as well. Until more people hit the endgame, the uncut rare gems will not be improving your prospecting haul anytime soon, so pick the cheaper ore.

2) Make sure you are checking your AH for situations like this (click for full size):

A lot of people are putting the level 78 Cataclysm greens up on the AH for pennies on the dollar (copper on the gold?) - in the above case, they were selling an item that disenchanted into Hypnotic Dust x2 (80g) for 12g buyout. Regardless of whether these items D/E into Hypnotic Dust or Celestial Essence, you can probably expect to make 40g per piece of enchanting material. Anything under 35g is an instant buy.

3) Leveling enchanting past 475 at this point is, well, somewhat pointless. You can disenchant everything at 475 skill and actually have access to your Cataclysm ring enchants at that same level. Practically no one is going to buy enchants for their sub-85 gear, and we all know these Enchanting mats prices are unsustainable in the long term anyway - selling a stack of Hypnotic Dust for 1000g is simply absurd. Ergo, I am recommending you sell all the Enchanting mats you end up with right now before they become cheap later. There will still an scroll market later, trust me.

Forecasting Cataclysm Trends: Elementium Ore

The Elementium shuffle has already begun.

Within the first 24 hours of Cataclysm going Live, prices on Auchindoun for Elementium have gone down from the 550g/stack I was selling them at to 100g/stack, which is almost the price one would expect Elementium to stabilize at once the dreaded "Cata inflation" is properly taken into account. The reality is I am finding it entirely possible Elementium will reach near-Saronite levels within the next month based on its ease of acquisition in Twilight Highlands alone - I am talking in the neighborhood of 40-50g a stack. Unlike Saronite, Elementium Bars vendor for only 7.5g/stack, which means its price will only be buoyed by the Shuffle itself, which is great news for us.

Speaking of the Shuffle, if you have a Jewelcrafter and are not buying Elementium Ore at 200g/stack, you are probably giving gold away; at 100g/stack, you can literally buy 200g with 100g. The new uncommon gems should be going for 50g apiece minimum, and likely quite a bit more given their necessity for leveling JC. It takes 475 JC to prospect Elementium, so you will have to either start buying said gems or prospect some likely more pricey Obsidium Ore to get to that threshold. Once there, each stack of Elementium Ore is four uncommon gems minimum, which means you hit a profit at any point you get an extra gem (possibly a rare!).

Incidentally, the uncommon gems vendor for a whopping 5g apiece, which sets their deposit fee at a ridiculous 3g 30s whereas rare gems vendor for less (3g). The irony here is that none of the uncommon gems are useful in of themselves* since they require ilevel 285 gear to be socketed into, and there is basically zero gear rewards until the endgame that even have sockets. The uncommon gems vendor for 9g apiece when cut, so to a JC the True Vendor Price of Elementium (and Obsidium) Ore is 36g a stack minimum, although you can probably bank on 45g.

*Obviously the gems are good for leveling JC and making jewelry to be disenchanted. Uncommon gems are also used in Alchemy for transmuting 3 of the same color gems plus some herbs into the rare gem of that color, i.e. Transmute: Inferno Ruby. And, of course, to transmute the one-size-fits-all metagem. One additional thing to keep in mind: these gems transmutes have no cooldown. The herb cost is basically immaterial, so the rare gems should always be pegged at uncommon gem price, e.g. Carnelian x3 = Inferno Ruby.