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).
This change puts Carnelian and Inferno Ruby below Perfect Bloodstone and Scarlet Ruby. To me that is weird as well.
ReplyDeleteI still think this will be similar to the WoLK Epic Gem debacle.
ReplyDeleteIf it does go through you will see the Obsidium Shuffle actually become more profitable. The reduction in profits will drive bots and farmers to other markets, making Obsidium more rare--hence more valuable.
Reduce supply of Obsidium and the value of all the resulting by-products will go up as well. Dust, Essences, blue rings and necklaces--all will get a boost.
Finally, JCs who don't have Enchanting will no longer be able to make ends meet by vendoring the uncut gems. This will further drive supply down and profits up.
You are much more optimistic when it comes to bots than I am. Bots are bots. While the human running them might care in a general sense how much GPH they are making, it is pretty irrelevant if the bots are running while they sleep or are doing other things.
ReplyDeleteBesides, what other market could they go into for higher profit? Herbs? There are already herb bots. No, I think even if it comes down to 15g stacks of Obsidium, the bots will still be out there farming it. After all, the bots were farming 12.5g stacks of Saronite Ore last expansion.