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).

Sinking Ships

I think it is fair to say Cataclysm has not been going according to plan.

Right in the middle of my writing a very long post about the Great Tank Bribe of 2011, we get hit with a few more broadsides:

• Honor is now purchasable from the Justice Commodities Vendor at 250 Honor per 375 Justice.
• Justice is now purchasable from the Honor Commodities Vendor at 250 Justice per 375 Honor.
• Conquest is now purchasable from the Valor vendor at 250 Conquest per 250 Valor.
• Any cut of uncommon gem now sells to NPC for 75 silver instead of 9 gold.

Not to mention the things we already know:

• The rate at which Honor Points are earned has been doubled.
• Revamped ZA/ZG granting 140 VP.
• Daily heroics --> 7/week heroics.
• Tanks getting gold, gems, flasks, non-combat pets (including cross faction), and mounts.

All of this for Patch Four "WE SWEAR FIRELANDS ISN'T BEING DELAYED" Point One. Or perhaps it should be called Patch Four "Precipitous Subcriber Activity Freefall Solutions" Point One. Individually, each one of these could change the entire gaming landscape for millions of people, and they are all happening together.

The easiest change to grasp is the (data-mined) change of cut uncommon gems going from what we all knew was a ridiculous 9g vendor price down to 75s. This radically undermines the safety net of bot-bought ore for Shuffling purposes as the True Vendor Price (TVP) going from 54g for Obsidium to 4.5g a stack. Will that stop the bots from burying us under a mountain of cheap ore? Nope. What else will they farm? More herbs? It is correct that such a high TVP meant a fairly substantial inflation spiral, but honestly, all that removing the floor will do is send Shuffle components (gems, dust, scrolls, etc) down into further free-fall. The bots have to go; all the 9g gems did was act as a garbage bin for their goods.

But what of the other changes? It is almost impossible to even imagine all the interlocking synergy going on. For example, with the tank bribe deal? It is safe to say that the gems and flasks from the goodie bag will be normal gems/flasks (e.g. sell on the AH), but what about those pets? Can you even imagine having an X% chance of bam! opposite-faction pet in your bags and ready to be sold? If they are BoP when you get them, alright, but most flasks are still hovering at 100g apiece over at Auchindoun, which puts the gold total at 84g + 100g + however much extra that toss in the bag itself. It would take a truly ridiculous amount to bribe me to tank based on gold alone, but at some point I will do an otherwise useless gold/hour calculation. And, hey, while I am not a mount guy, Reins of the Raven Lord is something I have been interested in since Sethekk Halls was current content.

What is most interesting to me at the moment though, is the calculus involving the honor <--> JP conversions. It's set at 66% rate of return, which means you need to turn in 3375 honor for 2250 JP (e.g. a "tier" piece) and vice versa. On the face of it, that's a fairly bad return... but remember that all honor gain is doubling per the PTR notes. We don't know if that's honor from HKs or what, but can you imagine the alternative? I get 240 honor from a TB win, plus another 200 from the weekly quest, plus X amount from just general HKs around the map - 880 honor + X amount, let's just round that to a charitable 900. Random daily BG losses will be 90 per game minimum. All this stuff will add up pretty quickly. That 3375 honor target is actually 1687.5 honor post-patch. In other words, PvP will be the most efficient way to farm JP in that you can turn 1687.5 honor into 2250 JP. Conversely, you could simply be picking up the blue PvP gear for 1100 honor for the most expensive slots.

If it sounds like I'm all over the place here, well, I'm all over the place. It honestly feels like Blizzard is throwing everything at the leaking hull and seeing what will stick, to mix metaphors. The doubling honor deal went under a lot of peoples' radars, but added to all this other stuff? Madness, all around.

4.0.6 Primer

MMO-Champion is reporting that 4.0.6 will be dropping on Tuesday, and I tend to believe them.

There have been a lot of posts around the blog world after each PTR build, but some of those have been weeks (or months) ago, and it becomes pretty easy to lose track of the changes that should pique your interest. What follows are the top three things I think are important to keep in mind in the days before the patch.

1. New BoE patterns. Three new JC metagem random world drop recipes, all of which are going to be unbelievably hot commodities for the rest of Cataclysm - Wowhead is showing that they are +54 Agility/Strength/Intellect with the +3% crit damage, making them strictly better than the Chaotic meta, in every possible way. So stop making Chaotic cuts immediately, and you may want to consider dumping your remaining stock as well. It may be a while before the new metas saturate the market, but you don't want to be left holding bag either.
   
   Enchanters are getting three new +50 Agility/Strength/Intellect wrist enchanting patterns, which are also BoE world drops. The demand for the patterns themselves will probably be high, but since all three require two Maelstrom Crystals to enchant, I would not expect high demand until after 4.1 (when I expect the new 5m to drop epics on heroic).
 
2. Expect a surge in herb/Volatile Life prices. The number of herbs needed to make flasks will be reduced by approximately 33% across the board (8 of two kinds instead of 12). This reduction in mats should correspond in a surge of demand because now A) making flasks is closer to being profitable, but more importantly B) getting the guild achievement Mix Master is now within (easier) reach. To get some idea of the scope of the change, the herb reduction means a guild will go through 400 less stacks of herbs. Yes... four-hundred stacks. These aren't 400 stacks of Cinderbloom either (for the most part). The Volatile Life demand will come as a consequence of the quantity of flasks being made, especially since each flask will take two more Volatile Life each, basically creating an extra 2,000 Life demand per guild.
   
   Also supporting the extra herb/life demand will be the new Alchemy trinkets, like the Vibrant Alchemist Stone, which are amazing. Whether the alchemist never made one before or if they made the +Stamina version, chances are good that every Alchemist on your server is going to spending 50 more Volatile Life and nearly two more stacks of herbs each. 
 
3. More people will be running heroics. Not only have almost all the heroics been targeted with some precision nerfs, the recently announced broad-spectrum, ICC-esque 10% buff to players using the LFD tool will mean more successful heroic runs are being made. More successes mean it's more likely that individuals will queue again, which means more cloth, more enchanting materials, and ultimately more demand for enhancements like gems, flasks, and even enchants as players more quickly replace their old gear and perhaps move on into raiding.

Two more things to keep in mind that are not necessarily patch-related, but will impact us nevertheless. First, the Darkmoon Faire is rolling back into town on Sunday. I fully expect the competition on the Darkmoon trinkets to be particularly fierce this go-around, so just keep in mind that you don't have to undercut everyone; if your competition is going for a scorched-earth, fire-sale strategy, just hold onto your trinket until next week. If you have extra cards laying around or the mats to make them, the opposite is true: sell those to desperate players trying to find that one missing card and willing to pay a premium to avoid sitting around for another month.

The second is that Love is in the Air holiday is also starting on Sunday. It remains to be seen whether or not there will be any explicit money-making schemes like there was last year (Lovely Charm Bracelet fiasco anyone?), but it has been "confirmed" on Wowhead that the holiday boss drops ilevel 346 necklaces this year, some of which are strict sidegrades to the crafted JC ones. So if you were prepared to put down the cash for one, you might want to slow down. And if you were planning of selling some, well, you still might, but I would not take any undue risks attempting to do so.

PTR Patch Notes, 1/11

Some things to eyeball if you have not gotten to eyeballing the PTR notes already:

• A socket has been added to all crafted epic armor pieces that did not already have one.
• The number of herbs required to create flasks has been reduced, while the Volatile Life needed has been increased slightly.
• The drops from Tiny Treasure Chests have been improved slightly.
• The Electrified Ether recipe now creates 2 to 3 Electrified Ether instead of 1.

The epic items gaining a socket is very good news as obviously it makes acquiring them more appealing. MMO-Champion is reporting that the flask change is pretty significant, going from 12 herbs down to 8 while the Volatile Life has been increased from 6 to 8. It is hard to overstate my jubilation over this change as it might, might make flasks worth the trouble of actually making now. In the meantime, stock up on Volatile Life. Unless Blizzard has a radically different definition of "improved slightly," I doubt the Potion of Treasure Finding change will amount to much - Heartblossom is a huge pain to farm since the node nerf of 2010, and Auchindoun's current market means these potions cost 84g to make just considering the Heartblossom.

The last note may not seem like a big deal, but I have been making a pretty penny out of Electrified Ether. Not just items made out of the Ethers (the new Cata pets for example), but the literal Ethers themselves. The material cost right now is two Volatile Airs for one, but I have gotten 150g+ for each Electrified Ether despite that being nearly double the cost of the Airs for an item that I can only assume is being bought by people who could make it themselves. You cannot quite make a living out of such sales, but you can very occasionally make a killing.