I have been tracking the prices on gems on my server for a little while now.
They started to skyrocket even before this phase, I believe after a bot banwave. The most insane numbers I saw before the new phase was like 400 gold for red gems.
But when the new phase dropped this week, it became even more absurd. Yesterday, I saw the cheapest red gem being sold for 1000 gold, per single unit. I needed 8 at the time for my newly acquired gear from dungeons, which would have costed me 8k gold… just for my red gems. Orange, purple etc also went for 150-200g or so.
I checked again earlier today, and the cheapest red gem I could find was 600g. Still way too expensive imo. So I decided to buy orange gems even for my red slots, and even the orange gems costed me 560g (70x8).
Perhaps it’s time to make the raw gems purchaseable with justice points, or something? And you can atleast ask a JC to make the gems for you. Because I simply refuse to buy a single gem for 1000, 600 or even 400 gold.
Definitely got more costly after the big ban wave some time last patch. You didn’t notice it on the gems themselves right away, but the ore shot right up. I guess there might not be as many jewelcrafters as normal, since people want to minmax and JC is slightly worse than other professions when you get epic gems - So the market could be supplied by very few people, meaning less competition
Specific numbers aside, patch days were always like that, especially once people are trying to do stuff rapidly.
I suppose the cost of Red gems were intentional - every guide specifies them as the only desirable option, but Orange and Purple ones also provide useful stats and increase crafting variety. By intentional I mean Blizzard could have added options to supply the market with Red gems, looking at BC and WLK, but they didn’t.
Or, are you saying that bots shouldn’t be banned, because it will increase prices?
Nah, I’m saying that perhaps you should put raw Inferno Rubys (and perhaps other rare gems) on the JP vendor. So that you can buy them either to sell for gold, or craft into gems for personal use. Like some profession mats already are. That’d both give players an alternative to paying thousands of golds to gem their characters, and also create more supply to meet the demand, hopefully reducing the price tag a bit. On my main character(s), my JP is already spent to buy things such as Maelstrom Crystals anyway, since I don’t need the gear, or honor points for that matter.
Inflation happens. you looking at prices you do not like seeing. but at the same time all other stuff is higher too. so yes gems are now priced higher but at the same time you can sell too and earn more then you did at start of cataclysm. i currently have 4.3m gold market value on my items that i currently offer to sell and can make 20k+ a day with barely using professions. Gold has less value now but thats not what the people see.
if you go compare the price difference in Classic and retail it was obvious we going down the same road. 1000 gold now will be half the value in most likely by the end of Mists of pandaria
