Saronite Shuffle is gone... or is it?

My first real entry, and today’s post, will be about the Saronite Shuffle.  Let’s recap, for those who didn’t play in WotLK:

Saronite ore is prospected by a JCer, and the resulting mats are either uncommon (green quality) gems, or rare (blue quality) gems.  These gems were then cut, sold or otherwise utilized to produce a profit.  Rare gems were usually cut and sold on the AH (Bold Scarlet Ruby, Jagged Forest Emerald, etc.), and uncommon gems were either made into uncommon accessories with the use of Crystallized Earth (Sun Rock Ring, Bloodstone Band, and so on) and vendored or DE’d.  Dark Jades and Shadow Crystals could either be cut into Focusing Crystals (which sold for a decent amount, but only 2-3 per day), or cut into a random cut (Timeless Shadow Crystal, for example), and vendored.

To quickly summarize this, we have:

Saronite ore --prospecting--> Rare and Uncommon Gems

Rare Gems --cutting --------> Auction House

Uncommon gems (red, blue, orange, yellow)  --”accessorizing” -->Uncommon items

Uncommon gems (purple, green) ----Cutting----->vendor/AH

Uncommon items ---DE’d---> Put the dusts/Greater Cosmics on the Auction House, or vendor

Now, with every expansion, we move onto a new set of materials (Thorium to Adamantite to Saronite to Elementium).  That DOESN’T MEAN, however, that the old ones are useless.  Quite to the contrary.  We’ll start with the Saronite Shuffle today, and in the future look at other means of income.

It’s true that the serious farmers have most likely moved on to greener pastures with the advent of Elementium, and that the price of Saronite ore is no longer profitable to perform the shuffle on.  If you can find a stack for around 12g, by all means pick them up.  You’ll probably just about make your gold back on the uncommon items if you vendor them, and the blue gems can be cut and sold, sold raw for JC skillups, or vendored, whichever you feel is worth your time.

Another alternative here is to buy the materials straight off the Auction House.  A lot of people are selling gems on the cheap, as they think the gems are close to worthless.  The same goes for the Eternal Earth.  Recently, I was able to pick up around 10 stacks of 20 gems for 1g each, and the equivalent in Eternal Earths (80) for the same price (1g each).

Let’s do the math:

1g for the gems, and 1g for the earth is a starting investment of 280g.  Each Eternal can make 5 uncommon accessories.  For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that we just vendor them accessories, each one has a vendor value of 3g14s and some copper (but let’s be honest who looks at copper?).

The end result is 200 uncommon accessories crafted and vendored for 3.14g, leaving us with a total net of 628g.  Subtract the initial investment of 280g and you have 348g.  Not bad for doing nothing, right?

Let’s do the GPH calculation: 348g total, 200 casts and 5 second cast time for each.  That leaves us with 1000 seconds of cast, or 16 minutes.  That’s 21.75g per minute, or 1305g PER HOUR.  I’ve never been much of a farmer, and that’s why: I make more gold per hour standing around in Org or SW making these things and vendoring them.  I click a button, go afk for awhile, use AutoProfitX to vendor them all (add each uncommon accessory to your exceptions sheet), wash rinse and repeat.  Even if you buy the materials at the commonly accepted upper threshold (1.5g per gem and 5g per Eternal Earth), you’ll still be making 0.64g per cast, for a total of 460.8g.  That’s not bad for standing around and doing nothing, talking with guild mates or even waiting for a heroic queue (which on my realm takes upwards of 40 mins, so free 800g for me!).

You could also put the enchanting material on the Auction House. Prices will vary by server, so you'll have to ensure that the selling price for the dusts (at least 2 dusts or 1 lesser cosmic essence) is less than 3.14g, or you'll end up losing money in the long run.

Would you rather spend your downtime flying laps around Org/SW, or making a good chunk of change?

Cliffs:

-Buy Saronite if it's less than or equal to 12g/stack
-Cut and vendor blue gems, or AH the raw gems for extra profit
-Turn green gems into accessories, and DE or vendor them
-Cut other green gems (Ex. Timeless Shadow Crystal) and vendor