Time to write a bit more about one of my favorite things in World of Warcraft, making gold.
If you’re interested in this you might want to check out the post I did a few months ago about Inscription.
That still works as well even though I didn’t expect it to do that well after the changes made going in to cataclysm. The Darkmoon Cards do help a lot.
Anyway, on to jewelcrafting!

I recently migrated my mage, who is a jewelcrafter, back to the realm where most of my other chars are.
Inscription is still providing me a solid income but I wanted to try something new. So I decided to look into jewelcrafting.
The initial idea was to just craft rings / necklaces en disenchant those. While this is barely profitable on my realm it might work on your realm.
After finding out it’s not worth my time I thought jewelcrafting wasn’t worth it anymore. Until i came across a post on a forum mentioning that cut green gems sell for 9 gold and that got me thinking.
I bought out about 30 stacks of elementium ore and see what I’d end up with. Surprisingly I almost broke even by just cutting the greens and vendoring them.
Leaving me with about 20-25 blue gems which were basically just a bonus.

If you fail at math or haven’t realized yet. 9 gold per green gem is at the very least 36 gold per stack of ore. You always get at least 1 green gem when you prospect.
So what this means is that whenever you see a stack of ore going for 36 gold you should always buy it out.
I’m currently buying out everything around the 40 gold mark since blue gems aren’t that expensive anymore either.
On average you’d probably get 4.5ish green gems / stack. So all blue gems are basically free.

This method is foolproof thanks to the vendor price staying the same. Or at least until blizzard thinks it’s time to lower the price. Something that will happen I suspect because blue gems sell for less than the greens now.
Of course results may vary and it all depends on the ore / gem price on your realm.
The best thing to do is to work out the average price of a blue gem on your realm, divide that by 2 and add 36. What you’ll be left with is roughly your break even point for buying stacks of ore.
You could also look into disenchanting if dust / essences are expensive on your realm.

A weird thing I did notice is that perfect green gems don’t actually sell that well. Not even the red ones. I didn’t sell a single one even though I expected the red ones to sell. Some perfect gems are even cheaper than their normal counterparts. I guess it’s due to people not looking for those. But feel free to try and see if you have better luck selling them.

So if you want to make some easy gold and have 30 minutes time to spend on checking out the prices on your realm you should definitely give jewelcrafting a try.
Good luck!