16g New 4.2 Obsidium Shuffle Floor Price And Here's Why

How much higher does the cap go when you have a JC, Alch, and Enchanter? I will look it up. On my server the shuffle is quite profitable. I can send Alicite to the AH for 7g or so. I get ore at around 27g but I am buying as soon as it posts, the mean price is more like 30. I started leveling the enchanter a couple days before this news. I think the prospecting game can still be profitable.

I understadn where the numbers come from, but I think it's a flawed process.

You setting a floor price that is based on an equal distribution of which gems are prospected, which adds the RNG as a factor.

A true floor price shouldn't have any random elements.

I think the true floor using prospecting would be 6 Zephs x 75s ea = 4.5g as you are only guaranteed a minimum of 75s per gem since you could get all Zephs from 1 stack of ore and you would have been better off just smelting.

So prospecting wouldn't always be adding value.
What if you get 3 Zephs in 1 stack of ore?

A true floor has no variables involved in my opinion.

What about disenchanting the jewelcrafting items and selling the mats on the ah? Would that raise the bar a little?

You have an equal chance of getting any possible gem from a prospect. If you prospect enough ore, you will see an even return on each gem, so Flux's math is close enough.

i think, even though blizz says they will never attempt to "screw" with the economy of WoW, i believe they are trying to control the economy in WoW anyways. i say if they don't want botters and hackers then they make it so that any ip address not from a country with laws such as ours that pertain to wow (china...*cough cough*), should not be aloud to use our servers. im sure its much more complitcated but i think its wrong either way to change the market for wow players.

@Scott & JohnR: My definition for these calculations is the price you could obtain from items coming out of the ore and going straight to a vendor. Price floors take the auction house completely out of the equation.

Sure any smart gold-maker would try to sell gems/dust etc on the auction house. What make the older price floors so attractive was you obtained all the profit without interacting with others at all. You could do it day and night and always get the same results because you were selling to the vendor.

This new 16g price floor means if I wand Carnelians (for example) and I can find Obsidium Ore near 16g/stack than I have near zero risk in buying that ore because I could craft the extras into jewelery and vendor it and make my money back.

@Cold I agree with Well Dressed Orc. Any model for pricing is just that, a model. In the past price floors have been much easier to calculate because all they involved was vendoring all the uncommons which all had the same value.

We don't have that luxury any more. We have to move onto models that give us a rough idea of the ore value. If you simply prospected (1) stack of Obsidium Ore you would never get a equal distribution if gems.

The more stacks you prospected the closer you would eventually come to the 16g price floor but that doesn't mean my model is invalid.

If you believe you have a more valid/realistic model for a 4.2 price floor for Obsidium Ore I'd love to read about it.

(I'm really interested to see *if* ore drops down to 16g per stack.)

Loving all the math!

I added a little bit to it, hope you don't mind. It ended up reinforcing your point about the jewelry, but the vendor floor ends up being a bit different. I also included the new floor price for elmentium:

http://breakthebankwow.com/2011/05/new-ore-vendor-floor-4-2/

Enjoy

Much Cobalt Ore, I don't know that Obsidium will ever drop below 16g per stack, But for a completely different reason. The odd thing I've noticed on my realm is that Elementium Ore is often around 20-22g per stack already, while Obsidium remains around 25-28g per stack.

With the new recipes in 4.2, that won't remain -- Elementium will be in much higher demand. As a Jeweler, I've been buying up the cheaper Elementium in boatloads for my prospecting, however once Obsidium becomes cheaper than Elementium again (due to the expected demand increase in 4.2), prospectors will likely switch back to Obsidium, driving up their demand.

In conclusion, I suspect it will be awhile before Obsidium drops below 16g per stack, if ever. Then again, this all may change once we learn how epic gems will be acquired.

@Michael. The only problem there is that uncommon gems will be near useless now in large quantities, so the fact that elementium ore gives more than 3 times as many rare gems as obsidium means that obsidium will need to reach 1/3 the price in order to be worth the effort.

The reason elementium is cheaper than obsidium currently is because it's floor value is 31.5g compared to 27.5 for elementium, which is based on strong uncommon gem values. These changes in 4.2 will push the buying factor of the ore away from the uncommon gem value and back into the rare gem value, where it belongs.

@Kathroman Love it.

Sorry, but I am confused with the JC #s.
.75+3*2.43+4.85+4.9941 is 17.8841
Where did the 15g 76s 55c come from?

@Hagu You are mistaking copper for silver.

2g 43c = 2 gold 43 copper.

Personally, I like the idea of a floor price when it comes to buying ore/matierals, but it doesn't directly effect how I make most of my gold, which is through deing, or cutting gems. It's trial and error of course -- and I have some absolutely idiotic people on my server who try to price peopel out of the market by dropping prices lower than the current undercut price would be -- in order to push people out of the market but do so unsuccessfully so the overall rate of the whole market just plumets. As the next person tries the same trick and so on.

The biggest part of my profits come from cutting blue gems, and disenchanting rings, etc. The essense sells well but I have to prepare to repost several times a day, as people are quick to undercut me.

Dusts is a terrible market, and it rarely sells well. But even that market rarely drops below 2g and usually hovers around 5-7g per dust on my server, and consider each ring de's into multiple dusts, it is often more profitable to simply post the dust, than it is to vendor the rings.

I know the vendor is attractive to people for convience, and I worry that people who usually vendor their gems will flood the gem or enchanting market, but I find myself praying they simply drop out of the market entirely.

I'm not a wow millionare, not even close. But I do have 61k gold (the highest I've ever made) which is made slowly, but steadily over time. I usually make between 1-2k a day when all is said in done, provided the price for ore is right.