WoW Economist

Icy Prism, the new Brilliant Glass

Dec 13, 2008 Crafting, Investing, Patches, Professions, Wrath of the Lich King

After being the proud owner of nearly every Engineering pattern in the game (save for very few, rare green ones) for about two years, I decided it was time for something more profitable. There just wasn’t much Engineer-only recipes in Northrend to make it worth while. I dropped Engineering for Jewelcrafting and leveled it up just before the expansion. After hitting 80 and farming a few stacks of ore, I dropped mining and leveled up Enchanting (I wish I had gone Inscription instead, but I’ll probably just roll a DK for that).

The upcoming patch has a lot of disappointing changes (I’m a hunter), but I’m very excited for the new Brilliant Glass of Northrend, Icy Prism! Even better, it’s made from those three uncommon gems I seem to have the most of: Calcedony, Shadow Crystal, and Dark Jade. It also requires a Frozen Orb, which could make it a costly endeavor for now, but I’ll bet it’ll still be profitable after cutting the resulting gems.

I was going to write about Frozen Orbs and other rare materials, but it seems I might be a bit late, so I hope you were selling them as soon as you got your hands on them. In the first week or two of Wrath, Frozen Orbs were going for 300-400g on my server, Abyss Crystals made a few hundred more. I made a killing on them during that time. Now that the Frozen Orbs are down to about 50g each, it’s probably safe to start stashing them away for Icy Prisms. I haven’t heard if they have a chance to turn over epic gems, but it should still be profitable regardless. If epic gems are released through Icy Prisms, we’ll be insanely rich!

I have a neat little prospecting calculator that’s nearly finished to give you an idea of how profitable prospecting is on your server. Across the few servers I’ve checked, uncut uncommons go for a few gold a piece and uncut red, orange, and yellow rare gems sell anywhere between 50g and 90g. If this sounds like your economy and Saronite Ore is around 25-30g a stack, it’s probably safe to prospect the hell out of it. You’ll get some profit out of uncut gems, but way more out of cut ones. Just find the most profitable cuts and get those recipes before the competition does - and sell, sell, sell!