As some of you know, I'm a big believer in "money over all". I think money is the best way to get mats and that even farming is usually a wealth loss since unless you get lucky, you will be much better off running a few dailies and buying the mats you wanted to farm off the AH.

With Ulduar just around the corner, I decided to move one step further in this direction and I started selling pretty much everything of value that I own.

The trend started with obvious items such as Frozen Orbs or Dragon's Eyes, but soon, I was selling various food, green and blue gems, leathers, scales, silks, eternals, etc... If my main is not guaranteed to need it very soon (which is pretty much limited to a couple of blue gems), off to the AH it goes. And hell, it can be argued that even if it's something I might need in two-three weeks, I might still be better off selling it now and buying it from the AH when the need arises.

I have a couple of reasons to back this up this decision:

• Ulduar will make most items drop in prices at the AH. Note that I said "most" (see caveat below).
  
• There is little point in immobilizing hundreds of gold in assets in the expectations that I might need it later. I'd rather sell all my stuff for 500g and have to buy some back for 100g in a few weeks.
  

I'm also planning on spending pretty much all my Emblems of Heroism to buy Frozen Orbs since these sell for 80g pretty reliably. I'm even considering converting a few Emblems of Valor for that, although I still occasionally see people looking to buy the bracers for 1500g+, so it might be worth holding on to at least 60 of those.

My big question is: what items do you think will actually go up in price when Ulduar comes out?

Powerleveling Jewelcrafting

I'm almost done powerleveling Jewelcrafting and since I already received a few questions, I thought I'd share my notes with everyone.

Blizzard really did a good job with this profession in WOTLK.

One thing I like about Jewelcrafting is that you don't need to max it out to start deriving benefits from it, even if you raid. The target is 375, which is when you unlock the daily quest and when you can cut the Dragon's Eye gems, which only Jewelcrafters can use.

These gems are prismatic, meaning they can fit in any slot, and they are also more powerful than the regular gems (e.g. +27 strength instead of +16). You can't use more than three on your person, though, but it's still going to be useful for people who are using blue fillers in order to satisfy a metagem requirement.

In my case, I had two purple gems +12 sta/+8 str, which means that once I used of my three Dragon's Eyes, I ended up with +59 str (19 + 19 + 11), which is nothing to sneeze at.

Here are the guides I used:

WOW Wiki
WOW Guide Online
WOW professions

It cost me about 2000g to get to 420, so it wasn't too bad. Make sure you use two guides when you powerlevel because they all have holes at some point, or they give you instructions that are sometimes more expensive than their alternative. AuctionLite and Postal are lifesaver add-ons for intensive powerleveling since they save you a lot of clicks.

Leveling slows down after 420. You can get 5 more points by creating Prisms, which have a 24 hour cooldowns, but other than that, you'll need to create meta gems to max out. It's not that expensive if you can get an alchemist to transmute the gems for you, and each recipe costs five tokens, so that's five days of dailies.

Unfortunately, just like all the other professions, there doesn't seem to be much point in leveling Jewelcrafting past 440. Hopefully this will change with Ulduar, although I haven't read anything about this yet.

In the next post, I'll cover 420-450.