Yesterday I wrote about the two new races and their starting areas. Today I intend on writing something a little more useful, about jewelcrafting. Lots of pictures involved, so gonna make you click the link if you want to read this. The entire journal (to date) is also in my journal.

Jewelcrafting is the new tradeskill coming with The Burning Crusade, and it plays primarily off the new socketed items that exist in Outland.

So if the socketed armor only exists in Outland, what's jewelcrafting do before 300 skill? It also crafts jewelry items for your finger, neck, and trinket slots. While this takes a backseat later on, for the first 300 points, it is the primary focus. A list of all the combines can be found here.

True to its name, JC requires a lot of gems. Gems come from mining. So it stands to reason you might want to be a miner to do Jewelcrafting -- but moreso than you think. Gem droprates are pretty low, and you need them on *most* of the recipes. While someone planning ahead now might be able to buy up 80 Tigerseyes to be ready to go for the expansion, that won't help once the surplus on the server is gone. So what to do?

Jewelcrafting offers an ability with it, much as Enchanting has Disenchant, called Prospecting. Prospecting is used to analyze a set of 5 ore and try to find gems in it. This destroys the ore in the process, but you will get anywhere from 0 to 3 gems. The average seems to be 1.5, and it will always be a gem appropriate to that type of ore. (No Star Rubies from copper ore.) So while you will need some metal bars to create your items, the ore is often more valuable unsmelted.

While you will get gems from nearly every prospect, you might not get exactly the ones you need, so skilling up can take a LOT of ore. I came to the beta server with enough materials to easily get to about 225, and then a modest supply of thorium and thorium-level gems. I ended up going out and mining another 150 ore just to get 10 skill points. So don't shrug off those ore veins!

Getting Started on Jewelcrafting (pre-300)

Jewelcrafting is ONLY available in the expansion. As such, the only place to learn it is in the Outlands, and initially in The Exodar (Alliance) and Silvermoon City (Horde). There will likely only be two trainers where you are learning, but the Master Jewelcrafter will handle all your training from 75 to 300.

You will start off making Delicate Copper Wires from copper bars, which are used in other combines. Get as many skill-ups off these as you can! You'll need some gems to get to a skill of 50 where you can make bronze items, and many many more gems along the way up. I had a lot of materials saved up, and hit roadblocks at just before 225, and from 260 onward. The pre-thorium stuff was generally a cinch.

While skilling up, you will make rings, pendants, and maybe you'll use your mined stone to make statues. Stone Statues are expendable items that can placed on the ground like a totem and heal you for a bit. You can argue their usefulness, but it at least lets you do something with all that Rough Stone you've got building up.

If you're planning on stocking up ahead of time, plan ahead and refer to the list of recipes. Here is (most of) the road I took to 300:

80 Delicate Copper Wires, 47 skill
10 Inlaid Malachite Rings, 57 skill
40 Bronze Settings, 84 skill
37 Rings of Silver Might, 119 skill
30 Rings of Twilight Shadow, 140 skill
20 Golden Dragon Ring, 160 skill
80 Mithril Filigree, 207 skill
17 Engraved Truesilver Rings, 218 skill
9 Citrine Rings of Rapid Healing, 224 skill

From here, I only have approximates...
10 Aquamarine Pendants of the Warrior, 234 skill
12 Dense Stone Statues, 240 skill
30 Thorium Settings, 260 skill
10 Ruby Pendant of Fire, 270 skill
20 Truesilver Healing Rings, 285 skill
5 Simple Opal Rings, 290 skill
5 Glowing Thorium Bands, 295 skill
5 Emerald Lion Rings, 300 skill

For those last three items listed, I had to go out and farm thorium to have the resources for those combines, despite my best preparations. At least I'll know for live.

[b]Jewelcrafting after 300[/b]

At 300, you start caring almost exclusively about Outworld gems. Fel Iron, Adamantite and Khorium veins (the metals in Outland) drop different gems than you would find from the "Old World" metals, and their only purpose I'm aware of is to do jewelcrafting. Because the ore itself is a lot less meaningful, you'll be doing a lot more prospecting. My results after disenchanting 8 stacks of Fel Iron Ore:

When you reach that glorious level of 300, you can start cutting these gems. Once you cut the gems, your end of the activity is done. Simply give them to the person who wants to use it and they socket it themselves. So this bears a little mention of how socketing works...

Let's say I have this item:
 

You'll notice it has a red socket, a yellow socket, and a blue socket. I can only put certain gems in certain sockets. You'll also notice there's a "socket bonus" for fully socketing the items. Some of those socket bonuses have other requirements, like 5 total red gems. To open the item socketing window on the left there, you SHIFT-RIGHT-CLICK the item.

For example, let's suppose I start by adding a red gem, in this case a Bright Blood Garnet...

That "matches a red socket" and it's a red gem. No coincedence there. So let's pull a yellow gem in the yellow socket. 6 crit rating seems like another good hunter stat.

Looking good. But now I have a blue slot, and I don't have a blue gem cut I especially want to use for that item. (Being a jewelcrafter I have the luxury of looking at everything available at once.) However, I notice that this Deep Peridot I have, which is a green gem, "matches a yellow or blue socket."

There are ONLY four socket types: red, yellow, blue, and meta. Meta is the super-uber socket. The other three are your primary colors. Remember fingerpaint in kindergarten? What happened when you mixed yellow and blue? You got green. And so it is that my green gem can fit in a yellow or a blue slot. A purple gem can go in red or blue and an orange can go in red or yellow.

I socket my Expedition Forager Leggings with that green gem, and my socketing is complete. I press the Socket Gems button to lock those gems in there, and I'm done.

Notice I can still shift right-click the item to socket it. You can replace gems in socketed items, but it works like enchants do -- it replaces the old one, which you lose in the process. I'm pretty happy with the choices I made, so I'll leave it the way it is.

So how good is that item? Compare to my Tier 2 legs...and ignore the 8 agi enchant since they could both have that. (An item can be both enchanted and socketed.)

-70 armor, -9 agi, +6 sta, -3 int, no spirit or resists, +8 attack power, -1 crit rating, -10 hit rating. It doesn't quite stack up, but it's pretty darn close. Considering that the Forager Leggings are a green quest reward from Zangarmarsh that you could fairly easily get at 62, I'd say that's not that bad a deal.

In fairness, however, this is the only item of its kind that I've seen so far. There were two other socketable quest rewards from the same quest, but I have yet to see another outdoor quest or random drop item with sockets. Expect those to come from instance, PvP and raid gear mostly, I suppose.

[b]So where was I? Er...300 jewelcrafting![/b]

Once you get to 300 jewelcrafting, you can actually make those gems. There are, actually, only 6 different standard gems -- one of each color. However, each one has at least four different ways it can be cut, granting different bonuses. My Bright Blood Garnet gave 12 attack power, but if I had cut it differently as a Teardrop Blood Garnet, it would have +13 healing on it instead. A Bold Blood Garnet has +6 strength. A Runed Blood Garnet has +7 spell damage. So even within one narrow niche, there should be at least one choice for you. And that's just for Blood Garnets. Let's not forget we can also fill that red socket with Flame Spessarites (orange) or Shadow Draenites! (purple)

I can't tell you what will be popular out of those basic cuts, but it's probably best to leave most of your gems uncut unless you're trying to pawn them on the auction house.

Those are the basic gems. There is also a rare (blue text) version of each color that have five or six different cuts apiece. Those require a JC skill of 350, but if you can get to 300, you can get to 350.

And then finally, there are diamonds. Earthstone Diamonds and Skyfire Diamonds are special high-end gems that only go in meta slots. The meta slots are wildcards, and the only place you can put one of these powerful jewels.

So while I'm not certain of the demand there will be on jewelcrafting, given the amount of socketed items, there's certainly plenty of versatility!

So who wants to hear about Outland? Ehh, I'm tired. Maybe tomorrow.