Tobold's Blog
Monday, October 16, 2006
 
Jewelcrafting for beginners

As long as I am in the Burning Crusade beta, I am going to write a series of blog posts about the expansion. These are basically spoilers, so if you don't like spoilers, look away. But for the rest of you they might serve as useful hints, and even give you some ideas how to prepare already today for the expansion. I'll write a number of "BC Journal" entries with my observations. But whenever possible I'll group the information on a single subject into one post, for easier reference. This blog entry is about everything I could find out about low level jewelcrafting.

Jewelcrafting can be learned from trainers in the new Draenei and Blood Elf cities, I couldn't find a jewelcrafting trainer in the old cities. As I was playing a Horde character, I flew to Light Hope's Chapel in Eastern Plaguelands, and rode to the Blood Elf city of Silvermoon. Later I found out that there is a teleport between Undercity and Silvermoon, which made traveling back and forth a lot easier. The journeyman, expert, and master trainer are all in one spot, no idea yet where the artisan trainer is hiding.

When you learn apprentice jewelcrafting, you get two new skills in your spellbook: jewelcrafting and prospecting. You also get the first basic recipes. Prospecting is the art of turning ores into gems. Only basic ores, like copper, tin, iron, etc., can be turned into gems. Rare ores like silver and gold, or quest ores like incendite are not prospectable. Prospecting destroys 5 ores, and always gives you one worthless metal powder, plus between zero and two gems. The gems are of the type which you could also find when mining that metal, so Tigerseye and Malachite for copper, and so on. Prospecting is important, because jewelcrafting needs lots of gems, more than normal mining can find. But as prospecing destroys a lot of ore, it makes jewelcrafting use quite a large amount of resources.

As I had already heard about ores being needed, I came to the BC beta with 160 copper ore and 160 tin ore in my bags. That turned out to be not enough. Because besides destroying the ores for gems, you also need lots of metal bars to make either intermediary products or final jewelry. I ended up spending many hours in the beta mining; which was easy, because everybody else was in the new zones, and I had places like the Wetlands or Hillsbrad for me alone to mine. If you plan to do jewelcrafting when the expansion comes out, you should stock at least 200 each of copper and tin, plus gems and silver. I got my jewelcrafting up to 110 before I needed the first iron, but unfortunately the first iron item also needed large fangs, and I wasn't prepared for that. All other items I could skill up with either needed silver, shadowgems, or moonstone, none of which are very easy to find, and so I'm blocked at 110 right now.

You might have heard about socketed items and gems to put into these sockets being made by jewelcrafting. Well, not at the lower levels. There don't seem to be any socketed items below level 60, nor does it seem that a jewelcrafter can do any socketable gems before 225 skill. I assume that is something the artisan trainer teaches you, the one I haven't found yet.

The main product at jewelcrafting up to 110 are rings, plus some necklaces. As low level rings and necklaces aren't very common up to now, jewelcrafting will be useful to equip low level characters with jewelry. I heard, but couldn't confirm, that there will be recipes for enchanters to enchant jewelry, adding further bonuses.

The other product of jewelcrafting is statues, which are made from the stones (rough stone, coarse stone, heavy stone, etc.) which you find when mining. 10 stones make one statue, which is a clickable object in your inventory. When you use it, you summon a cute mini earth elemental pet, which heals you for a couple of seconds. Not by very much, but might be useful to classes which don't have other combat healing methods available. Unfortunately the statues are bind on pickup, only the jewelcrafter himself can use them.

Up to now I'm not terribly impressed by jewelcrafting. Lots of people will try it, just because it is new, but just like the other item-producing tradeskills, the quality of the crafted items isn't all that great. I was able to make one blue ring, with good stats for its level. It was interesting because when you make it, you don't know what stats it will have. You get a ring with a random "of the animal" name. I got a "of the tiger" ring, with +4 agility, +3 strength. The ring was labeled "Unique - equipped", meaning that I could have several in my inventory, but could only equip one of them.

To explore jewelcrafting further, I loaded up my Alliance priest with tons of metals and gems, and copied him to the BC beta. You can only copy 4 characters, and copying takes 2 days, so it will take a while before I can tell you more about higher level jewelcrafting, if I ever get there. But I have decided that my Horde priest, who currently has mining and tailoring, will not give up tailoring to learn jewelcrafting. I think I will take one of my level 40ish alts and make him a jewelcrafter instead, sending him the metals mined by my priest. This is not really a "must have" tradeskill.
Comments:
Do we know if socketed items can also be enchanted once the jewels have been installed?
 
Thanks for the excellent information and writing! I don't have access to the beta, but am stockpiling ore and gems to prepare for jewelcrafting. I am hoping that the artisan+ level will yield more useful (socketed) recipes. So I am looking for the fastest way to skill up. Two questions along those lines:

1) You mention the need for copper, tin, and silver bars. Would you say you need more bars than ore? I understand that ores can be prospected for gems, and bars are probably used to make jewelry. I'm wondering what to save up in my bank to prepare.

2) Is it worth saving up a lot of stones (rough, coarse, etc...) to skill up by making statues? It's too bad the statues are BoP, which means all the extra statues will have to be vendored.
 
Just a quick question, you said Jewelcrafting comes with 2 skills:jewelcrafting and prospecting.

Can both skills be leveled or just one. In other words if I have Tailoring/Herbing currently, do I have to drop both to get Jewelcrafting and prospecting?
 
I don't have a socketed item yet. But as the sockets are using a completely different mechanism than enchanting, I don't see why they couldn't be enchanted as well as socketed.

If you stockpile, a 50:50 mix of bars and ore is probably good. Unless you stockpile tons of gems, in which case you only need bars. Stockpiling the stones is probably not worth it, as it takes 10 stones for one statue.

Prospecting is not a separate skill, it is just an ability attached to jewelcrafting, and works with the jewelcrafting skill level. For example to prospect gems from iron ore, you need a jewelcrafting skill of 125. If you currently have tailoring and herbalism, you *could* just drop one of them for jewelcrafting. But then you would need to buy all the ores and metal bars. So the more logical thing would be to drop both old skills and take up mining and jewelcrafting. If you want to do that, it would be a good idea to take up mining *now*, both for skilling it up while ore spots are still plentiful, and for stockpiling the ore.
 
Thanks, Tobold. My 60 druid just dropped 300 skinning and got to 79 mining yesterday. Copper is easily found in the 10-20 zones, but tin seems scarce everywhere!
 
My favorite place for tin is in the Wetlands. There is a cave full of spiders, and the cave has lots of ore spawns. Some are tin, the others are incendite, needed for a quest. No use for jewelcrafting, but it does get your mining skill up.

Otherwise I'm mining for tin in the Barrens. Just start from the northern entrance of the Barrens, where you come in from Ashenvale, and go along the mountains in an anti-clockwise fashion. By the time you arrive at Thousand Needles (where some tin can also be found), you should have a nice stash of tin.
 
Jewelcrafting may not be necessary at the early levels, but it will certainly be very useful once you can start making socketable gems. Pretty much all the high-end loot and certainly the tier 4 gear will all have multiple sockets. When people start getting that gear there will be a huge demand for socketable gems.
 
Thanks again, Tobold. I play on a PvP server, so the Barrens is not so friendly for Alliance characters. And on PvP servers, you're not allowed to have characters of both factions (Ally/Horde). But I'm a reasonably well-geared 60, and can stealth, so maybe it will be an adventure.

I found this useful link of Jewelcrafting recipes. Not complete, but a pretty good list:

http://thottbot.net/beta?t=Jewelcrafting
 
Hi!
I wanted to thank you guys, especially Tobold for creating this platform and changedx for the more than valuable information regarding jewelcrafting which I myself will take up when BC is released.

I have also started stockpiling ores.
After a short farming period I'm now at ~500 Copper ore, ~200 Tin ore, ~700 Iron ore, 700, Mithril ore, 350 Thorium ore and 30+ gems of each sort (except Arcanite)
Adding ~200 stones of each sort (400 solids and only 150 dense atm)
And as you can guess my storage room is nearly full.
Knowing that there will be also need of metal bars allows me to pack more tightly, especially my Mithril reserves of which I already have 200 bars)
Smelting my Silver, Gold and Truesilver reserves (~100 each) will also help.
Mithril btw can be farmed very easily right now, because the information about the recipies is not broadly knowen yet and therefore nobody cares. One evening will give you ~100+ Mithril without straining yourself or having to fight competition (I play on a PvP-server)

Most important although was the information on large fangs and further more black perls, mojos and all the other stuff.

I hope that leveling above 300 will not require the crafted items but will be possible with gems, which would make sense. Otherwise the costs will explode resulting in an alltime high for Arcanite.

This brings me to the conclusion, that (if there is no / or nearly none) Thorium will be sought after and therefore the "old areas" will have to be farmed too. Of course this depends on the droprate of arcane crystal from prospecting thorium ore!

Note to me: I need more thorium!
I aim for 1000 at the time of release.

I definitly look forward to BC and jewelcrafting.

Deadlikeme
 
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