Jewelcrafting

orld of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade will introduce a lot of new features to expand the game in many interesting and fun ways. One of these additions is the introduction of a new profession: jewelcrafting.

Jewelcrafters learn the art of creating beautiful jewelry and trinkets from metals and rare gems. By processing the raw ore mined from the various deposits and mineral veins, jewelcrafters can extract gems from the ore which they can then use for their craft. Although miners sometimes find gems while gathering ore, jewelcrafters mostly rely on their prospecting skills to get more of the precious stones.

Jewelcrafters work with gems in many different ways. If a jewelcrafter uses gems to create jewelry, he usually only needs the raw, uncut stones for his work. These rings, amulets, and trinkets function just like those that can already be found in the game, with a few notable exceptions. For example, jewelcrafters can learn to create gemmed figurines that they can carry in their trinket slots. While these figurines all provide passive benefits, they can also be used to provide the player with a short buff – just enough to give you that little damage boost or maybe that quick burst of extra healing power you may need in a tricky situation. These figurines will bind when picked up, so only jewelcrafters will be able to use their powers.

Another way jewelcrafters can use gems is by cutting them, preparing them to be used in socketed items. Gems come in many different colors and shapes. Different types of gems have different basic properties, and a gem's cut also determines the effect this gem will have. Jewelcrafters can learn several types of cuts for each kind of gem: the Azure Moonstone, for example, can be cut into a lustrous, stormy, solid, or sparkling Azure Moonstone, and each one of these cuts offers different bonuses when used in a socketable item. Placing cut gems into an item's sockets will add the bonuses of these gems to those of the item, allowing players to customize their equipment to better suit their individual play style or the different roles their class can fulfill.

At higher levels, socketed items and specially cut gems become an important part of an adventurer's "bag of tricks". Both armor and weapons can have sockets. Some socketed items can be found in dungeons, but the expansion will also introduce a lot of new recipes for all the professions, including many recipes that let leatherworkers, blacksmiths, and tailors create socketed items. Socketed items can be of uncommon, rare, or even epic quality. An item's sockets can also have a specific color; if you put a gem of a matching color in each socket, the item will reward you with a special stat bonus beyond the gems' regular effects. However, you can also put gems of a different color in these slots if you would rather have a specific gem's effect instead of the added bonus.

ny character can insert gems into an item's sockets – you do not need to be a jewelcrafter to do that. However, you will need to ask a jewelcrafter or become one yourself to obtain most of the gems you can socket. Another source of cut gems are the expansion's high-level bosses. There are rumors that some of these monsters hold stones with powers beyond those of regular gems, but getting your hands on these jewels might prove to be a most formidable challenge; it seems unlikely that their owners would part with their precious stones willingly.

On the right side, you can see a preview of the current item-socketing interface from the game. When you shift-right click a socketed item, this box will appear, displaying the item's current stats and any gem effects that are currently on the item. You can add new gems to the item by placing one of the gems from your inventory into one of the item's sockets. The interface allows you to play around with different gem configurations, so you can try out how different gems will affect your item before you decide on what gems you want to socket. Once you have found a configuration you like, you can press the "Socket Gems" button to socket the gems you picked.

Socketing gems will lock them into place, and there is no way to remove a gem once it has been socketed. You can put a new gem into a socket that already holds a gem, but by doing so you break the old one out of its socket, shattering the gem and making it unusable. This allows you to add gems to your new socketed items right away without having to wait until you find the "perfect" collection of gems, since you always have the option of upgrading your item later.

Try putting some gems from your inventory into the socketed item and check out how they affect its stats; this should give you an idea of how socketing will work in the expansion, but please keep in mind that both the stats and the interface presented here may change as we progress further in the development of the new jewelcrafting and item-socketing features of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.

Jewelcrafting Guide

Where do I start?

Apprentice through Artisan Jewelcrafting may ONLY be trained in Silvermoon City (Horde) and The Exodar (Alliance). This is of course subject to change, but at the moment plan on a trip to those cities. Master Jewelcrafting may be trained at Thrallmar (Horde) and Honor Hold (Alliance) in Hellfire Peninsula.



What do you need for Jewelcrafting?

Primarily, ore and gems. There are a few that use alchemy mats, a few that use enchanting mats, and a few that use assorted mob drops, but nothing in such quantity that it would merit taking a second profession other than mining.



Where can I use Jewelcrafting?

Anywhere, there are no fixed resources required (like a Forge or Moonwell). Most Jewelcrafting items require a Jeweler's Kit to produce, this is a trade item you can buy from nearly any Trade Goods vendor for 8s.



What can I make with Jewelcrafting?

As the flavor text specifies, you will learn how to cut precious gems and craft jewelry. Specifically, Jewelcrafting allows you to make rings, necklaces, trinkets, a few crowns, and socketable gems. This is a very unique profession in that it produces two types of gains, new gear for accessory slots and augmentation of existing gear. It's a hybrid between a production profession like tailoring and the service profession of enchanting.



How good are these accessories?

The obvious shining point of Jewelcrafting accessories is that accessories are traditionally rare to characters below level 30, so being able to create accessories customized for characters leveling up is wonderful. Past level 30, the Jewelcrafting gear is vastly outpaced by dungeon loot. Past 30, Jewelcrafting items seem to be at roughly a "quest reward" level, and as of yet there are no "ringers" that would warrant taking off dungeon loot for. I imagine this may be addressed at launch via rare designs and just more designs in general. Endgame Jewelcrafting is not about accessories though, it's all about the gems!



Which classes benefit most from Jewelcrafting?

Since accessories can be used by anyone, and there are gem cuts to augment virtually every stat, all classes benefit most from Jewelcrafting. There are necklaces with high attack power, rings with armor and defense, trinkets with mana regeneration, socketed gems with crit rating. This really is a unique profession in that it doesn't seem biased toward any class or role.



Which professions work well with Jewelcrafting?

I would strongly recommend picking up Mining if you plan on Jewelcrafting. The reason is threefold. First, it's cheaper. Second, your materials may be in short supply due to the greater demand and lesser portability of ore versus bars, and you can't do much with bars (I imagine the ore market will boost when the expansion is released, but overall the demand for bars comes from many sources, the demand for ore is exclusively on Jewelcrafting). Third, by mining you will find gems naturally on the nodes while mining in ADDITION to the gems you will get when you Prospect all of that ore, not to mention stones for statues.



If not mining, I might recommend Enchanting, as nearly everything you can produce as a Jewelcrafter is of at least Uncommon rarity, and in many cases isn't worth selling on the Auction House due to oversaturation. Since very little of it is Soulbound however, there's not much difference if you simply stick Enchanting on an alt.





What should I skill up on?

There are two major standbys for leveling Jewelcrafting, Stone Statues and Trade Goods.

Those practically worthless stones that drop from mining nodes are converted into Stone Statues for a cheap Renew (10 hp/s for 15s at the Rough level up to 50 hp/s for 15s at the Dense level) and cheap Jewelcrafting levels.

Trade Goods are mats required for some of your Jewelcrafting recipes that are made from base metals, very similar to the clothcrafting or engineering schema in that at the "Copper" level you use the "Delicate Copper Wire" trade good in almost everything you do, and it uses 2 Copper Bars. So this is an item you can make for cheap skill that you will use to gain more skill, and is one of the only times in Jewelcrafting that Bars will be more important than Ore.



What should I stockpile now to level Jewelcrafting?

As far as rare items at higher levels, you're pretty much on your own because the recipes could change at a moment's notice, but think about elemental essences and the like.



How high can I get with materials from Azeroth?

310, this is pretty much the same for all other professions as far as I've seen.



What is Prospecting?

Prospecting is a skill that can be trained at level 20 Jewelcrafting from any Jewelcrafting vendor. It grants the Prospecting ability in your ability book. In game text:



Prospecting



2 sec cast



Search 5 ore of a base metal for precious gems. This will destroy the ore in the process.







The function is incredibly similar to Disenchant, it kills the ore but has a chance at returning materials used in your profession. In this case, gems.



What gems can be found with Prospecting?

From all testing so far, you can get any gem that is naturally found on the node of that ore type (eg Shadowgem from Copper, Citrine from Mithril, Azeorthian Diamond from Thorium, Flame Spessarite from Fel Iron)



Are there any restrictions to Prospecting

Two actually. First of all, as the description states you can only search ore of a base metal. This excludes noble metals such as Silver, Gold, Truesilver, Eternium, and Khorium (any ore with "green" rarity). Second, you must have Jewelcrafting skill roughly equivalent to the mining skill required to mine that ore (eg 175 for Mithril, 300 for Fel Iron, 350 for Adamantite)



I have a ton of gems, now what?

Below 300 Jewelcrafting skill, gems are only used as part of jewelry creations, and although you will need a lot of gems to skill up, they don't really take value until past 300.



Past 300, the Outland-exclusive gems can be "cut" into gems that can be added to socketable equipment.



Aren't socketable gems just portable enchants?

Gems are "portable" in the sense that a Jewelcrafter can cut a gem and sell it on the Auction House, but they have restrictions too. Gems can't be added to gear that does not have pre-existing sockets, enchants can be.



Can I stand in Orgrimmar all day cutting gems for people to make money?

While it is true that gems are significantly easier to acquire than enchanting materials, there is a cooldown imposed on gem cutting. From all testing so far, this cooldown appears to be 10 minutes for Uncommon gems and 60 minutes for Rare gems. I can easily see Jewelcrafters selling the ability to cut a gem though for this very reason, since your time is a premium and the recipes are rare.



How do I cut gems?

Gem cutting requires a gem, a recipe for the specific "cut" of gem you're aiming for, and a Simple Grinder, which is just a trade item found on nearly any trade goods vendor for 2g50s.



What does specific cut mean?

As mentioned in the Jewelcrafting preview, there is more than one way to cut each type of gem. For example, a Golden Draenite can be cut Brilliant (+6 Intellect), Gleaming (+6 Spell Critical Rating), Thick (+6 Defense Rating), Rigit (+6 Hit Rating), or Smooth (+6 Critical Strike Rating), and these are just the ones we know of so far. Every cut requires a different recipe, so you can imagine already how many potential recipes there are!



Where do I find these recipes?

In the alpha, a small selection of gem cutting recipes have been placed on the Master Jewelcrafters in Thrallmar and Honor Hold. In the release, these recipes are designed to be world drops. I imagine some of them will be vendor-bought, but the vast majority of gem cuts will be found in the world. Additionally, there are some blue gem recipes that have so far been found only in Nagrand.





Blue gems?

There are six "uncommon" (green rarity) Outland gems: Blood Garnet, Flame Spessarite, Deep Peridot, Golden Draenite, Shadow Draenite, and Azure Moonstone. They come with relatively similar and common drop rates from Fel Iron, Adamantite, and Khorium nodes, as well as Fel Iron and Adamantite prospecting. In addition to this, there are super rare blue (blue rarity) gems that are found the same way with an exceedingly lower drop rate, these gems tend to produce fabulous effects when cut.



What kind of effects?

From the limited number of rare recipes I have so far, the stat gain from rare gems is a very marginal increase over their uncommon equivalents. For example, the Brilliant Golden Draenite gives +6 Intellect, but the extraordinarily rare Brilliant Dawnstone, with an even more rare recipe drop, gives +8 Intellect.



Are rare gems really worth it then?

Absolutely! For the extra day of stripmining it takes you to find a Dawnstone, you can have 100 days of playtime with a piece of Tier 7 armor that has 2 more intellect than everyone else's. Understand that as a line item, the increase is not that significant, but when you consider that it is a bonus above and beyond everything else you have, getting the best gems you can for your gear will be crucial.



What is the best gem you've seen so far?



Brutal Earthstorm Diamond



+3 Melee Damage & Chance to Stun Target



Requires at least 5 Red gems and at least 5 Yellow gems and at least 5 Blue gems



"Only fits in a meta gem slot."







What does the 5 Red, Yellow, and Blue gems thing mean?

Good question.





Gem Cuts known so far:





Cut Color Effect1 Effect2



Lustrous Blue Mana/5



Solid Blue Stamina



Sparkling Blue Spirit



Stormy Blue Spell Penetration



Dazzling Green Intellect Mana/5



Enduring Green Stamina Defense



Jagged Green Stamina Critical Strike



Radiant Green Spell Penetration Spell Critical



Brutal Meta Melee Damage Chance to Stun



Destructive Meta Spell Critical Spell Reflect



Glinting Orange Agility Hit Rating



Inscribed Orange Strength Critical Strike



Luminous Orange Intellect Healing



Potent Orange Spell Critical Spell Damage



Glowing Purple Stamina Spell Damage



Royal Purple Mana/5 Healing



Shifting Purple Agility Stamina



Sovereign Purple Strength Stamina



Bold Red Strength



Delicate Red Agility



Runed Red Spell Damage



Subtle Red Dodge



Teardrop Red Healing



Bright Red Attack Power



Brilliant Yellow Intellect



Gleaming Yellow Spell Critical



Rigid Yellow Hit Rating



Smooth Yellow Critical Strike



Thick Yellow Defense







Prospectable Ore list with Required Jewelcrafting Skill to Prospect:



Ore Skill Requirement



Copper 20



Tin 50



Iron 125



Mithril 175



Thorium 225



Fel Iron 300



Adamantite 350