New Ore Vendor Floor – 4.2

Back to back posts – nice! Don’t get used to it, but this post is pretty much all math, so it was pretty easy to throw together. It was just question of transferring the info over from the scraps of paper I had hashed it out on. Flux just wrote a post about the new Floor price for obsidium ore, and it got me thinking. One of the things that came to my mind was “yeah, but how much more work is that going to be?” So, I whipped out the ol’ calculator and threw some numbers together. The main purpose was to determine what would be the most efficient way to process uncommon gems. Flux has shown us the most profitable way, but it seemed at first glance to require an awful lot of time.

NOTE: If you could care less about the math involved and just want to know what the new vendor floor values for both obsidium and elementium ore are, skip down to the end of the post.

Groundwork/Assumptions

Cast time for any uncommon gem cut: 3 sec
Cast time for prospecting: 2 sec
Cast time for jewelry crafts: 3 sec
Cast time for smelting: 2 sec
Cast time for Meta transmute: 5 sec

Vendor price for uncut, uncommon gem: .50g
Vendor price for uncut, rare gems : 5g
Vendor price for cut, uncommon gem: .75g
Vendor price for obsidium bar: .50g
Vendor price for elementium bar: .375
Vendor price for uncut, meta gem: 5g

Proc chance for Transmute Spec (because, without it, I don’t think you should bother with JC anyway…) : 15%

Jewelry Profits (after JC settings @ 1.5g):
Carnelian: 14.98g
Alicite, Jasper, Hessonite, Nightstone: 5g

Prospecting Ratios:
Obsidium: 6 uncommon and .03 rare per stack
Elementium: 4.5 uncommon and 1 rare per stack

Dominating your server: Priceless!

Anyway, let’s now compare how efficient each of the following options are for dealing with our uncut gems:

• Vendoring uncut gems
• Cutting and then vendoring the gems
• Crafting the gems into jewelry and then vendoring
• Transmuting the uncommon gems into shadowspirit diamonds, then vendoring
• smelting the ore and vendoring the bars

Obsidium Ore

I am using a sample size of 60 stacks of Obsidium ore since it gives us some nice round numbers to work with and is a bit more meaningful than a single stack. Let’s take a look at the results:

Prospecting 60 stacks of Obsidium would give us an average yield of 60 of each colour of gem, or 360 total. A total of 240 prospects @ 2sec per cast would take 6 minutes to get through.

• Vendoring all 360 gems at .50g each would get us 180g total, or 30g/min
• Cutting 360 gems @ 3 sec/cast would take us an additional 18 min, which would bring us up to 270g total. Unfortunately, that only works out to 11.25g/min. Definitely not worth it.
• If we were to turn the uncommon gems into jewelry, we would end up with with the following amounts (processing times in parentheses) : 20 Carnelian Spikes (60 sec), 30 Alicite Pendants (90 sec), 60 Jasper Rings (180 sec), 30 Hessonite Bands (90 sec), 30 Nightstone Chokers (90 sec) and 60 raw zephyrite (since cutting them didn’t prove to be worth it). Vendoring the jewelry would bring our total profit up to 930.94g, but would cost us an additional 8.5 minutes in processing time. After all is said and done: 64.20g/min
• Transmuting the gems into Metas, we would be looking at 20 crafts. At 5 sec each, that would cost us an extra 1.67 min. As a transmute-specced Alchemist, we would end up with 46 meta gems. Vendoring those would get us 230g, which works out to 29.99g/min.
• Our last option would be just to smelt the ore into bars and vendor them. Smelting 600 obsidium bars @ 1.5 sec each would take us 15 min. That would vendor for 300g, but only works out to 20g/min.

Elementium Ore

80 stacks of elementium ore will also yield 360 uncommon gems, so I will use that stack size in order to calculate the floor price for elementium. The gold/minute numbers will obviously be a bit lower since the extra ore takes us 8 minutes to prospect instead of 6, and the smelting will take 20 mins instead of 15, but the total gold amounts can still be used to calculate our profit per stack. We will then factor in the rare gems in order to get an idea of a “safe” price for purchasing ore.

The Floor Prices

We can see that turning our uncommon gems into jewelry is indeed our most efficient option, so we’ll use that option for both types of ore. Nice work, Flux. The jewelry is still the most efficient use of time even with all that extra work. I just needed to be sure before spending ALL that time…

So, 930.94g profit for 60 stacks of obsidium works out to 15.52g per stack. 0.3 rare gems per stack at a vendor price of 5g means we can add an additional 1.5g to our total, which means that:

THE VENDOR FLOOR PRICE FOR OBSIDIUM ORE WILL NOW BE 17.02g PER STACK

With Elementium, we will still end up with 930.94g profit, but since our sample size was 80 stacks, that means our profit per stack is only 11.64g for our uncommon gems. Since a stack or elementium produces 1 rare gem on average, we can add an additional 5g to that total, which then means:

THE VENDOR FLOOR PRICE FOR ELEMENTIUM ORE WILL NOW BE 16.64g PER STACK

Like I mentioned in the beginning, this post was all math, so I’ll save any analysis for later. Let me know if you have any questions or notice any problems with the math. My little scraps of paper weren’t the easiest things to decipher in the end, but I’m pretty sure I got everything worked out.

-Kathroman

EDIT: Based on new PTR numbers, the price of uncut rare gems has been dropped to 3g something, so these numbers should turn out a bit lower. I’ll fix the calculations later. Looks like crafting and vendoring perforators might even come out ahead of the raw gems…