Shadowlands Goldmaking: Jewelcrafting base legendaries

Third in our list of base legendary professions is Jewelcrafting. It only has access to two items, but they are quite useful as they can be equipped by every spec in the game.

Base legendary basics

The base legendary items are used together with soul ash and missives to craft a legendary. There are four different variants for each slot, each corresponding to a higher item level, with higher material costs and a better item.

You can craft a higher rank directly, or you can upgrade a rank 1 item to a higher rank by adding a new base and paying the difference in soul ash. This means that all ranks of the base item can be useful to players. Right now players have access to enough Soul Ash for a rank 4 legendary, and alts will be crafting what they can get.

Getting the recipes

The rank 1 recipe for each item requires you to max your profession and get to level 60. You unlock the recipes from doing the Torghast intro questline up to where you give the Runecarver his first memory. He will then give you quests to take back to your profession trainers that unlock the rank 1 recipes for training.

The higher rank recipes are obtained by crafting the lower rank 1s. You need to craft 15 of the lower rank to increase your rank.

Can you make a profit?

Sadly it is very hard to figure this out. Leveling to rank 4 is expensive, and most rank 1s are selling for less than materials cost. The Rank 2s and 3s are profitable on many realms, but this will vary a lot.

I suggest taking a look at the various ranks of recipes on theunderminejournal and doing some quick napkin math to figure out which ranks are profitable. With jewelcrafting is just two items to cover, so this is actually pretty feasible.

Saving gold on shards and flux

You can save 25 gold per Orboreal Shard by farming exalted with The Ascended or just being a goblin. There is a vendor in Hero’s Rest that sells them with a vendor discount, which is absolutely key. Some other reputations also sell Orboreal shards, so check the wowhead page for whichever you have the most rep with to see where you can get it. For Blacksmithing you will also need a lot of Luminous Flux, which you can get in Hero’s Rest or back in Kul Tiras/Zandalar if you are exalted with those professions.

Running a successful jewelcrafting base legendary operation

Prospecting versus buying essences

The essences required to craft will require you to prospect a lot of ore, or buy them outright. Currently the ring is much more in demand than the necklace, so the price of the related essence is much higher. Laestrite and Elethium yield equal quantities of each essence type, which is great for leveling both of your recipes to rank 4. Generally though Elethium is way too expensive relative to Laestrite. The rate of essences is about 3% per ore whereas Elethium gives essences at about 30% per ore. Elethium is selling for 20 times as much as laestrite on my realm, so Laestrite is the way to go.

For the zone-specific ores, that only give one essence the rate seems to be about 5%, but I have not prospected a large enough sample myself or found one online. If you want to target craft rings it may be cheaper to buy Sinvyr and Phaedrum Ore. You would have to compare the average price of essences from laestrite to the price from the specific ore. The quick math would be:

Laestrite/0.03 for the cost from laestrite ore for a random essence, and Phaedrum/0.05 for the cost of an Essence of Rebirth from Phaedrum. Target-prospecting will save you a significant amount of time though, and you get way less gems to deal with.

Dealing with gems

If you prospect yourself it will be very hard to get rid of all your gems. If you have crafter’s mark 2 that will help you get rid of a chunk. Personally I use that alongside just vendoring them for 2.5 gold each, which is fine as the price is trending that low on my realm anyway. The clusters are not worth the time required to repost them for me, but they may be for you.

Blacksmithing

You need a lot of Shadowghast Ingots, and you can usually save 20-50% if you can craft these yourself. The recipe is easy to get as long as you have a level 48+ character that can pick up blacksmithing and I would highly recommend it. As with blacksmithing you will need a lot of ingots, so buy ores in bulk when they are cheap and craft a bunch when you are planning to go AFK to save time.

Success slots

The rings are much stronger than the necklaces. The main reason to craft necklaces is if you want to prioritize Laestrite prospecting, which will give you an even quantity of every essence, forcing you into an even mix. Down the line both recipes will be useful as Blizzard will definitely be expanding the legendary system.

Restocking effectively

We restock the same way as with tailoring. Look through your auctions with the normal UI and look for any slot/ilvl combinations you are missing and go for that one. Players may not upgrade as they go from this point on, but blacksmithing legendaries are not that expensive, so I think a good chunk of players will do it even for their alts.

Should you do it?

I would only suggest entering base legendaries if you already have at least a million gold and you are willing to take the risk. There is no guarantee you will make your investment back, so you need an appetite for risk.

TSM Settings

The TSM Setup this time is fairly involved. Since TSM does not like the various ranks I have had to create separate operations for each rank. There is no crafting operation, as TSM cannot effectively restock. You will have to craft with the base UI to pick the right ranks and keep track of your stock manually. Hopefully they add full support down the line, but currently TSM will only work well to post your items. Keep in mind that the settings assume you are crafting your items yourself.

What do the strings in the operation mean

The operation strings take the matprice() of the various materials needed for a base legendary. This will use the default material price method to value your Shadowghast ingots, and all the required Essences. The setup also assumes you can get the full discount for shards and flux, hardcoding the Shard price at 100 gold. If you cannot then you should change the value in all the operations to whatever your current price is.

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5 thoughts on “Shadowlands Goldmaking: Jewelcrafting base legendaries

      1. There is something wrong with the Auction posting operation for Rank 1 JC legendaries, and possibly others ranks. The formula you created has an error in it, so you can’t post using your JC Auction posting operation. You get an error right away when trying to post the auction to AH.

    1. The formula works for me, I’ve been using the published setup since the beginning of Shadowlands. The most likely issue you have is that the default material value for shadowghast ingots is invalid. Look it up under crafting reports in /tsm crafting to ensure it has a value

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