Jewelcrafting was a great profession in Burning Crusade. If you bought the right rare BoE gem patterns and worked it you could make a lot of money. Wrath of the Lich King turns that all around though. Now the rare cuts are mostly purchased via daily quests, with a few trained recipes, drops, and reputation rewards in the mix.
I went to Wowhead and researched all the rare gem cuts in their database to find their sources. The result is a simple spreadsheet, available here. Take a look! There's some missing or bad data at Wowhead: I'll update the spreadsheet as we learn more.
There are a lot more cuts in WotLK. The two-colour gems have a lot more varieties now, almost any combination of stats you could ask for. The Wowhead database lists the following:
- 8 red gems (7 available now)
- 4 blue gems (4 available now)
- 6 yellow gems (6 available now)
- 19 green gems (16 available now)
- 22 orange gems (17 available now)
- 13 purple gems (9 available now)
There are no more BoE rare gem recipes. This pretty much removes the ability for someone to control the jewel market solely by spending gold: you really have to quest and do PvP to get most of the patterns. Here are the sources for the rare cuts:
- 6 Trained
- 23 Dalaran dailies
- 12 Wintergrasp
- 7 Reputation rewards
- 11 BoP drops
- 13 not available. (Missing or bad data at Wowhead).
Gems that require Dalaran dailies cost three tokens. You get one token per day for doing the daily quest and each quest requires combining a drop off a level 70ish mob with two uncommon gems. Each quest gives you one token: three tokens let you buy a pattern. (You can also get tokens occasionally from a BoE drop). It'll take 69 daily quests to get all of the cuts. But tokens are also used for the epic crafted item patterns and Dragon's Eye gems, so there will be a lot of competition for them. You can start doing the Dalaran dailies at level 70.
Gems that require Wintergrasp cost twelve tokens. Tokens are BoP drops off level 80 instance elites as well as rewards from PvP dailies in Wintergrasp. You get 3 tokens per daily quest, so it may go relatively quickly to accumulate all 12 rare gem cuts. Wintergrasp requires flying and level 77 to even access and seems designed mostly for level 80s.
Blizzard changed Jewelcrafting a lot: I can only assume they weren't happy with the jewelcrafting cartels that emerged on most realms. My guess is there will still be a lot of profit to be made in rare cuts but that there will be more competition as any jewelcrafter can easily accumulate most of the rare cuts over time. The introduction of Gem Perfection may also narrow the price between uncommons and rares: a perfect uncommon is pretty good and much easier to come by.