The Shuffle Lives On

Many claim that the shuffle is dead as of the patch, even I said so. But after watching the markets since then and giving a bit more thought on the matter, I don't think that's entirely correct. I honestly believe that the shuffle is down, but not out. Not for now at least. Why do I think that? Because you can still profit from prospecting ore and if you can do that then you can shuffle. You just have to be very mindful now instead of smashing your face against your prospect macro.

Bottom line points on the shuffle:

• It still works
• Requires JC, xmute alchemy, and enchanting
• No longer free money
• All mats and gems are an investment at an "assumed" vendor price
• There is no vendor everything safety net
• You must exploit every aspect of the shuffle to profit
• Continues to fuel several markets with huge cuts on costs

I'm going to be covering how the shuffle is still clinging to life today by giving several examples of how you can profit from it in the same way. First thing to point out is the new floor price of 30g per stack of ore. That's the new vendor everything and profit price range. Before 4.1 you would ask "how much should I vendor" where as today you will ask "should I vendor?" To be honest, I feel a little guilty writing this entry because it feels like fake content in a way because things are mostly the same. But it's the "mostly" part that is pushing me to write this up.

The things that are the same are, well, everything minus the cut uncommon gems step. Buy a ton of ore, prospect, vendor useless greens, DE stuff, so on and so forth. The primary difference is what pricing points you put on gems, enchanting mats, metas, and what you intend to do with them all. Also the main thing to keep in mind is that with probably 90% of the people that were shuffling ore totally gone there isn't a flood of gems anymore and there won't be again if things stay the same.

So bearing that in mind the obvious price increases have happened and are compounded by the increased demand. All supplies are drying up fast, even mine. So that means that if you can outlast the competition you're going to be in a happy place.

Assuming a stack of ore sells for 40g, you'll get no less than 4 common gems but it will average out to 5 and a fraction of a rare. I believe it's 1 rare per 3 stacks of elementium ore? In any case, 2g per ore makes 10g per prospect and that translates into paying 10g per common gem. That's only a single coin more than before the patch that they were all valued at anyways, but the difference this time is that you can't get that money back from a vendor. This assigned value is an investment that must turn a profit in and of itself or you lose your money. So what do we have available to us that can use the same pricing method of a 10g common gem?

Metas.

Once you factor in the vendor price of the rares and xmute spec, you're looking at around maybe 7-8g or so per common. This gives you a lot of wiggle room where most of the other JC's out there have none. You DO have xmute spec don't you? Good I thought so, you're learning! So at somewhere around 40-45g per stack of ore, the method of shuffling ore with the intent of crafting meta gems has not changed what so ever.

On my server these are now selling for at the lowest price of 150g with a top price of 500, but lets go with a more realistic price of 200g across the board. That turns the shuffle into a 160g profit for every set of gems you put together with a very healthy market and a reliable customer base. Meta gem sales were great before the patch and now they're even better with the increase of demand. Once the demand simmers down the lack of competition will compensate for that thus keeping this an extremely profitable market to be in.

So 10g (ish) per common gem, what else can we do to match that up from before? Disenchanting. The biggest change here is based entirely on how the enchanting material prices are shifting on your server. The only real thing that I can say here is that if they have gone up you can safely shuffle for DE mats to sell as is.


Ok I think that's enough of that. What's the purpose to stating all of the above? The simple fact that at 40g per stack of ore you can continue to shuffle to your heart's content but without a safety net. In other words, don't buy 9000 stacks of ore, only buy it as it becomes available or as you need it. But what can we do now? Ore prices are likely still in flux right now, I know they are for me. But I haven't mentioned rare gems. This is where things get tricky. If you assume selling the average rare gem for 50g then the shuffle is alive and well just as it was before even at 50g or so per stack of ore.

We can still make metas, we can still get easy DE mats, and we can still sell rare gems for great prices. The only change is that none of this is free and your threshold has to be above the vendor price. The short version of all of this is if you add 15g to the vendor price of anything you get from the shuffle and sell it all at that price, you're going to profit no matter how much you do it.


Thanks for stopping by!