Yesterday I shared with everyone my gem calculator which helps determine the values of gems on the auction house along with the cost of combining gems into higher tiered gems. One of the things that immediately threw me off was the massive amount it costs just to combine gems. At first sight, 50 gold to turn 3 chipped gems into 1 flawed gem doesn’t seem like a lot. Then you consider that it will cost another 50 gold to combine 3 flawed gems into 1 regular gem… but wait, you actually need to combine NINE chipped gems to get 3 flawed gems before you can do that (150 gold), meaning it really costs 200 gold total to make a single regular gem. You’ll need 3 of those (600 gold) before you can spend the 50 gold to craft a L4 gem; putting the total at 650 gold… boring right?

The point is, the cost to combine each tier of gem increases exponentially. The breath taking number that was revealed only when I punched the numbers into my calculator was nearly 40 million. Forty million what? Forty million GOLD! A single Radiant Star gem is going to have 40 million gold worth of combining backing it. That’s actual money that leaves the character’s hands and goes to their Jewelers. This won’t include the 100s of thousands of CLICKS made to combine all the gems at your Jeweler. This is intense and gives us some perspective on how rare and valuable these gems will be, initially.

A Free Lunch?

It also occurred to me that there is a ‘free lunch’ across the first 5 levels of gems. The first five tiers of gems drop while clearing dungeons and killing elite bosses. According to Blizzard you won’t find anything better than a level 5 gem from killing stuff. If we assume that Perfect gems (L5) are found in so much abundance that they are worth zero gold, a Radiant Star gem will still cost 511,733 gold to combine. That’s a half a million gold that Blizzard is going to pull out of the economy to make a single Radiant Star, and most players will want a half dozen at least!!!

What’s all this means? It means that the Jewel market is going to be huge. There is going to be suitable demand for gems and people to combine those gems. Especially in the first month of the game when players have better things to do than train their Jewelers and combine gems all day.

Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.