A lot of successful World of Warcraft players thought they were going to make a ton of gold in Diablo 3. After making millions of gold in World of Warcraft with their professions, professions like Jewelcrafting, they geared up, collected some gems and power leveled the jeweler. Did they get rich? Maybe, I’ll explain how you can lose gold, save gold and even make gold with your Jeweler.

Chipped Gems…

In Patch 1.0.3 the cost to combine gems was adjusted to make it more cost effective to use your Jewelcrafter and possibly even more practical to do it. But I’ve got news to all the new players combining low level gems, you’re losing gold! A chipped ruby is selling for about 160 gold right now, while a flawed ruby is selling for 60 gold. Are players buying chipped rubies?! I wasn’t sure, so I bought 10 and sold them back at the same price in just a few minutes. Why the hell are people buying almost-completely useless gems?!?! A chipped gem sells to the merchant for 8 gold, so it’s not that…

The gem everyone should be buying, if they had their head on straight, is the Flawless Square since it’s only about 100-500 gold. But we know we won’t make gold if we combine gems of lower quality than the Flawless Square, what about the others?

Losing More Gold

In order to create a single Perfect Square gem you need 3 Flawless Squares, 3 Tomes of Secrets and 30,000 gold. That’s 30,000 + 300 gold + 1650 gold (for the Tomes) or about 32,000 gold total. If you wanted to make a business out of this you would need to sell the Perfect gem for around 37,800 gold on the auction house(you can calculate exact amounts with my gem calculator). The going rate for Perfect Squares is 36,500. Repeating this math for some of the higher level gems and we’ll see that every combine is a loss after auction house commissions.

Saving Gold… DIY Gems!

So when is it smarter to combine gems? Well, first of all it costs about 175,000 gold to level your Jeweler and it won’t be quick to make that back; so unless you already have a leveled Jeweler don’t waste your gold. If you have a Jeweler, you can save gold by combining your own gems instead of buying them on the auction house.

The savings is not worth it for a Perfect Square, but let’s take a look at the highest level you can craft without buying a 500,000gold design. It will cost you 602,000 gold to buy a Star wholesale on the auction house. How much would it cost to craft one? About 535,000 gold (if you bought 27 Flawless Squares). If you don’t believe me, use my gem calculator to see for yourself.

You can save about 65,000 gold if you craft your own. If you want to use a higher quality, like a Flawless Star, it’s smarter to buy it off the auction house since it would cost youa ton to purchase the design off the auction house for your own use. This won’t last long though, since the designs will come down in value very soon.

Making Gold

In order to make gold with your Jeweler you have to sell in trade to avoid the auction house commission. You can price high level gems off Flawless Squares, since those are, without question, the best entry point. When Flawless Squares sell between 100-500 gold, the cost to make a Star, Flawless Star, Perfect Star and Radiant Star is about: 545k, 1,700k, 5,400k and 16,600k. These typically sell on the auction house for about 14-18% more, which comes out to about 640k, 2000k, 6300k and 20,000k. You can start by undercutting those prices in trade

Keep in mind if you craft up from Flawless Squares you’ll be spending a really really really long time crafting. It will take you 6 seconds to make a Perfect Square, 20 seconds to make a Radiant Square, 62 to make a Star and over 3 minutes to make a Flawless Star. You can do the math from there. You’ll also be investing millions of gold on all the designs so that you can actually have the ones people want in trade. Good luck!

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.