Patch 2.4.2 just threw the gem market in for a loop. Because Brilliant Glass now has a chance of giving an epic gem, the reagents required for the Jewelcrafting ability became scarce and prices shot through the roof. Uncommon gems which used to rot in players' banks or languish on the Auction Houses started disappearing into the hands of Jewelcrafters and cunning businessmen (sometimes both). Blood Garnets, as nice as they are, never sold for more than 1 Gold apiece, even after Brilliant Glass was introduced. Nowadays, on our server, they're about 10 Gold a pop.

And why not? It's almost impossible to catch it on the Auction Houses now since it's pretty much an instant sale. Even prospecting has gotten some love because even destroying Fel Iron Ore has become useful for a chance to get some uncommon (and sometimes rare) gems. The chain reaction of profit continues as Jewelcrafters prospect, get uncommon gems, create Brilliant Glass, and sometimes luck out on an epic gem. The irony is, with most servers now having the alchemy lab on the Isle of Quel'danas now open for business, epic gems are starting to find their way into the market, driving prices down.

Crimson Spinels, which many guilds rarely put on sale, used to run as high as 800 to 1,000 Gold on our server. Now they have become among the most commonly bought (for badges) and sold (on the AH) gems, averaging about 300 to 400 Gold. Uncommon gems are now bought as a reagent for Brilliant Glass and almost never cut, driving prices up; while epic gems are becoming more and more available, driving prices down. If you're a Jewelcrafter, don't pass up on the chance to Brilliant Glass every 20 hours! It's a crazy time for Jewelcrafting, but it's never been more fun... or profitable.

Tomorrow morning Arena Season 3 is scheduled to start up and, among other things, this will bring a lot of new loot into the game. I'm sure many of you are like myself and have been hoarding up honor and arena points in order to buy the new gear as soon as it appears on the vendors. This season, due largely to the new rating requirements placed on some of the new items, I've decided to actually put forth effort to be competitive in the arena.

With that in mind, picking up the new PvP gear becomes a priority, and I imagine other people are going to be in a similar position. Gone are the days of dying in the arena week after week in order to finally pick up that amazing weapon. Of course, for many players, there's a much more important aspect to preparing for Season 3: making money on the auction house.

Yesterday I posted regarding the odd drop behavior of the design for the new meta gem, the Chaotic Skyfire Diamond. Many readers commented that the gem requirements were too stringent, making the gem undesirable for them. Unlike the majority of other gems, this one required exactly two blue gems in order to activate its bonus stats. Most meta gems have quantifiers like "at least" or "more than" and players found that limiting themselves to a specific number of gems was, well, too limiting.

Today a player brought their complaint regarding this requirement to the official WoW forums and was able to garner a blue response. Drysc posted in the thread, mentioning that the gem has already been changed in an upcoming patch. Specifically, the "exactly two blue gems" requirement will be changed to "at least two blue gems". Additionally, he stated that other meta gems with similar requirements are being reviewed as well (although I know of only one other that might fit that category).

What do you think? Is there any doubt now that this will be the best meta gem for most DPS caster builds?

Raidar is a neat little site that claims to let players plan and organize guild raids in WoW. It's pretty clear the site is new, so it's not completely done yet (not to mention that almost no guilds are in the system at all), but in my few minutes' experience signing in, creating a guild, and setting up a raid, it all worked pretty smoothly (and AJAX-y, if you're a web designer into terms like that-- the site works like it was built in Ruby on Rails).

So what's still missing? The "planned features" page promises a top-to-bottom guild management system, incluing email raid notifications, character profiles, and even a "Looking for Guild" board. The one thing I missed in setting up a was the ability to set up numbers for class balance on a raid, but over on the site's message board, the creator says that wasn't a priority for him quite yet (seems to me like it would be a big one). But as I said, the site looks smooth-- if he keeps up with it and throws in all the features he promised, it could be the place for raid planners to set up on the Internet.

And as far as I know, there is still a hole for one right now. One of my guilds simply uses our Guildportal message boards to set up and plan raids-- members sign up on the board, and our guild leader keeps track of who signs up and who we need. I know Guildportal has a system for it as well, but none of our members seem to have be interested in using it yet. The other guild I'm in, which is a little bigger, uses the Guild Event Manager addon to announce and plan raids ingame. I do like the way GEM works-- it's easy to use and set up, has that min/max feature that I want from Raidar, and keeps up a constant list of who's signed up for a raid in what class roles.

But the only real problem with GEM is that, as far as I know, it's ingame only. There's no way for me to check when a raid is or sign up for one unless I'm in-game (not always an option, especially at work). If Raidar can fill out its features, and do the same thing that GEM does (but from anywhere), we might have a winner.

I'm not sure whether I can classify this one as a rumor, since it doesn't come with the requisite blurry screenshot. And while there's no verification to any of these gem abilities, they're certainly interesting if true -- providing a wide range of small buffs that will be interesting to see in different combinations on items. Blizzard's own jewelcrafting information suggests that items will have a a varying number of sockets and that some sockets will be specific to certain types of gems (you'll get a bonus ability for socketing them with the appropriate type of gem). Read on for the specific gem abilities.