WoW has grown a lot since its inception to become of the largest MMORPGs ever in terms of pure content as well as subscribers. This is even more impressive when you consider how detailed it was to start with. Along with the new levels and areas the expansions have opened up for players, there has also been a move towards new professions, such as jewelcrafting.

Why would you want to choose jewelcrafting? It allows you to make all the accessories that you sell for high prices on AH such as necklaces, trinkets and rings. You can also make gems which you can use on items with sockets to enhance their power. Before you get a chance to do this you’re mostly be crafting. It’s a little bit like being a tailor, only instead of making clothes you’re making jewellery using mineral ores. It’s a lucrative profession if done correctly but it’s also newer than the others so it’s harder to find good information about starting out. Here’s a quick guide.

Starting Out

As a new player, you’ll first need to train for jewelcrafting as you would for any profession. WoW lets you choose both primary and secondary professions and jewelcrafting is a primary. Unless you have a good reason or specific idea in mind, the best secondary profession to complement it is mining, as you’ll need ore often to use the skill.

You can still be a successful jewelcrafter without mining but you’ll have to buy the ore yourself from the AH which can make things quite expensive. We won’t focus on mining in this guide but there are trainers in most major cities in the game so learn mining and grab a pick as soon as possible.

Finding a trainer for jewelcrafting can be slightly trickier. You can find trainers in Exodar (Alliance) and Silvermoon (Horde) but in the Old World there you’re quite limited. If you’ve picked a Draenei or Blood Elf character you’re in luck as their starting areas include the trainers. Otherwise you’ve got some quite major travelling to do. It’s recommended that you wait in your own starting area for at least a few levels before trying to make the journey alone. You can use this time to practice your mining skills and earning enough money to afford the two Jewelcrafting tools you will need — the ‘Grinding Stone’ and ‘Jewellers Kit’. Once you’ve finally got both professions trained and all your items acquired, you can finally start learning the skill.

Levelling up

Starting out as a jewelcrafter can be a little slow, but you’ll soon be making items that will prove useful and save you some money at the AH. You won’t be able to cut gems until level 300 so you need to work hard on gathering (or buying) materials and making various different types of accessory which can then be sold on to other players.

When you begin as a jewelcrafter you’ll soon have two new skills to utilise: Jewelcrafting (no surprise there!) and prospecting. You’ll also have some of the most basic designs to work with. Prospecting will turn the ore you gather into gems – the same ones you see occasionally while mining just as Tigerseye – but you first need to focus on getting your level up a little.

You’ll start using copper and move up through the various ores. You’ll normally find that your jewelcrafting skill moves along quite well with your mining skills so there won’t be a massive gap providing you do your own gathering. To begin with, you’ll be mining a ton of copper ore. You can then turn this into copper bars using the smelting tool and begin making a lot of copper wire, which will start you off in the profession and bring you to around level 30 with no need to leave the newbie areas.

Once you’ve reached this level you can use your prospecting skill to find the gems to make Tigerseye Bands and Malachite Pendants. You can also buy these of course, but this is where the skill might get expensive depending on the server and the demand for such materials. These should bring your jewelcrafting forward another twenty levels or so. You’ll run through most of the early levels like this making more and more items from the various different ores. You’ll run into trouble when you need a hefty amount of bars from rarer ores such as gold and silver so you’ll need to do some serious mining or money making to keep up with the raw materials you’ll need.

Some designs are only accessible through the games vendors so check if you find yourself stuck on a particular level. You will also find that some designs need various different item drops to complete so you won’t be able to make every single design through using the AH and your mining skill alone. It’s not all bad through, during your first 30 or so game levels the items you’ll be creating may be quite useful to you and other low level players.

Once you move past level 300 in the profession you can start looking to make it a serious choice for the endgame. You’ll need to start using outland mats for your crafting and start making various socketable gems. You’ll be doing far more gem cutting than creating jewellery from this point. The cutting only requires the gem itself and the socketed items can be used by anyone so there’s a great market available for you to exploit. Outland cut gems have now taken a serious second place to those available in the Wrath of the Litch King expansion, however.

By the time you reach this point you’ll have a much better idea of how you want to continue in your profession and should know a lot about prospecting, jewelcrafting and mining — enough to take you all the way to the final levels after many, many hours of gathering. The most important thing to do is to have fun with the profession and if you aren’t doing that, there’s no shame in changing it for something else.