Note on enchanting metal bars: Do not attempt to interrupt the casting of the spell, doing so will cause you to loose the bar of metal. Also, even though it appears you could keep casting the spell and having the bars stack onto your mouse pointer, it does not work this way, you will have to drop the metal bar back into your inventory before enchanting another or you will loose the metal bar that was already on your pointer.
Your First Item: If you can get your skill up to 21, I recommend the first items you try combining are silver and cats eye agate. This is a relatively low cost item that creates a necklace that gives three charisma. Do this item first because unless your charisma is at 95 or above, you can get better pricing and thus aid your jewelcraft even further. (Note: If your charisma is 105 or above, you can get pricing as good as you could in your home city in other friendly cities… for example, I'm a High Elf. Opals cost 17pp in Felwithe, and with my base charisma, they cost around 19pp in Kelethin. After wearing all of my charisma boosting items to get my charisma up to 106, Opals now cost 17pp in Kelethin) If you cannot get your jewelcraft up this high, I recommend starting with one of the lesser jewels until they become trivial (I didn't keep record of this unfortunately) but do not bother enchanting them because they produce worthless items that neither you or any PC would want unless they have very specialized needs.
To produce your item: Place ONE gem and ONE silver bar into the jewelcraft kit and hit combine. This recipe holds true all the way from silver malachite up to platinum ruby. Either you get a nice sparkly piece of jewelry on your mouse or you get that dreaded red message in your text.
If you can successfully produce the cats eye necklace, then I recommend moving on to the bloodstone earrings which are next. Be sure to equip the necklace as soon as you produce a magical one. Remember that jewelry that is made with normal silver bars will never be magical and is useless, just sell it back to the vendor to recover some of the price of the jewelry.
Importance of Stats: You will want to keep a few of the items you create, for example, the wisdom rings. Increasing your wisdom means a decrease in the amount of failures. Sometimes this is the key to a successful jewelcrafter, and was my key to riches the day of the trade patch. I had only a skill of twenty four in jewelcrafting at the start of the day, and managed to make 150pp, three sets of dwarven chainmail, a shiny brass shield, and up to 41 skill (point at which jade rings become trivial) by the end of the day [Please note: doing this with low value gem silver jewelcraft would be next to impossible in any existing economy now, however on newer servers without jewelcrafters you might be able to net the same results, note however that everyone else will be just as poor as you]. How? Because even though my skill went up very slowly, I maintained the cash flow by being able to provide my customers with their items with as few failures as possible. The fewer failures in this expensive skill, the more likely you are to see the elusive profit margin.
Another set of valuable rings are the intelligence rings. If you are just playing with electrum and don't care to sell the items to a player because they are either worthless or you can't enchant them, then getting skill points is more important than money, because this is obviously why you are endeavoring to work with such a gem/metal combination. Failures will happen no matter what your wisdom or skill, and the first time I failed on a silver ruby veil even though it was trivial, I was pretty upset, but it was not be unexpected. (now the second, third or fourth try especially if they are all in a row…)
Another note on failures… I have heard from numerous places that Everquest's random number generator is broken. I try to take this into effect, and if I have a failure, I just take a deep breath, wait for a little and then try again. Especially if I am working with something that is thirty or so points below my trivial level.
In addition to this guide I have provided a spreadsheet listing all possible combinations, and some profit margin evaluations. Keep all of your monster looted jewels. This will save you more money than you make in profit from selling them I assure you, even and especially the low ones like hematite. There comes a point in jewelcraft when a gem and metal combination becomes too expensive to practice with. Even if you can't enchant it, you will want the practice so that you might have a possibility of making the most wanted and profitable fire emerald, star ruby, sapphire and ruby items.
Training: To increase your skill always work from the least expensive gem up to the most expensive gem until it is more feasible to go with the next metal because of your cost. When you get up to Silver + Opal, about that time you might want to consider Electrum instead. Likewise when you get to Electrum + Opal you might want to consider switching to gold. It appears 'cheaper' to switch sooner but in my experience you have a very low chance of making something that goes trivial over 20 skill points over your current skill. (Wisdom will buffer this later on when attempting platinum jewelry but when training you want to maximize your Intelligence instead.)
Note on attempting jewelcraft for others: This is always the most tense mouse click of the game. Holding someone's black pearl in the balance is very powerful. The other person is putting a great deal of trust into not only your ability, but your integrity. I always put everything in the bag (bar on the right and gem on the left seems to be better luck for me for some reason) and then position my mouse over the combine button. Then I close my eyes REALLY tight and click the mouse. Luck is luck, do whatever you feel will bring you the most luck, it's about all you have in the end no matter what your skill or wisdom. You always have at least a 5% chance of destroying the item. Remember that. I usually accept no payment for attempting an item provided all of the materials are brought to me. I do make VERY sure that they understand that it is always possible for a failure and that they UNDERSTAND that risk. So far I haven't had any irate customers, even when I failed on one Gold Sapphire Earring. (I did succeed on the Gold Fire Emerald bracelet and the Gold Fire Opal ring however, both of which she had found as monster loot, and so I greatly improved her profit margin)
Selling: The way to make money with this skill isn't a fast one, nor is it an easy one… you will have to sell to PC's at reasonable prices. I got lucky and raised most of my skill the day that the trade patch came out, so I had a massive influx of money for my items because 1) they were new 2) I was on the server first thing and was in Greater Faydark, probably one of the most crowded zones in the game. I am lucky in being based in Greater Faydark because of the large traffic of people coming in and out of the zone, either to crushbone, on their way to unrest from ak'anon, going from butcherblock to the largest city zone in the game, where you can be bound right inside of an orc tent or at the entrance to any of four zones.
Anyway, I digress. I usually offer my wares with a macro (warning, if you use shout in a macro, only the first auction will go through, you will have to use enter, shift+up, and enter to repeat the additional lines or you will find yourself under a barrage of questions that you thought that you just answered - on a similar note both shout, say, emotes and OOC work like this, however I have heard that if you alternate them the entire message will show up IE: Line 1: /auc Jewelry for sale Line 2: /em Lays out his wares on display for everyone to see. Line 3: /auc Selling the following stuff: - etc etc.). I take the initial influx of orders (sometimes up to three if I'm lucky), then announce to everyone that you have stopped taking orders for a while.
This is important, as you do not want to keep your customers waiting for long while you create your items. If you do so it is likely that another jeweler will come into your zone and sell for less than you or they will simply move on to someone else who won't keep them waiting for so long. The prices I have posted are just a suggestion, but will get you a reasonable profit margin. I have included percentages of profit so that you can keep track of how much you are making, please try to stay above my minimum profit margins. I included these as prices for friends and guildmates. You will be tempted to sell to them for cost, but always remember the dreaded 'You lack the skill to combine these items'.
Either run back to your nearby city zone where you can get the materials, or reach into your trusty backpack that you have full of materials. I advise keeping the gems and the metal separate until you are ready to sell because they take up less backpack space this way. Also try to enchant the metals before hand. This will save you some time as well. You can stack 20 bars of silver and say.. four each of each useful gem in a backpack, where as if you made all of the items you would need twenty slots or so and might not sell all of the items. Do not sell back the unused gems if you go this route… You will always be selling another day and just take this backpack out, refill it with the gems you did sell, and go out there and sell again. Many different people need many different things. The silver opal engagement rings usually sell for about 30pp. Who would want three stamina and two agility you say? How about a monk? This is a perfect ring for them and they are most likely to pay the price. I recommend going to a zone like oasis or something for these items though, because 1) there are likely to be human monks there, and 2) they are likely to have the cash to spend.
Conclusion: The chart is in Excel format, If you don't have Microsoft excel, then try to find the excel viewer (probably on microsoft.com). There are several tabs, The first gives a table of what all the jewelcraft items make, the second provides a raw pricing chart giving the cost of attempting each item, the third through sixth are for silver, electrum, gold, platinum recommend pricing and profit analysis for popular items in the respective metals, the seventh is the trivial chart. If you have any trivial values to add to this chart or any other please e-mail me at adroken@swbell.net.
Do not go below the minimum amount. I recommend you ask the recommend amount, and then use the minimum amount as a guide to bargain with. People feel better about a deal if they can get you to go down a few plat. Try to give discounts for pairs, as it will encourage people to buy more from you at once and let them get the feeling of getting a better 'deal'.
Resources:
Sites that can help with Jewelcraft:
Casters Realm (Excellent page all around, also has jewelcraft info)
Casters Realm Jewelcraft Vendor Listing
EQ Traders Corner
Traders Corner Jewelcraft Vendor Listing
My old guild and good friends, also home to vast information (Warning, main page is graphic intensive):
Seekers of Lore
Seekers of Lore Guides
And last but not least my current guild:
League of Champions: [Currently Under Revision]
Lasted revised January 31 2000
created by Remelio Gemweaver
edited for web posting by MadWand
