To smelt or not to smelt?Follow

What i normally do is buy tin ore(50s) and then smelt it into bronze(2g50s) to make profit. this is a tip to increase mining and profit. if i were you i would raise your mining and smelt to allow you to mine better and also give you money. you can for now buy copper ore from your profits(do first instance and sell greens even if ur to high lvl) and buy copper ore then smelt that and sell for more.

it seems like a choice you can make money or raise ur skill and i think raising your skill is better in the long run



-Ramoku a freind msg me if you have questions(depending on server and faction we coupd become partners and make lots of money i made like 15g in a short time period!)

I tried selling copper ore back in the day and I had little luck with it. I could sell the bars much easier. But times change and servers differ. I’d suggest trying to sell a little of both and see what the market is like on your server. If you can make a lot more money selling ore then go for it. Copper really is plentiful. So even if you don’t get the skill points from smelting you can get them from mining more ore to sell. But if the ore just sits on the AH while your bars sell, then start smelting like a madman. *grins*

Perhaps something else to keep in mind is that there is at least one alchemy recipe that requires, I believe, Thorium Ore as one of the ingredients. I think it's the Greater Stoneshield Potion. Maybe the Thorium sells well either way, I don't know. Just putting it out there ...

The first time you come upon a vein that is too high for your skill to mine, you'll know you should have done a few more smeltings on your own.

In the long run, I don't imagine it matters much, as the whole point of mine/smelt is to create money from nothing, to put your income ahead of your leveling curve.

standard ore like copper tin ...... semlt it those are the low levels and not a lot of loss on the smelting. IMHO the stuff to not smelt is, Silver(the adds from smelting come at a difficult time , when tin nodes are not giving skillups verry libiraly(still get them it is just rare), Gold(for some of the skill adds for folks, this is not as relevent as the silver(unsmelted silver sells much better on my server than any other unsmelted ore). With a little time you will get to Mith and Thourium, theese sell well unsmelted due to the need for stonesheild pots(heck some folks use them) but the market is low due to most folks not being "In" to said potions.

But other than those, smelt away.

It's a good question- and one that leaves me in a bit of a pickle (at least at low levels).

If you smelt your ores at lower levels, it raises your skill. If I recall correctly, this ends at iron ore, and the only skillups left are when you first tap a vein. Thus, at lower levels, smelting makes sense for skillups. One of my alts is smelting every copper ore he finds.

However, the prices of ores vary from realm to realm. For example, the last time I tried to sell bronze bars on Uldum, I put them up a number of times at cheap prices before vendoring them in frustration. Also, my alt can sell 10 copper ores at about 51s a stack (just yesterday I had 6 stacks- 3 gold at level 11). However, copper bars sell for about 85s per stack of 20. This means that, while I gain valuable skillups, I lose about 17 silver on every stack. It's not a big loss, and the 85s is still pure profit (I love Loch Modan for its copper vein richness), but selling stacks of copper bars loses money every time. Once copper smelting ceases to net skillups, I'll sell the raw ore.

In the end, you should probably price the ore stacks versus the bars, and decide which is more profitable. Take into consideration that the skillups from smelting may be worth the small loss of revenue, but once you don't get skillups, go back to ores if they're more profitable!

Edited, Jul 29th 2006 at 9:36pm EDT by Wondroustremor