ProspectingFollow

Are there any tricks to prospecting? Anyone who is familier with FFXI knows that some crafting works better on certin days, and facing in a given direction. I'm wondering if there are any tricks like that to WoW.

I find that most times I will get a gem for 80% of the number of stacks of ore (20 stacks will usually get me 15-17 gems). Some times this average will be way lower, or way higher. I know its not completely random because I will prospect 20 - 30 stacks at a time.

Also, I notice that most of the time there is one specific gem that I get a lot of. Say I work through 20 stacks of ore, I will end up with 13 talasite, and 3-4 of something else. The dominant gem changes. I don't know if it changes day to day, hour by hour, or what. But it is definitely not random.

"Wait we need to take a break after the next chain, its lightning day" Ah the memories....

No there is nothing like that in WoW. Its all purely random.

So, my question is this: is prospecting a viable way to make money? I'm a miner/BS, but I've got enough spare ore left over that I'm interested in asking a friend to prospect a bunch of it. Is it smarter economically to sell the ore by itself, or have someone prospect it all for me, and then sell the gems. On my server, an uncut blue gem goes for around 25g, and a cut blue gem goes for 30-45g.

I looked into this and was halfway through writing a guide when I realised the prices related only to my server - Aerie Peak EU. The percentages remain the same but the actual prices will be different on each server. Also, they will fluctuate over time. On AP-EU, most of the gem prices are slowly falling but Talasite is picking up after doing a Northern Rock-style freefall recently.

Anyway, what I found was that most ore is better sold than prospected, especially Thorium ore. Adamantite ore was the only one that came out better for prospecting and even then it was marginal.