Do people prefer ore or bars on the AH? I’m never sure whether to list my Copper as Ore or as a Copper Bar.
Check price of ore > Check price of bars > Compare prices > ??? > Profit
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Yah was just wondering in general. Like, do miners want ore to smelt and up their mining skill or do engineers and blacksmiths just want the bars cuz they have some other profession?
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Bars, for the most part.
Okay so smelt me stuff and auction sounds like the move.
Depends on the ore. Only a few of them are good for leveling mining. Copper for sure and then maybe gold and silver are decent ores for leveling mining.
Thorium, Dark Iron, true silver and mithril give zero mining skill ups.
One thing to note though, thorium ore is a special case as it’s required for greater stone shield potions.
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probably bars, it’s not like it’s hard to skill up mining 
Bars are cheaper to post.
Ore is more expensive to post.
Time sensitive or non miners have to buy bars.
inverse again.
Often ore and bars are listed at the same price. A non-miner has no use for ore.
Okay, cuz I have tons of ore. So maybe smelt and list it sounds like? I guess I’ll see what sells better lol
Ore can sell sometimes to newer peeps to speed up edit mining smelt leveling. if priced nicely. I’ve seen ore sellers price themselves out of more sales.
But bars are usually better priced. or later on players are going I really don’t want to be here for 200 smelts lol.
ore lets you skillup mining. bars let you craft.
we prefer bars but ore sells a hair higher in price. but less in quantity.
Combining other posts, it depends on the buying demand. As Wax noted in the first response, at the end of the day you should compare current prices, but it is true that in general prices will align with how useful the ore is compared to the bar. All the rest of these posts are just explaining some of the ‘whys’ on the variance.
People who want ore>bars typically want it for leveling mining, There are a few crafting recipes for ore, but the only notable one I can think of is the one Al mentioned (mithril can be sneaky good for cheap alch skillups for the lesser pot but that’s not going to drive the market).
Most crafting professions want bars>ore, not least because you save time in not having to smelt. Some players are double crafting, and if you don’t have alts, you may not have direct access to a smelter at all vs. begging a guildie or tipping a miner to smelt them for you, which takes time and is annoying.
If you are stockpiling to sell kits (or hold them for TBC) then generally bars are going to be preferred bc they stack to 20 where ore stacks to 10.
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At this point in time, I’d say bars for sure.
You can’t level up mining exclusively from smelting ore until TBC anyway.
Isn’t jewelcrafting going to want ore for prospecting gems?
Yeah, I considered mentioning that but it’s a bit murkier how much demand will outpace supply, esp at launch.
I think once we get a few weeks past launch, then sure, if there’s any demand at all (returning players, alts) then demand will pretty quickly outpace supply and prices should soar.
I’m sure some are already weighing this, but current ore prices suggest to me people are not (yet) buying up stocks to prospect or sit on for TBC, at least not in any volume. Mithril in particular is shockingly cheap, which shows I’m not alone in wanting to be on the sell side of managing inventory v. gold.
They both sell. Smelting takes a lot of time however. Depends how much you value your time.
Yah it can definitely be a while depending on stacks. But I’ll do it if the bars sell for more than the ore. For example, a BS just wants the bars because they have some other profession already, compared to someone who wants to buy ore to quickly level their mining.
Take notes on pricing before smelting then. All I can recommend. A lot of Enginer / Miner often have Mining as well so sometimes they want to get the mining skill up from smelting. Silver Ore for example is usually 20-50% more than the bar.