Alchemy leveling is total BS. The only recipes I have that I can level from are the Basic Experimentations. Guess what. My failure rate is above 50%. It’s very discouraging when every other attempt is a failure and incurs a 4 hour cool down. The attempts that do succeed, rarely result in discovering a new recipe.
This is very very discouraging and takes all the fun out it. Can you please look into lowering the failure rate or lowering the cool down. 50% failure with a 4 hour cool down is too punishing.
Dont worry. Once you eventually learn all the recipes, you will be blessed with a profession that NO ONE uses the new work order system for! So you at least have that to look forward too!
Alchemy does feel bad at the start, but there are things you can spec into to reduce your rate of failure. By the fact that you’re still using Basic Experimentation, it’s unlikely you have spec’d into one of these. Both Phial and Potion masteries have their own sub specialization that gives you advanced experimentation, and it is less likely to fail. You can easily get to this sub specialization if 1. you head out into the world and quest/gather to get some of the free knowledge points that are scattered about. Or 2. You weren’t one of the people who weirdly thought it was a good idea to try to get Potion AND Phial mastery at the same time.
After getting advanced experimentation it is pretty easy to max out your alchemy, and while you can get unlucky with them (I only ever got 1 on my alch), the courage potions that you can randomly get while experimenting also can make it go faster if you’re failing. The only mild issue I have with alchemy after playing around with for a while and maxing it out is that it seems to eat artisan’s mettle WAY faster than other professions. My alch usually sits at around 100, my leatherworker has like 1000 sitting around and nothing to really do with it.
TLDR: My suggestion would be to go out and collect some knowledge so you can get advanced experimentation. If you tried to go Potion AND Phial mastery… god help you.
I mean, they’re not going to really use the work order system for it, because almost nothing alchemy makes is bound in any way, so you can just grab it off the AH. If you’re complaining about not being able to get the weekly work order quest done, keep in mind you can send yourself personal orders from an alt to complete this. Even if you’re a 1 character Andy, you still got a free character boost from buying the xpac. So take that 60 alt to valdrakken, park it at the work order area and use it just to send yourself weekly personal work orders. This takes 5 mins to do and is how I get the quest done every week on all my characters for all my professions.
I never said it was good design, or that other ways weren’t possible. If your guild is in need of potions or phials, you could also ask them to put in a work order instead of just crafting the items. There are ways to get it done by yourself, which is what I usually do at the start of the week just to get it done, and there are ways to do it by interacting with other players. You could also post in trade chat letting people know they can put in a personal order to you if they need anything. I’ve gotten multiple leatherworking orders this way. If you’re just standing around waiting for people to put in public orders, you’re doing it wrong.
Most people that will place Alchemy work orders will highly likely make personal orders with someone they trust to make what they need at a higher quality rather than public orders which won’t guarantee anything.