wondering why alchemy is a gold lost instead of given a gold gain, the changes to the AH to commodity items killed alchemy as a profession, the material cost for a phial is like 2k, but the price for the phial is like 200g, good bussiness, you are better selling the mats, we need help badly blizzard!!!
5 Likes
It’s fine if you do your own mat farming.
Also on my realm I have been selling even lower quality phials for 500+.
That’s not how it works though. If you farm mats worth 2000g and use it to make a 200g potion, it doesn’t matter that you farmed it instead of buying it. You lost 1800g.
19 Likes
I am glad someone on the forums understands business.
8 Likes
Rank 3 phials are usually profitable, but they require high inspiration.
Basically, the idea is to craft using lower rank, cheaper reagents that normally make rank 2 and rely on inspiration procs + multicraft to get enough rank 3 product to cover the costs and turn a profit. Rank 2 is a byproduct of fishing for rank 3 procs and so it’s dumped at a loss.
Thats assuming you used all 2k of mats on that one pot. Which would be insane. I hope nobody is doing that.
Otherwise you still have some of those mats left and maybe you get an inspiration proc on the next one. Now you’re making money.
Rng is rng though so probably not and you just break even and would have been better off just selling raw mats. Lol
Seems like it’s not worth the effort to bother with RNG. Just sell the mats and buy whatever you need off the auction house. I have a character with both mining and herbing, whose sole purpose is to farm gold in this manner.
2 Likes
You’d have to math it out very carefully and have enough gold to make large batches for RNG to average out.
As of last week, this strat still required having all blue profession gear, almost impeccable spec with little to no wasted KP, and running an incense to max out inspiration. For my alchemist, the break even point is about 30% inspiration with good multicraft. Too bad she’s still stuck at 26%.
1 Like
It’s not a gold loss, it’s a net gold gain but it’s somewhat obfuscated behind inspiration, multicraft, and resourcefulness. Inspiration will turn lower quality materials into top tier consumables which saves gold, multicraft will take 1 set of craft mats into multiple potions increasing yield and thus reducing cost per consumable of that batch, and resourcefulness will reduce the amounts of materials used when it procs so it also reduces cost.
It’s a matter of opinion which spread of stats will yield the best, but I think inspiration > multicraft > resourcefulness is the best priority in terms of maximizing profit. Even with the high material costs of things on the AH, I can constantly be churning heavy profits if I were so inclined to sit at the AH all day buying all the mats instead of relaxing and gathering herbs myself.
1 Like
update: alchemy is only getting worse. to many people blindly undercut just to sale something.
4 Likes
I have 175 points in Alch. Mostly potions. 38% Insp 16% multi. I have all the potion recipes. If I go clear Brackenhide hollow and spend 100k on mats I can make back 10k maybe if I dont get undercut.
4 Likes
im not even seeing that.
im phials. can rank 2 everything, 37% inspiration, 11% resourcefulness, 16% multicraft.
on a random day (i known they say to buy on the weekend sale on reset, but i wanted to see the current mat price/ to product price) i bought enough mats to make 50 corrupting rage phials.
50 awakened decay 14,500g
50 awakened frost 4,334g
100 phial rank 1 484g
450 rank 2 writhebark. 37,312g
total: 56,630g
from this i made:
32 rank 3 34,076g
93 rank 2 18,214g
total: 52,290g
from resourcefulness i did save enough mats to make 2 more crafts. but it looks like ive lost 4,430g.
i know results might vary but these are the results im seeing. i dont think it will be sustainable to expect to have to make 100+ crafts at a time to see a profit.
also my inspiration proc was low. i also made 50 crafts of glacial frost (38 rank 3), charged isolation (46 rank 3), and static empowerment (54 rank 3) however with these i still lost gold with 2 and basically broke even with with the 3rd.
2 Likes
Alchemy is just getting a nerf in DF. It happens to all profs in various expansions. It’s just alchemy’s turn this time. My S.W.A.G. is that blizzard looked at the distribution of crafts and saw too many alchemists making too much gold. I met one guy who claimed he ran 15 alts just for daily transmutes. Looks like enchanters got a (somewhat milder) nerf also.
My guess is that Alchemy is more susceptible to the wander of reagent prices across qualities, and so there are definite ‘incorrect’ builds that make it feel like a sunk cost. Personally, I’ve had some success leaning into multicraft as a way for it to feel worthwhile, sort of in the same way that multicrafting felt in BFA - more so, even. I’m seeing more alchemists lean into inspiration, which might be safer if you’re trying to push margins. Until it’s nerfed (and I hope it isn’t), multicrafting ~25 tier-3 potions from an inspiration proc on a x5 recipe feels superb.
Transmutation, on the other hand, needs serious design review. The sub-spec is an ambiguous, counterintuitive mess with limited benefit. If alchemy has truly been hard nerfed anywhere, it’s there.
Profitability is about inspiration and multi craft luck.
On phials of glacial fury you break even on mat costs with about 50% inspirations and any thing above that with multi crafts will be profit.
But if your inspiration is lower you’ll lose money on mats.
It’s a very bizarre market situation how it worked out, but as is, prices will probably end up where it’s just barely profitable with high inspiration and multi craft.
Entirely predictable though. Going all the way back to when they first added Elixir Mastery to Alchemy, the cost of flasks quickly became (cost of mats) / (1 + Mastery proc rate)… i.e. the bonus was just factored in so anybody without the bonus just couldn’t compete.
This is just a more elaborate version of that, with a more serious problem - you can’t just be immediately competitive by choosing the right Mastery, you have to eventually earn it after a lot of time-gated constant play.
It feels bad because at the end your reward is just keeping up, and you are behind until you get there. The only people this system is good for are those who got in front early by exploiting the release bugs, who got a longer than usual period of market dominance.
2 Likes
The biggest problem facing alchemy right now is that Phial of Tepid versatility is just as good if not better than all the more expensive phials. And that is all anyone is buying.
1 Like
Then sell the mats. If enough people do that the number of potions, phial etc will decrease eventually raising the price they sell for.
1 Like
the problem is that the mats prices start to drop in price badly too
Looking at the Phial effects they kinda suck. At least the versatility is semi-useful. What happened to the flasks and cauldrons that just gave you X main stat? Did they take those out or are the recipes locked behind 1% RNG drop or 30 rep somewhere? Add in 3 quality’s, the 5min cooldowns and the way potions share cooldowns with other stuff like tinkers and yeah I can see why Alchemy is tanked this expansion. From what I understand Enchanting isn’t much better.
1 Like