Too late to build an army of Alchemists?

[Boylston]

I've been making money in WotLK and Cata with a couple of focused tradeskillers as well as some arbitrage on the AH. It's been a long time since I've sold transmutes much, but I was thinking about possibly starting up with some easy once/day transmute sales on my main team.

I have up to 18 level 80 characters I could eventually expand to, but I think I might start small and do my 4xShaman team and possibly another 5x team.

So, the question is: Am I too late to start the Transmute sales mania? Miss out on all the good $$ potential? Or will it be OK for a while, you think?

Curious to hear your thoughts...

[Bigfish]

I don't imagine the money potential is going anywhere anytime soon. Should be profitable for some time.

[ZooljinX]

Truegold is a pain in the ass to get mats for for 10+ chars every day so much clicking! I miss gems :(

[Boylston]

Truegold is a pain in the ass to get mats for for 10+ chars every day so much clicking! I miss gems :(

I think I would centralize all mats buying on one AH character. Just mail out supplies to everyone and mail back truegold to be listed by same seller.

[olibri1]

I had 2 transmuters in wotlk and I made lots of money on this throughout the xpac.

[Ishar]

I just leveled my alchemists up to the transmute: liviing elements or whatever recipe it is. pulls in pretty decent profit, considering I have like 18 alchemists and once or so a day I fly them over to uldum and make a ton of air; i'd highly recomend it. Granted, I was at 450 from the epic gem craze in wrath, but still,taking 18 chars from 450 to the first xmute paid for itself in like 2 days.

[Boylston]

I just leveled my alchemists up to the transmute: liviing elements or whatever recipe it is. pulls in pretty decent profit, considering I have like 18 alchemists and once or so a day I fly them over to uldum and make a ton of air; i'd highly recomend it. Granted, I was at 450 from the epic gem craze in wrath, but still,taking 18 chars from 450 to the first xmute paid for itself in like 2 days.

That's encouraging.

Starting from scratch on a few guys hasn't been that bad, with the exception of the Oily Blackmouth / Firefin Snapper set of recipes. Goldthorn is in short supply as well... argh

[birdbleed]

Oily Blackmouth / Firefin Snapper

Stranglekelp might be an alternative. Chances are though, it's in just as limited a supply. I'm stuck on this part too on a few toons because I don't feel like farming it myself and there's very little on the AH.

[Thyristor]

The transmute living -> air is a net 400 gold (up to x3 if the supply is short) per char profit alone on my server exluding any transmute master procs.

Herbalism combined with elixir mastery and flask making alone is earning me around 1500g an hour atm though so the gold income is nice even though I don't box any more.

[Ishar]

yeah. my guild bank has 6 tabs full of various alchemy mats. whee. (well, whatever the max number of tabs were prior to the guild level additions...). The reason is that for most of wrath I just bought alchemy mats in bulk whenever they were available out of my epic xmtues, because when leveling my initial teams i always had trouble with mats. The stranglekelp/firefin range is probably the worst, although goldthorn is notoriously bad. Honestly, any of them can be incredibly annoying when there are none on the ah. Use auctioneer and make a snatch list of all the mats that you think are remotely rare (I did this for all the mats) and just buy them when you see them relatively economically priced. (I did it with my centralized AH Buyer seller character that mails everything to everyone.) I was in the process of leveling up 30 or so alchemists but about half of them never got past 60 or so cause I got sick of instance-boosting and quit in the middle, but I still have all the mats. I'll get back to that project eventually, but really that or farming is your only option. Farming with a druid might not be so bad actually, given flying in old world...

Ya know, someone should make an addon for bulk mailing things for boxers hehe. Funnel all non-equipment to a specified character, and configurable send 10 X,5y,3z to characters a,b,c,d. I actually hard coded some stuff for epic gems in wrath, but have neither the time nor inclination to take it to the level that a general release would entail. I had a deal going with a friend who was cutting gems where I would COD him gems for slightly under market value. Being the lazy SOB that I am, i automated the 'add gems to mail window and set the cod price' bit. Ultimately expanded that into automating the distribute mats bit...but that code is rather convoluted and hackish...hehe.

I in no way endorse the use of this file, it is basically functional at this point, tho as I said names and things are hardcoded. A lot of leftover stuff from wrath too, for my personal use I sort of hacked in the cata stuff=p. Isn't hard coding fun?
Lua (http://codgems.googlecode.com/svn-history/r2/trunk/COD.lua)file / Repo (http://code.google.com/p/codgems/source/browse/trunk/?r=2)

Mostly linking it cause you mentioned buying/selling centrally. Theres also some other misc stuff in there...pretty much "Ishar experiments with lua" file, lol.

Edit: Just wanted to clarify that I'm including the file incase anyone feels handy or inspired to do something similar to what I did. By all means grab the file and hack it to suit your characters =p I provide zero support, though, lol.

[Tonuss]

Gah, goldthorn. *shudder*

Most old-world resources have been shuffled and re-ordered and they're often very easy to find in pretty large numbers. I am only leveling one of each profession for now so that I can be relatively self-sufficient, and I decided to level up alchemy on one of my characters. Gathering the mats myself wasn't bad except for two items: bruiseweed and goldthorn. Goldthorn seemed to be particularly sparse. Once I got past goldthorn it was a breeze. Stuff like sungrass, kadghar's whisker, blindweed and sorrowmoss are available in large quantities in the right zones, and before you know it you've got a bagful.

Then again I was leveling alch on one character, not 5 as I had planned some time back. :o