Alchemy has had a varied story as a goldmaking profession, with fortunes being made at times as well as at times being incredibly hard to break into. Let’s see what Blizzard has in store for us in The War Within!
Experimentation is back
Like in Dragonflight experimentation is how you will learn most of the recipes. This time around you use catalysts from breaking down items alongside a herb type. There are multiple types of experimentation with differences in the chance of learning recipes or the experiment blowing up.
Gear
The alchemist stone epic trinket is making it’s return in The War Within. The trinket has versatility as well as a sizeable main stat proc. It could be good, but it could also end up being mostly pointless.
Flasks and phials
Flasks are returning, with less wild effects than the phials of Dragonflight. Players will still flock to whatever sims highest, and I expect only the quality 3 crafts to have a real market. Skill is found a lot of places around the skill tree, and you will rely on concentration for max quality for quite a while, which will help profits be more easily attainable. There’s also profession Phials, which will have a market, they were quite profitable and useful in Dragonflight, but ultimately a much lower price ceiling as they only make sense if they make you a profit.
Potions
Potions are similar to flasks. You unlock the recipes through experimentation primarily. There are two main potions for damage in the Tempered potion which gives secondaries and the Unwavering Focus which is a pure single target option. They both use Arathor’s Spear and Mycobloom, so focusing on those herbs for experimentation, as well as those herb nodes to get the required skill for max quality.
Transmutation
Transmutation has been changed quite significantly in The War Within. You experiment using thaumaturgy to break down 20 materials at a time into transmutagens. This also has a chance of teaching you a new recipe. There are three uncommon transmutagen types, alongside the rare Gleaming Transmutagen. You can us uncommon transmutagens to transmute into each other or materials on a shared cooldown. The Gleaming transmutagen can be used to transmute random materials on a cooldown, or to create the epic gem Blasphemite used by Jewelcrafters. Not sure if this can also be prospected or not, but it requires 80 Gleaming transmutagen, and you get 1 for every 20 materials you destroy with thaumaturgy, so the cost is fairly high.
The various material dailies give a huge amount of gleaming transmutagen, and I expect the best usage here is to craft the Blasphemites.