Classic goldmaking: Alchemy deep dive

I’ve been adding a bunch of alchemy recipes to my crafting rotation and I have been doing really well with it, so let’s take a deeper look at the goldmaking opportunities with this profession. 

The crafts

There are four major categories of items you can craft with alchemy: 

1. Potions are short term consumables with instant effects
2. Elixirs are long term consumables that give some form of buff
3. Flasks are long term consumables that persist through death
4. Transmutes allow you to turn one material into another

We’ll take a look at the recipes I’ve used successfully for each group and then I’ll share my TSM settings at the end. 

Potions

The most relevant potions are the various elemental resistance potions, PvP utility potions and healing and mana potions. Potions in classic generally do not provide DPS buffs, but the utility is very useful. I’ve had great success with fire protecion, free action and lesser invis potions, with some others like swiftness bringing in some extra gold. 

Potions are a high volume market as players typically need a lot of them, so be prepared to go through a HUGE number of materials. 

Elixirs

Elixirs are the most accessible DPS increasing consumables in the game. There are also some utility elixirs for stuff like water breathing that can be useful. The best ones include Mongoose for melee, shadow power for warlocks and greater arcane for other casters. All of these recipes are tradeable. Some are sold by vendors, but you can always check the AH.

The three I mentioned first are used by the largest number of DPS classes and will likely be most relevant. I have had some success with mongoose, shadow power and water breathing. The shadow power recipe is also a great vendor flip, it is sold by among other the SW alchemy supply vendor so it is very easy to check. 
Elixirs are slighly lower in volume than potions, but you can still expect to sell and post a lot of these. 

Flasks

Flasks are the top tier consumable. The recipes drop from various dungeon bosses, but they can be traded. You have to craft the flasks at the alchemy lab in Scholomance, so bring materials and be ready to stay a while as the cast time is 10 seconds per craft. These are very expensive due to black lotus being extremely rare, but they are the cream of the crop. 
With the low wipe rate I assume a lot of players will be prefering elixirs for PvE, but PvP might be a different beast. 

Transmutes

There are three major transmutes that are relevant for goldmaking. Arcanite bars are the easiest to get, but also the lowest value one. It has a 48 hour cooldown, but the essence transmutes only have 24 hours. The other two are world drop recipes that you can buy from the AH. Life to earth and undeath to water are both very profitable. Undeath to water is the most profitable one, with the recipe selling for about 1000 gold on my realm. I bought life to earth for 130 gold, which would pay itself back in about 2 weeks of transmutes. I get about 8 gold worth of profit per day using that transmute, which is about twice what I would get from arcanite. The arcanite transmute is best sold directly as the AH cut and deposit cost will eat the profit if you sell it through the AH. 

TSM settings

The TSM group includes all the recipes in the game. I don’t recommend crafting everything, so focus on testing the recipes mentioned at the bottom of this wowhead guide. Then you just need to figure out what works and doesn’t work on your realm. Make sure you buy any recipes cheaply if you can find them. Getting the right recipes is half the battle!  

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