Today I will show you how you can use TSM to apply a slightly different approach to alchemy. This might be the difference between making a profit or not making a profit on rank 3 flasks.
Rank 3 procs and TSM
The nature of alchemy with rank 3 recipes giving a random extra yield of flasks or potions means that it is not straight forward to setup TSM to sell your items.
Setting the right crafting cost and the right profit calculation in the crafting window both require you to do some extra manipulation of the pricing strings you use.
Cut-throat competition
The competition in alchemy is usually very high. More competition will generally always lead to lower profits, so our goal is not too compete with everyone. The method I will outline and show you how to apply in this post is something I have used to great success throughout Legion. I have not tested it in BfA as I do not have alchemy at 120 however.
How do you eliminate competition
The easiest way to eliminate or reduce the competition is to focus on a different set of customers. The main way you can do this with flasks in particular is by posting in other stack sizes than others. Flasks can be sold in stacks between 1 and 20. The most common stack size by far is stacks of 1, followed by the “round” stack sizes: 5, 10 and 20.
I have typically focused on selling in stacks of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 to target a wide variety of buyers that are looking for flasks for tonights raid. They will often be in a hurry and are willing to spend 20-30% more per flask to limit themselves to 1 click on the auction house.
By doing this I could post flasks at prices quite a bit higher than the 1-stack auctions as I did not compete with them.
Implementing this in TSM
To implement this in TSM the main trick is to make operations that have checked the box to match stack size pricing. This ensures you only compete with other auctions of the exact same stack size.
We will then set the minimum price based on our crafting cost which includes the expected number of average extra procs from the rank 3 recipe.
This is quite easy to do as you can just divide crafting by the expected proc rate which is between 1.4 and 1.5. To get a minimum price that ensures a 20% profit margin we will use 120%crafting/1.4. using 1.4 will slightly overestimate the crafting cost to ensure a decent profit margin. If your sales are too low you can experiment with decreasing the percentage of increasing the divisor to 1.45 or 1.5.
Setting up profit calculations
By using a crafting operation you can change the default craft value method in TSM so the profit column in your crafting window includes the expected proc rate. You can do so by overriding the default craft value in a crafting operation that you apply to the group.
I set it to 1.5*dbmarket. This is purely cosmetic but as you can see by comparing the two screenshots it has a large effect on the profitability of flask crafting.
Using the settings
The alchemy market is quite different from realm to realm, so you should definitely experiment with different stack sizes. Depending on your realm, there may be a different niche in terms of stack sizes than what my setup includes. It is quite easy to change the stack size on the auctioning operations.
You can also change the pricing if you’re sale rate is too low. I would not go below 115%crafting/1.5 though as at that point you are getting way too close to break-even.
Where to put 115%crafting/1.5 on TSM interface
as on screenshot it only shows that u only multiplied by 1.5 and not the
120%
As your minimum auctioning price