Shadowlands goldmaking: Alchemy Crafter’s marks

Crafter’s mark of the Chained Isle gear started crashing in price on my realm last week, and I found the reason. With alchemy you can craft the items very cheaply, granting you a huge competitive advantage!

When someone crashes your market

Someone crashed the market for jewelcrafting Chained Isle gear from about 4500 gold per ring or necklace down to 2800 gold. My initial reaction was that they were making some kind of mistake, but I eventually realized that they were sourcing their crafter’s marks significantly cheaper than me. Alchemy is incredibly cheap apparently, and I could not compete, as my crafting cost was about 3500 gold.

Re-checking the costs

I did some analysis on the crafting costs of the various crafter’s marks before 9.1 launched to try to look at what profession combinations made the most sense for those markets. Clearly I should have done this more regulaly to realize the potential in swapping to alchemy, but I did not. It’s time to do so now though, let’s check all the mark recipes and see how important alchemy is.

I used the region market value for EU in these calculations. That means they will not be completely correct for your realm. You should definitely check the math on your own realm to be sure. The pricing for engineering is also overvalued as I used the region market value of the intermediate materials, and you can likely craft those cheaper than that, so It may be an option.

Crafter’s mark 3

For Crafter’s mark 3 Alchemy is the cheapest one, but the difference is not too large to the second best. Now I haven’t done CM3 gear in a while, so I don’t know how significant the savings of 100g relative to the second cheapest mark is. For leatherworking and tailoring however things look bleak as those marks are both extremely expensive. To really get some bang for your buck on cm3 gear you will want 3 crafters so you can have alchemy/tailoring, alchemy/LW and then BS/JC on the last one.

Chained Isle

For Crafter’s mark of the Chained Isle the numbers are more uneven. Alchemy clocks in a full 1300 gold lower than the second cheapest. This means you are unlikely to be profitable for most items unless you have alchemy marks. Some very popular stat variants might work out with missives even without alchemy, but outside of that you really want to run alchemy. This means either having multiple crafters or having one crafter where you keep alchemy and rotate through the armor professions, leveling them as needed. You should be able to level them fairly cheaply, but if you go the rotational way you want to do very large crafting sessions and store all the items in a guild bank.

Race to the bottom

The race to the bottom is on on my realm and I will have to find a way to get alchemy marks if I want to keep making gold with Chained Isle gear. This niche has been incredibly profitable for me, so the situation sucks a bit, as I can’t easily swap my crafters over as I have legendary recipes or other hard to get ones on all 3 of my character’s that are tier 4 with the archivist codex.

If you want to level up your gold making come join me on Patreon and get access to awesome rewards like Early Access to all my posts. 

Have a question or a thought? Leave it here:

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.