Today we will focus on how youc an utilize transmutes to make gold with Alchemy in Cata Classic. While the raid is out now and potions and flasks may be coming online, but transmutes is still my preferred way to utilize Alchemy.
Daily cooldowns
One part of alchemy are the daily cooldowns. You can do one daily cooldown, and there are multiple different choices to go for. The top two in Cata is either Living Elements, which turns 15 volatile life into 15 of a nother volatile or the truegold transmute for expensive gear. If your alchemist is leveled up you can guarantee that living elements gives you volatile air by being in Uldum. this is on most realms the best daily cooldown by a significant margin. If you can do this. Living elements on it’s own is still good, and a lot cheaper than truegold, which can be an advantage. Truegold does sell really quickly, as does the volatiles so you will get your gold back pretty much instantly regardless.
Alt armies
The nature of daily cooldowns makes alt armies very interesting, and alchemy is a top pick for these. If you have spare characters at 75, leveling alchemy to 490 for the volatile transmute will give you a guaranteed easy profit every day, but leveling can be expensive.
Colored gems
In Cata you can also transmute 3 of an uncommon gem and 3 of a herb to get a rare gem of the same type. This can be a good way to generate gems, particularly the red ones, as they are the most valuable. Generally speaking I expect this will only be really good if you can also cut the gems, but if you can do that it can be a great way to generate red gems. I am personally seeing about 40-50 gold per gem profit usually for Brilliant rubies compared to the cost of transmuting one.
Meta gem
The meta gem transmute requires 3 of every uncommon gem, and will yield two meta gems. I find that generally the profit margin is not high enough here, but your realm could be different. Uncommon gems have been a little expensive so far due to leveling professions, but I expect that will change as we see more of the value shift into rares. Either way this transmute will probably rely on you having meta gem recipes to make gold.
transmute life: random (move all chars to uldum) = all air, was exceptionally profitable first week for me with 6 transmute masters. 15g cost turned into easily 15-30 air which was like 80g a pop. Even at base it was generating around 7k daily.
it’s tanked now with the price of volatiles but was less captial intensive than truegold. (started 6k and now up to 100k)