Monday, January 26, 2015

Who Doesn't Love a Good Alchemist Army?

Since I gave up on Alchemy being worth a damn, well, most every profession for that matter...

Just kidding, everything is worth having.  Some moreso than others.  My breakdown across my characters right now:

Engineer - 2
Blacksmith -4
Tailor - 4
Leatherworking - 5
Enchanting - 11
Jewelcrafter - 6
Inscription - 2
Double-Gatherer - 1, yes a Tauren Druid

and....

Alchemy - 8

3 of them have been powerleveled since the 6.1 announcement, because cooldowns.  The logic being that if they aren't busy making bloods, they'll be busy transmuting elements, and at the very least crafting catalysts every single day.

Let's do the math here.

Alchemy is by far the easiest profession in the whole damned game to level, regardless of racial.
Alchemy produces 10 catalysts from the daily cooldown.
Alchemy produces 6 catalysts from workorders per day, double that with the follower.
Alchemy's powerleveling produces items that are readily purchased for full market value plus profit every single day of the week (on my server, if not on yours then I'm sorry for your loss).
Since Draenor's removal of the stupid flask procs, the profession is again profitable.
It's the only profession where you could stockpile 3000 of each item and not be considered stupid for doing so.

QED - Alchemy is one of the top professions in the game, again.  Back in Classic, this was THE profession to level because you were stacking every single elixir in raids.  It is nice to see since it's been basically screwed up since Tier 6 of The Burning Crusade.  By screwed, I mean it was only good for one thing.  Now it's essentially coming back to where all 3 disciplines of the profession are actually worth crafting again, just like the good ol' days where you made potions and flasks for raiding, and transmuted items on cooldown.

For those keeping up with the news, we have new transmutes in the works, and I'm happy for it.  Finally, the game is released in it's entirely, and not like some group project that didn't get finished on time.  Sorry Blizzard, but the game's professions felt unfinished.  I know, interns.


We haven't seen the cooldown on this (if there is one), and what makes me a little nervous about plunging head-long into this glorious change is so deep seeded and involves years of getting fucked over by our host.  Reason?  Well two.

1)  Dupers have been screwing this item up for weeks now and Blizzard has done jack and shit about it.  How hard is it to answer a report, then track what the character was doing, or follow the chain of ownership of the items and review the logs and close the loophole?  It must require elite skills to review these logs, better than anything the dipshits managing the show will throw money at.  I would guess they're too busy having meetings about upcoming fart and poop jokes in the next expansion.

How hard is it to spot them?  It must be extremely hard, because they usually sit in Org on level 1's for days spamming SB's in batches of 100.  Sure, I did some business with them because I'm forced to if I don't want my SB's to get screwed in value and these dupe events will usually screw the price of bloods for a week or more.  Raid quality armor crafting has always suffered when these guys make an appearance.

People don't think about this - their costs are zero.  You cannot compete with them.  They can ride the value of an item all the way to zero if they wish.  Of course they won't, but they'll contribute heavily because this is how they eat in whatever backwater country they live in.

And as always, if you don't believe in dupes, then fuck you and the Easter Bunny you rode in on.  Hacked accounts, bots, and overzealous farmers are bullshit lies, these are outright hackers subverting the game's code on throwaway and invisible accounts.   Try /who on a mass seller if you see one and see if they even show up, pretty soon you'll get the drift.

2) Alchemy will allow you to collect a maximum of 154 Cats per week without any rush orders (which are nothing more than another daily CD at max skill).  So someone like me will be making 1,232 per week.  Half of which will go to flasks, the other half probably ending up as bloods.  The cost to make each catalyst will still be attached to the value of Frostweed and Blackrock Ore, both of which will probably get a small bump from all of this.

So let's say everyone dusts off their alchemists or rerolls them after taking Blizzard's name in vain for making them do something other than alchemy (perish the thought), and you'll get thousands of players making catalysts every single day.  Having a rather extensive knowledge of flask crafting this expansion, there's going to be a flood.  It wouldn't surprise me to see flasks either take a huge hit from the glut of catalysts available or rise in value tremendously because the cooldown to make the bloods never goes live.  I'm guessing the latter, because everyone is either going to grow the shit out of frostweed in their gardens putting extreme pressure on the price of other herbs.  If people do not grow it, then they'll have to buy it, which means others will see that selling frostweed will be more profitable than selling catalysts (or waiting around for 50 cats to stack).

The price of bloods versus the price of catalysts is a huge concern of mine.  Part of me hopes the price collapses in these so the hacking gold farming dupers all need to kill themselves, but I know that market pressure will push it to something reasonable.  Neglecting the value of Crescent Oils:

700/50 = 14g
600/50 = 12g
500/50 = 10g
400/50 = 8g
300/50 = 6g
200/50 = 4g

You get the idea I hope.  This is the cost you have to beat to craft one Alchemical Catalyst at a profit given pricing of Savage Blood.  Currently 20 Frostweeds and 10 Blackrock Ore will net you 10 cats, meaning that the cost of Frostweed and Blackrock Ore MUST be proportional, or else people will be operating at a loss.  I know the AH audience is not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, but roll with me here.  If Frostweed today costs 2g per and BRO costs 75s per, then it's 47.5g per 10 Catalysts at 700 skill.  1 Catalyst would cost 4.75 gold to make, which means that there's a floor in this scenario of roughly 250g before AH fees.  Remember that there IS NO TRANSMUTE PROC, can't believe people still believe there are.

Now, how low can we go?  Well, I farmed it so it's free!  Farmers will not do this level of accounting, so as long as their crap is selling and they can make more free herbs and ore from level 3 gardens and mines that cost them over 5000g each to build, then it's all good, right!?  Everybody in the pool!  I'm putting on my stupid hat here to imagine what's going to happen, because this is what usually happens.  What I'm describing here is a total crash in the price of these, regardless of a cooldown.

If Scenario:Stupid comes to fruition, then I can almost guarantee that the next mass duped item will be Temporal Crystals, because those things are still competitive in price with Savage Bloods on my server and they require as many materials to craft weapon enchants which everyone needs.  Upgrading epics at this point is just a luxury, whereas enchanting your weapon with something besides a bleed is required reading if you're doing any sort of serious raiding.

Time will tell, I'm normally an optimist but with professions and the release of Attack of the Interns this expansion, I really have gotten good at playing it by ear.

This is Fun

I used to always post weekly results in my blog showing you my sales volume for the week.  This last week I did some massive spreadsheeting (not a word) and found that my profitability was actually an average of 48% on everything that I've been selling outside of armors, which still carry ROIs in the 1000+% range.  Additionally, I've discovered 2 new markets this last week, still not participating in inScrubption.  Below are my numbers from my primary posting account, my other account sells the armors so it doesn't show here, but they were only 80k.

As always, the top number is the total sales revenue for 7 days and the bottom is the daily from TSM.  If I had a goal to make a million gold per month, that would require 33,333g per day in profit.  If I'm sitting at 48%, just using ballpark numbers here, I'm at 38,196g per day profit.  Sure beats the shit out of dailies.


Having a blast, wish you were here!


Thanks for stopping in!


No comments:

Post a Comment

Remember to keep your comments pithy, they will be posted after approval!