WoW Alchemy tradeskill

Mana Potions - now with fruit punch flavor!

Alchemy is a highly useful tradeskill that takes herbs and turns them into useful potions, elixirs and flasks that make adventuring life go that much smoother. Expert alchemists can also transmute various elements into different ones on a 20 hour cooldown, offering those that pursue it a generally easy and low risk way to make money with the auction house by transforming common elements into rarer ones. If you have herbalism, it's quite simple to level alchemy from nothing to grandmaster while purchasing very little. It's unlike blacksmithing, leatherworking and engineering in that way, as the items that you're creating are generally

far less material intensive than creating weapons and armor is.

The release of Wrath of the Lich King will give alchemists above skill level 50 a new permanent ability called Mixology that increases the effects of all elixirs on the character by a full 20-25% depending on the elixir and current skill level of the alchemist. This helps to make it a more attractive skill to keep on a main character, in combination with unique equipment like the Alchemist's Stone, a trinket which improves statistics and increases the effect that healing and mana potions have on the wearer by 40. Alchemists can also produce powerful metagems by taking a rare base gem and transmuting it along with a powerful primal element.

Alchemists can choose between three specializations after they get to 325 skill: Master of Potions, Master of Elixirs and Master of Transmutation. These all give significant benefits to the chosen field that the alchemist decides to pursue, but doesn't grant any special equipment like most other crafting specializations do. Instead, it allows the crafter to create between 1-4 extra items whenever they create the item type of their specialization. For example, if they specialize in potions, every time they create a healing potion they can create up to four extras while only taking the material cost of one. This can greatly increase the profitability of alchemy depending on how lucky you are - the chances of crafting four extra items is well below 1%, so it's a very rare occurrence.

Excellent alchemists can also craft flasks, which are very powerful statistic buffing elixirs that persist through death for a very long duration. Serious raiding guilds buy these in bulk, so you can often find a very good market for these. Super Mana Potions and Fel Mana Potions for hunters are also in constant demand, as raiders and others literally go through more than a dozen each in an average raid run. Make sure that you're making a profit relative to the cost of herbs on the auction house, and get to serving that market!