Alchemy: Making gold on the way to 525

Today was another day spent mostly leveling professions up. I spent a great deal of time farming and buying materials intermixed with some minor dungeon runs. Today I want to focus real briefly on how I'm making some quick, easy gold before I'm maxed out on one of my alchemists.

Stuck Leveling Alchemy?

I've been pretty closely following Kaliope's Alchemy Leveling Guide these past couple of days. One of the challenges as you get later on in leveling is the split at which you can level via flasks or transmutes. Now, obviously your alchemy spec plays into this a great deal (this one is elixir), but so does your server's prices, and your other professions.

Flasks right now are simply too expensive to level on, and I'm not in the mood to farm stacks and stacks of herbs. Something like an hour of farming for 3-5 skill points isn't my idea of fun right now. On the opposite side of things, I'm hesitant to unload all my gems off as my jewelcrafter is currently in the process of leveling as well (486) and still needs those green gems for her daily quest and creating jewelry. So right now I'm a bit "stuck", all the while painfully removed from the ever valuable Transmute: Truegold ability at 525.

Transmute: Living Elements

What is a gold oriented alchemist to do in this spot? Ultimately - it's up to you. If your servers prices are right, it might be worth it to eat a short term cost to get to 525 and churn out some truegold. For me, the risk factor isn't worth it and I don't think prices are right anyway. This is where I've been turning to Transmute: Living Elements.

This is your average transmute ability on a 1 day cooldown. The nice thing about this is its versatility as well as its relatively early position in the alchemy tree (485). Taking 15 Volatile Life, you can transmute them into either the fire, water, earth, or air variety depending on where you use the transmute. The list of locations is as follows:

• Mount Hyjal: Volatile Fire
• Vashj'ir: Volatile Water
• Deepholm: Volatile Earth
• Uldum: Volatile Air

Prices will vary from server to server, but you're sure to find at least one a decent margin above volatile life, which are fairly common while herbing. Air is probably the rarest in terms of farming sources. On my server, life comes in at around 10g, while air is 35g each. That's a 25g profit per volatile, and remember we're transmuting 15 at a time. At least for me, this is a 375g/day enterprise.

This won't make you rich overnight, and it won't get you to 525 instantly either. At only one use a day, its probably not best to level off of this entirely. It will remain orange until 510 however, and in these first few days of cataclysm if you aren't willing to part with thousands of gold or hours of farming time, then this might just be the best option you have for bridging the gap.

I'm still hoping to get to 525 soon and start cashing in on truegold, which should be closer to 1000g/day in revenue, but if you aren't there yet, there's no reason not to be making gold with your alchemy cooldown today!

For those of you like me with multiple alchemists, consider this a call to get that army up and crafting. I'll be doing this tomorrow with my other two alchs, both of which are transmute specced and I'm looking forward to the results! Here's a quick list that should get you all the materials you need to hit 485 and start churning out volatiles:

• 25 cinderbloom
• 5 stormvine
• 20 azshara's veil
• 15 whiptail

That's it for today's post. What is everyone else planning to do with their alchemy armies? Are you biting the bullet and going straight for truegold? Are you leveling them all at once?