Why is alchemy an utterly bad profession right now? I think it’s even worse than engineering right now and frankly, most of the items you can create with alchemy right now is either useless or gold negative. Let’s make a deep dive into it
Utterly useless items
- Delicate Suspension of Spores - a small AoE heal usable on dead body or on yourself when dead - requires dying in a specific location to make it any useful - which is obviously rare. Its price on AH is pennies - so I belive nobody uses it + requires altar of decay to make >.< And high skill requirement to make… lol
- Potion of gusts - light movement towards direction - useless since the amount of mobility we have doesn’t excuse wasting a keybind or place on action bars for this potion. With 5 min CD…
- Residual Neural Channeling Agent - seems nice since you can contribute DPS when dead but since it shares CD with combat potions, then if you are any serious about this game, it will be on CD when you die + the damage is negligent. Also it has high skill level to make so most often you will be making rank 2
- Potion of frozen fatality - this one is nuts - on beta it was feign death in potion so you could drop combat but itwas considered too good so now it’s absolutely unimaginably useless with no practical use whatsoever - people only use it for Reclaim Concoctions. Now out of combat you can pretend to be dead for 30 mins.
- Exultant, Fervid, Somniferous Incenses - three completely useless incenses that do nothing - they are not toys, their price on AH is way below mats… it’s 3 items with no use and … a separate knowledge branch xD - why can’t it add some profession bonus like sagacious incense?
Useful in theory, useless in practice
- Phial of Charged Isolation - sounds good - get primary stat if you are away from allies but… a lot of bosses require you to stack… or if you are a melee, you will have hard time staying away from other melees. Basically a caster only phial and you might need to go out of your way to get any use out of it.
- Phial of Static Empowerment - another good in theory but current bosses and dungeon meta makes you move all the time… I don’t know if this can have any serious uptime over passive constant stat phials
- Phial of still air - after doing anything else than healing for 5 sec, your next heal heals for like 15k more - this might be theoretically good for aggressive healers but the bonus heal is so low I don’t know if it’s worth anything - the AH price suggest it’s useless
- Phial of icy preservation - 5% less dmg over 50% hp and 5% more dmg taken below - so… the price on AH suggests its useless and frankly, you don’t wanna use it in a high key as a tank. Frankly I don’t know why you would ever use that, maybe if you wanna soak some big hit, when you know you can be topped before it? Outside of some niche applications, this is useless
- Potion of Shocking Disclosure - outside first boss in Algethar Academy and revealing rogues in WM or BG - this is pretty much useless and even the uses I listed are pretty niche. It’s probably most useful useless potion but idk… I know, not everything has to be for everything but the damage should be bigger for it to be considered as a good alternative to the normal combat potions imo.
- Cauldron of the Pooka - I really don’t understand the goal of this - expensive to make, can’t be sold on AH, is worse than mage cookies and can transform you into a pet - if it was a toy, it would be fun but this?
Gold loss
- Transmute: Decay into elements - basically transforms more expensive decay into a lower amount of cheaper elements - there is no transmutation for the other way
-
Transmute: Order into elements - same as above but with Awakened Order.
The only way to make gold with the above is have a resourcefulness proc but I wouldn’t gamble on it.
in Shadowlands we had weapon oils - now we lost that and it was given to scribes.
We can’t transmute pets anymore.
We don’t make a single toy, unlike many other profession.
And the biggest slap in the face is that the best potion recipe comes from a raid drop only and not only it is super rare (Clearing the raid every week - saw only 2 drop), it’s also super expensive if it ever appears on AH, and since work orders for it see 200-300 gold… you are not making your money back any time soon.
The only good thing for alchemists is the 1,5h phial but with low phial costs it’s pretty irrelevant (you can buy good type rank 2 phials for 30-50 gold right now and rank 3 versa phial is like 70g).
I’m so disappointed with alchemy and we’re not really getting anything good in 10.1 either. Except small QoL - we’ll be able to create our own altar of decay LOL
What would I like to have changed in alchemy?
- Reduce mettle cost for phial/potion experimentation - the only fun thing is this RNG phial/potion creation but it costs stupid amount of mettle for random results
- Reduce material cost of the most useless items so they will at least be cheap to make. Some of the useless things listed above require two awakened elements to make per batch!
- Add pet transmutation - like in the past - a weekly cooldown - no need for new pets - just put some old expac less common pets you could make
- Add elements into decay/order transmutation - which will probably be still money loss but I don’t know why it’s not a thing at the moment.
- Rousing ire transmutation - why is it not a thing - people who don’t want war mode could get easier access to the resource (sans AH)
- Add more sources for the Ultimate Power potion recipe - maybe high M+ or at least normal/LFR raid… The current situation is awful.
- Add at least 1 alchemy toy. I don’t care how stupid - maybe change your character color to a random one for 10 min.
