Ualaa and his Amazing Alchemy Guide

[Bubba]

Auctioneer has a snipe capale built in, never used it but my understanding it does this automatically. But buying and selling on teh AH is too time consuming, not fun and you could easily lose your shirt if you dont pay attention. I have a hard enough time buying disenchantables at a reasonable price. Of course I am stingy.

[Ualaa]

The snipe capability is dependent on having a toon at the auctioneer, and running the addon with the auction house open.

If you restrict the movement of items across the neutral auction house -- to times when there is physically no one but your toons there, then having your auctions sniped is impossible.

I have a team of otherwise unused toons, whose only purpose is to transfer things across to the opposite faction.





Interestingly enough, talking with the guy who agreed to match prices with me, if either of us were the lowest auction price on a given gem... He would be very interested in the bulk purchase of uncut epic gems.

On my server, cutting gems adds 30-40g to their value, so I would lose that much per gem. Also, chances are, with a bulk purchase he might want a bit of a discount. We haven't worked out details yet, but he could be making 50g a gem. And then with my AH toon not selling gems, there is one less person listing 60+ gems a day.

However, cut gems won't stack, so inventory becomes an issue. And then there is watching the auction house and needing to undercut people who undercut me. Selling uncut gems removes both of these headaches. And I'd still be making in the neighborhood of 125g per gem, depending on the type, with no hassles. Even at 100g per gem, that's 3k gold a day just for spending 5 minutes cutting gems and then mailing COD.

[Bubba]

The nice thing about rogues is they can be unseen for a long time, but it would be a lot of trouble. I just like to think of creative solutions to a problem. One nice thing about the AH is they send the usold items via mail. I find the mail system a great temp storage for 30c. I wonder how many items the mail will store though.

[TheMuffinMan]

Umm... At least 712 by the number of items I have in the Mailbox right now

[Ualaa]

I found a guy who is interested in making bulk purchases of gems. Mail to him COD, 125g per gem.

He's interested in everything except Cardinal Rubies, which have a high sale price but cost a lot of mats don't sell for that much more then the uncut gem. Not a good gem to make a profit on either the transmute or the cutting, even if they sell for the most.

Basically, produce all of whatever type of gem he wants for that day, which is rather easy.

He said he's willing to be as many as I can produce. I let him know I'm a boxer, and will have 30 odd toons shortly (up to 12 now).

With bulk purchases of the transmute mats, that works out to a little over 100g profit per alchemist. Which is 1200+ at the moment, and will eventually be 3000+ or more with the transmute spec procs, which long term seem to be 15% extra gems.

Ten minutes of transmutes, and then mailing gems COD will sure beat dailies for gold. Plus, if gold is ever an issue for anything, dailies are still an option for supplemental income.

It is less profit then cutting the gems myself. But then I don't need to manage inventory, and don't need to mess around with AH sales at all to ensure I constantly undercut my competition. All in all, that seems a fair trade.

[Bubba]

Hmmm, the time involved with logging in and out could be a hassle. So what is the output in gems per toon? Your particulars and explanations seem to leave this out or obscure the details. Im a spreadsheet number cruncher kind of guy. IE each toon makes 10 gems per day at x cost of mats and sells them at y making z profit. Sounds like an interesting plan.

[Ualaa]

I did up a spreadsheet, where I input the current cheapest price of the various materials for the transmutes.

I also do a 14 day trend, the actual price of the cheapest listed gem of each type.

The formula takes the average sale price for each gem (over the last 14 days), multiplies this by 0.95 (to account for the AH cut on sales), and then subtracts the cost of the materials.

That gets the profit for each type of transmute, assuming it sells on one listing. Each 12 hour auction costs a little under 2 gold, which is refunded if the gem sells but is lost if the gem does not sell.

You can do a single transmute per toon, once every 20 hours. This is basically one transmute per day per toon. Long-term, transmute specialization averages 15% additional gems over time. I currently have 12 alchemists, which means I can output 13.8 (on average, long-term) gems per day.

Looking at my current numbers, gems range from 100 to 200 gold profit, after the material cost. Most of the Cardinal Ruby cuts are in the low 100's range, with other gems ranging from 140 to 180 gold profit for the most part.

If you are willing to stockpile uncut gems on your AH toon (preferably your Jewelcrafting toon), and cut gems as required to always have one of each cut your JC toon knows on the AH at any time, I figure you could make 150g per toon per day. That is subject to gems selling on relatively few listings, and not being undercut too often or by large amounts.

I've started to sell the gems to my warcraft business partner, instead of listing them against him. It is a win-win relationship, as he gets to sell the 30-35 gems I will be producing per day, rather then compete against my prices or split sales on each gem type. And at 125g per gem, I'm essentially making 100g profit per gem produced and without the hassle of maintaining inventory or dealing with the AH. I'm trading away 50-75g profit per gem, for not having to deal with the hassle end of the business.

In IS Boxer, I have my teams divided into character sets. I right click on the IS icon in the taskbar and choose to launch the first team. When done, camp them out. At character select, use IS to launch the next set which doesn't take long as I'm already most of the way into the game; when its on the correct characters, press enter. Rinse and repeat for each team (eventually 7) which transmutes gems. Then trade gems (via macro + mouse broadcasting the accept trade button click), to the toon on each team who is on the same account as my AH toon for the instant mail transfer. Then COD the stack of gems over, and periodically replenish the transmute mats.

Easily under 15 minutes a day.

[Bubba]

Now the fun question what is the purpose of the wad of cash? If there is no purpose then its next to useless. Not that 3500g a day is useless but there are only so many toys and baubles one can buy.

[Ualaa]

At the moment, I have epic flying on my main PvE team, my second and third PvE teams (which just do dailies), and enough gold saved for my Feral Druid team (alliance side PvP) to buy epic flying. Horde side, I'm sitting at about 15k now, with only a single team (currently at 22nd, for horde side PvP).

I'll be leveling Hunters, Priests (left over from RAF) and Death Knights (because they start at 55th) purely for additional toons to do transmutes. I wouldn't mind faster flyers on these teams, but its not an essential thing.

The early goal is epic flying on every team that I'll play actively for a given amount of time. I'd also like to have enough saved, for my alchemists to purchase the new herbs of Cataclysm and reach whatever the maximum skill level is, in a short period of time. This, just to maintain the transmutes and the income source.

After that, there will be a certain number of items which are BoE. The majority of high end gear is BoP, but some of it is BoE. It is nice to be able to equip high-end raid gear, the sort that boxers rarely have across their teams on a lot of your toons. A lot of gold gets you the freedom to do this kind of thing.

You'll reach a point where more gold doesn't really get you anything... but it's nice to be there. Currently, I'm not there. The time it takes to do transmutes is relatively minor for the return from the transmutes. Dailies, while an easy source of income, aren't nearly as quick. I cannot see myself spending 3-4 hours a day, doing dailies on 3-4 teams, once the gold saturation point is reached. I could see myself spending 15 minutes a day on the transmute process, when in the same situation. You never know when the next gold sink will come into play. 5000g for epic flying was a shocker, in Burning Crusades. I've got five teams I'd like to keep at maximum level, and they'll all want to purchase whatever the gold dump of the expansion is.

[Bubba]

Ualaa I have changed severs a few times because I had too much gold and it became pretty much meaningless which is why I asked the question. As in RL money is pointless without something to spend it on. Afetr you reach 216K gold or so on on toon the game, at least for me, lost its luster. Thats when I statrted to do every quest in the game as a diversion.

I really prefer role playing but even in the role playing realms hardly anyone does it.

I even have this great addon called speak n spell which says things ,you can program events, when you perform actions. It is something to spice the game up.

To my way of thinking end game is kinda boring after a while.