Saturday 6 October 2012

Leveling Zen Master Alchemy - My Way & The Right Way

Leveling Zen Master Alchemy
I currently have 2 Alchemists - both Transmute Masters. One is my rarely played Rogue & the other is my main candidate for leveling to 90 first but whilst I'm still faffing with banks, auctions & getting to grips with all things Pandaren, I thought I'd get these two started with their farms at least.

My Leveling Method

In my usual manner, I checked the Auction House for pandaren herb prices & was pleasantly surprised by how cheap the Green Tea Leaf was, so I grabbed 18 stacks for around 490g (just 25g a stack!). I knew they were the starter herb for Alchemy & of course my main money making profession of Inscription uses them too. In doing so, I may have got slightly sidetracked from my plan to get my farm started & I started leveling my alchemy.

I dived straight in & learnt the Zen Master level & the 2 trainer taught recipes - Master Healing Potion & Master Mana Potion. Almost 2 stacks of healing potions later, I'd picked up about 10 new 'discoveries' & off I went, back to the Auction House to price up the next leveling potion. Within about 1 hour, I was at skill level 590 and had picked up a nice bunch of new recipes, including Transmute: Living Steel - yay!!!

Back to the Auction House to price up the Trillium Bar - Eeeek! no way was I paying those prices so I took my little Rogue out to start her farm. With that done, I logged into my Hunter & did exactly the same thing again! I still had a load of Green Tea Leaf left from earlier so that reduced my costs this time round. As I neared 590 skill points, the discovery for Transmute:Trillium popped up - phew! That was lucky otherwise both my girls would have been stuck until Trillium prices dropped or my Miner actually got out of Stormwind!

Again I got lucky - someone had listed Ghost Iron Bar for just 262 gold a stack or 131 gold per Trillium transmute so of course, I snagged as much as possible, having 2 alchemists waiting for it now. Just 5 transmutes later, I'd maxed my skills for my Hunter & on the very last transmute, the discovery for Living Steel popped up.

Now I know there are some folk out there who are going to hate me but my very first Transmute:Living Steel proc'ced for me -  woop woop! 2 Living Steel to sell straight away. To make you hate me even more, I've now done 3 days of Living Steel transmutes & have had a proc every day - giving me 9 Living Steels out of 6 cooldowns!

Overall, I spent 3090 gold on herbs & ghost iron bars to level both alchemists to 600. Out of the potions, elixirs & transmutes I made, I have sold 3524 gold's worth so I am already back in profit & have 7 Living Steels still to sell as well as enough Healing potions to keep my alts alive whilst they level through The Jade Forest. What I don't have yet is all the recipes so once my herbalist starts to level, I will go back & make more potions to complete the discovery process on both alts.

How I Should Have Leveled!

As I sat down to write this post, I realised I hadn't noted down everything I had done, so off I went to Kaliope's Crafting blog to look for some of the details I'd missed. What a slap head moment that was! One of the very first points she made in her Alchemy summary was

'don't learn Zen Master Alchemy straight away, just the healing & mana potion recipes'

Basically, you need to make a whole bunch of the Master Healing Potions to start learning the discoveries. Once you have made about 5 potions without a discovery, you have probably learnt all the discoveries at that level and THEN you can learn Zen Master Alchemy & continue making Master Healing Potions until the recipe goes grey. In this way, you will maximise the number of discoveries you make with the cheapest & easiest potion, giving you a wider selection of recipes to make for the rest of your leveling process.

So that's my Oops! of the week so far. I'm off to read the rest of Kaliope's profession summaries - I do not want to find a similar oops on any of my other professions, that's for sure :)

Image credit © Horia Varlan under Creative Commons licence

1 comment:

  1. If you happen to learn Mantid Elixir along the way, it's 2 Green Tea Leaves each, and has a chance at procing the trillium transmute. Even with that I have an alchemist (out of 4) with 595 Alchemy and still no Ghost Iron -> Trillium xmute but the rest have em.

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