Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Lifebound alchemist goldmine

The PuG update:
1 tank, 4 healers, 2 melee, 3 ranged. With the speed we are killing bosses, we are holding our #16K-17K position, deep in the top 10%. And of course, permanently recruiting, just read the rules.


Update: Blizzard hotfixed it, it's no longer disenchantable! Note to self: post such things instantly with a 3-liner update in the current post, and don't wait for a hole in your posting schedule. I had this written for a week, made good gold of it and always had something better to post.

If you check the news feed of the guild, you can see several lines of someone crafted lifebound alchemist stones. It's an alchemist-only trinket, giving lot of stamina, so not really useful to anyone but tanks and definitely you can use just one. Then why did various people craft so many, that our epic crafting achievement is already 155/1500?

Because all the crafters are not only alchemists but enchanters too! The material costs of the alchemist stone is about 700-800G. The maelstrom crystal is guaranteed to drop from the disenchantment and sold for 1500+ for long, now dropping in price to the 1000-1200 region due to more and more people recognize this opportunity.

This is clearly a bad design, as it gives a certain profession combo advantage that neither has alone. If you are an alchemist and another guy is an enchanter, you can't craft a trinket and sell him. If Blizzard meant it to be a crystal source, it should be BoE, just having alchemist profession requisite to equip. If it's meant to be a profession perk like engineering head, it should be made sure to be unprofitable to mass-produce by demanding high material prices.

However as long as it stays, you can use it: check the material costs of the trinket in the AH and also crystal cost. If the difference is big, open your guild in the armory, list the roster according to professions and filter all alchemists. Open the same page in a different browser window and filter all enchanters. Find a match. Then approach this guy with materials and tell him to craft several trinkets and disenchant them all. Since he can't have more than one trinket at a time, he must disenchant his own first. As the trinket has a gem slot, you shall provide him a gem as he'll lose his current trinket's gem. Give him some crafter fee, sell the crystals, count the heap of gold.


Integrate from Deathwing US found us this classic specimen:

7 comments:

Yoco said...

It looks Blizzard was already on top of the Alchemist Stone. From today's hotfix list ( http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/1232869 ):

"Lifebound Alchemist Stones can no longer be disenchanted."

Seeing how this disenchant was suggested yesterday by one of the guides on MMO-Champion's "Guide Contest", I'm not really surprised about the quick action.

Riptor said...

Blizzard really has it in for strange hotfixes lately. It seems so over the Top how they are approaching these things. They could have just raised the Material Costs and no one out for Profit would have kept doing it (especially with the Price of Maelstrom Crystals slowly declining). Also why did they not foresee this?
It has been common practice to disenchant low cost Crafts in order to get Materials for such a long time. I think it was in Wotlk where Jewelcrafters made those Rings from scrap and then disenchanted them. In early BC, on the Server I was on at the time, Tailors crafted blue cloth Soulders/Pants, disenchanted them and sold the Shards for Profit.
And even if they didn’t know about this Maelstrom Trick, they should have known that there must be a “cheap” way to get those Crystals by Christmas. Around that time there were suddenly two or three Pages of Crystals in the AH, most Players in HC Guilds started to have Power Torrent and other Enchants with up to four Maelstrom Crystals required and yet, the prices of the Crystals started to drop slowly but surely. That was around the 3rd and 4th Cataclysm Raid ID so it was very unlikely that these Crystals came from the Raiding Guilds as they were still gearing up at that time.

Ðesolate said...

The strangest Hotfix strategy is what they did with the dungeon hc bosses. It was quite an up and down the last weeks. As Forgemaster Throngus usually he was a challenge then they nerfed him in several cases and now he's up again to be a good challenge.

Anyway it's quite sad that the flow of cheap melastrom crystal support is down now. The enchanterpets and epic enchantments were a good buisness on my server.

Malthan said...

I'm wondering if you updated your view on guild level achievements, since they announced that the exp cap will no longer be enforced on levels 23+ so there will be a race for server first, plus many guilds had problems with the xp cap not resetting (my guild had at least 3 days when we weren't able to get any exp).

Bobbins said...

The 'fix' will help reduce the demand for the rare heartblossom and cheapen even further the volatile life (and other volatiles?). The cost of maelstrom crystals will rise significantly.

So BUY any cheap maelstrom crystals and sell the herbs. But of course probably is too late now.

Markco said...

I know your pain, I used to have this happen to me for the same reasons. You write up something good and let it sit in que for a break in your posting schedule, then bam! you post it and it is already nerfed that day or the day before.

Shame really, I was so excited to see a gold tip on this blog and then mega fail lol

Anonymous said...

This was one of two profession combos in Cata. The other is engineering. Rather than go to the trouble of making nodes for a "z mote extractor" or cata replacement thereof, the new extractor just helps engineers who skin/mine/herb. So an engineer who is a blacksmith, JC, etc looses out on the engineering gathering perk entirely!

My eng/ench and eng/jc disapprove.

The most interesting question is why did Blizzard do this?

1) The designers lack the basic understanding of economics to realize what [hundred of] thousands of gold blog readers knew.

2) Blizzard does not care about professions

3) Blizzard is brilliant and it was a calculated plan to ease the beginning supply of MC. (which does not explain why it was reverted in a hotfix.)

I find #2 to be the most likely but strong arguments could be made for #1. #3 is right out.