Bubble, Boil and Trouble

So I'm leveling up my priest's alchemy profession, and it occurs to me, back in Burning Crusade we had the ability to specialize our alchemy with either potion mastery, elixir mastery, or transmute mastery.

What was involved was doing a special (expensive) quest for an alchemy master, and then you would have a chance every time you used your alchemy for that area of mastery to create additional product without requiring any additional ingredients. Depending on the mastery, it usually mean 15-25% extra stuff produced using the same ingredients.

So at level 74 I ventured back through the portal to Outland and before hunting down the master of my choice, stopped at wowwiki to do a little reading on the quests. I'm glad I did, because not only do these quest requirements still exist, they're still a hurdle.

Transmute Mastery. This one is probably the easiest to solo (which I'm glad to hear, since it's the one I chose) and it requires talking to a questgiver in Netherstorm. All he wants you to do is provide 4 Primal Mights and bam, you're a master. No one uses primal might anymore, so if you head to Shattrath the arrakoa alchemist guy will probably have the recipe waiting for you, and then you just need to farm all the primals to make the mights, transmute them to primal might, and turn it in. For primal mana, I suggest doing the old L70 daily quest in the consortium area of blade's edge that makes all the mana wyrms visible - you can farm them until you get all the primals you want, and then turn in the quest too.

Potion Mastery. Somewhere between L70 and L80 you will get powerful enough to head into the Botanica in netherstorm and kill High Botanist Freywinn by yourself. Until then, good luck finding a group, and you'll need to kill him and return his book - along with a bunch of potions - to become a potion master.

Elixir Master. And the reason I chose Transmute Master is because I knew it would be almost impossible to get a group for Black Morass these days. To master in elixirs you need to travel to black morass in the caverns of time and get 10 drops off the rift lords and rift keepers in there. Some classes will be able to solo this at 80, some will not. Adding to the difficulty, you still can't even enter the black morass until you've done the durnholde keep instance and turned in that quest. Also, you'll need to bring 15 elixirs with you when you turn in the mastery quest. Ugh.

There is one small saving throw however. If you absolutely need to be an elixir master and can't possibly get a group together to jump through the hoops, you can do one of the other mastery quests and then switch, for a fee of 150 gold.

(That's it? 150g?)

Yeah, 150g isn't worth what it used to be, eh? Apparently if you complete a mastery quest in one area you can drop it and learn another by just paying gold and switching, which is pretty awesome. So if you're headed in one of these directions, probably the time-saving one is to go transmute, then visit the other trainer and just pay to switch.

If you live on a high-pop server this could possibly be done very quickly too, since they removed the cooldown for transmuting primal might in patch 3.0.2. You might be able to find all the primals (and maybe even the primal might recipe) in the auction house, learn it, craft them up, and turn it all in, then pay and switch, and be done immediately.

That's just a little bit too lazy for me. I'm at least going to farm for my own primals.