Making Money: Transmutes

Just like every profession, there are some recipes that are not worth the gold or time required to obtain them. This is especially true of transmutes, because (depending on your server) only transmutes in certain directions will actually increase the value of the initial primal or other reagent.

In this diagram, the transmutes between Life to Earth, Earth to Water and (maybe) Fire to Mana increase the value of the original primal (at least on my server). The biggest difference being Earth to Water. You should take a look at your own server and see where the biggest step-up in transmutes exists. With that information, you can spend your time grinding rep or farming mobs for the transmutes and motes that you really need. The transmute of Earth to Water is cheap, as Primal Earth sells for around 3g each.

A basic rundown of each transmute, potential profit and how to acquire the recipe. Lastly, some alternative methods of gathering primals:

Reagent	Product	Gain (g)	Recipe Acquired
Life	Earth	0-2	Discovery
Earth	Water	17.5	Sporregor
Water	Air	0	Cenarion Expedition
Air	Fire	0	Sha'tar
Water	Shadow	0	Discovery
Shadow	Water	0	Discovery
Fire	Mana	0	Discovery
Mana	Fire	0	Discovery
Fire	Earth	-17.5	Mag'har/Kurenei
Earth	Life	-2	Discovery
E/W/A/F/M	Might	0-125	Vendor
Miner	Earth	4	n/a
Herbalist	Life	4	n/a
Fishing	Water	17.5	n/a
Engineer	M/S/A	17.5	Quest: Zapthrottle

Returns from transmuting Earth to Water are about 270g more than you would receive without mastery for every 100 transmutes.

Math:
0.15 chance of an extra 1, 2, 3, 4 products (unconfirmed)
So, average products per transmute= 0.15 * 1.5 + 1 = 1.225 products/transmute
Where "1.5"= weighted average of multiple products. The usual proc is for 1 extra, I have only seen more than 1 extra occur once- so only 1.5 per extra proc.

This is not an impressive money maker, but if you get a proc on Primal Might, you will make scads of gold. As an alchemist, there are two methods of making money:

1) Offering free Primal Might transmutes and keeping the extra products- which doens't work.

2) Transmuting Primal Earth to Primal Water once per day, which works very nicely.

Offering free transmutes can be time consuming and requires you to be in a major city to obtain a large audience for your: /2 FREE [Transmute: Primal Might] your mats pst. Responses may/will come slowly. Alternatively, tell your guild that you will do all of the P. Might transmutes and send the back to the materials owner. Transmuting P. Earth to P. Water offers the advantage of certainty- never will you wait for others to agree to a free P. Might transmute and the money is yours. With the P. Might strategy, you may never proc and extra.

In summary, transmute mastery is not a particularly good way to make money, while performing a P. EArth to P. Water transmute on a daily basis is a reliable way to make a small amount of money with a minimal time investment. Occasionally, a mastery proc will occur amplifying your profits greatly.