Benefits from Alchemy (WoD start)

[VKP]

Heyya, and sorry in advance if this question's been asked here before:

Simply put, what's the big deal about having say 9-11 alchemist characters at the start of WoD? With or without garrison buildings to support it.

[Alroxas]

Well there's a few factors to consider.

First, the transmute that we are seeing so far are for "Alchemical Catalyst" which are primarily used for flask generation.

Second, datamined information from WoWhead shows two transmutes for Alchemical Catalyst. One is your standard use once on daily reset CD (produces 4) [spell id = 156587], but the second transmute [spell id = 168042] reads "Produces 10. May also yield Sorcerous Fire and/or Sorcerous Water. Can be performed up to three times in a row, but it takes 24 hours to recover 1 use."

So you could make up to 30 catalysts in one go with a 24 hr cd to recover 1 use (or 3 days to recover all 3 uses), without transmute mastery.

Speculating here that one version is for players with alchemy and the second version is the NPC who works in Alchemist Lab building. If this is so (and similar across the board for the rest of the profession), then you can clearly see the advantages of still having all professions (scattered amongst various toons) over just having a garrison profession building. Naturally this also underscores the benefit of having the same profession building with said profession as well.