should i keep alchemyFollow

as a tank, the alchemists stone is golden...

but if making gold is your thing... go get skinning and pick, skin and sell...

Alchemy is not the greatest money maker, although transmutes can be very profitable. At 70, I used to transmute earth -> water. It wasn't huge profits, but it was something I could do every day for about 15 seconds of work.

If you want constant gold while you level, drop alchemy for skinning.

Don't dismiss it so quickly I'd say. My main is a balance druid with 450/450 Herb/Alchemy. I usually use the herbs myself, so I don't sell them. I could probably have made more money selling the herbs when I hit Nortrend and started herbing there, but I didn't. Instead I leveled Alchemy and made lots of spellpower elixirs and Elixirs of Mighty Thoughts for myself. The excess I sold on AH for quite some money. Again, probably selling the herbs would've made more money then.

But, now that I can make flasks, I'm pretty sure selling those outprofits selling the mats on my server. The Frost Lotuses, though they seem rare, are readily availably so they don't sell that well on AH. The rest of the mats sell average for herbs, but not nearly for the kind of money I can ask for a flask.
Flask of the Frostwyrm for instance sells for about 70G a piece. Flask of Stoneblood for about the same (Why anyone would get excited about 650 health when they're walking around with 30K is beyond me btw). And then there's the fact that elixirs and flasks have double duration on Alchemists :D That combined with the ease to get mats for flasks, makes me use Flasks for everything, not only raids. I can walk around and do daily quests, a couple for heroics and what not, and last 4 hours with one flask :) And for you, being a mage, 125 SP from the Flask fo the Frostwyrm is not trivial.

Edited, Jan 8th 2009 3:03pm by Curois

I also thought about giving up Alch for LW for a while, but decided against it since, as a rogue, I have no other buffs to apply to myself.

Very glad that I did not give up Alchemy after levelling it up just a bit more. Not only are the most recent recepies I've gotten quite a bit more useful, but I've noticed that the difference in prices of mats vs the prices of finished alch products is huge. For example, mats for a skyfire diamond on my server are about 50g total. The diamond itself, sells for over 150.

It can definitely be worth it.

to put it simply, blizzard balanced all the major craft skills around each other in terms of how much dps/tanking/healing benefit you can gain from their 'improved buffs' for example: alchemy get roughly 40 SP bonus to the frost wrym flask, enchanters get 2x19SP on rings, JCers get some amazing gear, tailors get cool back enchants, etc.... the overall benefit from each is roughly equal, with no specific craft gaining any large benefit over all others (you can argue alchemy benefits mana based classes more due to the crazy alchemist pots after their upcoming buff etc...) overall just go with what craft you enjoy / the one that provides the largest profit on your server. if you're after long-run dps increase, you'll have to go 2x craft skill and buy the reagents / make an alt for the gathering crafts.