The Method to My Alching Madness

As of this post, I'm about 80% of the way to Alch 128. Alch mixing stats thus far:




My Alch Guide: Many moons ago, I wrote a personal-experience guide to alchemy items and leveling. I have just updated it, though not so much has changed since I originally wrote it.

You'll find it here: Burn's Alch Guide


About Power Leveling

There's a tendency to think that if something gives higher experience, it must be the thing to level on. Thus, many use bars and magic essence to level.

Not so here. I do make bars, but only for actual use... I have done S2E projects in the past, I need them for ring crafting, and so on. I did use magic essence at one point to level, but as can be seen by the mere 236k of them mixed, I didn't stick to that.

I generally make what I need. The only thing I've been known for when it comes to sales is the thing that I use to level... health essence.

And those are the #1 mixed item by a huge margin. Why? Harv mums myself, and use a combo of buying and harving silver (mostly buying). Mix, easy sales, repeat.

Experience isn't the only factor in deciding what to use to level. Power leveling a mix skill means you need to find something to mix where the ingredients are easily obtainable. Silver is a heavily harved (for sale) item.

Compare to magic essence... emeralds and lilacs are not generally seen on market. The only real way to level using those is to self-harv. While cheaper, and the magic shop will buy all your excess magic essies for an okay price, this is incredibly slow. Leveling? Yes. Power leveling? Not even close.

Am I saying Health Essence is the only way to go? Absolutely not. Perhaps you're in a guild with a lot of harvers that sell other ings to guild members. What I'm saying is take everything into consideration:

1- Experience - LEs can be as easily made as HEs, but HEs are better experience.
2- Ing Access - Can you quickly and easily get access to the ings that are necessary?
3- Cost/Sellability - Having easy access to buying gold isn't going to do you a world of good when gold bars are rarely bought. You need to ensure you can both be rid of the finished product, and as well in a way where you're not losing gc in the process.
4- Your Skill Level - Don't expect to make something for profit without self-harving for at least 30-40 levels above the recommended level for the item. There's a comparability to combat training here... You may be the same a/d as a mountain chim, but for easy training without depleting your HE stash and less armor breakage, you're more likely to train on a desert chim.

In my personal case, I found means to efficiently get the ings, make, and sell what is one of the most popular and used alch items available. And well, at my alch level, I didn't have to worry about step 4, heh.


My Alching

As a Jack of All Trades, I try to level everything. Alch being the base for many other skills (crafting needs essies and bars, manu needs bars, tailoring needs essies, magic needs... you get it), I mix what I need when I'm not looking to mix just for power-leveling.

Thus my alch list looks like it does above. A quick overview of how the top 10 items got there. There's of course other reasons to make each, but these are the primary ones:

1- Health Essence - Power leveling, plus of course my own training.

2- Fire Essence - Not done much anymore, this will drop in the list some day. But of course, for bars. And Ashes for engineering. I'm more likely to buy these nowadays though.

3- Energy Essence - I teleport a LOT. I also have sold these on occasion.

4- Magic Essence - Early attempts at power leveling. These days I normally only make them when I plan to magic train using radiation shields.

5- Life Essence - Normally only made when I do my occasional attempts to level summoning. That being done by mixing summon stones which require tons of these.

6- Air Essence - For my rare attempts at magic leveling. (I don't pk/pvp, so I mana drain bears, then radiation shield to use up the drained mana). I would never make these to sell, too much wasted time on the diamonds.

7- Steel Bar - Mostly thanks to my occasional S2E projects, working on buying a nexus. Though most of my S2Es these days come from phantom warriors so mixing these is a rarity of late.

8- Water Essence - A combination of my days of crafting (polishing gems), but these days more likely being made for dyes for leveling tailoring. (Actually, I hate making these, so there are times I'll mix other things for profit, and use that profit to buy WEs instead from the magic shop.)

9- Matter Essence - For some reason in my more newb days I thought these would be good to level on and sell. I got over that quick enough. These days I'll every other month or so set aside some time to bag mix 850 or so of these in the feros cave at once, primarily to have a stock for teleporting magic. Otherwise I generally don't touch these.

10- Earth Essence - A dying one on the list, at one time I used to make batches of matter conglomerates (which also explains the matter essence count). I can't remember the last time I did those though. These just don't get made anymore.