Data collection: Concentration builds
In the last 4 weeks, I've been doing data collection for concentration builds. Here are the results from spending 239 000 concentration!
GOLDMAKINGNEWESTFEATUREDWAR WITHIN
Many creators (including myself) have praised concentration as a great way to make gold. However, we are now over 3 months into the expansion and things are constantly changing. Some ways to make gold are still decent but many have fallen off. For example, gathering took a big hit in the last few weeks with the reduced prices of null stones, null lotus, rank 3 herbs and rank 3 ores. Did it affect concentration goldmaking? Let’s find out!
In the last 4 weeks, I’ve been documenting the gold made from concentration on roughly 26 characters. I only tracked enchanting, alchemy and jewelcrafting. I currently have 21 enchanters, 18 alchemists, 5 jewelcrafters and 7 tailors (the tailors are not part of the concentration goldmaking. More on that later). Other professions can be good for concentration but these were the professions I identified to be good for alt armies. I’ll explain why later in the post. In total, I've spent 239 282 concentration and earned 3 317 733 profit.
In my first week of tracking, I had less characters that I have today. Most of the characters were started quite early in the expansion. As you’ll see in the alchemy section of this post, new alchemists earn way less than older alchemists. The data reflects that. In week 2 and week 3, a lot of my characters were new characters which means their profits are lower. However, here are a few reasons why I think the gold per concentration went down:
1- The gold per concentration for enchanting went from about 21 gold to 14 gold on average
2- My alchemists didn’t have enough knowledge to earn a lot of gold
3- I got more jewelcrafters starting in week 2. Turns out jewelcrafters are not doing as good right now
4- A general price decline of the market.
More data!
As you’ll see in the specific profession details later in the post, there are a lot of factors that can affect your goldmaking. The number 1 factor is the chosen professions. The number 2 factor is the amount of knowledge on your characters. Let’s start with some data about each profession. I have 2 types of characters: Enchanters with alchemy and enchanters with jewelcrafting. They all have enchanting as it was simply the best profession for me as you’ll see later. Here is the data from my top 4 alchemists and top 4 jewelcrafters:
The gold for alchemists versus jewelcrafters is similar. Sadly, I didn’t separate the gold made from each profession. The enchanting ingenuity procs massively increases the variance of the process. Stashdruid and bigboydruid have the exact same setup but stashdruid got more lucky on procs. The same thing happens with multicraft when it comes to jewelcrafting and alchemy. As much as we can see the average gold per concentration on craftsim, it’s really important to understand the importance of the word average. To showcase the variance, here is the full data from week 4. You’ll see that one character made 20 gold per concentration while a different character earned only 7 gold per concentration.
Since some characters were made in the first few weeks of the expansion, they’ll have way more knowledge than my newly made characters. So how can we see the impact of knowledge on goldmaking? To figure this out, let’s see the average gold per concentration of my 4 most knowledgeable characters versus my 4 least knowledgeable characters:
When someone joins my stream to share that a particular goldmaking method earned them a huge amount of gold, my first two questions are:
1- How much gold did you make?
2- How much time did you spend?
For instance, I was chatting with a viewer on my stream and he claimed that farming BFA world drop mounts is an incredible gold-making method. At first glance, the mounts being worth around 100 000 gold sounds impressive. However, the catch is their 1 in 10 000 drop rate. If it takes 10 hours to obtain one, you're effectively earning just 10 000 gold per hour. On the other hand, if the drop rate were 1 in 1 000, I’d be all over this method since it would yield 100 000 gold per hour.
Time
Week by week data
So how much gold per hour are you making when using concentration? It’s a bit more complex than with our previous example. We need to calculate how much time we spend from logging in to getting consumables, crafting items and mailing them. We also need to account for the time spent leveling the profession, getting the profession treasures, buying equipment and enchants. In other words, the first time setup. With the goal of calculating time, I’ll split this section into 2 parts. The weekly time versus the base time.
The weekly time
Let’s take a look at how we spend our weekly time with an alt army:
Logging in and out
Choosing a recipe to craft
Patron orders
Make sure you have your buffs, consumables and crafting materials
Craft the items
Open your warbank or mailbox to send your crafts to your banker
In the list above, there are 6 tasks that will be repeated every time when using your concentration. Once we find the total time, we need to multiply it by 2, since we are using concentration twice a week. With my calculations, I can say that each character takes me roughly 6 minutes per week. Since each character spends 3350 concentration per week (you get 10 concentration per hour per profession) and that my average gold per concentration is 13, that’s 43 550 gold per week. Since I could do 10 characters in an hour (1 character takes 6 minutes so 10 characters takes an hour), that’s 435 500 gold per hour. However, that’s not the full story.
The base time
Since the initial setup is roughly 40 minutes per profession (because enchanting takes a while to set up on day 1), we need to account for that. When starting, you spend 80 minutes and get 0 gold out of it. How can we implement that time into our metrics? I’d like to do it on a 6 month basis. There are a lot of assumptions when making a 6 month prediction. However, I should do this for well over 6 months. I think that it’s a fair assessment of the future but obviously, nobody knows the future. Take the numbers ahead with a grain of salt!
If I make 43 550 gold per week, it adds up to 1 132 300 every 6 months. Since it takes 6 minutes per week, that’s 156 minutes over 6 months. Adding the 80 minutes for the initial setup, that’s 236 minutes or roughly 4 hours. We can now divide 1 132 300 by 4 (or 3.933 if you want to be more precise) to get 287 821 gold per hour. This is quite an impressive number. I’d like to argue that in our current economy, a great way to make gold is to level up more characters! Without characters, it’s impossible to earn gold this way. If you enjoy leveling, concentration goldmaking could be incredible for you!
My best profession: enchanting
Here are some factors that can make a profession great for an alt army:
Lucrative patron orders
Multiple recipes available
Enough knowledge on day 1 to start making profit
Not too expensive to get started
Cheap equipment
Max potential obtained early
High potential of goldmaking
As I examine the list above, I can affirm that enchanting fulfills each and every item on it. However, it’s not the best for every category. For example, there are professions with cheaper equipment, better patron orders and lower entry cost. What makes enchanting incredible is how quick the max potential is reached. The only difference between a day 1 enchanter and a day 90 enchanting is the amount of base skill points. After about 2 weeks, you should have the full 100 base skill points. From that point on, you’ll make as much gold as any other enchanter that has played since day 1. Here are 2 screenshots of profit between a day one enchanter versus a day 90 enchanter.
For a full video guide on enchanting, you can check a vod from a recent stream where I went from nothing to making profit with enchanting. For an enchanting written build, you can find it on my patreon.
My second best profession: alchemy
Let’s take a look at the previous list of beneficial factors for alt army professions:
Lucrative patron orders
Multiple recipes available
Enough knowledge on day 1 to start making profit
Not too expensive to get started
Cheap equipment
Max potential obtained early
High potential of goldmaking
Looking above, you’ll see that 3 out of the 7 items on the list are greyed out. It means that the patron orders are not lucrative, the equipment isn’t cheap (mostly the tool) and the max potential is obtained quite late. When I look at my alchemists, the older ones are making an average of 12+ gold per point of concentration. When I look at the ones made recently, I sometimes struggle to make 5 gold per point of concentration. Again, here are 2 screenshots of a day 1 alchemist versus a day 90 alchemist. You can also find a full alt army alchemy build right here.
Other profession: jewelcrafting
Let’s take a look at the previous list of beneficial factors for alt armies:
Lucrative patron orders
Multiple recipes available
Enough knowledge on day 1 to start making profit
Not too expensive to get started
Cheap equipment
Max potential obtained early
High potential of goldmaking
Looking again at the list above, you might think that jewelcrafting is better than alchemy since it has 5 out of the 7 factors. However, each factor has its own weight. The most important factor is by far the high potential of goldmaking. With my older jewelcrafters that are almost maxed, I can barely reach 8 gold per point of concentration. I’m currently working on a strategy to increase that number. To be fair, jewelcrafting isn't bad. The initial setup is very quick compared to alchemy which might make it a much better option for many players. Jewelcrafting is still much better than the next profession for concentration...
Tailoring
In dragonflight, one of my most used professions was tailoring because of azureweave bolts and chronocloth bolts. You could craft 6 bolts per day and stack the cooldowns for 10 days. After 10 days, I would craft 60 bolts for roughly 30 000 gold profit. In other words, 90 000 gold per month for every tailor I had (I had about 15 so 1 350 000 gold per month).
Coming into the war within, I was hoping to make gold with tailoring by crafting dawnweave and duskweave bolts. While yes, you can currently make about 100 to 200 gold per bolt, that’s only 6 000 to 12 000 gold every 10 days (18 000 to 36 000 gold per month). I was also hoping to make gold with the tailoring concentration but it’s currently quite hard to make 2 gold per concentration with tailoring. When I look at enchanting and its 13+ gold per concentration, that’s 94 900 gold per month per enchanter (you get 7 300 concentration per month, 7 300 multiplied by 13 is 94 900 gold). Since tailoring gives me about 30 000 gold per month, that’s 64 900 gold I’m losing per month from having tailoring instead of enchanting.
The big picture
It’s so easy today to see that enchanting is the best with our current vision. However, it wasn’t so easy to figure out in the beta. Furthermore, we are talking about prices that may change in the future. If everyone dumps tailoring for enchanting, what happens to the prices of bolts and enchants? Will the enchants tank while bolts rise in price? Is there enough players to buy all of these rank 3 enchants? What if the enchanting mat prices plummet and suddenly, people can craft guaranteed rank 3 enchants without using concentration…
These are all great questions in an ever evolving market. I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself if like me, you have chosen a lot of tailors in the early days of your alt army. If we looked at dragonflight, it was a solid option. In patch 10.1 during Dragonflight, the alt army meta changed with the introduction to Dracothyst. Will it happen again? While patch 11.1 could completely shake up the profession meta, let’s keep a “big picture” approach and adapt to the new realities. Adaptability is one of the best assets a goblin can have. To answer the initial question: "Are concentration builds falling off?", I'd like to think that they have lost around 20 to 30 percent in the last month or so. Before the expansion, I mentioned that I would be happy if I could earn 5 gold per point of concentration for the full duration of the expansion. It's now looking like it might be way more! Only time will tell...
