This guide will show you how to get your alchemy skill up from 0 to 300. The guide will only use recipe's available at a trainer until 265 and vendor available recipe's from 265 to 300.

This guide only uses recipes that require herbs and vendor bought material (vials).

This guide does not tell you how to get all the different recipe's from quests, vendors or drops. What you do once you hit 300 is entirely up to you. This guide will not tell you what to do with the potions you make either.

This guide is primarily aimed at those who want to switch profession at high level or have high level alts, friends or guildmembers.

Preparation

You are going to need a lot of herbs. Create an alt storage character to store these herbs and then farm (or have an alt farm) for the herbs needed. Use the ingame mail system to send the herbs to the storage character. Don't forget to send some gold to the storage character, so she can send the herbs back.
Once you have all the components collected, everything has to be send back to your main character. The mailbox only shows the first 50 items you have in the mail. It also puts the last item send to you on top. So to avoid complications send the components you need first last: i.e peacebloom and silverleaf are needed first, so these are the last to be send back to your main, after the briarthorn, mageroyal, etc.

The recipe's used require vendor bought components such as vials. These cost gold. To learn recipe's from a trainer also costs gold. The amount of gold needed is aproximately 40 to 50 gold if you farm all of the herbs. If you want to buy everything you need from the auction house expect to spend upwards to 225 gold. This does not include gold for recipe's from vendors or the auction house.

I know there's a million ways to make money in this game (and 5 million ways to be broke!), and I know this topic has been discussed over and over and over...but I thought i'd help the newbies out with how i went from rags to riches.

*Rule One: Pick 2 gathering professions*
Take two gathering professions initially. My personal favorite is mining and skinning because you'll be killing tons of animals anyway, why not skin them? Mining/Herbalism is not ideal because they share the same minimap (unless there's some addin that fixes it). The reason that you pick two gathering professions is simple...crafting professions require higher and higher level items the further up you go, and you'll reach a point quickly where you need materials that you can't gather yourself. And since most crafting professions don't make money until you are high high level (discussed later), you will be broke as a joke...and we don't want that, do we? :) With mining and skinning you will find yourself with enough gold to pay for gryphons and all the latest green items you need (heck maybe even some blues!)

*Rule Two: Invest in big bags*
Once you start gathering leathers, hides, ores, stones, gems, etc...you will quickly find that you'll fill up your bags. Skip the 10 and 12slot bags and go all 14slots. Don't worry, you'll be able to afford them faster than you think! More bagspace equals less trips running back to the Auction House. Speaking of which...

*Rule Three: The Auction House is your friend*