Rage/Najentus that is.

This would change very little for me- Mad Alchemist's Potions are superior to Super Healing potions, identical to Super Rejuvination potions and not comparable or inferior to Super Mana, Fel Mana, Ironshield, Resistance, Haste, Heroic and Destruction potions.
An unreliable and uncontrollable buff when using a moderately useful potion counts for very little as far as I'm concerned.

I've really run out of patience with Alchemy- I levelled it pre- TBC for the Alchemist's Stone, that just isn't very good at all these days and other tradeskills appear to have much bigger and much more dependable benefits.
What I'm looking for in 2.4 changes is something like an upgradeable Alchemist's Stone or some change to buff mechanics/ restrictions. e.g. letting us use a third elixir or introducing superior BoP Alchemy flasks/ elixirs to compete with LW drums, ring enchants and JC gems/ trinkets.

Well if you really only have 2 guilds killing Vashj then you have a server that isn't out of content. They can work on T6 while going after the first bosses in Sunwell for quite a while.

The only situation where you really need to think about splitting up and dragging less advanced guilds through is one where you have 1-2 Illadin farmers, and a bunch of mid T5 ***AND THE 2ND/3RD GATES REQUIRE A LOT MORE ESSENCE***. Even 2 Illadin farmers are only 5 weeks from the first gate even if they get no help - 2T5 + 2T6 + 3SW per week.

-Flasks with durations measured in days.
-More exclusive toys. You could make a lot of people happy just making the stone also double the effectiveness of all used flasks, pots, and elixirs.

I'm still pissed about the shattrath flask change. They finally let raiders replace all of the flasks we make. The only way they could rub any more salt in our wounds is if they provided a replacement for destruction and haste pots.
I would not bet on this, although you might. Essences might drop from gruul/mag/etc, just not 100% of the time. Perhaps the % scales depending on the boss' difficulty. Think about Primal Nethers; there's a small chance they drop in non-heroic instances, it's just very small.

That's sort of what I was hinting at. I was considering chugging a Mad Alch pot and getting an extra Adept's Elixir for 2 minutes (24 spell dmg and 24 spell crit), more powerful than enchanting's 24 spellpower. It would count as a 3rd elixir (ie stack with a flask or a pair of normal elixirs).

There would probably be some function to link your Mad Alch pots to the elixir you want. You'd have a 3rd elixir; but would have to chainchug the new Mad Alch pots to maintain it. I think a static 3rd elixir is simply too powerful.

I really don't want to be pigeonholed into using the alch stone....doubling the effectiveness of a flask rates the trinket as 80 spellpower and 50 mp5. It just became the 2nd or 3rd best trinket in the game.

Either way I'd be highly reluctant to drop my Skull/Icon or future Skull/Hexhead combo.

While we're on this tangent, have the Alchemist's Stone remove the Battle/Guardian restriction, or at least loosen it.

It really is disappointing that Alchemy provides zero benefit to a raiding mage, but I'd really rather not drop it due to all the effort I've put into obtaining rare recipes. What I'd really like to see is recipes you've learned stay with you if you drop a profession and pick it up later, much like the 2.4 talent change.

NO NO NO. The whole point of that restriction is so that we don't have to put on every single elixir known to man, and so they don't have to balance raids around those buffs.

That said, I think a 10%-20% bonus to flask effects would be a great buff but not too overpowered.

This brings up the question, are we going to find a hilarious 8 pull in TK because the Kael 6 pack AND the 2 Robot pull is up at the same time in the hall?

Oh drag, if the bridge is already up I wonder if we still get to hear her little speech about how water is life.

Hopefully the bridge console is just unlocked.

They could probably just move that first KT trash pack into the spot they cleared out in 2.3. Same amount of trash, little less dangerous. Make the pat path a little less far down to the hallway?

Thats all great and everything, but a 20% bonus on elixers and flasks would be just to much, it would make several other professions worthless to have for raiding. Now, if they added a use to it, on top of the current stats, based on your alchemist profession to provide a boost to Armor, Health, Mana, Healing, Damage, or AP that lasted for a while, it would be a bit better.

Overall there's lot of alchemy perks that could be added that's for sure. Considering blizzard has taken a step in the good direction with other aging professions, especially tailoring, which besides the very powerful 3piece sets, pretty much had nothing more. LW sucked in terms of patterns, but had the drums, smithing sucked, but had upgradeable weapons/armor and the shield buffing stuff(it looks pretty useful for some encounters tanking at least). They added insane new craftables for all of them, and for JC which was already quite profitable, but alchemy was left in its semi broken state, and enchanting has nothing new worth noting really(could have used a new self necklace enchant with sunmotes as components imo).

But seems 2.4 isn't set in stone yet, far from that, so well might see improvements before it goes live. It seems that because they know wotlk isn't too soon, they can actually take their time for 2.4 and make it good for everyone. I guess making some constructive post on the test realm boards about alchemy would be a good thing.

Or they could simply make several separate versions of the Stone to suit all four basic roles.
If it did buff elixirs and flasks, I think 10% would be a lot more appropriate number.. seeing as these things are already relatively powerful.

I do think that Alchemy does need some other BoP cooler than the stone.
Somebody suggested a portable Alchemy Lab, for which I might give an arm and possibly a leg too.
Also some sort of craftable item that would give a slight buff to your current specialization, like boost the proc chance by a few %, make crafting times shorter or just plain have the ability to proc slightly superior products of your chosen spec (which would leave transmutation in the dust, but I still like this idea, blatantly stolen from DaoC)

At the very least I would like to see them add a flask that gives +healing. Having to use elixirs because you don't need the mana given by Mighty Resto is not enjoyable.

I like the idea of more very cheap Alchemist only consumables as well. I think cheaper BOP flasks would be very nice, perhaps dropping the Fel Lotus requirement. If Alchemy is not going to provide me a significant personal advantage for having it, the least it could do is significantly reduce my time spent preparing to raid.

Basically all I still use it for is being the raid's default flask maker, since no one else is Elixir spec with all the flask recipes.

20% from flasks and elixirs is only 16 spelldamage from a flask of pure death. Even socketing it with 4 runed crimson spinels would make the total spelldamage gained from the stone 64. This is much lower than the hex lord Malacress trinket gives, which comes from a much lower tier of raiding than the Sunwell. The stone would be good for you depending on how much you would value the stamina and the extra effect from potions.

Besides, this would be the alchemy equivalent dropping from the sunwell. Other crafting professions are getting bop items, that are best for their slot, or at least very close to it. Why should alchemy be the only profession not to get something you can still wear in the Sunwell?

Or convert Binding Light to add +heal.

Is anyone still an armorsmith? I've been secretly hoping that they'll make a useful tanking plate piece only available to armorsmiths (much like the weapons for weaponsmiths and the goggles for engineers), but there hasn't been any love since the expansion( the [Bulwark of the Ancient Kings] is nice, but outside the armor isn't that great of a tanking piece). I spent so much time and gold (back in the day) getting to this point that I'd really hate to drop it, but given that there's nothing in 2.4, I think I'll finally have to.

I neglected to factor in one small wording change you did. Did you mean to say that if all potions were affected? If thats the case I would need to re-evaluate my position on the trinket, but even so, the power boosts of potions and flasks is absurd.

Still, 16 Spell Damage is a fairly big gain when you pair it with the other possible changes to that trinket, can't neglect the other passives when designing trinkets. Adding in to many passive buffs can take an item from moderately decent to very powerful. Just look at caster offhands and you'll see my point.

Brutallus hotfix just announced.

Slight decrease to the recently raised HP, and some adjustments to abilities. Additional details released by blue can be found here:

WoW BlueTracker: Brutallus PTR Hotfix

I would think twice about dumping something as expensive as BS at this point. I would at least wait to see what WotLK beta holds. What would you dump it for? I don't know much about prot pallys, but I'm not sure if there are two professions that would give a paladin much of an edge. If anything, I'd think about dumping mining, make your TBC gold with the BE's next to BT, and make your new death knight your miner in WotLK.

Remember you can respec armor smith to a weapon smith for a nominal fee... there may be some decent leveling goodies in WotLK.

I originally meant it for only healing and mana potions, like the normal alchemist's stone is. I'll reword the suggestion. The actualy stats could of course be tweaked. My intention was to present an idea of making the stone useful for all classes through sockets and a passive boost to flasks/potions, which every class should be using. As far as I know, the jewelcrafting bop necklace is the best in slot for many classes even considering sunwell drops. I believe the same is true for the sunfire robes? Should not the alchemy bop benefit also be competitive with sunwell drops?

If you're going to object about alchemy's low leveling cost, I would have no problem with making the craftable cost an absurd amount of materials in exchange for it's power. Right now I'm not seeing any reason to keep alchemy at all. Should I go leatherworking instead, I'll gain a powerful craftable and even more powerful drums. Enchanting would give me ring enchants, and jewelcrafting an extremely powerful melee necklace and bind on pickup gems.

Edit:

On reconsideration, perhaps it would be best afterall to make 2 different versions of the stone. The increased health and mana potions effect is mostly useless for some specs (rogues for example), and fairly powerful for others (healers) One stone would increase the effects of potions only, and the other flasks/elixirs. The amount of sockets could be adjusted to make it fairly close in power to ilvl 159 trinkets.