The Pot/Flask Situation

[Flarelaine]

Farm off hours there is plenty.

What are off hours though? I have a habit of logging in early and do a few quests or some gathering while eating breakfast but even then there is noticeable traffic.

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People probably don't remember the days when Golden Lotus was hard to come by, or when some specs had to do 1-2+ hours of open water fishing for their food back in Cata.

Used to do all the fishing for feasts for my guild raids. It gave me a steady flow of DKP before even setting foot in the raid.

[Deleted]

Blood of Sargeras vendor in 7.1....20 herbs for 1 blood

Its 10 now

But you can get the herbalist shoulder enchant, but most people (like me) are using the mana shoulder enchant, after i reach excalted with nightbornes ill switch to the herb enchant!

[Normie]

In MoP, pots didn't require golden lotus though.

I think Blizzard is aware of that.

No one needs to be using potions during practice pulls. If they're cheap, sure, use them. But if they're precious, don't waste them. If you're not within 5-10% of getting a boss down or into the next phase, keep practicing, or wait till next week.

[MegaVolti]

I love to farm herbs and mine nodes for hours ......you find all kinds of neat things out there that you would not normally see unless you out there for long time.

Which is fine, the option to do that should of course stay in the game, it just shouldn't be almost mandatory for players who don't want to do that.
For everyone who actually enjoys mining / herbing / fishing there are 10 more that don't enjoy it but need to do it to not lose their raid spot.

[Jewsco]

You can roll herbalism and start farming starlight rose at lvl 1 herbing. I have made over 1 million gold selling it at about an hour of farming per day.

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Farm off hours there is plenty.

Some players due to families or jobs can't farm in off hours.
Being forced to do things in off hours shouldn't be in the game for everyday needed things like flasks and potions it isn't like farming a rare mob.
Finally if everyone did it at off hours then would there be any off hours?

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I think Blizzard is aware of that.

No one needs to be using potions during practice pulls. If they're cheap, sure, use them. But if they're precious, don't waste them. If you're not within 5-10% of getting a boss down or into the next phase, keep practicing, or wait till next week.

Then why is the rose needed then for them? Also the potions aren't a guaranteed buff either but something else that is rng dependent if it procs.
Awfully pricey for a maybe proc item that is used multiple times per fight

[fengosa]

As long as I can turn 300g worth of herbs into 2500g pots I am happy

Most potions cost 400-700g to make and sell for about 900g on my realm. I seems some spikes on raid days where the are over 1000g but never anywhere near 2500g. It's possible that you managed to sell high but let's not pretend this is the norm.

[Deleted]

I spent 4 hours farming the herbs for 50 pots and 3 flasks for 1 2.5 hour raid yesterday. It was mind numbing. On the bright side, it was also free. It won't take 4 hours next time, probably more like 2 since I had just learned herbalism but I'd pose the question "Is it good to encourage something which a 'large chunk' of the player base find mind numbing?".

I think the biggest problem is that raiding doesn't have any form of guaranteed gold reward which a raider could use to finance the purchase of herbs/pots from non-raiders who enjoy the tasks. There will always be the odd lucky BoE but these aren't guaranteed. I suppose boosting could be considered but I doubt that helps the majority of raiders at the minute.

[pkhs]

I spent 4 hours farming the herbs for 50 pots and 3 flasks for 1 2.5 hour raid yesterday. It was mind numbing. On the bright side, it was also free.

4 hours isn't free, mate. That was 4 mind numbing hours of your life that you'll never get back.

[Deleted]

I'm a raider and I have alchemy on my main, I also have an alt with herbalism. Still I'm in kind of agreement with this situation being bad.

I'm not sure how much time you all have to play this game or what godly farm spots for herbs you obiously found in secret where you can get several stacks in a mere hour? I'm in a mythic guild so I'm expected to keep up, that means both my character (gear, AP and so on) and raid materials which means flasks, runes, food and pots.

Food is simple, you don't need a lot of mats and the mats them selves are easily farmable. I'm lucky to have rank 3 of my best food, if I spend maybe 1 hour I'm set for at least 2 weeks of raiding.

Runes are problematic. They go for between 400-500g on my server and I have to buy them. There is no alternative, my main is a DPS and my alt is farm for geared to even do HCs and since I can't get the loot bags AH is the only choice. This is a good chunk of gold every week that I HAVE to spend.

This leads me to the flask/pot thing. I transfered to this server at the start of the expansion so I only had 250k. Gaining some from leveling, quests and so forth and spending around 200k in the first weeks reset on gear upgrades and the like I'm currently floating around 50-100k gold, I simply can't afford to just buy all my raid materials so I'm farming them.

Herbalism is fairly slow in my opinion. Starlight rose is by far the easiest (althou the yield is low because of how it works). Right now I'm stickign to what I need which is rose, fjarnskaggl and dreamleaf. This takes me at least a few hours farming time each week just to keep up with what I need for raids. At the same time I'm not really "progressing" my alchemy since I have a guildie who can make rank 3 pots. It feels retarded as an alchemist to have others make my pots for me but it's just such a waste of gold and time to do it myself.

Apart from this I have to stay on top of my WQs, do the daily HC and now with the m+ out most of my time is spent on that. ADD TO THIS that I work full time and I do have a social life that I want to spend at least one weekend evening on, I have irl chores that needs to be done during the week like cleaning, cooking, laundry, and for that matter human stuff like eat, sleep, showering, doing soem sort of work out or exercise to stay healthy.

There simply isn't time! Right now I'm spending (let's be honest) a bit too much time playing, more than I'm comfortable with, and all that ingame time is spent either doing progression stuff on my main or farming herbs on my alt. There is so much stuff i WANT to do, like archaeology, actually "play" my alt, level my druid, find the new pets, fish for the bottomfeeder, farm eyes in the sewers and much more. And in my current state I allow myself maybe one or two hours per week to do the "fun" stuff, and even then I'm mostly not enjoying it because I'm stressing over the fact I'm not being productive.

If the herbs were cheaper on AH (and I really don't understand the prices, there are tons and tons of herbs up there but the prices are still insane) so I could actually buy them, or better yet, if the material costs for pots were more reasonable like 3/3 herbs and no rose, it would save me a lot of time to do stuff in game I actually want to do, or just play less.

It's only been 2 weeks of raids and right now I can deal with all this but if stuff don't settle eventually this will completely burn me out. I never thought I'd say this about WoW again but right now I feel there is just too much to do.. and by that I mean stuff that's "important" if you're not a casual player. I don't feel it's unreasonable that if you spend 2 hours per weekday and 5 per weekend day that should be enough to stay on top, I'm spending a lot more and I'm barely keeping it together. I feel somehow along the way Blizzards idea about people "should have something to do if they play more" is a bit twisted, most people don't play all day, every day and at some point they should just man up and tell this nerdy majority that hey, maybe you should try and alt or simply hey, take a break for a bit, you're out of content.

[Normie]

Then why is the rose needed then for them? Also the potions aren't a guaranteed buff either but something else that is rng dependent if it procs.

The predictable nature of potions was getting to be a bit much ... people were getting absolutely stupid pull numbers. I understand it's fun to stack for enormous burst numbers but ... doesn't really contribute to a rich design.

[grizz92]

heres a idea just get herbalism and you can get the pots and flasks

[Normie]

It's only been 2 weeks of raids and right now I can deal with all this but if stuff don't settle eventually this will completely burn me out. I never thought I'd say this about WoW again but right now I feel there is just too much to do.. and by that I mean stuff that's "important" if you're not a casual player. I don't feel it's unreasonable that if you spend 2 hours per weekday and 5 per weekend day that should be enough to stay on top, I'm spending a lot more and I'm barely keeping it together.

You're competing with exactly the same people you were competing with last expansion. If you don't want to play 12/hr per day they don't either. You can dial it back and you'll find everyone else has dialed it back too.

[Deleted]

I'm a raider and I have alchemy on my main, I also have an alt with herbalism. Still I'm in kind of agreement with this situation being bad.

I'm not sure how much time you all have to play this game or what godly farm spots for herbs you obiously found in secret where you can get several stacks in a mere hour? I'm in a mythic guild so I'm expected to keep up, that means both my character (gear, AP and so on) and raid materials which means flasks, runes, food and pots.

Fjarnskaggl is the worst herb to farm, as there is no way to get extra spawns. So stop farming it.

Think about this from a goblin perspective. Time is money friend!

All those herbs you farm, you could sell raw on the AH so they do cost you gold. You could turn them into pots/flasks too and sell those for extra profit.

Try out some other herbs, check out youtube vids for good farming spots. Spend 30 mins farming a couple of good farming spots for whichever herbs you think give you the best return. On my server this is Starlight Rose and Foxflower. Once you've found your most efficient farming spot just farm whatever herb it is that gives you the best bang for your buck. If you go farming and you find the returns are low (as other people are farming too) then find a farmer and follow them, nodes stick around for ~15 seconds after they're picked, so you can both get the same nodes. It's not like farming used to be where you actively avoided fellow herbalists. If you can get a couple of guildies to come with, so much the better you can group up to kill mobs and all get the same nodes and get a greater return than you would individually and have a laugh on vent at the same time. (other voice comms are available)

If you happen to need that herb for your flasks, then keep as much as you need and then sell the rest on the AH. Use this gold to buy the other mats that you need. The best time to buy mats is the weekends, the prices go down at weekends as a lot of people are posting auctions then and fewer people are buying.

Sell herbs in large stacks (100+) and don't under cut everyone else, just go a few silver less than the lowest priced big stacks.

You can then probably trim your farming time by a couple of hours a week and have more time to do the things you'd rather do.

[tl:dr don't farm everything you need, farm the most efficient thing you can farm, in a group where possible, and use the gold that generates to buy the rest of the mats you need]

[Joeydivision82]

I started this expansion with about 40K gold, I am sitting at about 80K after repairs, putting money in the gbank, buying crafted items for the Obliterum Forge and just random odds and ends. There are so many ways to make money in this game, and although these things are stupid expensive, they are still affordable if you put in some effort. There are tons of world quests that give 300-500 gold each.

[TheRogue]

Love it, so rich, I have never had so much gold before because I missed most of WoD

[Deleted]

I was going to farm yesterday but ended up not having time so I know what awaits me this weekend.

I actually don't find fjarnskaggl that bad unless there is a lot of competition, it's the only herb I have rank 3 on and the returns are okay. Rose is a bit time consuming due to the not even 100% for 1/node but even with lots of competition the spawn rate is okay. Dreamleaf is more annoying, I guess I just haven't found a good farm spot. The nodes seem so spread out over the entire zone and sometimes I can run around for over 2 minutes without seeing anything at all.

I went for foxflower the other day since I had found a really good farmspot a few weeks ago. It seems it was discovered now tho because after 20 minutes I only had about 30 flowers. I had been wondering why the prices for foxflower was so high on AH (sometimes up to 200g) and seems this was why. Maybe spawns in general are bad in highmountain? I went all over the zone before I found my farmspot and the reason I found it so good was because well.. they didn't really spawn any place else. It's the same with highmountain salmon which I need for food, I've found a total of 3 schools in the entire zone.

On the plus side even if the herb spawns are bad I'm getting quite alot of ore. I'm getting such bad gem returns on it from my JC som I'm concidering dumping some of it on AH and use the gold to get some herbs and runes.

On the topic of farming herbs btw. I used to be able to get up early before work and find farming was very easy due to people well.. sleeping at that point. However it seems with Legion I never get this "alone time" anymore, I guess sharding has ruined it? Peak hours in evenings are atrocious but it feels like there is no optimal time to farm anymore which makes me sad.

[Kreeshak]

Things are usually pretty expensive in the beginning of a new xpac. Things will lower as more people level up, etc.

that's not the case here though. Ore prices describe what you said, not herb prices.

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It was like that before. People seem to forget how easy Draenor made professions and how much the market was saturated with mats. Pots and Flasks used to always be high at the start of an expansion before Draenor tanked the market.

No. There is no precedence on the current situation of herb economy. Those prices are a record high.

[izayoi80]

I've spent about 350k on flasks and pots. No items, no obliterum, nothing...but flasks and potions.

Oh well, it's gold...in a game. The blood vendor is on his/her way, and when that happens flasks will be 10g.

[Kreeshak]

Blizzard can't do anything about player greed.

It's not player greed though, it low supply and high demand.

And yes Blizzard can do lot's if they wanted to interfere. For example reduce the number of herbs needed per flask/pot.

[skannerz22]

Did blizzard announce any plans to do something about this?

On my high pop realm, a single potion of deadly grace costs 1200 Gold. Nobody can afford this. Looking at the single prices, i am not surprised people resort to botting

Starlight rose 250 Gold each

Fjarnskaggle 150 Gold each

Its pretty much impossible to supply the entire Raid with pots and flasks. It was never like this before, and i have to be absolutely honest: I considered botting myself. Spending every day multiple hours to get MAYBE a stack fjarnskaggle(constantly despawns, very low spawnrate) is draining the life out of me, especially since i also still have to do the AP grind every day and other stuff.

if you get the harvester shoulder enchant then the materials are free.....................lol