Originally Posted by
Plastkin
That's not how this works, and the amount of time it takes is the problem because the recipes for flasks require 27 herbs and pots require 10. WoD flasks required 8 plants and potions required 3, and flasks required 2 types of herbs while pots required 1, where in Legion it's 3 for both. You also get 1 Starlight per flower.
Dreamleaf isn't the problem. Let's look at some guild called "Most Casual NA". They raid 2 days a week, 3 hours a day. They need 6 flasks per week and let's say 30 pulls a night with only 3 pulls requiring a second pot. That's 66 potions per week. With rank 3, they're looking at needing 216 of each flower and 116 Starlight rose. That's per person. Dreamleaf is easy to farm, and getting 216 Fjarn can take 1 hour to 90 minutes. So let's call that 2 hours for the two flowers. Now 116 Starlight rose if you're really fast takes a little less than an hour. So that's 3 hours of farming mats for their 6 hour raid schedule. If you're not doing anything else and have 3 hours outside of doing world quests, daily dungeons, mythic+, alts, etc, then you can easily sustain it.
Now consider the hundreds of guilds pushing 12-16 hours, where every person in the raid is expected to spend about half of their raid time gathering mats to raid. And if you're a top guild, pushing 20-30 easily even before mythic, and then 40+ on mythics, with multiple alt clears of heroic (all using consumes), you have a massive frontloaded cost that equals months of raiding for average players.
If all you're doing is normal/heroic, you don't need those consumes. I could go in taking of 4 pieces of my gear without consumes and clear heroic. Those aren't the people who complain about this. There's a reason the top guilds were buying these things in bulk and asking for donations, and there's a reason there are tons of bots out there right now. We're trying to spend every second we can outside of raid running mythic+, which makes it completely infeasible to gather herbs. And given the prices, you're talking about ~66k + 12k = 78k gold per raid week for the casual 6 hour raider, for a more reasonable schedule in the first few weeks, that's 150-200k. Most people aren't sitting on millions of gold, so if you don't have the time, you run out of gold, and that's after we spent gold to get early enchants, crafted gear, etc.
Gold sales, bots, etc are all a thing right now because Blizzard fucked this up. One or two people can't cover any guild but extremely casual ones or guilds not raiding mythic.
We're about to start selling heroic/mythic EN clears for absurd prices because carrying we're going to have to blow consumes, so it has to cover consumes plus give enough gold to cover the expense of getting this far, plus prepare us for the next raid. Get ready to pay through the nose for carries.