Consumable cost and the price of raiding

[rogoth]

three major factors are playing into the ludicrously high inflation of consumable costs over the years:

first off you have the people who have played for a long time (which lets be honest is almost all of the top end raiding community at this point), they remember when it was dirt cheap to use consumables for even the most mundane low level stuff that it became the norm to use the best consumables for everything, even sending current expansion consumables en masse to alts to make levelling up easier when they were at a level to use them.

second point is that blizzard have gone out of their way from cata i would say (arguably mists also) onward to make resources used in crafting scarce or hard to come by, making it harder to mass produce the best consumables at the time, this is in part a side effect of the scaling tech applied to the game where anyone can level anywhere in the game (current restrictions apply of course), there's no dedicated 'high level zone' anymore where you would find the highest concentration of the best materials, personally i would say wrath had the perfect balance of resources available vs places to find said resources.

lastly it's also due to the server economy and people who play the AH, especially thanks to the garrison inflation/mission table inflation of the past 2 expansions pumping so much 'free' gold into the system that prices were forced upwards on many things related to consumables and haven't changed their course regardless of the interventions by blizzard recently, the best one was the start of legion when they radically changed the cost of potions/flasks due to their egregious gold cost from AH costs, but also the amount of materials needed per craft was excessive to say the least so it needed to happen, it's also why they added the potion of prolonged power to the game, both as a way to offer a cheap alternative to the extortionate end game crafted consumables and as a way to drain people of the hundreds if not thousands of blood of sargeras people had been getting from farming world quests for rep/random drops from dungeons/M+ etc, this leads into the whole reason BFA is such a flop of an expansion, it's a hollow shell of a game and nobody is willing to grind like they used to due to the nature of the zones currently being so boring to be in and such a pain in the ass to traverse that only the people brave enough to bot will have any decent stockpiles of materials.

TLDR: blizz screwed up crafting to the point where making top end consumables was really hard to do en masse, coupled with the old guard mentality of using consumables for everything being at odds with the current game philosophy and the declining player population reducing potential supply making demand for these items higher than what can realistically be supplied on a server by server basis in most cases causing prices to skyrocket.

[Gilmour]

In next 3 weeks I will go broke. I need 10k gold per night( raid and m+). I have engineering and mining. I mine all the time while I am searching for m+ dungeon and its barely enough as ore prices drop significaly but potions and flasks are still same ( pot is 250g and flask 700g). I cant make anything with engineering for selling, only took it to make head armor and its useless for anything else.

If I dont have gold, I wont be able to raid and m+. If I cant do that I wont play. 20 more days and I am out.

[f4ncybear]

And there I was wondering why tokens are so cheap despite everyone allegedly quitting. World 300s are chugging potions despite overgearing content by 10 item levels.
If your raiders don't want to do anything outside of raiding, just stop using potions. The market will correct itself.

[Barzotti]

In next 3 weeks I will go broke. I need 10k gold per night( raid and m+). I have engineering and mining. I mine all the time while I am searching for m+ dungeon and its barely enough as ore prices drop significaly but potions and flasks are still same ( pot is 250g and flask 700g). I cant make anything with engineering for selling, only took it to make head armor and its useless for anything else.

If I dont have gold, I wont be able to raid and m+. If I cant do that I wont play. 20 more days and I am out.

I'd advise you to reroll to herbalism/alchemy then, you'll be self-suficient and the new tools of the trade item does wonders. The proc rate is pretty high, with the few outliers (like getting 15 flasks instead of 1).

And there I was wondering why tokens are so cheap despite everyone allegedly quitting. World 300s are chugging potions despite overgearing content by 10 item levels.
If your raiders don't want to do anything outside of raiding, just stop using potions. The market will correct itself.

Please no, I wanna keep making gold easily

[Marrilaife]

second point is that blizzard have gone out of their way from cata i would say (arguably mists also) onward to make resources used in crafting scarce or hard to come by, making it harder to mass produce the best consumables at the time, this is in part a side effect of the scaling tech applied to the game where anyone can level anywhere in the game (current restrictions apply of course), there's no dedicated 'high level zone' anymore where you would find the highest concentration of the best materials, personally i would say wrath had the perfect balance of resources available vs places to find said resources.

The problem is from tbc to mop we had flying the moment we dinged max level. That significantly speeded up herbing for pots. Then wod came, flying was removed, then delayed and gated, but there was herb garden in garrison, so nobody complained. Then legion came and it was a disaster. Basically herb market became bot market. Suramar and Stormheim were infested with them, and every time I listed a group for world boss half of the players joining were herb bots realm hopping. I think they later nerfed realm hopping that you have to be in the same zone, not just continent. Because boy I had fun sitting in Azsuna seeing "player joined the group. player has left the group." and it was a parade of druids / demon hunters in Stormheim.

Tbh farming herbs doesn't add anything to MMO experience, it's some fossil from vanilla times, it's not engaging, not social, it's infested by bots because it requires zero human interaction and is boring as hell. Classic servers are coming, you'd hope that attracts all the players who enjoy "raid 3 hours then farm for 3 hours to be able to raid again" playstyle. And then they could make modern wow more about playing challenging and / or group content instead of mindless herbing.

Even when they forced AP grind onto the raider playerbase and forced world quests as a way to get AP (by nerfing m+ AP yields in comparison to legion), the amount of time you spend in the world doing wqs is not enough to "naturally" gather herbs along the way, you actually have to do farming sessions on top of it to actually supply yourself sufficiently.

Also professions are extremely imbalanced in bfa, basically the only things that make any gold is herb / alch / enchanting. Inscription is next to worthless after DMC time has passed, since you can't upgrade these trinkets unlike in legion. And every other prof is basically sunk cost because you wanted a bop item.

coupled with the old guard mentality of using consumables for everything being at odds with the current game philosophy

Unfortunately I have for example few people in the guild that are extremely pushy towards using augment runes for goddamn everything, but I can't just "go to a different guild" as at my level of play it's basically impossible to find a guild that won't have much bigger issues (the amount of guilds I've witnessed going downhill and disbanding isn't encouraging) or be much worse raid progress wise, and I can't tell them to stop enforcing it either because they're higher in guild hierarchy.

They're pushing for it for 2 reasons, one is obsession about logs and speedkills, and another is a claim that if people feel the cost of pots / runes they will fuck up less because every wipe costs them money. Neither of which I believe is right. People don't wipe on progression because they want to fuck up. It just happens. Everyone wants to kill the boss. And about logs and rankings and allstar points I don't give 2 shits about. I've seen too many wipes because someone wanted to get a log rank it's not even funny, from not moving from mechanics, not doing "bitch jobs" to underhealing fights to rank on hps and wiping due to it.

So it's basically a "suck it up" situation. I have also no guarantee going to any other guild wouldn't have similar problem of some officer being OCD about pot / augment rune usage.

We also have an issue with people who insist on using consumables even on stupid content like alt runs or m+ but won't have their own and will pester others to "borrow some" and never give back. I mean do you really have to use that flask in a weekly +10 run on your 5th alt?

[f4ncybear]

Tbh farming herbs doesn't add anything to MMO experience, it's some fossil from vanilla times, it's not engaging, not social, it's infested by bots because it requires zero human interaction and is boring as hell.

Herbalism was social in Legion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAc64PcrxvU

[Volitar]

Yeah honestly it's fucking ridiculous. Pots use to be 2 herbs and foodbuff use to be 1 meat. Mythic raiding is practically impossible without doing sales because of the shear amount of gold for consumables needed.

[Marrilaife]

Herbalism was social in Legion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAc64PcrxvU

Well it's not in BFA because there are no seeds. If they bothered to add something to make it more engaging than walk around the map click on nodes would be another story. Even things like herbalism wqs require you to go and click on nodes... they could make for example elite mob that requires a group to kill, but only for herbalists and give herbs as reward. Or you could find a key to a treasure trove that is a timed event and too much stuff to loot for 1 person so you'd be inclined to invite others to not waste the key. Anything. Gathering professions are awfully simplistic.

[kamuimac]

I want to preface this by saying i am in a guild that progresses fairly quickly through content. we are usually finished with a tier within 5-6 weeks of its mythic release. I am making this thread to see people's opinions on how much consumable requirements for raiding cost at the moment. my guild went into this tier with nearly 5 million gold and now, on the fourth lockout since we killed jaina, we are hovering at about 300k gold left to use in crucible. people's personal expenses (particularly ring rerolls) probably also added another 2.5-3 million gold to that requirement. we provide pots, flasks and feasts for our raiders. I honestly think that even with the new items that make the alchemy proc chance high, the cost of potions is too high, whether this is caused by scarcity of resources or by the greed of herb/alchemists, i'm not particularly concerned.

Sales for mythic guilds are far, FAR down. People who have gold nowadays generally don't spend it on carries beyond +10 and 15 purchases, and we recieve far far less interest for sales (for extremely reasonable prices relative to the past) than we used to in legion and before. Basically if you are someone who wants to spend most of their time in raid, you will begin to hemorrhage gold, especially if you are purchasing your own consumables. one good attempt at jaina costed ~900 gold in pots per person, ~100 gold for a wipe, 50 gold eachish for the feast (assuming sanguicells are worthless), 3k for your vantus on pull 1, 300 for the augment rune you can't use on pull because of there not being enough of them. that's about 24k for a guild in costs per attempt. We did not perform the best on Jaina, taking about 350 pulls. if we had used potions before the last 100 or so pulls, we would have spent 8.4 MILLION gold just attempting to kill the boss. just rekilling all 8 previous bosses, assuming no wipes, is a guild cost of almost 175 thousand gold.

I think that either herbalism/alchemy needs to be buffed to the point that your time spent yields 5-10x the potions, or people need to be encouraged to purchase raid sales again. Raid sales right now are cheap compared to the amount of gold still in the economy, but the people who make money from herbing also need a gold sink to funnel that money back into a single person, who can then afford to buy raid sales and keep the economy circling. If you want to play any more than casually now you will soon have to invest nearly the time you spend in raid out of raid collecting herbs. what do you guys think of the state of consumables/what would you change if you could

all i read is "those bad casuals dont want to buy mythic carries"

perfect - you should have been never been able to sell them in first place if devs would care about endgame in first place.

raiding was always expensive . if you want to save gold make your raiders to use alts for prodiding flasks/pots for themselves instead providing it for them.

[Mardux]

The fact someone thinks it's fine and makes sense that guilds should have to sell raid runs to support the cost of consumables and raiding is ridiculous itself.

I mean. there are top 200ish guilds that roll over the majority of Mythic bosses, but the vast majority of mythic raiders have a much slower progression system before they take the whole raid out, and those guilds don't exactly have the luxury to "Just farm pots in the 3 months you have between raid tiers 4head" They spend a ton of time wiping, progressing, and burning through potions.

Hell. If you push keys you burn through a ton of pots, too, which is what makes the price of pots go up in demand as well. I guess it's cool if some people don't have to worry about such things, though, then you can have an idiotic, and wrong, opinion like that guy because it doesn't affect you.

Its not that guilds should "have to" sell runs. But the option is there if you want to support the lazy guildmates who won't put forth the effort to bring their own consumables.

[kamuimac]

In next 3 weeks I will go broke. I need 10k gold per night( raid and m+). I have engineering and mining. I mine all the time while I am searching for m+ dungeon and its barely enough as ore prices drop significaly but potions and flasks are still same ( pot is 250g and flask 700g). I cant make anything with engineering for selling, only took it to make head armor and its useless for anything else.

If I dont have gold, I wont be able to raid and m+. If I cant do that I wont play. 20 more days and I am out.

so reroll your skills to herbalism/alchemy if you cannot aford buying them .

or roll alts with herbalism/alchemy and farm it up yourself.

like a real mmorpg player would .

wow is mmorpg not a instance symulator.

[Beingbob]

As a mythic raider in a pretty competitive (progressing on Jaina M now) guild on a pretty small server, the consumables costs are ridiculous. Agi potions tend to be around 500 gold, and int potions 450 gold - Riverbud, Siren's Pollen and Anchor Weed is similarly way above the EU averages thanks to a sluggish economy. Our guild is broke despite only providing feasts, vantus and flasks to raiders, and despite many among the officers buying both tokens and guild transfers (transfering bank full of herbs from a better server) to help out the guild.

In Legion I really used to enjoy doing heroic runs on off-nights both to help out the guild and to get good parses, but I've stopped doing that because it's just too expensive to raid using consumables on content that isn't directly rewarding.

Mythic raiding should ABSOLUTELY NOT require a large time investment outside of the raiding itself, because that raiding schedule (typically 3 hours 2 to 3 days a week for non-hardcore guilds) is in and of itself a huge investment. That time could instead have been used on other activities, such as sports and social activities, that you end up missing out on because most mythic guilds don't want people who can't maintain a 90-99% attendance, at least during progression.

Having to farm artifact power was bad enough in Legion, now we both have to farm azerite (do daily emissaries, check missions semi-frequently and 3x weekly islands) and at the pace we are losing gold to expensive consumables, it will be necessary to farm gold or consumables ourselves to prevent going broke. I bet in 8.2 there will even be another necessary azerite grind to get essential traits on the necklace as early as possible.

This isn't 2004 anymore. Mythic raiding should not be restricted to people who have tons of free time on their hands or only want to play wow - 9 hours a week of game time should be enough to participate if you have the skill.

[Marrilaife]

This isn't 2004 anymore. Mythic raiding should not be restricted to people who have tons of free time on their hands or only want to play wow - 9 hours a week of game time should be enough to participate if you have the skill.

I sympathize with you, but you'll find lots of people (mainly hc raid puggers) that claim raid logging is a crime, mythic should be tuned around raiding 5-7 times a week with extra mandatory 20h a week farming sessions of herbs, ap, and other meaningless crap to prevent people from being "raid loggers", because that's how it used to be in glorious days of vanilla. Basically mythic raiding shouldn't be gated by skill, but by timesinks that make it blocked from anyone who has a job or wants to do anything else in their spare time than sit in wow.

I swear I had people claim that my guild is "not a real guild" if people mostly log to raid and do 1 m+ a week. That if people play 12h a week that's not hardcore enough. That if people don't wanna grind for hours for ap and consumables they should step down from mythic and go casual. Well basically what people want is mythic raiding to die so they can feel better about themselves that only "nolife basement virgins" raid mythic or nobody does, it's removed and they're at the ceiling of the game.

No one really knows why grinds exist in this game, casuals can ignore them and hardcores hate them. You think forcing people to grind herbs, ap, augment runes etc. would stop all these "wow has no content" threads? Nope, ofc not. These people don't even consider it "content". The only people who have to do the grinds are people who already have another reason to stay subbed to wow, like mythic raiding or pushing high m+ keys. The people who feel there's a content drought and they ran out of stuff to do won't suddenly fill their time with grinding herbs.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

all i read is "those bad casuals dont want to buy mythic carries"

perfect - you should have been never been able to sell them in first place if devs would care about endgame in first place.

raiding was always expensive . if you want to save gold make your raiders to use alts for prodiding flasks/pots for themselves instead providing it for them.

Raiding was basically free from mid TBC (whenever they broke Elixir stacking) to Legion.

During ALL of WotLK, Cata, MoP and WoD I bought all my consumables from the AH with passive gold that you got from simply playing the game, and selling some enchants here and there. And I was one of those ppl who used Food and Prepotted for every single pull, every single raid, aswell as doublepotting on every farm kill.

That was impossible early Legion, and is impossible now. One would think that Blizzard learned their lesson after the shitstorm they got because of the prices of pots and flasks in early Legion, which made them nerf the herb requirements for both, aswell as adding Potions of Prolonged Power (which was better than the original caster Dps pot for many classes).

But no, ofc Blizzard did the exact same thing going into BFA, making absolutely insane herb requirements for crafting pots. Each pot costs 18 Herbs, each Flask costs 30 Herbs. Compare that to the crafting requirements in MoP, when each pot required 2 Herbs, and each Flask required 5.

If I want to play the way I used to, and the way that honestly feels best, I have to spend MORE time running circles in Nazmir farming Herbs, than the 9 hours I spend in BoD each reset.

[rogoth]

all i read is "those bad casuals dont want to buy mythic carries"

perfect - you should have been never been able to sell them in first place if devs would care about endgame in first place.

raiding was always expensive . if you want to save gold make your raiders to use alts for prodiding flasks/pots for themselves instead providing it for them.

let me just stop you there kiddo, as someone who has raided extensively at multiple levels over the course of wow's lifespan lemme give you a little history lesson:

boost runs have been sold since the game began, the reason you didn't hear about it as much back then was due to how communication about such things was so much less than it is today, you had to know someone who knew someone to get stuff done, ppl were being boosted through molten core to get eye of sulfuras or thunderfury, people even paid for boosts to get the first wing bosses in naxx 40 on some servers, in TBC boosting was even more prevalent with people paying for full BT runs to maybe get warglaives, ppl paid for TK boosts for ashes, as far as i know there was very few people capable and able to boost in SWP at least not until wrath pre patch, then in wrath you had tons of boost runs for various things and towards the end of wrath you had full GDKP runs where people who joined paid gold to the raid leader for gear drops and the gold was then divided equally among those who participated (essentially community boosting cos i was one of those that didn't need any gear since i was full BiS and was there for the free gold), made a pretty penny from that, raid boosts picked up in cata and have been ongoing even more since, you had boost services for challenge modes in mop/wod, you have had M+ carry runs since legion, it's been everywhere in almost every aspect of the game in some form or other, so complaining about it now is just a waste of time.

[vilememory]

I use to like farming mats, but now I get stuck trying to deal with multi boxing bots that are running a path farming everything in sight. Gods help you if you are trying to farm leather, because there are still entire raids worth of bots farming those clefthoof in WoD Nagrand.

[Marrilaife]

But no, ofc Blizzard did the exact same thing going into BFA, making absolutely insane herb requirements for crafting pots. Each pot costs 18 Herbs, each Flask costs 30 Herbs. Compare that to the crafting requirements in MoP, when each pot required 2 Herbs, and each Flask required 5.

Aaaand you had flying from the get go, aaaand you had tiller's farm that after getting to exalted you could plant herbs, spirits of harmony or whatever other mats you wanted instead of cabbages.

[Stacie]

The mats required should be less, a vendor should be added to buy them like in the past. That said allot of friends still raiding and doing high end m+ buy tokens frequently to avoid the farm. Guess this kind of thing pleases Blizzard. But i think its also turning others without much money IRL and time away from the game (i know a few who have quit raiding because of time/costs, eventually getting bored and leaving the game.)

It's a balancing act i like to think Blizzard isn't doing this for money, it will reach a point that they will likely loose more than gain as more people just give up raiding/m+.

[Spotnick]

I still pre-pull with prolonged power pots on my main.

Granted I'm a healer, but the price of the current pots is so ridiculous it's not worth even thinking about it.

No idea why we don't have a breath of bwonsamdi trader yet.

But I found out a long time ago you need to be enchanting/alchemy to drastically reduce your raiding expenses. Just those 2h flasks are worth a lot.

[burek]

And I was one of those ppl who used Food and Prepotted for every single pull, every single raid, aswell as doublepotting on every farm kill.

That's the problem. What is the point of having consumables in the game if everyone can get them for free and use them all the time? They should be meaningful, not something you waste on every pull.