Quote:MMOs, as always, come down to time /played and the smart use of it. Maybe someday a developer will figure out a way to break that.
Problem with the heavy consumable requirement is time /played outweighs smart use of time.
It's not really rocket science to pick flowers effectively. Sure someone might use mods better, choose zone more shrewdly or someone might soup up their mount speed to the max with all the mount speed buffs but that's about it. After that it's all about time
Now raiding, although it rewards time in that raiding 4 nights a week is more than twice as efficient as raiding two nights a week, places much more emphasis on using time smartly than on playing well. And because of that it's made an interesting end-game
A second problem is that the gear no longer catapults you ahead of old content. If you had T2 you didn't need consumables for MC and MC was a farmable raid. Now there isn't really any raid gear that jumps characters up so much it trivialises other level 70 raids. Just because you can beat Gruul does not mean that you don't need flasks and potions to beat the harder parts of Kara
It's an interesting quandary. I've never been a big fan of mudflation but now that successive raid encounters don't make the previous raid particularly farmable I can feel the lack of mudflation as a bad thing. I'm not looking forward to a WoW in 6 months time where I have 4/5 different raid instances all of which are hard to impossible without consumables and none of which are truly on farm status
It's hard to see how the game can provide long-term satisfaction when the main way to succeed is simply picking flowers for hours and is essentially both skillless and boring. It's frustrating too that for most raiders our situation is that some pick flowers and some don't and there's no attempt to reconcile the effort put in there by guild leaders mainly concerned with not provoking guild-splitting drama. As a healer it's always been annoying to see someone outputting under half the healing I do and still being too cheap to use mana potions. I feel that it will be harder in future to contain annoyance with people not contributing consumables if they are absolutely mandatory on almost every boss
Another issue is gold-buying with a great many raiders saying that members of their guilds buy gold on EBay to keep up with consumable requirements. That leads to a mad loop where most of the top players cheat to keep up with content which is tuned on the assumption it needs to be challenging for the people who are cheating. Very unfair on the rest of us
TBC has done some nice work on the Alchemist profession with many interesting and useful additions. That however has compounded the problem because really highly motivated players may want to use half a dozen buff potions per wipe which is too much over a tough evening. It also has the effect that if you are wiping on the boss repeatedly the more you wipe the more people will run out of potions so there really is no point in the doggedly persistent try try and try again approach that most of us used in AQ40 etc (and which sometimes culminated in a wonderful evening such as when my guild took down Twin Emps on the twelfth attempt when most of us were very demoralised but efficiently chivvied into one last try before giving up). But in these TBC raids if you can't win in 4 attempts with everyone buffed to the gills you won't win on attempt #20 with no one using elixirs any more
Various solutions have been bandied around, the one I like best is that you have one potion slot and drinking another potion over-writes the previous effect. So you make a hard choice whether you want to tank with Flask of the Titans active or instead be able to drink healing potions during the fight. The exact solution doesn't really matter but I'd like to see some solution that keeps alchemy useful for raids, allows players to make value judgements on whether to and when to use potions but doesn't allow buffs to power up a raid so much that the only way to keep encounters non-trivial for buffed-out raids is to tune the boss so that those of us who don't buff to the max can't do it
Anyway Tseric mentioned they are looking at the issue of consumables. I only hope they don't cock it up as they seem rather erratic recently