Raiding Consumables

[Brista]

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

[Xanthix]

Fel Mana Potion (3200 mana at a cost of -25 +dmg/heal for 15 minutes)

Consider how much +heal a current well-geared L70 healer has. Sirreal is sitting at around 1400 +heal. I'm sitting at ~1000 +heal (and I'm not well geared). With my gear, a reduction of 25 +heal is pretty darn minimal when you consider that it's guaranteeing 3200 mana every 2 minutes (Super Mana is 1800-3000. Quite a difference).

It may be worth noting that the -damage/healing debuff stacks up to 10 times, and in game the debuff tooltip actually says -50 healing/25 damage.

[Kevin]

It may be worth noting that the -damage/healing debuff stacks up to 10 times, and in game the debuff tooltip actually says -50 healing/25 damage.

They are still perfect for hunters though. So your serpent sting, that you probably never use in a raid anyway, gets weaker, but you can keep aspect of the hawk on and never need to FD & drink. Of course I got to play my hunter with a paladin for the first time the other and wow the power of seal of wisdom being judged on the mob is just awesome. I knew it was great from theory craft but getting to experience it... But with Blessing of Might upping ranged AP as well, taking Fel Mana pots to pop means that I want my buffs in the order of might, kings, then wisdom. I never needed salvation because I can zero my aggro every 30 seconds and I can misdirect my aggro at the very start of the fight (as well as misdirecting a little bit more of it every 2 minutes). But yeah for a hunter 3200 mana every 2 minutes (or 133 mana/5) is really rather nice.

[Frag]

They are still perfect for hunters though. So your serpent sting, that you probably never use in a raid anyway, gets weaker, but you can keep aspect of the hawk on and never need to FD & drink. Of course I got to play my hunter with a paladin for the first time the other and wow the power of seal of wisdom being judged on the mob is just awesome. I knew it was great from theory craft but getting to experience it... But with Blessing of Might upping ranged AP as well, taking Fel Mana pots to pop means that I want my buffs in the order of might, kings, then wisdom. I never needed salvation because I can zero my aggro every 30 seconds and I can misdirect my aggro at the very start of the fight (as well as misdirecting a little bit more of it every 2 minutes). But yeah for a hunter 3200 mana every 2 minutes (or 133 mana/5) is really rather nice.

Hush you! Hunters are worthless in TBC and we all know it! muahaha. :blink:

[Lissa]

Hush you! Hunters are worthless in TBC and we all know it! muahaha. :blink:

Unlike: Bird brains, Shrubs, and Bears... :whistling:

[Tuftears]

rocket science

Actually it's rocket herbary, to paraphrase Sebudai!

But yeah, at +1100 heal or so, a guaranteed 3200 mana could be worth losing 100 healing for. The top part of that heal always winds up as overheal anyway.

[Artega]

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.

Breaking it will involve breaking the idea of paying monthly fees.

Why should they do something that will save the majority of the playerbase playtime when that very playtime is buying them new cars?:P

[Professor Frink]

There's a reason why consumable buffs aren't allowed in the Arena. And there would be no problem allowing them for raids if it weren't for the fact that Blizzard is balancing raid encounters FOR the consumables, meaning that for each hour of hardcore raiding, you're spending 2 to 4 hours farming. For 95% of guilds, this is not sustainable. You can't have a full time job/family/whatever and sustain that. It's supposed to be a game.

It's not like these items are soulbound or impossible to find in the AH. Why do guilds that are capable of bringing 25 people to bear on raids for hours at a time have people throw away that advantage and go off soloing to get their supplies? Raid (and even 5-man) content can be very profitable for groups that can farm them quickly.

-- frink

[protoshoggoth]

Why do guilds that are capable of bringing 25 people to bear on raids for hours at a time have people throw away that advantage and go off soloing to get their supplies? Raid (and even 5-man) content can be very profitable for groups that can farm them quickly.

-- frink

Because it's hard enough to get 25 people to agree on a single 3 hour block of time just for the raid itself, let alone a 3 hour block of time plus several other sizable blocks of time for farming. You can only bring people's schedules together for so many hours in the week. I don't doubt that organized effort > unorganized effort, but there's only so much organization an organization can muster.

In any case, say you had ten people available. Would they really make more gold raiding a place together than doing ten separate farming runs during that same time? Or eight runs with some of them two-man teams (for instance prot warrior + cloth dps, holy priest + melee dps)?

[Warlock]

Because it's hard enough to get 25 people to agree on a single 3 hour block of time just for the raid itself, let alone a 3 hour block of time plus several other sizable blocks of time for farming. You can only bring people's schedules together for so many hours in the week. I don't doubt that organized effort > unorganized effort, but there's only so much organization an organization can muster.

In any case, say you had ten people available. Would they really make more gold raiding a place together than doing ten separate farming runs during that same time? Or eight runs with some of them two-man teams (for instance prot warrior + cloth dps, holy priest + melee dps)?

I'd guess that multiple pairs would be the most efficient, though I haven't really analysed it. Two people in a solo farming spot will farm more than twice as fast, ten people will spend a lot of time waiting for spawns. None of the BC Instances will admit ten people except Kara; if you're past there I guess you could sell raid spots. Five could run heroics to make and sell the BOE epics. How long do these take once known well? So far I've only run heroic underbog a couple of times, taking ~5 hours each time. I'd expect to get it down to two with practice but even that means ten man hours for one nether and the AH prices I've seen on these aren't all that high.

[oldmandennis]

Bound to be nerfed, then, like the "wow, it actually had a use in the game, briefly" Luffa trinket. Can't have people devising innovative solutions to the fights!

The problem with the luffa (or my personal bane right now the Mark of Tyranny) is that somebody who made a reasonable decision to trash or not take a quest reward... 2 years ago... can permanently gimp their character. Granted, nobody's going to get dropped from a raid because they lack a Luffa in Kara, but if you extend the concept to an actually difficult encounter (Maieve on the way to Illidan?) you could have a serious problem.

You shouldn't be stacking consumables to the point of pain for the Curator. The Prince or Nightbane maybe, but if you need that much to do the curator, in my opinion you should take another week to gear up in 5 mans rather then spend your time picking flowers.

[Arethor]

Added in Fel mana an Oil of Immolation.

The need for consumables has become enough that I dropped my second profession on my warlock so I could pick up herbing.