Agreed. All this change will do is make 4-5 different elixirs the only ones ever made and drive the price of the herbs used in those few up quite a bit. Making them last through death or cut materials in half would have been a much better change

This makes me very very sad.

Great, so now instead of using Fel Strength + Major Agi + Flask it'll be Fel Strength + Flask. Still +480ap from potions - this is such a minor nerf, they don't even need to retune encounters (past what is already necessary due to all the broken raid bosses).

Flasks need to be removed from the game, and elixirs need to last through death. Add some more BoP frills to Alchemy to compensate and call it a day.

As a side note, Fel Strength Elixirs aren't correctly flagged as elixirs right now, so this change will have even less of an effect on melee than it's supposed to, unless that's fixed.



edit: since flasks proc off elixir spec, maybe they do qualify as elixirs? I sincerely hope so.

I really hope the new +spell hit gem is yellow/blue since if it's only yellow it would mess up my metagem (5% half spell cast requires more blue than yellow; since blue is useless for raiding mages I just stack +9 dmg and avoid any yellows). I doubt this will be the case since it'll just be a clone of the meele one.

This was my thought exactly, and it might mean that this is more of a change than it sounds like. If flasks are elixirs, then you have, at most, one flask, and an elixir of the opposite type.

You still face problems of scaling (even those two consumables dwarf gear progression upgrades) and of potion chain-chugging, but the decrease in the amount of effort involved in fully buffing does get pretty heavily reduced: a single flask, or a single elixir, in your primary area, and possibly a contrasting elixir.

So they're fixing the set bonus. Wonderful. Noone sane would actually wear the entire set anyway due to the ridiculously stacked stat balance on all three of the pieces, but never mind.

Now how about fixing the fact that it's ~10ilvls underbudget and completely missing sockets, as well, ffs.

Heh, I doubt flasks will count as elixirs. Still, as a warlock, this change will knock off one elixir that I have to use which helps. I assume bosses will have to be retuned as tanks will no longer be able to use as many elixirs (Mastery, Fortitude, Stoneshield, Agility) so they will have to hit softer. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out in the end.

The prospecting change is also interesting. It is already more profitable to prospect your ore and sell the gems than sell it in bar form. As mentioned previously, it will most likely mitigate the dramatic difference in price between green and blue quality gems. More gem types is also a good change that I look forward to.

Elixirs still need one of the following;

Lasting through death
More Herbs gained per node with Herbalism
Alchemy specialisations having a 100% proc rate

This change is decent, but we still actually have to farm for them, plus now it feels like we would be expected to have them at all times. Any one of the above I believe would fix things right up.


As for Engineering, I thought it was very disappointing. Unless the Goggles have some incredible stats and bonuses on them, I don't see too many making them. Hopefully they will be meaningful items, rather then just 'toys', but we'll see.

What I was hoping to see with Engineering was Gun/Wand/Relic/Trinket epic patterns (something which benefits more then one class), which can be upgraded through Primal Nether and Nether Vortexes, just like the Blacksmithing patterns. I think that type of thing would be very popular.

There's just no way that this is the extent of the consumable changes. There's no way that an official statement of "there are big changes coming for alchemy, to reduce the crazy amount of time raiders are spending on it" amounts to this solution. Just wait and see.

Stoneshields/Ironshields are potions, not elixirs. Probably all it means for tanks is they won't be using Elixir of Fortitude anymore. It's not tank damage that has to be balanced around, since they mostly flask anyway, it's dps encounters.

I wonder if they changed the socketbonuses on the 'moonkin' set. (it's 4 agility btw)