Perhaps you meant "flasking" rather than "potting", or left out the "hardcore guild" qualifier. GSA could not do Faerlina, Maexxna, and to a lesser extent Noth without raidwide dps pots. And does Patchwerk even need mentioning? Half the fights in Naxx were dps races, and they all "benefitted from potting the whole raid".


Back on the general topic, who cares if lots of stuff is trivial for those willing to use every possible consumable? How many of us are in that group, and more importantly how much of the total playerbase? If the choice is between encounters that are trivial with pots and challenging without them, and encounters that are challenging with pots and impossible without them, isn't the right choice obvious?

Speaking as a player in one of those "average" guilds, it's nice to have consumables as an option to bridge the gap when your gear/skill is not quite enough. If you take that way and balance all encounters around ideal gear and perfect execution, we'll just hit a brick wall and stop. This happened to us in a slighly different form at Huhuran. We couldn't motivate enough of our rogues and hunters to farm up the needed NR gear so for weeks we just steamrolled through Fankriss and then hearthed. Obviously farming up gear is different than farming up pots but it's still the same "do boring shit to enable interesting shit" mechanic and it really put off a lot of our players. The prospect of meeting an encounter that we just can't do because we're not good enough to beat is very disheartening (though admittedly if we'd ever tried C'Thun or Heigan I'm sure we would have experienced exactly that).

They better be fixing the Netherstrike socket bonuses while they're tweaking Primalstrike.

I recall a lot of people mentioning on every world first about the entire raid being flasked. 4H comes to mind, despite random D&T people saying the titans weren't really needed, they were still present and still deemed necessary by who ever is in charge of that sort of thing. C'thun was a full titans run, and I do recall people calling it out. Even on Nef I know a lot of melees used titans to counter fear + shadowflame/cleave combos, back when he was the end.

Of course, I remember and am aware of all of those points...the question being, did anyone -really- care? Or, more specifically, were people clamoring that "omg the bosses need to be buffed, all these pots trivialize raid content?"

I don't remember any such types of comments, and even if they existed they were probably a distinct minority. Most people were aware of what we have found out through experience now: farming week in and week out is time-consuming, totally un-fun in any way, and generally a pain in the ass. So long as that is the case, consumables should be viewed as a crutch, not a balancing point.

If they provide too much benifit? Just nerf them. That's all. Simple solution. I'd prefer that raids return to being something we do on raid nights, rather than something we have to spend time on every other day of the week as well.

The biggest difference from 1.0 (besides Loatheb) and the one people just won't put up with is required potting on farm content. Due to the shit loot in Raids/SSC once you beat a boss you really get no closer to beating him without consumables. They are retuning the gear (major change) and tweaking alchemy (minor change) at the same time while presumably tweaking the encounter itself (unknown).

All of this speculation really doesn't take into account the three-pronged approach that blizzard is using for 2.1.0.

Another update on the alchemy situation:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...234401&sid=1#0

Here's the highlights, from my perspective:

That last line has me worried. "A future patch" is not necessarily the same as "2.1".

Edit: She made a followup post which suggests that all this is in fact slated for 2.1.

So basically now, since the flask eats up both slots, this makes the farming problem better, but the requirement even worse.

Now, a flask is 3-5 times better than any 2 elixirs you choose to use on a raid. So basically if you need to boost your dmg, you have no choice but to flask because anything else is clearly not comparable. Here's to hoping that we don't need to as often once they retune, cause if we do, it will not be pretty.

BAM, encounters will be designed with a fully flasked raid in mind. Woot. =/

So let's see. For a DPS caster, you have a choice of let's say adept + mastery, or flask of supreme power. Obviously the flask is much better. In fact I don't see any situation for any class where the flask wouldn't be better than any combination of elixir. So for raiders, does this change basically mean elixirs are no longer going to be used, but flasks will become the norm?

Oh, I don't know about that. For farm encounters, I'd be perfectly fine with just using an adepts, for slightly more difficult encounters I can use an elixir of major shadow power, and for new content I can use the flask which is 2 hours without any worries about throwing away money on other consumables. There are similiar "tiers" of buffing for most classes I think.

Yes. which:
a) Does not address the high-end raider issue that flasks far outstrip gear upgrades. Therefore bosses are tuned for flasks, and then implicitly require them.
b) Does not address the stated dev concern that potting was causing undue herbalism tedium.