Blizzard has quite a few options open to it at the moment, regarding professions/farming/raid content in general.

a) they can do nothing. Pretty easy. It's unlikely that people who burnout from farming will put too large a dent in their pockets, certainly in the short term - and WoW only needs to last a few more years before its technology becomes redundant and needs a huge rewrite anyhow. Immune-to-X mobs are generally immune because logic/flavour demands that they be - sadly flavour is no replacement for fun.

b) they can do almost nothing, and pretend to do something. This keeps the wolves from the gates, gives them time to make small changes and then they can spend a few months analysing what knock-on effects their changes have. I think that's what they've gone for.

c) they could make some interesting content. What if there were repeatable instance-type quests where you could heal mobs to complete the quest (like the Benediction quest) or tank up mobs with NPCs healing you, and doing this gave you some money? Not much, but enough to be competitive with a hunter grinding mobs. Enough to cover the repair bills. This would require a lot of work, a lot of balancing. It would remove the need to respec and pay money to earn money, but I don't hold up much hope for this. Although I would dearly love a raid encounter where the mob was damaged by heals and put a debuff on people that meant they could only be healed by damage (I'd love to try healing in a raid, don't want to level a healer). Gimmicky but adds variety.

d) they could remove respec costs totally. I imagine they're there to be a gold sink, but given how many people seem to have to buy gold anyway - why have it? Why put in a gold sink? Make epics more expensive to repair, or something, but given most people need a different set of gear for each spec anyhow, and will be suboptimal for their non-primary specs - I simply can't understand why (if 'fun' is Blizzard's primary motivation) they won't do this.

e) they could remove consummables totally. I have never understood why drinking a potion equates to fun. I don't like using consummables - perhaps because I'm a hoarder - but I resent the idea that at some point I'll need to pay hundreds of gold a week simply to raid new content. It's stupid. It's not fun. I'd be upset if Tailoring were removed from the game, after spending hundreds of hours grinding tailoring sets for two characters - but I could cope, and happily, if it meant that Alchemy got completely removed from the game too. I spent less time playing my raiding character in EverQuest and grinding AAs (and I had well over a hundred) than I have my WoW character farming crafting materials, and this is before I've had to grind for money to buy potions/level up a character with Herbalism.

If they need a cash sink, to ensure that economies don't suffer from hyper-inflation, it should be easy to put one in that doesn't enforce "extra" grinding, simply uses up what you have spare. For example, make a heroic key a one-use item. Make it cost 100g, 500g, even 1000g to complete the SSC or TK attunements. One-off payments that will drain cash but that will not enforce farming every spare minute of a raider's life.

Somewhere I think Blizzard lost the willingness/bravery to upset the status quo and think back to their original "Will This Be Fun?" model that was mentioned in the interview with one of their designers. I think they're scared that people will 'beat the game' and quit, if they don't add all these huge artificial time sinks. Maybe they're right - maybe Nihilum and Death and Taxes would quit if they beat all of the raid content and there was nothing new in the offing. But fights tuned to be really hard with no consummables in existence would surely be i) better tuned and ii) hard enough to keep all but the most dedicated raiders busy until a new content patch.

As for the new professions - screw you, Blizzard. Everyone should have to go through the pain of levelling fishing that I went to. On an overpopulated server, fishing pools for Motes of Water is one of the few ways to get something to sell. Never mind that since the Elemental Plateau nerf there is one hunter per two fire elemental spawn points, and three shadow priests/warlocks farming the fishing area most of the day.

Differentiating between gathering and crafting professsions was a bad call from the beginning on imho. They should have tacked mining and skinning on BS/Ing - LW instead like they did with enchanting and disenchanting. Of course most folks then would elect to take herbalism/alchemy as one profession, given its usefullness and universal appeal. But it's much too late to change this now.

When chosing the professions for my second rogue I rerolled just before BC I agonized about what crafting profession would be perfect (I went mining/enchanting for cash) but at the end neither blacksmithing nor leatherworking held much appeal for me. Had I known that I would reroll 3 months later again, I would have gone alchemy/herb for sure, the only thing that prevents me from doing it now is the fact that my enchanting spellbook is already pretty full.
Pretty much the same happened when I rerolled to warrior, in the end I choose hammersmith because of the coolness of Thunder/Deep Thunder (though I probably won't use it much, beeing one of the few tanks left) but not because I felt it would give me an edge on the long run.
I sincerely hope that all crafting professions (well except for tailoring which looks fine if not overpowered at the moment) get more interesting stuff in terms of upgradeble BOP stuff in order to lend them a long term perspective.

I don't think anyone's posted it yet, and it doesn't really relate to the current consumable discussion going on in this thread, but it pertains to the initial thread topic nonetheless. Delete if someone else has posted it, skimmed through the last pages of posts and didn't find anything, so my apologies if I didn't catch it - anyway, Euro CM's posted some additional info a few hours ago:

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread....75607940&sid=1

The BoJ->Nether "exchange rate" is at 4:1, according to worldofraids, and responses in that thread.

What is the meaning of this intrusion?

Previews in the past have been The Big And Exciting Thing You Were Waiting For, so this one... made people freak out, understandably.

As long as there's more alchemy nerfs coming down the pipe....