Yea, I thought the same thing. I mean, elixir stacking was a problem, but basically this will just limit your choice to one or two elixirs (if the guardian elixir is useful for your class role or not). You will still pop flasks, use weapon oil/sharpening stone, food buff and still chain chug mana/stoneshield pots.
Unless they really reduce boss HP a lot or otherwise retune bosses, i don't see how this elixir change addresses the consumables issue at all >.<
Short of removing flasks in their entirety will not fix the problem unless they up the mats or severely reduce the mats required to make them. If Flasks were 200g each and they stopped designing raid encounters around them...maybe...or they make a flask worth only 30g in mats and then maybe...
From reading these posts I feel a lot of people have lost sight of the fact that these are NOT ALL OF THE CHANGES. This is a preview... a direction... a frame of thinking. Expect more changes similar to what's posted here.
/patient
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
I'ld be impressed if there was any compitent decently geared healer who said he couldn't get by without flasking, using every consumable, food buff, & needing to chain-chug potions every cd.
Sure you need some of the above occasionally, but never(?) all of them all the time.
Tanks have to do it else the raid will wipe when he dies (overtuned boss damage), and DPSers have to do it else you fail to meet some silly enrage mechanic (overtuned boss hp etc).
Just because you may have the 'option' to still use everything doesn't mean that you will 'have' to use them. The only reason I use flask of mighty restoration currently is out of a feel of commitment as everyone else is, I have plenty of mana potions to last me instead and I'ld much rather chug them than a 150g flask.
Im not saying they aren't an issue, but people are still somewhat going to extremes about it I believe, the tuning of content will hopefully contribute alot to the fixing of the 'need' for consumables, wether they are completly available or not. The only issue is the ability to brute force an encounter down due to it, but as everyone seems to despise consumables so much I doubt that will happen much?
Meh anyway, the fixes to elixirs are not as 'good' as we hoped for, its a very slight change that doesn't effect things that much, the flasks are still unknown as are enounter retunings, and untill we see how everything works in cohesion then we will always tend towards the 'its not enough' vibes.
I'ld be impressed if there was any compitent decently geared healer who said he couldn't get by without flasking, using every consumable, food buff, & needing to chain-chug potions every cd.
Sure you need some of the above occasionally, but never(?) all of them all the time.
Tanks have to do it else the raid will wipe when he dies (overtuned boss damage), and DPSers have to do it else you fail to meet some silly enrage mechanic (overtuned boss hp etc).
Just because you may have the 'option' to still use everything doesn't mean that you will 'have' to use them. The only reason I use flask of mighty restoration currently is out of a feel of commitment as everyone else is, I have plenty of mana potions to last me instead and I'ld much rather chug them than a 150g flask.
Im not saying they aren't an issue, but people are still somewhat going to extremes about it I believe, the tuning of content will hopefully contribute alot to the fixing of the 'need' for consumables, wether they are completly available or not. The only issue is the ability to brute force an encounter down due to it, but as everyone seems to despise consumables so much I doubt that will happen much?
I can see it now though, tanks will have less HP (potentially) so they will have to lower the damage each attack a boss makes...but that would severely trivialize encounters because healing would be too easy, so they will increase the attack speed of the bosses. Bosses attacking more means a more steady stream of heals, less chance to spirit regen...more consumable uses by healers.
Anyway, if you want an example of blizzard requiring healing to go balls to the wall, I point you to Patchwerk.
Meh anyway, the fixes to elixirs are not as 'good' as we hoped for, its a very slight change that doesn't effect things that much, the flasks are still unknown as are enounter retunings, and untill we see how everything works in cohesion then we will always tend towards the 'its not enough' vibes.
Agreed. I guess it's a bit too early, I just find it somewhat disturbing that the "big" change to elixirs was of this kind and has left me wondering what the associated "big" change to flasks will be. Gear progression fix remains to be seen as well.
Regardless, I still don't understand why we can't go away with consumables as part of end game raiding. Obviously it's an improvement to farm for 30 mins instead of 2 hrs, but why do we "have to" farm for consumables as a time sink?
You may win a thousand battles, but you can only lose one.
From reading these posts I feel a lot of people have lost sight of the fact that these are NOT ALL OF THE CHANGES. This is a preview... a direction... a frame of thinking. Expect more changes similar to what's posted here.
/patient
I'll accept this argument with respect to alchemy. The amount of changes needed to make consumable usage appropriate is immense and requires raid balancing as well. Conceivable they could salvage this.
But I'm not holding my breath, based on the lackluster changes elsewhere. The Engineering changes don't fix the profession, not by a long shot. Maybe the epic goggles will be equivalent to the tailoring and blacksmithing gear, but since they are only 350, and the current 375 epic goggles are lackluster, it seems unlikely. If they were going to do some of the things that engineers really want (epic BoP guns, comparable to the new BS weapons, ammo that is reasonably priced and worth using, usable PvP trinkets/grenades that don't cost a million gold), why wouldn't they say so? Previews tend to feature the good and catchy things, not the boring parts. Especially when you know that people have been waiting months for these changes, because 2.1.0 has been promised as the second coming of WoW. Likewise, for reasons mentioned several times in this thread, without being listed with other changes, the elixir change looks very much like they missed the point completely on what was bad with consumable usage.
On a different note, what the heck is "As a result Elixirs now stack with class abilities such as "Arcane Intellect." about? Please don't tell me one of the new defensive elixirs is going to be a straight +intellect buff, and that I'm being clueless about some wierd currently existing elixir.
Originally Posted by Soladoras
I found this while wading through the blue post in the general forums today:
I can see it now though, tanks will have less HP (potentially) so they will have to lower the damage each attack a boss makes...but that would severely trivialize encounters because healing would be too easy, so they will increase the attack speed of the bosses. Bosses attacking more means a more steady stream of heals, less chance to spirit regen...more consumable uses by healers.
Anyway, if you want an example of blizzard requiring healing to go balls to the wall, I point you to Patchwerk.
I did intend only to include TBC stuff but ok :P
Patchwerk, at first we did it rigidly, every healer was forced to go balls to the walls on him simply because that was the done thing. Once we had the encounter down (not to mention the tanking warriors had perhaps 1-2 Naxx looted items) they all suddenly seemed to be able to manage without going that heavy again, most opted only for mageblood or oil, and mana potions.
Their gear didn't improve that much, we didn't change tactics and he didn't get nerfed.
I'ld not consider a fight where they are only a buffer to support inexperience the same as what I mentioned before, nor was there back then Mighty Resoration which on Patchwerk would of been 2-3x the power of FoDW (5k~ mana over 6mins vs 2k).
From reading these posts I feel a lot of people have lost sight of the fact that these are NOT ALL OF THE CHANGES. This is a preview... a direction... a frame of thinking. Expect more changes similar to what's posted here.
/patient
Yeah, if these are all or most of the changes Blizzard pushes, they deserve all the shit they're going to get. Which sort of begs the question of why they DID release such a crappy preview, a question I certainly don't have the answer to.
Hopefully the devs are listening and incorporate some player feedback. 2.10 is probably still a month or two away from hitting the live servers, so they have time.
From going over this thread I've been noticing that most physical dps classes have been taking Elixir of Mastery being an offensive elixir for granted - and the tanks are all considering it a defensive Elixir. So ... what is it then? I think this is pretty much the only one that falls into that kind of grey zone.
For my personal use, if it's considered offensive, I'll probably end up with a Mastery/Major Defense combo, otherwise, it'll have to be Major Agility/Major Defense, with Mastery for Elemental fights. If Flasks do happen to be considered as Elixirs, well, then bye bye Major Defense altogether. Hell, that might end up cheaper at the end of a wipe night. It's the insane Lichen/Terocone requirement that's making tanking elixirs a huge chore right now (Major Agi/Major Def/Mastery all use at least one of them) - I'd gladly give up having to pay ~35g per stack of herbs and instead just buy 1-2 flasks per night of raiding.
But I digress, so again, any word on where Elixir of Mastery goes in all this?
On a different note, what the heck is "As a result Elixirs now stack with class abilities such as "Arcane Intellect." about? Please don't tell me one of the new defensive elixirs is going to be a straight +intellect buff, and that I'm being clueless about some wierd currently existing elixir.
Some of the straight +stat pots from Classic did not stack with class buffs.
There was one +int and +spi I think that just never stacked and was therefore totally freaking useless even at the time you could learn to make it.
BSG Reference Sheet
in EJBSG 10 -My instincts tell me that we cannot sacrifice democracy just because the president makes a bad decision.
Some of the straight +stat pots from Classic did not stack with class buffs.
There was one +int and +spi I think that just never stacked and was therefore totally freaking useless even at the time you could learn to make it.
Definitely used that on my priest (while shadow) for solo farming/pvp, after making a boatload to level Alchemy. And yeah, other than that ... completely and utterly worthless. Conversely they made ridiculously lowlevel Elixirs such as Fortitude (+120hp) be the end-all-be-all up until level 70 - by that I mean, it was irreplaceable, and every tank used it if you were hard pressed to max out your hp.
Conversely they made ridiculously lowlevel Elixirs such as Fortitude (+120hp) be the end-all-be-all up until level 70 - by that I mean, it was irreplaceable, and every tank used it if you were hard pressed to max out your hp.
I still use these... is there something better that I don't know of that doesn't stack with it?
Yeah, hopefully there is a bit more than what they listed slated for the patch. What with engineering having exactly one faction based recipe, the infamous green flare.
As for alchemy, the elixir change is wholly unsurprising as the change was hinted at awhile back here. I'm far more interested in what they plan to do with flasks, because those seem like the real 500 pound gorilla in the closet in terms of consumables having way too powerful of an effect. Even if the choice is 1 Flask or 2 elixirs, I know I'd be hard pressed to come up with two elixirs being as valuable as 360 AP.
Excuse me if the following will come off as a rant.
But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that we (as a raiding community) never really had a "Consumable Dilemma". It really was an encounter balancing dilemma instead.
To explain: Full potting was possible since the good old MC days. Sure, we had no melee flask or fel strenght, but for the time being the pots added up to no less raid DPS increase then they do today (I have to remind that e.g. Mongoose Elixier was a greater relative upgrade than Greater Agility is now, as were sharpening stones etc.)
But, and this is a big BUT, we were not driven to flask up a whole raid to kill a boss. Because perfectly (or at least not with too many errors) executed an encounter was doable very well without potting to extremes.
Just as a personal experience, we never flasked in BWL (except for the titan on the MT) and for our C'Thun firstkill 5-6 people (wiht low HP and notorious bad tentacle experience were flasked at most.
We flasked more for patchwerk.
Loatheb was an even bigger offender.
From there it went downhill. Enrage timers became the norm and not the exception (while it can be disputed that mana being not such an issue as in the early days this was necessery to cap the time a raid had on an encounter ... but this is for another thread)
Yes, tuning bosses to be downable without potting a raid (and thus increasing the raid efficiency way more than gear upgrades could ever manage) could result in being trivial easy when potting. But does your raid spend significant money just to bring down encounters from manageble status to trivial status? My raid never did that. (apart from one or two people when really exploring their DPS limits ... but thats just for fun and giggles really).
Loatheb was IMHO the first (neglecting Patchwerk and potting of tanks) boss where raid wide potting was considered a precondition to success.
Gruul prenerf no less.
And then Hydross done the "intended" way.
The patch will make it worse. Even if they nerf the questionble bosses (hydross e.g. as I think the tank-him-thorugh-his-marks method will be patched), some elixiers just gained their must have status. And the competition for the mats needed will be extreme.
Flasking just got even more important me thinks.
As an alchemist (though no herbalist ... so this is no money profession for me) I am really concerned that the change is for the worse. They doctored the symptoms. Not the disease.
Drums are a great idea which should be expanded on - possibly to offset some of the alchemy changes. Given the large percentage of Druids who take LW why are they not useable in forms?
For the effort required to actually achieve 375 LW the epic sets are laughable. Make them decent, at least Karazhan decent even if that means insane material requirements. There's no point in making something easy to make if no-one wants it anyway (like 95% of all LW recipes). I'd rather have an item require 5 Nethers/Voids but only if it was actually desirable and a viable option for people who don't want to wait for a random drop.
I'd suggest make Skinning proc something to make it worthwhile. maybe a reagent which depends on your LW specialization? (Tribal procs motes of Life and Mana. Elemental procs motes of Earth and Water. Dragonscale procs motes of Fire and Air).
From reading these posts I feel a lot of people have lost sight of the fact that these are NOT ALL OF THE CHANGES. This is a preview... a direction... a frame of thinking. Expect more changes similar to what's posted here.
/patient
If this is their frame of thinking, their direction, then nothing changes. It's not like they've displayed one ouf of 10 good changes, there simply is nothing we can point at and say "5 more changes like that and it will be fine!"
Alchemy changes actually make things worse. I knew they'd fuck it up. The problem is people who work at blizzard and make these decisions are probably not spending hours a day farming for the mats for potions in a raid. And the QA people almost guaranteed are not doing it.
This post sums it up best:
The 2.1 Alchemy Checklist
1. Casters chain chugging Mana potions still? Check.
2. Tanks chain chugging Stoneshields still? Check.
3. Full flasking of raids still? Check.
4. Herbalism still the most important raiding profession? Check.
5. Full buffs is two elixirs + food + flask + world buffs? Check.
Meet the new Alchemy, same as the old Alchemy.
So we can still flask our raid, and thats considered a fix? Stupid.
Maybe. But if encounters are also retuned this might not be an issue. If you dont need potion/elixer XXX will you use it? Sure it will help to simplify some stuff but I doubt it would be used as massively as now if there was the clear impression that it was basically not needed. I dont know anybody who loves to farm all the consumables or spend his gold for it. Would this simplify the game too much? Depends, BWL would undoubtedly have been much easier if guilds potted up like they do now.There were enough options for it in wow classic. They didnt, it wasnt needed.
But then again if this is the reason behind the idd minor adjustements to consumbales Blizz suddenly would show more insight in the psychology of players than they have shown until now in TBC.
Making skinning a part of leatherworking is not making it more like tailoring and would just be a horrible idea making people have to skill leatherworking to be able to skin.
If you want it more like tailoring blizzard should just remove the skinning proffession and make the beasts drop the leather as humanoids drop cloth.
No changes for blacksmithing and specifically armorsmithing? Would be nice to get some craftable BoP plate that isnt utterly useless for others than warriors.
Alot of Naxx was completly doable without anyone (perhaps throw the MT a titans) touching a potion. (we only got 11 bosses. I realise Gothik, 4H, Saph and KT was different. But 11 bosses down was still far far longer in naxx then ~98% of wows population).
Anub, Faerlina, Instructor, Heigan, Gluth, Grobbulus, Maexxna... We did all our first kills without anyone but the MT flasked and potted.
The ONLY fight where we used flasks on anyone else then the MT was Patchwerk the first few times. (Oh, and Loapot. But we never flasked for it... Worldbuffs + DPS-pots)
Noth, Thaddius, PW (Dps and healers), all went with normal DPS-potions, and nothing excessive. And we phased out the use of pots.
Now, even with that VERY low consumeable use (compared to now), was Naxx a pushover? Some might argue, but i mean for the broad public? I've seen number where 5% or so of wow-players saw Naxx.
I know atleast my guild had loads and loads of fun making our way thrue it at about 1 new boss down a week. Never using extreme flasking, never using extreme potting.
Encounters does NOT NEED TO BE BALANCED AROUND THE USE OF EXCESSIVE CONSUMEABLE USE!
Yes, the "hardcore" will farm, pot up and do it easier... So what? I know for a 100% fact that my guild would rather progress a bit slower, with more or less no need to farm.
Maybe. But if encounters are also retuned this might not be an issue. If you dont need potion/elixer XXX will you use it? Sure it will help to simplify some stuff but I doubt it would be used as massively as now if there was the clear impression that it was basically not needed. I dont know anybody who loves to farm all the consumables or spend his gold for it. Would this simplify the game too much? Depends, BWL would undoubtedly have been much easier if guilds potted up like they do now.There were enough options for it in wow classic. They didnt, it wasnt needed.
But then again if this is the reason behind the idd minor adjustements to consumbales Blizz suddenly would show more insight in the psychology of players than they have shown until now in TBC.
If the option exists content has to be balanced against a raid using it. If not then content will be trivial with excessive potion use which doesnt alleviate the consumables grind for anyone but the best of the best who can already do everything without consumables. Everyone else will mass flask/mass pot in order to kill a boss they otherwise wouldnt be able to kill.
You compare with BWL and people not potting because it wasnt needed and thats wrong.
People didnt pot because they didnt think about it.
On new servers people most assuredly potted their way through MC and BWL so that they could reach Naxx faster for quicker gear progression. As long as potting allows you to progress through content you dont have gear/skill for we are going to keep seeing mass consumables, it doesnt matter if its low end or high end content.
The cat is out of the bag and there is no way to put it back in.
If the option exists content has to be balanced against a raid using it. If not then content will be trivial with excessive potion use which doesnt alleviate the consumables grind for anyone but the best of the best who can already do everything without consumables. Everyone else will mass flask/mass pot in order to kill a boss they otherwise wouldnt be able to kill.
You compare with BWL and people not potting because it wasnt needed and thats wrong.
People didnt pot because they didnt think about it.
No? the majority of Naxx was tuned without using them, as was AQ, they meerly helped if you couldnt do it normally.
We flasked for our first C'Thuns (titans) because we lacked experience and made alot of small mistakes that would otherwise simply kill people and wipe us, it didn't make the encounter 'simple' nor did it mean we could sit through the normal mechanics of the encounter and ignore them.
If people use full potions when its not 'needed' then its either because the 'risk' is too high to get by without them (aka needed) or for epeen matters on the DM.
04/09/07, 11:55 PM
were flasked at most.
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