An idea I was throwing around was perhaps changing the "herbable" and "minable" mobs to skinning exclusively. But never the less, we need either A) skinning into LW so we can pickup a better gathering prof or B) Make it so skinning can get you motes (along with the above change possibly, because as it stands now; getting 350+ leatherworking requires 4+ primals -per point- and it only goes up the higher it gets.

Also, I liked the idea of the 375 sets being upgradeable, that would certainly be a huge perk.

EDIT:
@ Dragkhar, increasing the drum range would be awesome, especially since most of the time hunters are buffing or being buffed my melee classes and we're (hunters) often at max range/out of drum range.

Counterargument is that a Tailor just needs to kill mobs to 'gather' his materials and gets the same degree of side-drops. It's like 'cloth-gathering' was already bundled into Tailoring.

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:

So we can still flask our raid, and thats considered a fix? Stupid.

Thats another decent way to fix it too, however it would most likely end up being 'too' good, however it would allow non grinding classes the ability to get these items from helping their dps buddies questing and in instances ^^.


As to Quigon, the flask thing is an unknown currently so thats not even valid, we KNOW however it is going to be changed in someway however, so we have to hope its a big thing.

Potions not being looked at too are also a bad thing, god knows why they decided not to look into that as with the flask nerfs coming into play there will be more heavy usage on them instead.
ie currently I have the choice of 'Chain Mana Potions' or 'Flask of Mighty Restoration', its very rare I would need to use a mana pot while having the flask up, so simply nerfing the flasks will mean I have to just take the potion route more often.
Sadly the only way to fix this would be to have a way for healers to get mana back on healing (think JoW on a tank instead of a boss), or severly nerfing the length of encounters which have high healing requirements, although if DPS requrements are nerfed enough then bringing extra healers is also viable.

One of the more unknown issues that will effect this is the balancing changes on raid bosses, when they come down from being a necessity to just being a perk things should calm down, the only issue will be with the ability to 'brute force' a boss down, however having more fights based on mechanics, co-ordination, & execution instead of numbers should help there too.

All I have to say to this is "LAWLS." We got served.

As to playered, if they were going to change flasks significantly they should've put it on their preview. As blizzard goes they rarely add much past previews, its a way to stave people off by prereleasing patch notes well before they're ready to go.

Making farming miserable for non-DPS classes seems to be basically in line with Blizzard's goals. Why should this be any different? Also, as has been mentioned skinning is the only gathering profession that requires you to kill stuff. Which is not fun, easy or time-effective as a healer or tank.

My idea for a solution: in addition to the normal skinnable mobs, create critter-type mobs that wander around outdoor zones. Minimal HP, limited spawns, drop guaranteed Knothide + motes.

edit: And I agree absolutely with the crappy radius of the drums. Good news is, as a Shaman I'm used to paying attention to positioning area-specific non-mobile crappy buffs

The solution, to me, seems simple. Keep herbing the same, make alchemy combines give 4 potions per combine, 8-20 with a mastery proc (any pot, including flasks), and make potions stack to 20. This way they can balance raiding around consumables while removing most of the tedium from farming herbs. 1 Terocone and 2 Fel Weed would net you anywhere from 4-20 major agility potions. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

LW needs a couple of desirable trainer recipes and a couple of desirable (and preferably farmable) dropped recipes. Where's our version of spellstrike and battlecast to profiteer off?

Making drums of restoration at least farmable would be a good thing. I have had a large bounty out on that pattern since day 1 TBC. It has never been on the AH on our server, nor as far as I am aware offered for trade or made available in any other way. For all I know, it has not dropped at all for the Horde on Shu'Halo (OTOH, every world drop epic pattern has been through the AH, some multiple times). If it has, it's being used by someone without the brains to offer their services to all other LW for a fee

Skinning upgrade was necessary, but at this point really the horse has bolted. Leather supplies was only really a hassle up to 375, and even then the truth was that supplies of stuff like clefthoof leather and primals was more of an issue. I suppose it'll make 375 easier to get for re-rollers and latecomers. Still wanting some kind of side reward for skinning the same way that there's side-rewards for mining and herbalism.

Edit: Rolling it into LW wouldn't be bad. Then I could pick up herbing so I can collect my own flask mats, since unless there's further changes in that direction to be announced the solution is basically "well, at least you'll only need to make a flask plus other elixir now!". And hey, that's great news for ele shaman since there's grater firepower, frostpower and shadow power pots but no +nature damage pot, so this does reduce the gap at full potting
It's also great news for healing, which will probably just flask and be done with it instead of flask, mageblood and healing power.

It has been sold once on my server, but back then I wasnt sure how much it was worth or what it dropped off and I was totally unwilling to spend 500g on a green pattern for leatherworking.

Good lord that restoration sells for that much? I never should have given that away

There is a certain excitement and fun in totally potting the f*ck out and finally pain-training that boss you've been working on for weeks. The problem comes when you need to do it for repeated kills or even realistic attempts. I don't think any serious raiders object to using consumables...hell, to compete at the cutting edge you've needed to flask up your tanks and have your healers slam pots since BWL. We used our first world buffs on a Horde-world-12th Nefarian kill a LONG time ago. The difference is, as Gurgthock says in his recruiting post, the DPS races. Used to be tanks and healers were all you needed, with the DPS races we've seen since AQ40 (well, really since Vael and Nef Phase 1) a whole new dimension has been added to consumable use. The implementation of DPS flasks was really the tipping point. DPS races are fine, as they require everybody in the raid to contribute at the top of their game. The consumables that add 2+ tiers of gear are not fine when that gear doesn't exist.