In light of the new alchemy changes, and the announcement that flasks will now take both the offensive and defensive elixir slots, I propose the following as a solution to protection potion viability, cost, and usefulness.

Given that these potions currently require rather expensive materials, in order to bring their cost and usefulness in line with other potions, here is what I propose:

1) Major Protection potions are now flagged and renamed as elixirs, occupying the defensive slot when used.
2) Creation results in a stack of 5 elixirs of protection, eligible for an elixir mastery proc.

I believe these are the only 2 changes necessary. Why?

The first change makes it such that if you wish to use these items, you can no longer flask and protection pot together. This means, raid designers and developers know that when creating a resist oriented encounter, or one with heavy elemental AE damage, that your raiders are either going to be using a protection elixir and another offensive/beneficial elixir, or resist gear and a flask to make up for the lost stats. Ideally, this would allow for better and more balanced tuning of such fights.

The second change benefits raiders, alchemists, and all parties involved. Elixir mastery now remains desirable for those resist based encounters, as who could resist doubling your protection potion stock. This also lowers the effective to cost of these elixirs (with the exception of shadow), to a more reasonable ~5g / elixir.

This removes some of the tedium of farming for raiders, while still requiring them to participate to some degree. Instead of having to farm for hours on end for 10 potions, or having to farm old world materials, you can now spend 30 minutes farming for your primals, have the elixers created, and have 10 ready for the next nights raid.

I feel that this would solve some of the tuning issues currently facing designers, while removing some of the mindless tedium for raiders, and it keeps elixer mastery as a viable profession choice given the new changes.

Thoughts and comments are appreciated.

Knowing blizzard, they would make them only needed on the last bosses of a dungeon for an encounter that takes 20 mins and you are forced to take one every 2 mins. So even though you may not have to flask, you will be spending countless gold on these pots required to even learn the encounter and every time you wipe you would be forced to start back over and hope you have 10 more pots.

This is a good start, but I suggest 1 more change.

3. Resistance pots no longer require a PRIMAL to craft.

I left the primal there as a counter balance to the fact that you would now be getting 5 per craft, rather than one.

I'm certainly open to allowing singular crafting, requiring a mote or 2 instead. The idea here being balancing cost of them versus how they are currently.

I suggest:

- In the mats, change the primal to a mote (and allow people to turn a primal back into 10 motes with a right+click)
- The potion cooldown doesn't begin to expire until the resistance buff is completely consumed
- The potion cooldown doesn't begin to expire until combat breaks

Call me crazy, but wouldn't you prefer to never have another fight that grossly benefits from protection pots?

I'd prefer they go away and die, but if they have to stick around and show up once in a while (as they seem to), I'd prefer they be properly balanced and not such a pain to acquire as they are now. At least that would remove some of the loathing of them and the encounters that spawned their use.

Using them on Rag wasn't bad. Loatheb on the other hand....that was horrible Grave Moss was awful.

Fixing them will make them acceptable as general use requirements. There's been a lot of complaining about consumables throughout the raid game, but (thank god) not a single complaint about Protection Potions. Maybe they just added them out of a sense of needing completeness, maybe they were added so OCD alchemists (like myself) farm for silly, pointless recipes. Maybe they actually got one alchemy related thing right...a buff only to be used in the direst of circumstances, or just as a luxury.

But I just *loved* farming Scarlet Monastery for hours on end... /wrist

I mean protection pots are nice how they stand if the encounters themselves do not somehow use abilities that dramatically favor their use in trivializing that element (like KT's frostbolt, or Ragnaros, or obviously Loatheb).

The real question is how to make them less proactive in a sense of "everyone pop one of these every 2 minutes." It would take someone far more creative than I to come up with skillful ways to implement protection pots from a sheer design standpoint.

We had a hunter like that that used to terrorize alliance in redridge for 5 hours a day. I think his NPH (n00bs per hour) peaked at 120. Yes, 120 NPH. This was back when the game first launched, everyone was level 20, and he was level 60. Good times.

Protection potions need to be changed from a "chug every 2 minutes" type of item to more of a reactive item since reactive potions are fun, stoneshields and protection potions are not.

If they changed them to be "for the next 6 seconds, fire effects now heal you instead of deal damage" it would be a lot more fun. This is of course assuming they don't make a boss that has a timered fire ability that you had to chug one every phase or whatever.

Also, I believe blizzard has their own design about potions. Making suggestions before a change is announced is ok; but after they say they have plans about it, they will do something about it, its just babysitting ourselves.

While i can follow your point about being defensive pots, changing potions to elixirs is a bad idea. Look at the amount of useful elixirs/potions you can brew. The highlights from potions are
- major protection pots (way too expensive atm, ergo no one uses them)
- the 15sec boost potions (only very few people use them atm, maybe more after the changes go live. Those would be way more useful if they had their own cooldown timer and not share it with eg. healing/mana pots)
- Ironshield potion

So basicly at the moment there is not much joy for potion masters, it's definately not on par with how useful elixir mastery is. We'll have to see how this changes for the patch now.

There's also those little mana potions that are the largest benefit any healer can get.

Something like that.

Basically, a "potion" that lasts an hour shouldn't be a potion. It's dumb. Pre-drinking potions is dumb. Along with Ironshields/Stoneshields and mana pots, these are a major culprit.

The "elemental effects heal you" bit would break some encounters, since there are elemental abilities that are meant to one-shot you if you screw up (think Dark Glare -- popping a shadow pot and standing nonchalantly in Dark Glare to get topped off would be silly).

I'd just change them to be something like "Absorbs 1000/3000/5000 <element> damage for ten seconds" or the like (depending on the grade of potion), and make them require a mote instead of a primal. Problem solved. You need to run through an Abyssal hellfire on Prince, or you screw up and aren't going to make it out of his Shadow Nova in time while Enfeebled? Quick, pop a pot and live! But no more chain-chugging or pre-emptive potting.

The mantra I've been repeating for months now, if not longer:
1) Make Ironshield/Stoneshield pots + a large amount of armor for 15 sec, like a mitigation version of a Haste/Destruction/Heroic pot.
2) Make elemental protection pots absorb more damage, but only have a short duration.
3) Give mana potions a drawback so that they aren't really just frontloaded massive mp5. Chugging a super mana when I'm at 75% mana a minute into a major boss fight shouldn't be a reflexive act.

Designers could create a number of interesting boss mechanics through the use of abilities that needed to be fully absorbed to prevent some nasty side effect. These abilities would either affect specific individuals over the course of a fight, or as an alternative, simply require any N players to rotate their absorptions to complete some task. Both could be implemented in such a way that only a small number of pots would actually be consumed during an attempt, as opposed to like 25xfightLength/2 pots.

Two examples:
1. You fight some wind-elemental boss on the roof of a tower. Periodically he targets a random member of the raid, and locks aggro on them for 15 seconds. He begins spamming an ability that has a nature damage + knockback, but if the damage is absorbed, there is no knockback. Getting knocked back would send you flying off the edge of the tower to your death. Once you have "tanked" the boss, you are ineligible to be selected again (or ineligible for 2 min).
In this case, every member of the raid needs to have pots available, but only a few people will actually use them. It also makes chugging mana pots a risky move. To prevent pre-buffing, the boss might open with a room-wide shockwave for a few thousand nature damage.

2. You fight some engineer/tinkerer boss that is trying to create golems in a small furnace. Every 30 seconds, he'll start making a golem (though he remains outside the furnace). The furnace itself is small and enclosed, so to attack anything inside it, you must go into the furance itself (can't dps from outside). The golem incubates/grows in the furnance before it activates and comes out to attack the raid. Standing in the furnace applies a firemaw style debuff that hits for a small about of damage but applies a massive stacking +fire damage debuff. Fully absorbing all the ticks with a max-rank pot would allow a rogue (or some dps class) to attempt to destroy the golem before its finished growing. As an alternative, you could send in two dpsers with lesser pots.

Consumable cost: 1 pot per 30 seconds of the fight. Assume a 4 min fight, The raid itself needs to bring a total of 8 pots. The boss can drop primal fires.


The common theme here in both cases is the damage is intended to be absorbed rather than healed through.

I would prefer they make things like Fire Ward and such to be on a targeted player and bring down all Protection potions to be similar to them. Also, Blizzard should be not allowed to ever require a full raid to use them repeatedly as some sort of gimmick on a fight (loatheb).

I agree entirely with 1&2, for #3 my suggestion would be to turn mana pots into a form of "last stand" for mana. You would gain X mana, but also lose more than the amount gained after a while or over time. This way they would only be used if you were out of mana and just needed a little more to cast that extra heal or two right now, the overall effect should be negative.

I haven't seen it mentioned on this thread yet that they now require only two motes each, and have a 2min duration.

I've got it, they could have protection potions yield 5 per mote instead of just 1!

Kidding aside, what sort of change if any is the 2 minute timer going to have for people other than removing pre-popping a protection potion going in to a resistance fight?