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.

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

I don't know about you, but I love my resistance fights and protection pot fights like I love my taffy. Taffy made out of the blood and sweat of burned out raiders. There's just something exciting about unnecessary and un-fun game mechanics that just gets my loins tingling.

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.

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.

I just farmed the Darkshire graveyards. You didn't get it as fast, but you had the option of killing massively underlevelled Alliance characters to cool your rage.

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.