No, you'd still use them on every cooldown.

I don't think there's any real question that Potion Sickness is too broad right now; it should be on potions that extend your DPS or healing output - Mana, Haste, etc. Likewise, include any and all "alternative" consumables except class or profession-specific perks. "Survivability" stuff should not be on any cooldown beyond it's own - so no Potion Sickness on Healing Potions, Protection Potions, or Healthstones, as well as Mana Gems and the Herbalism thingies. Ironshields are in a category of their own here - double or triple their armor bonus, reduce duration to 15s or so, and bam, they're now excellent tools for burst damage without being chain-chuggable.

Anyone arguing that resistance potions and health potions should be exempt from potion sickness had better hope they changed Loetheb...

As long as they did change Loetheb, though, I would be quite happy to have the reactive potions (health potions, resistance potions, free and living action potions, sprint potions) keep their current status. Potion sickness seems the ideal solution for the "spam" potions - mana pots, destro and haste pots, and the current incarnation of stone/ironshield potions. I don't really see any value in allowing a second such potion in a 10 minute fight - the point of such a long encounter is precisely that it challenges players' mana management.

I'm sure potion sickness won't affect healthstones or mana gems. They're not potions.

Fungal Bloom gains a HoT component. Forces you to rotate it around the raid to keep up, and your healers focus on the main tank. Judgement of Light/Shadow Priest/Healing Pots can help fill in for the later Dooms. Rotating healers through Fungal Bloom means they may be able to toss raid heals, especially if you can get it timed so, say, a paladin gets bloom and tosses a crit HL on the tank topping him off for a little while.

EDIT: This is a theory, by the way. I'm not even in the beta right now.

Between the severely reduced duration of protection potions (from 60 minutes to two), and assuming there's a WotLK version of Cauldrons, that's not as big an issue. Loatheb should change anyways due to being kind of dumb in its current form.

I obviously can't speak for everyone, but yeah, this totally applies to me, and I'm sure it applies to lots of other people. If I raid 6 PM to 10 PM, I don't necessarily farm for that raid from 5 PM to 6 PM. I farm when I have expendable time - usually all in one go on a weekend. Making it so that I don't have to spend several hours of my weekend farming isn't going to make my guild change its raiding schedule. It isn't even going to make me want to raid later or get home from school/work/whatever earlier. It is just going to make it so that I spend less time doing things I do not enjoy doing.

Obviously nothing holds true for everyone, but I think my guild is fairly typical. We nominally have invites at 7:30, start at 8, but in reality it's usually 8 before we even have 25 on. We certainly aren't starting any earlier. We raid until 12, at which point a significant number of people want to go to bed, so I really doubt we'd extend to 1 either (usually by 1am there's only 10 people online). I think that's fairly typical of most guilds: they already raid as often as they can for as long as they can manage to get 25 people to commit to.

Well, raiding IS multiplayer. It's a co-op game, and you can certainly play through co-op games multiple times. Look at Diablo II, people still play that co-op, despite that fact its graphics are eye-bleedingly bad now days.

Besides, if I spent less time preparing to raid, I could spend more time PvPing, or completing achievements, or levelling an alt, or any number of things I might like to do. I can assure you, I'd much rather spend an hour doing that than an hour doing dailies or farming or fishing to raise some cash. There is so much to do in WoW there's not enough time, even if you play 24/7, to do it all. You can never really "beat" this game.

All I'm saying is that if you want to tackle one aspect of this game (raiding) you shouldn't be forced into doing another aspect of the game (gold farming). I really don't see it as fundamentally different from not forcing people who want to PvP to raid.

To some extent, all of these materials are provided by raiding. The actual cost spent on enchants, etc, is fairly low compared to the amount of time spent raiding, and it comes closer and closer to being covered by raiding itself. (Most noticeably, I actually made money on every single raiding week when 2.4 came out, selling badges and other items that weren't valuable to me.) I'd never been so happy playing the game. It was around then that I quit, but that had more to do with the fact that I need to switch to free-time activities that aren't on a schedule.


Are you honestly telling me that you would raid five hours a week? I spend my hour of farming per four hours raiding at completely random times, by myself. Getting the guild together for a 25-man group four times a week for 3-4 hours is a pain for most guilds, they're not going to take advantage of reduced farming requirements increasing people's free time to demand more raiding.

Fallacy, for a few reasons.
1) Reducing solo farming time does not itself increase raiding time. In casual guilds, this time can't be easily re-distributed into more scheduled raiding time. In the professional guilds that blow through content, they farm consumables between content pushes. For the hardcore guilds that go through content at a reasonable pace, it's a little from column A and a little from column B.
2) The majority of guilds don't exhaust the current content, and I've seen more than a few that had strict consumable requirements, spec requirements, etc. It takes people time to learn the bosses, no matter what. Making them waste time they're not spending raiding makes them think of raiding as a sixteen-hour-a-week job where they have to put in overtime.


The Diablo II community has proven that a PvE game can have longevity. Not to mention a number of other single-player games: My dad does vs-computer matches in Command and Conquer games, despite the fact that he's beaten the AI hundreds of times on those maps. Repetition itself leads quickly to content devaluation, but it does not itself kill games.

World of Warcraft uses fair-sized loot lists to make sure that it takes quite a while to get everybody their ideal gear, combined with a gradual content-release mechanic that ensures that although yes, people will have the game beaten for a while, they'll have something new within a few months and their characters will continue to progress while they wait. (The BT/Hyjal->Sunwell debacle aside.) Blizzard doesn't need to try and slow down people's ability to go through content by adding farming requirements - most guilds are stopped more by player skill than by anything, and the ones that aren't will be preparing for this every second that they're not done with content.

Even assuming that for some reason, they were desperate to slow progression, intentionally ignoring what players enjoy, they could just make it take time for bosses to respawn, shorten trash respawn timers, add more trash, etc - take the grind from outside and put it directly into the raid instance.


The ability to use something repeatedly is not "flexibility." It is "using it more often." Especially when we're talking about a 10-15 minute cooldown between uses. It also makes potion cooldowns incredibly irritating when soloing. (Potion sickness means that you have a relatively short time between potions, if needed, while soloing, while also making it not a repeated-use item during encounters. Longer cooldowns mean you have to wait longer between difficult fights.)

This is the WotLK profession thread, not a philosophical debate about whether or not raiders should farm for potions in preparation for a raid. Obviously there's a link between potion sickness and alchemy, but there has been very little mention of alchemy in the last two pages.

Honestly, potion sickness in it's current form isn't all that problematical, assuming they make the neccesary adjustments to potions. If they're one-per-fight additions and were rebalanced as such, you could - with relative ease - make a tactical potion management "minigame" out of a previously quite boring system. Take the WotlK equalent of [Major Dreamless Sleep Potion]. Tune it properly to make it actually compete with the regular mana potions, and the decisionmaking involved in which one to use would actually be a decision of tactical importance. Similar approaches could be made to all potions - currently, haste potions must be balanced around what happends if you chain them, but no more. If the debuff is accompanied by the appropriate potion balance, it will make the game more enjoyable to play, because what potion, and when, to use it will go from automatic chore to important tactical decision. That's a good thing.

The moneymaking impact on alchemy is also fairly slight. The most popular potion is a no-limits vendor recipe, and thus available to each and every one who had the tenacity to level at least one alt - and nowadays, they practically level themselves - which means that the impact of that particular loss of consumable isn't likely to hit "real" alchemists as much as it is going to hit the profession alts. A system in which there are multiple items with a market is way better than a single item with a big market for the "real" alchemists. Doing potions right, you might actually end up making more money as a hardworking WotlK alchemist selling potions. 'course, it's worth noting that I'm an elixir master myself, and I certainly havn't seen anything yet to make potions (or transmute mastery for that matter) look like they're even on the table in WotlK. But potion sickness alone does not rule out the financial viability of potion mastery, or alchemy as a whole.

The most serious concern in my mind about potion sickness is - and someone did mention it earlier - the reduction in non-healers ability to look after and manage their own health. Not exactly a huge issue, and having no real experience of raid healing, maybe not an issue at all, but I still think it's worth bringing up again.


Having said that, there are two disturbing trends in this thread I'd like to comment on;

First, the cavalier disregard of profession balance. Crafting, if done right, can be a huge beneficial addition to the quality of gameplay. Leaving it unbalanced "because it's easy to switch profession" is not doing it right, anymore than leaving a class in the gutter because "it's easy to switch". Arguing that it's okay to leave alchemy wanting because it's easy to level is every bit as inane as saying shamans should be more powerful than hunters because hunters are easier to level. You could do it, you could probably get away with doing it based on this thread, but it sure as hell isn't good game design. And most importantly, looking at upcoming, past and concurrent MMORPGs, it's not a good business move. Crafting has a place in MMORPGs and there's absolutely no reason for Blizzard to let competing MMOGs score free points of a crafting system. This isn't the most engaging and deepest crafting system known to the genre, but there's no point in not working to at least fullfill the potential it does have.

Secondly, while having to farming consumable materials is hardly the best solo-content this game has to offer, the fact is that it is a part of the solo-content this game has to offer. With PvP being either hardcapped or on strict diminishing returns, the "Making Pretend Money" minigame that lost some (though far from all) of it's charm with increase of dailies, the rep grinds no particularly major hurdles,logging on to my character - a character of the same class as the one I originially started the game with - for solo-content is rapidly losing it's appeal. I mean, I log on, I look around, and then what? There are no raiding preparations that I have not already done. There are very few single-player things I have any greater interest in doing, I have not yet done. To put it into perspective, I recently ground out the Justicar title (honour capping myself doing pug Arathi Basins, now there's a serious pain) and I'n now toying with the idea of a Winterspring frostsaber or Deathcharger's Reins. Of course, the latter would require me to respec from the raid spec, which puts a bit of a dampener on the whole project.
Anyway, the point I wish to make; I did not roll a warlock because I wanted to "finish the game". I rolled a warlock because it was the playstyle that held the most appeal to me, and still does. I have a lvl 70 druid alt, and I enjoy it too, but it's not my class, nor is it my character, it's my alt.

Again, I'm not saying that I don't think potion sickness isn't a good idea, I'm not saying I will particularly mourn lessened farming for an uninteresting mechanic as potions has largely been up to this point.

But I will - and to an extent, do already - mourn looking at my character screen, seeing my character, and knowing that there's no point in logging in on that particular character, because the things I have left to achieve on him are either ridicolously boring or provide very little in the way of actual "character advancement". Raid preparations done in single-player mode is one way to keep that character active, and removing those because they "take too much time"... I have a hard time seeing anything that makes my character less desireable to play outside of raid hours an actual improvement to gameplay. Even if farming isn't exactly the most amusing aspect of the game.

well if they are zapping healthpots I fear that healthstones won't be far behind. Mana gems as well. They are just as much the same as the problem Blizzard appears to be addressing. Yes the second and third are of decreasing return but it still is essentially the same mechanic as pots.

For the most part I only had a problem with mana pots. Granting a lower MP5 over time would be an interesting change from my standpoint. Basically turn the mana pot into a watershield/viper aspect regeneration.

Eh, no.

Healthstones and mana gems are completly different pair of shoes, because they are not sold or have to be farmed for. On the top of that, healthstones are always reactive measure (not preventive, like mana pots in TBC), while mana gems are one class only, so they can be easily balanced for it.

Like mentioned before, potion sickness is a good thing, as long as more then just 1-2 types of potions remain useful after that nerf. 1 use per fight makes sense for Mana/Fel mana (or its WotLK equivalent), probably for protection potions and armor improving one, but not so much for haste, destruction, healing or other, more exotic ones. If we assume 1 potion per fight, potions have to be adjusted to that change as well.

I don't quite understand why you're putting haste pots on the "no timer" list.

Healers are more likely to chain chug mana pots than dps is to chain chug their pots (mana or haste) because of the difference in role. For most fights, if your healer(s) run out of mana, you die; if your DPS runs out of mana or doesn't haste up, it just takes you a little longer to kill the boss.

Having said that, it is still the same mechanic. Haste pots are not reactive. When I am on a progression fight, I will chain chug haste pots. Why should that be treated differently than a mana pot?

They have to tune fights about it then, that every dps class is chain potting those pots (haste etc).

And are dark/demonic runes affected by the potion sickness? If not that healers gonna have a new thing they have to farm for.

You're missing the point. If the intent of Potion Sickness was only to reduce the amount of materials you have to farm, they could just make all the potions cheaper. The problem with potions is that they're a brainless mechanic - you push it, and then when it comes back up you push another one. The goal is to require a decision from the player - output potion (DPS/mana) or survivability potion? Which DPS check on a multi-phase fight like Kael or Kil'Jaeden or Illidan do you use your offensive potions during?

Diminishing returns on potions, removing potions entirely, changing cooldowns, none of these suggestions make the player think. Potion Sickness adds some depth to choosing which potion to use when, and depth is good.

You could also have a paladin using Beacon of Light while everyone groups up to receive that heal for every Inevitable Doom.

Sydane, I don't know your history of raiding or where you are at currently but your character is a warlock. Let me give you a priests perspective from Sunwell Plateau.

I don't drink a mana potion in Black Temple (unless something is going wrong), but when it comes to Sunwell I bring 4 stacks of [Mana Potion Injector], when combined with my [Redeemer's Alchemist Stone] is a very powerful tool. Any what I do, very religiously, is this. When my mana hits 70% I use a mana potion, then everytime the cooldown is up, I use it again. Rinse and repeat for all the bosses I have done in the zone (except Kil'Jaeden).

No matter the tuning of the fight, unless it is farm (like BT currently is), for a progression zone I chain chug. Not because I have to, not because I want to but because it is getting the most out of my character through the tools given to us as raiders. If Sunwell was not so mana intensive, I would simply gem purely for [Quick Lionseye], but instead I try to balance out the haste gems with regen gems. I choose items to balance the two, instead of favoring the haste. If the encounters were not as mana intensive I would still be chain potting, but I would be running around with twice the haste and half the regen.

The potion sickness buff is a good way to go, a great way in my opinion. But being an alchemist they will need to change our very useful trinket, perhaps give us the ability to have a second flask, or a third elixir or something along those lines that do indeed show that we are alchemists.

Even with the potion sickness change, mana potions are a boring consumable. All the change does is prevent you from chugging them on every timer and instead you take one as soon as you'll get the full benefit. There's nothing interesting or intelligent about that use at all.

I wish they changed the way mana potions worked to create a dynamic playstyle. Some random thoughts I had were taking mana potions and changing them to work like Divine Illumination:

Super Mana Potion:
For the next 20 seconds the cost of your spells are reduced by 20%.

Obviously the percentage can be adjusted but this requires some forethought into your usage. Huge damage spike coming up that you'll need to max rank spam, use the potion. True you could use it whenever but you'll get a much wider range of benefit depending on how well you time it. Same thing for dps casters, can time it for haste buffs/procs to maximize the benefit.

Additionally since this kind of potion is of no benefit when you are actually out of mana, change the dreamless sleep mechanic:

Major Dreamless Sleep Potion:
Restore 3% of your health and mana per second for 12 seconds. This potion will cause drowsiness increasing attack and cast speed by 50% for the duration.

Again you have to time your usage for lulls in damage or breaks in combat since your output will be noticeably decreased. The aura applied would need to affect the gcd as well so hot/dot classes won't get a disproportionate benefit. The big problem with the current dreamless sleep is you can't actually afford to be able to do nothing for the full duration while the change lets you continue to move and perform your job albeit at a reduced effectiveness until the timer ends.

There are much more elegant solutions and I think blizzard can do better.

This is a good point, but I don't think it's quite absolute. What needs to be true is that there are other potions that you might conceivably want more in a reactive situation. As an example, haste or destro pots for a burn phase or synchronizing with DPS cooldowns, or some sort of your-heals-give-shield-wall potion for healers. As long as it's least debatable whether giving up your oh-shit button for 3k mana is a worthy tradeoff, you're okay.

The problem is, if a mana pot gives 3k mana, then any other effect some other potion can give is basically a spell that costs 3k mana to cast. That's a fucking expensive spell. Of course, any spell that actually (eg) saves the raid from a wipe is worth the mana cost, but by holding off the pot you're basically saying that the option of casting the spell is worth 3k mana... except that 3k mana doesn't actually mean anything up until you OOM, so saving the option is penalty-free. And, if you end the fight with more than 0 mana, that excess mana effectively reduces the opportunity cost of the other potion.

So, now that I've gone through a page of discussion on this on my own: It may look like there's no reason to wait to pop the first pop, but there's also no reason to do it early since you don't have to front-load the cooldown on the second one. So long as other potions are useful enough to carry in your inventory just in case, the optimal play is to wait on the mana potion until you need it, and use one of the other potions if you need that one instead. This caveat assumes that you've built your character to not need the mana pot, or that fights where a (eg) haste pot may be useful will not require a mana pot (ie fights with burst are easier on the endurance). The first situation is unlikely, given player psychology, but the second one is, and I would conclude that there will be at least some fights where the use of pots (type and timing) will be a non-uniform tactical decision, although not all fights.

You just lost me there. I want to play smarter, not longer, in order to beat encounters. Farming Kz so that I can be geared up for ZA is/was super annoying.

Well, okay: you and I have different play styles, as the evidence of the difference in how much time we spend playing and what content we do. That's not terribly interesting or relevant. What's relevant is: where is, say, 70% of the playerbase?

I suspect there are a lot more players like myself than like you.

That's a proof by assertion.

The issue I have is that people want their cake and eat it to. I know lots and lots of people that do nothing but log on and raid each week. They don't farm, they don't grind, they rarely have more than 500 gold, and they are perfectly content. Plenty of them know their classes really well, some read sites like this, some don't. There is nothing in the game that forces them to do more than that to raid, play, be successful, and have fun. Those people exist at the T4 level and the T6 level. But they certainly aren't farming Kil'jaeden.

I see nothing wrong with requiring those that want to be on the bleeding edge to have to work harder and try harder, and to have to do things outside of raiding to make their raiding successful. Should those things be fun? Of course, as much as possible. Do I have pity for a guild that can skip a month's worth of BT/Hyjal farming and kill Brutallus that much sooner because they chain pot and all reroll leatherworking? Not at all.

Reducing people's need to farm mats is the last reason they will put in potion sickness. Farming and grinding repeated content is an aspect of MMOs as a genre. If they've found that it's hard to balance encounters around gear levels that are going to be more incrementally tiered than previously, and that to do that they need to restrain potion use, it's understandable but unfortunate. I would hope that the current implementation is merely a stopgap, or signs of a larger change that will result in more interesting and dynamic potions. However I am skeptical that will happen.

I guarantee you, the absolute smallest segment of the playing population is the group that feels obligated to chain pot but resents the cost of it. The largest group right now is the part that doesn't feel obligated to chain pot. I'd contend the next largest group is the ones that do chain pot, and may not like the cost, but understand it is part of the game. Even on the highest end, people have contended that there's nothing truly difficult about T6 content, very few actual gear checks, and much more just a test of getting out of the fire. This is a direct contradiction to the idea that chain potting trivializes content. The problem with Sunwell is the difference between guilds that farmed Illidan for 9 months, and ones that downed him the week before release. One would hope that disparity won't happen again in WotLK.

WotLK introduces a parallel raiding structure that will be far harder to balance than BC was. If your 10 man guild farms Naxx for long enough to move to Ulduar, but realizes at that time it has enough people to do 25 man raids, where is their gear going to let them compete? Not good enough for 25 man Ulduar of course, because then people could get to there too fast by running both 25 and 10 mans. How much 25 man Naxx farming will they have to do? If they then drop back down to a 10 man guild after farming 25 man Naxx, will they be able to skip 10 man Ulduar and move on to whatever is after it? These are all significant balance issues, and the only thing that will keep people from leapfrogging content will be the gear checks (or attunements and broken content, like we saw in BC). Which means small things, especially in 10 mans, like health pots and healthstones, are going to have a bigger overall effect. Again, all chain potting does is allow you to undergear content. It may seem more complex than that, but that's it.

The overpowered nature of Mana Potions has long been the bane of the entire potion system. Personally, I think if they just removed Mana Potions entirely the game would be better off for it. Then they could make judgment calls over whether a potion sickness type ability is need. There's a lot of interesting ideas in potions that barely get touched upon, and potential for an interesting and complex system. However, I don't believe it is something Blizzard has the desire to dedicate a large amount of time and resources to.

I pay a monthly fee for this game. I expect that, after that fee, I am able to have my cake and eat it too. I pay Blizzard the same amount of money regardless of whether I farm or don't farm outside of raids - I don't see why I have to spend my time as well.

If Blizzard charged us a per hour fee instead of monthly I could understand it. They do not. They have a mechanic in place to guarantee I have to spend real-world time (not the same as in-game time) to raid, and that is the weekly raid reset.

In fact, farming potions as a mechanic to spend less real time in the game (if I could spend 5 hours a week extra and skip 2 months of farming Illidan, for instance) is entirely counter productive to Blizzard. I clear content faster by farming outside raids, and spend more time online for my actual dollar. Potentially I cancel my account in between expansions because I've done everything.

From a business perspective, it doesn't make sense(to me) for us to be able to clear content faster by skipping raid farming and doing solo farming extra hours - but if they don't balance for potion use, that's what happens. If they do balance for potion use, we can't skip it, but we farm it nonetheless, which is a boring activity for me.

Your hypothetical raider is a perfect example of the situation that Blizzard is trying to fix, IMO.

In your opinion, the best raiders should be those who are willing to put in ample farming time and effort outside the instance. They use this investment to buy consumables that give them an edge over more casual raiders.

But what about the time-constrained raider who is extremely skilled, but doesn't want to dedicate 25% of his game time to farming?

By introducing potion sickness and increasing baseline regeneration, Blizzard is decreasing the importance of gold and grinding in the raiding game while buffing the importance of PvE skill. And I think that's a very good thing.


Anyway, we are getting WAY off topic here. Maybe it's time for a separate "Potion Sickness" thread.