This wasn't an argument, I was clarifying the fact that if you got the impression that tanks had their consumables handed to them (sans flasks for most things) for each fight you were sorely mistaken.

Plate wearers (and the MT in particular) still ring up the highest repair bills by far - keep in mind the MT is the one who is taking the most hits, and also is likely dying the most. I think most guilds supply flasks due to the cost, but everything else is usually on their own.

Since the talent review, priests definitely do not need epic DPS gear to farm. All it does is speed up the process some. One little tip is to run Sm Strath with 3 people - when you're splitting money from orbs and the other drops, it adds up fast, and the fun factor is there watching a rogue tank the whole thing, for example. Personally I grind out either the satyrs in Azshara (demonic runes are a nice byproduct), or during light server time, Silithus. Of course I'm being somewhat hypocritical since I'm a shadow priest, but I did try out holy/disc for a short time to see how it was and I can't say I was majorly gimped. It was just a little slower.

As others alluded to though, herbalism is the true money winner. If you can get it + alch up on an alt, you can cut down a lot of your own costs. I leveled a shaman to 53 and that's been good enough to farm Un'Goro/Azshara. I can make my own Greater Arcane Elixirs, etc.. and mail mats for Mageblood/GDS/Flasks to our best alch. Sure, it's a little bit of a grind, but what isn't in this game?

Oddly enough, my mage alt pays for my warrior via herbalism. I regularly farm all my own potions for raiding (though this reminds me that I'm running low on a few things), and sell herbs I don't need as a source of income. I almost never have to pay for any enchanting mats besides librams, because it's easy to stockpile shards and GEEs if you still go to 5-man instances.

I've never had to go off farming mobs just to pay for repairs or consumables or enchants.

lol - i ALWAYS bring the necessary consumables to every raid. when i needed them, i used major mana potions - as a hunter, i can generally get by with combat potions/mana oils/downranking aimed shot with JOW/BOW mana regen. i bring mongoose pots when i'm not provided with them (and i certainly dont' ask for them), and i always have a stack of greater nature resist pots for every AQ raid (rather than the cheap regular ones half our raid seems to use :-P). i use ice-threaded or better arrows every raid, when i could easily skimp and use the far-less-expensive Jagged Arrows. I contribute 2 sets of Flask of the Titans materials and one Repair Bot to the guild bank every month. My point is that i can easily generate enough gold to sustain myself doing all of these things without any out-of-raid farming, as well as keep all of my gear in top-quality enchants whenever i get an upgrade, so i really don't see the terrible necessity for massive solo farming. perhaps i wasn't clear in my post, but i regularly do ZG and AQ20, which are reasonable money makers, and BWL is more or less Cashwing Lair at this point. So no - i'm not a leech, and i do more than my part for every raid i attend, and i sustain what seems to me a perfectly reasonable level of consumable use for every raid i go to.

do i use potions on every encounter? no, because i don't need to. drinking a mongoose pot, for instance, on any fight before Huhuran in AQ is just overkill, as is (generally) burning a mana potion, for me at least. our progression certainly hasn't been hindered because we don't use massive amounts of consumables all the time - when we need them, i use them, and when i'm using them, i'm providing them myself.