Thanks for the reply. I figured you guys had built it up slowly over time :)

Originally Blizzard intended the MC BOEs and the various farmable stuffs in the world to be the gateway for the raiders to monetarily interact with the non-raiders. Raiders would sell MC BOEs, and in turn would buy things like arcanite or essences.

I'm not sure why Blizzard didn't continue with this system in BWL/AQ/Naxx. It appears they continually want raiders to incur more and more costs to force them to farm more and more. (The lack of BOE epics as well as more consumable use / exponential repair costs)

Our old bank was up at something like 70k gold at one point, thanks to the efforts of some dedicated bankers. Right now we spend gold like never before - seriously no other instance is close to the gold investment Naxx is, so we're constantly running through Flasks (which we provide) and pretty much all our members burn potions constantly (which we don't provide most of the time).

Making money, sadly, is really all about knowing who will buy stuff. We had a guy on our old server who bought full Might, then wanted to buy Wrath and AQ40 gear. He alone probably gave us thousands of gold.

This is something I'd been meaning to make a thread of its own about. At the risk of coming across like a whining pussy who clearly isn't hardcore enough for real raiding, I can't help but question whether dependence on consumables and such has gone too far, to the detriment of the "fun" of the raiding game. Repair costs I can handle. But when you have fights that are tuned a bit above the level of gear of an unbuffed raid group entering the zone, consumables are pretty much required in order to even learn the fight. Try learning Gothik without using any DPS consumables at all: You won't get very far, because you won't be able to keep up with the spawns (on dead side especially) and won't be able to tell for sure if your strat is flawed, or if the strat is good but you're just lacking the DPS to execute it.

Spending 3 hours wiping and coming away without a kill can be frustrating. Spending 3 hours, using mongoose and arcane elixirs and giants and stoneshields on every attempt, and coming away without a kill, is depressing. Because it's not just the 3 hours -- it's the additional hours you'll need to restock, whether by farming gold or farming herbs, without anything to show for it.

It's part of the reason I clearly have abandoned any pretense of maintaining a stable guild bank, and am instead burning through what we have to learn Naxx with the hopes of replenishing it after Naxx is cleared and as the expansion approaches. Doing otherwise would be brutal on morale.

We're a guild just entering BWL (Vael down). At the moment I've got about 15 flasks built up (prep for Broodlord) and have roughly 5k in mats/ingots/cores etc. About 1.3k in gold.

We're putting 100% of our effort into Flasks for Broodlord. Far down the line we'll support repair bills for those "let's spend 4 hours wiping to learn something better" nights, but have to get up over 10k gold to do it.

Umm, what?

Anyway, in a previous guild that raided 5 nights of the week for 5 hours each night, i found it a major challenge farming self-consumables, as well as flask mats for the tanks. That's probably 15 hours a week in AQ40, incurring probably about 10g/hour between pots and repairs, while making maybe 3g/hr. BWL was generally a gain of about 15 gold over the course of the night. That doesn't do much to offset the other 105 gold that I needed to make up to stay even, nor does it offset the 30-40g worth of flask mats that we were encouraged to send to the guildbank every week for no compensation.

For anyone that goes to school or has a job, that amount of time-consumption really isn't very sustainable.

Broodlord, if you've gotten like any tanking gear in MC/RazorVael really won't be a huge issue as far as flask consumption. You'll burn 3 for you first 4-5 kills, and then you'll say 'fuck it'.

The drakes, Firemaw in particular before you get positioning down, will be a bigger drain as far as flasks are concerned.

Every time i ask for somthing from out bank, i get the reply "saving for guild house, shut up and farm".

We get repair money, and the tanks get things like flasks and such.

There is a lot of things you can make money from as a guild bank. I dont know if there is anything good most people use the obsidian from AQ for, but we aparently dont. Our guilbank guy made epic shields of it and sold like 5 for 1600g a piece on the AH pretty quick.

I am curious what systems guilds use for reimbursing repair costs. Is there some calculator guilds use to get the money? Right now we just hand out lump sums that are rough estimates. However, this is hardly a desireable approach to the situation.

We don't use one, we just have the participating members CoD to the guild bank their repair costs. You have to trust your guild for that though.

Not only is the relationship different now, it's the exact opposite. Now the raiders, after many hundreds of gold, get a nice shiny loot token. And with that token, you get to go to the AH and buy ~100g worth of cured rugged hides, arcane crystals, or mooncloth to get a piece of tier 3 loot. I like the token system, but the hide/mooncloth/arcanite component of it is just boneheaded.

Oh, and on a side note, does anyone know if elixirs of superior defense (the 450 armor one) stack with stoneshield potsions (the 2k armor one)?