When do you find the time to farm for the mats for the consumables that increasingly, seem to be an essential part of the game?

I managed to have a job, a family and even time to go to gym, and 5 raids a week.

But lately as we progressed further into Naxx, I started feeling the strain on the consumables that we need to bring to the fight every night.

Early Sunday morning. I'm on a PvE server so it's relatively easy to lockdown Tubers in Felwood if you're on top of it. I'll try and do that for as long as my patience can hold out and get a stockpile of a hundred or so, so I don't have to make it a weekly event. While I'm doing that I'll poke around that cave in felwood to try and scrounge up some living essence to sell on the AH for spare g.

The only other consumables I go out of my way to farm are Mtn Silversage/plaguebloom for mongoose pots. I just buy agi pots for trash and such - seeing as how they're so cheap. While I'm farming for the silversage I'll hit up some of those winterfall guys to get the mats for the juju str and potential for firewater - all while herbing everything I see (including icecap, which sells alright, and I have no use for it as melee).

It's pretty nice having an 300 herb/alchemist alt with a good # of recipies to make all the stuff I need. My main (rogue) is my 300 eng / disenchanter - for pvp toys and DE'ing greens from blackrock stronghold - which is another way to make some stressless G and pick up some major healing pots in the meantime.

this is something that i've noticed a lot lately. It's not uncommon to go through a lot of consumables to learn an encounter, but Naxx makes consumables more of a requirement, than a tool. Encounters that are of magnitudes harder without usage of mass consumables.

more and more, i'm hearing that people are having to farm just to stay ahead of repair cost. the guild has supplied the raid with most of the pots, but it's at the point where we're buying up everything the AH has, and still having to farm.

and lets face it, mobs that drop elemental earth/fire don't exactly drop money. most people have taken to farming for gold, and just buying the crap off of the AH because it's more time efficient.

this still leaves the "average joe" who works regular hours pretty screwed, because they log on during prime time, when the AH prices are considerably higher.

i don't know what blizz can do differently to stop people from using consumables to blast through contents, but i think making consumables almost a manditory requirement is detrimental to the health of the game.

Yeah, I definately feel your pain on this one. I work 50 hours per week, hit the gym 5-6 days per week and raid 5 to 6 nights depending. Though once this wasn't a problem it now has become increasingly so as the consumable costs of Naxx become more and more prevelant. For me it's just making myself suck it up and do it. Farming consumables is truly drudgingly boring but now clearly a mandatory part of raiding. I try to set aside one day an off-day or what not when I have no RL engagements to attend to get alot of consumable farming done.

At the moment comming off a light weekend where I had spare time I managed to round up about 150 major manas, 60 mageblood, 50 Brilliant mana oils, and I think 4 Distilled wisdom. Even if I have just 30 minutes I make a point to head out and grab at least a few herbs, it adds up over time. The only change I really made was no more laps around IF in boredom or mailbox chillin' on the mount. Any free time now = simply go out and herb.

I play a hunter so I generally save on repair costs for the most part.

I made friends with an herbalist in my guild who has no use for mountain silversage or icecap to get my mongoose, and my other consumables are really cheap: Greater Mana Potions (700-900mana; 1 stack for 1g or less on the ah), and Lesser Mana Oil (super cheap if you just buy the herbs). Occasionally I will use a mageblood potion as well if I want to really push it.

I ussually just sell nexus crystals or use the payout from BWL to fund my raiding.

I don't generally mind farming for herbs, I actually consider that a bit of fun. :)

It is farming for other mats that is mind boggling boring. All the resistance pots coming to mind...

/2 WTB Grave Moss/Fadeleaf PST

Truth, I wasn't even considering that when I typed a response. I will honestly say I have been enjoying herbing slightly more since picking up my black battle tank mount, E-Peen complex? Who knows ;). Back on subject - I generally try to farm elemental earth / elemental fire for a little bit but it does grow tiresome pretty fast as a holy priest and lately I have resorted to simply selling off unused herbs and buying the elemental mats with the money from that. This isn't viable on the majority of servers but I usually have free-reign of Azshara when I herb. Generally I can make a profit between selling off Sansam from my Dreamfoil rounds and using the gold to buy elemental mats + Naxx repair bills.

What about other guild mates selling the mats for higher-than-average price when they know a certain pots is required for the fight?

How do you guys deal with this?

Our guild raids every night and I work a full time job so I understand the crunch for non-raid time farming. As someone posted above, Saturday and Sunday mornings are nice for some quiet farming while enjoying your morning coffee.

/gremove

That's pretty dick of them. I can't tell you how many mongoose/str/juju/FR/NR/SR pots I've given out in my time. I was never a serious raider, I just like consumables, my nickname was POTSbiscus. :)

My old guild had a system where we could sell the bank mats at slightly below market. Worked out pretty well, and was sure as hell better than giving DKP for mats, as I've heard some guilds do.

We have an awesome mage in our guild (Rasli) who has organized a system for collecting and distributing consumeables -- basically people CoD him the herbs, he makes the potions, and people can request potions via in-game mail and have them CoD'd to them at cost. He doesn't make any profit off it (afaik) and it's very helpful for people who simply don't have the time to farm mats for themselves.

I VNC my home computer and autoattack baddies when I get a moment to spare from, y'know, working. The income from that is surprisingly decent over a weekly span.

We used to give DKP for various potions. It was mostly for Flask of the Titans and GFPPs for Ragnaros. It made sense on a per-hour basis vs DKP, gave people something to do while being waitlisted, and wasn't abused. We stopped doing it because repair costs, personal consumables, and changes in our DKP system caused people to sell potions to the AH.

Now we buy consumables at 80-90% of the AH price, which has been working well for us. Except that we can't do that for Greater Shadow Protection Potions because the AH price is hyper-inflated right now.


I guess this is a tangent- How bad are the prices of GSPP on other servers that have multiple guilds on Loatheb? Our server is looking at 40 gold a stack, and I'm wondering if the price will start to go down after people start killing him regularly.

Since my guild really isn't in Naxx I don't know if it will still hold up, but farming just 30-60 minutes every morning before work has worked out fine for me so far. I always have plenty of Major Mana, Greater Arcane and Firepower pots. Since my herb farmer is my alt druid I also leave my mage parked at whatever instance we are doing if I'm having to wait for a raid spot and farm during the wait.

I've started working though on the writs + turn-ins to get the AD trinket, no idea how anybody could handle leveling up fishing. Ugh........

If your having trouble getting consumables together running scarlet strat 3-4 times back to back one evening, then splitting up the loot (orbs ect) sell it off on the AH, you can normally fund a few weeks worth of consumables (flasks aside) from a few trips. Between the LBS, Orbs, and random Blue and sometime Epic drops you should be able to yeild quite a profit.

I'm a warlock. Farming has been a way of life for the last 100 days /played.

I generally farm shards from the ogres near Morgans Vigil in Burning Steppes. I can reliably 2-shot them, they drop shit tons of runecloth (I sell at least 10 stacks of runecloth per week), Major pots, sellable grays, and d/eable greens. It's indoors so I don't have to worry about people bugging me for the most part, and there's dreamfoil/sansam/mountain silversage/black lotus all over Burning Steppes for me to herb. The respawn time is also nice. I can make a BL circuit around BS and the mobs have respawned again.

:o

If they are selling to guildies that's a definate /gremove. I'd even frown at someone selling progression consumables at market prices.

If you mean they are selling them on the AH, well, they have to make money as well. So long as they are doing their bit. We have told people to pull auctions and give them to us when we've needed them though. Or bought them at a lower agreed price. If you NEED them and they weren't willing to give them up I'd definately consider booting them. People who don't see that helping progression is in their best interests have no business being in a raiding guild (as opposed to a guild that raids).

I'm a Warlock too. I've been farming everyday I play since I hit 60.

I typically spend about an hour or two every couple days in Dire Maul. As a Warlock, I have the tools to solo quite a bit in the instance. The mobs have good coin drops (up 30ish silver per mob), high-value gray drops that drop frequently, valuable crafting materials (ex: Living Essence, Felcloth, various herbs including Dreamfoil), a high drop rate of green items, and some zone-specific blue drops. A mage could very well do the parts of DM West I frequent as well. Or, just go in with a healer, a warrior, and another DD. You might be splitting the loot, but a small group like that would probably clear faster than me, and could take on bosses for things like GEEs and LBSs ( <3 Brilliant Wizard Oil )

The Living Essences and the blue leather gloves that drop in DM west ( http://www.thottbot.com/?i=35904 ) are a great way to help a guild gear up for AQ40 and certain parts of Naxx. Multiple casters / groups farming out DM could supply the Living Essences for an entire raid's NR gear very quickly.

Between juggling work, woman, working out, and wraiding, plus random stuff that comes up, I typically only have a few hours Sunday and Saturday mornings to farm gold. Fortunately, guild AQ40 runs take care of most consumable costs.

The easiest way, I've found, is just to take 30 minutes where I don't have anything going on to log on and farm SM for a little bit. My hearthstone is set to Brill, haha. On Monday I made 200g from BoEs and vendored items in not much time.

Only time you can reliably farm Dreamfoil and Plaguebloom on Magtheridon-EU is at 3AM or so in the morning. Oh, how I just LOVE to play on a server with 10 guilds in Naxxramas every night.

go fishing.
1. get the "mod" fishping
2. tv/lap top/2nd screen watch something
3. wait for ping

in gerneral we also have an system to get the mats. send mats to a twink get money and buy pots from three other twinks. works good.