and on top of that, these 2 bosses are quite optional, seeing how you can complete T3 sets without them. So if your guild says "fuck it, we're not going to pump hundreds of gold per player into gearing up frost resistance" they can still get full T3 sets.

20-30 Badges of Justice (Hard Mode token drops), ie about 6-10 Hard Mode instance clears each. If this stuff is going to be mandatory raiding gear, looks like we'll be spending extra time in 5 man stuff just for resists.

Those are some pretty underwhelming stats on that armor though. I sure hope there is more to them than STA and FR. but they haven't been updated yet. Here is to hoping.

Stole this from SA and found it somewhat alarming:

Well, looks like the "non-farmer normal player has something valuable to sell to raiding players" part of a viable raiding/non-raiding economic interaction is now present.

Hopefully when we get to raids we'll see that the reverse is true as well.

You make it sound like it was never there =p

This whole Ancient Lichen thing seems like a horrible idea to me. I hear "instance only herb" and immediately farmers crashing/hacking whatever springs to mind. Blizzard added the 5 instance per hour cap after teleport chest farming in Mauradon broke a ton of servers, made changes to DM chests, added/moved mobs in other places, whatever. It just seems like Blizzard is asking for farmers to crash this instance because it's the only place to get what appears to be a very very valuable herb. Either Ancient Lichen needs to be used much more rarely (like Bloodvine for example) or it needs to be more readily available.

I guess we'll see.

^^ that sort of thing is going to make raiding on high end servers like mal'ganis pretty expensive nonetheless.

On some servers live atm herb prices are controlled by farmers. In a way this is possible because there are only a certain number of herbs that can spawn outisde at any one time and they only come back at a set rate. With more people raiding the demand for black lotus is higher but the supply is capped at 96 per day(24 picked on the hour every hour in each of the 4 zones). If essential raid consumables are instanced then theoretically they aren't capped at a maximum for high population servers.

However that depends on the amount the instance provides and the ease of collection. If its too low then you just get a lot of pissed of raiders when they are raiding nax 2.0 and have to run a 5 man 10 times a week for their pots.

We're going to have a bunch of pissed off raiders if it stays as is currently. Either potions are going to have to be limited extremely, or you're going to be farming twice as much as you used to to keep your tank/caster/healer pots up.

There's three spawns in the 63-64 instance (slave pens,) 5-6 spawns in the 64-65 instance (underbog,) and 5-6 in the 68-70 instance (steamvaults.) I can only think of one of those spawns that a single player would be able to stealth to and harvest. A druid/rogue duo would be capable of farming most of them, but a healthy amount of time of movement and risk would be involved.

And for those unable to stealth, you're going to be running the instance. I'm going to play around with the instances a bit tonight to see if it's possible to farm them, but right now, I think it's going to be be pretty bad.

At least super mana potions are fairly easily farmed.

I have to admit I'm a bit disturbed by the variety and power of the datamined consumables. Now there's a flask for every class, a ton of 15-second "super potions," the disturbing engineering perk of being able to stack 20 super mana potions, and the leatherworking and jewelcrafting consumable party buffs. Even cooking has tripled in power, with the best buffs all coming from fishing. Then of course there will be the farming grinds of all those extra enchant and jewelcrafting spots.

Of course, perhaps I'm just seeing the sky fall here. Perhaps gathering all these mats will be fun.

Not instance only. You can get them by "skinning" the plant giant things. Those spawn both inside and outside the Coilfang.

Gurg wrote that in August 2006, I'm inclined to disagree now. BC potions are clearly keeping up with our current pace of potion power, and this worries me. Why?

Assuming that fights are tuned with alchemy in mind, it seems possible to me that alchemy serves the function of effectively limiting the amount of attempts a raid can have on a boss. Wonder if that seems like a stretch.

A little bit of an update on lichen.

I went through and stealthed around all three of the instances a bit, to see what I could get. There were five herb spawns in the steamvaults, and two of them were herbable by a solo stealther. The other three were unaccessable to anything less than a 5 man group.

The Slave Pens had 4 herb spawns that I could find before I ran into stealth detecting mobs, will need a small stealther group to acquire the other 3-4 throughout the rest of the zone. 3 of those 4 were herbable by a solo 70 stealther.

The underbog had 4 herb spawns up until the hydra boss, which means a 3-4 man group will be necessary to get any more out of the instance. Was able to herb all 4 spawns before then.

These spawns were fairly static over 3 resets of each instance.

I'm not a beta player, but is it not possible that lichen will spawn in the 25 man part of coilfang? If there are a decent amount of spawns in there, the raiding itself could cover a part of the farming. Apart from this small hope I'm very dissapointed in all the consumables available, it adds to the game sure but there should be like 1-2 elixirs per class and maybe a burst pot, not 5 plus flask. I believe Naxx raised the cap on whats ok to ask of the raid to farm, and it will change our perspective in TBC. Uber guilds will have all these pots farmed even before black temple is released, they will expect them to be required, and we a more mediocre guild will have to be prepared to do the same or we will lag too far behind.

If TBC raiding becomes World of Farmcraft too early and too much, they will kill off raiding for most of the raiding population.

Making certain consumable ingredients really rare (not just grave moss rare, but even moreso), then maybe top level consumables become a thing which they really can expect no-one to be able to get enough of to always have every attempt. Loatheb was balanced around the existance of GSPP, but what if SM farming for ingredients wasn't available? It could have been balanced on the basis that people could get an easier kill if they managed to scrape together 80-120 GSPP, but also that that many GSPP would not be possible to farm consistently.

Blizzard shouldn't care if intermediate bosses can be "cheesed" with mass consumables as long as mass consumables is too much pain for the reward (Loatheb was the edge of what's possible, and was I suspect over the edge for many).

If people are willing to flask an entire raid to beat TBC's equivalent of Vael or Huhuran, let them. Balance the end-boss, the "world first" prize, around a raid doing whatever it takes. But nothing else. And then make "whatever it takes" really difficult. Flasks requiring multiple primal nether might be a good start :)

Sounds pretty awful to me. I'm already afraid of the fights in TBC that will require "raw output" from the raid, aka Patchwerk/Loatheb/Sapphiron/Gothik/Thaddius. Any fight that you go into feeling ridiculously more comfortable buffed than unbuffed is not a good fight, I feel. For example; 4 Horsemen feels almost useless to world buff on, because it's tuned to aggro/rotation management, not raw DPS/Healing/Damage Input.

In any case, it was bad enough in Naxx, but Naxx really introduced us (the raiding population) to buffing heavily very regularly. And I really, really hope it isn't necessary in TBC.

Gurgthock said this about C'thun in April 2006. The buffs, once "far beyond the point of reason" are now a pretty standard buff setup for say, Sapphiron or Loatheb first kills. How far can this go?

I'm just curious as to where you are getting the 1% drop rate from using Herbalism on a "skinnable" mob.

If it's coming from http://www.thotbott.com/beta?n=155, then that drop rate is very unreliable due to the fact that thottbot may not be differentiating between a mob kill and a mob that is harvested.

http://www.thotbott.com/beta?n=15144 shows very little data from harvesting a Withered Giant. Not enough information to go on, but one of the mobs yielded a ancient lichen.

I'll try to test the drop rate when I manage to finish leveling herbalism.

Hmm, I can't seem to find this. Does anyone have a good alchemy levelling guide post 60? What I'm most interested in is whether I'll want a stockpile of current high end herbs to get started (like First Aid), or if I can jump straight to TBC herbs. Additionally, where do I find the first few new recipes on which to level? Do the current Master Alchemists in the game offer a few more post-TBC?

You'll need to stockpile herbs to make major mana pots for awhile, and I think someone also said to stockpile mountain silversage as a lot of the new recipes use it for awhile.

Thanks Malan. I guess I'll try to spend more time in Winterspring between BGs then. God bless the Stockades.

Actually i spent about 10 or more hours in Zangarmarsh, and killed a lot of these mobs. While i don't have exact count, it was in the range of couple hundreds. I got 3 Ancient Lichen from them.