Hey guys and gals,

for optimal raiding progress, a raid needs loads of consumables. Small, personal buffs like sharpening stones, mana oil, agility potions, etc, but also different kinds of Flasks and sometimes huge amounts of certain Protection potions.

I have heard of several systems to deal with this. One ties DKP to such items, which means you get extra DKP if you provide the raid with Flasks. Another system is where you can send mats for such flasks to the guild bank for a fixed CoD price. There must be many other ways of dealing with this, but they all have one thing in common: you need to stimulate your raiders to contribute.

A few questions. How does your guild deal with this? Which (dis)advantages are there to your system?

A similar issue is how to manage things like Fiery Cores and Frozen Runes. Buy for DKP? Buy for cash? Give to tanks for free? How do you deal with that?

We do something similar for flasks, only we charge 6 flasks (titan/supreme/destilled) for a drop. In certain cases the price differ, a warrior payed 30 flasks for Ashkandi for example. We also in some cases accept just herb mats, which means we aren't reliant on the AH for pots/flasks. For personal pots like protection pots, mana, damage etc, its up to each member to bring enough to the raid, or he gets replaced/gets no dkp. The downside is if you're not in a guild that can demand this of your members.

We generally use alot of pots because our server is really, really laggy and on the whole a crap server. So pots give us a little bit of error margin when 20% of the raid randomly disconnects, or get a 5 sec freeze.

about that COD system..

Up until now we just told the guild what we needed and let our farmers do the job. However, as we're making our way through BWL, the increasing demand on flasks and such is putting a strain on them. And as we dont want to lose our most dedicated farmers, we're toying with the idea of the COD method for plants and others.

But I just cant see charging guildmates for T1/T2 loots. It's just not possible anytime soon. So that leaves us with a huge issue : how are we going to find the money to run the whole COD system? Onyxia's goldpieces in the weelky runs are good but far from being enough. We can sell some stuff at the AH but we still need most of it. Selling nexus/enchants to guildmates is being considered as it's becoming increasingly difficult to explain why we're not doing any +15agi to the first person who just asks for it. People who just cant stand farming are strongly encouraged to just send gold once in a while instead of items.

But all of this added up wont make the COD system viable. We dont raid as often as other hardcore HL guilds so we dont actually burn a lot of flasks, but we still need a way to encourage our farmers to keep up with their great work. Any other ideas?

In order to make the COD system work, you certainly need to have sound financial basings. Quite a long time ago there was a thread about making money as a guild. There were quite a lot of good suggestions.

http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=6656

further good stuff:

http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=6656

Our raid uses a combination of COD and the inevitable AH. Most stuff coming from the raidbanks are either tank specific consumables like flasks and stoneshield potions when needed in greater masses and heal and mana potions as well as protection potions for those encounters needing an enormous ammount of stuff (e.g. our healers burnt tons of major manas when we learned the twin emps encounter). We also stock a smaller number of flask of supreme power nowadays. But generally speaking we try to smooth extreme spikes of consumption by our members rather then to provide them with everything they need. Naxx had a very positive effect as most people are much more ready to farm consumables than they were in AQ oder BWL. If folks repeatedly don't show up without consumables, they might get sanctioned for it in different ways (no raid slot, minus dkp...). However that hasn't happened yet.

aggripa - no one is saying charge guildies for t1/t2 loot, you bring in non-guildies and charge them. its more beneficial to the guild to have an outside pay 200-500g for a MC/ony loot item than it is for a guild alt (thats why alts are never also allowed in 40 man raids).

depending on how many guilds are on your server and how populated it is, you can make crazy money or almost no money this way. generally when we did this we would bring 2-5 non guildies in every MC run and ask them to just stand back and do nothing lol.

you shouldn't need many flasks pre-naxx however. maybe one for the MT up to nef, but as fast as possible try to clear BWL without flasks (you will wipe a few times at broodlord, drakes but its worth it). AQ40 shouldn't require any flasks, its not going to make a diff on sartura, huhu. Maybe TE's and c'thun first few tries.

another way to make money is escorting people through baron 45 or ZG/AQ20. there are tons of ways for a guild to make great cash, it just requires 19-35 people willing to put up with noobs for a few hours and a view of the long term benefits of raising 1-2k gold per week for naxx.

You're definitely going to want to flask your melee-tanking warriors for Emps.

If it really starts to be necessary, just require your raiders to turn in a certain amount of mats/herbs/potions each week in order to be eligible for loot in the next week. This helps to spread out the cost of consumables such as mana pots, flasks, DPS pots, health pots, etc.