This argument has been laid out many times, and it rears its head in threads about raid encounters, about real-money trading, about professions, about burnout, and so on and so forth. My aim here is not necessarily to break any new ground, but rather to summarize the main problems with consumables as they currently exist in WoW, and with alchemy in particular, as they relate to raid design and player enjoyment.

One-sentence summary: Consumables are too powerful, such that Blizzard's raid designers are forced into the untenable position of balancing around unbuffed groups and having their content steamrolled, or balancing around buffed groups and forcing players into a cycle of unpleasant farming in order to even have a chance.

I am going to mention world buffs only for a moment and then move on to focus solely on true consumables. The problem with world buffs is obvious. They do too much, too well, and they scale fantastically. I do not want to be farming Hakkar in order to kill Illidan a year from now. Don't nerf them at this point. Just make them zone-limited in some form -- either Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms only, or stripped upon entering any raid zone.

For some easy numerical illustration, I made a set of CTProfiles profiles for my own class, since that's what I'm familiar with, comparing gear progression in full Tier 1 or equivalent (MC and 20-mans), full Tier 2 (BWL and first-half AQ), and full Tier 3 (pre-Sapp/Kel).

Here are the key values:

Tier 1 Gear: 4450hp, 6085mana, 251 spirit, 365 +healing, 58 mana/5
Tier 2 Gear: 4250hp, 6700mana, 244 spirit, 567 +healing, 73 mana/5
Tier 3 Gear: 4610hp, 6970mana, 123 spirit (lol), 1008 +healing, 109 mana/5

+healing does less for mana conservation than it once did due to downranking changes, but it still can be more or less converted into some equivalent amount of mana regen since where +healing shines is generally in maximizing healing/mana rather than healing/time. There isn't a boss out there that puts out enough damage to require max-rank spam, so whether the +healing means downranking or fewer heals cast per minute, there is a mana savings. Based on the HealPoints and itemization formulas, I'm going to say that 6 +healing = 1 mana/5 for easy approximations.

Using that conversion ratio, we're left with the following:
Tier1: 119 mana/5
Tier2: 167 mana/5
Tier3: 277 mana/5

Unsurprisingly, tier 3 is a large step above the rest. That's good. Now, how do consumables fit into the picture? For a healer, let's assume the following non-exotic consumables:

Nightfin Soup = 8 mana/5
Mageblood Potion = 12 mana/5
Brilliant Mana Oil = 12 mana/5 and 25 +healing = 16 mana/5
Major Mana Potions = 1800 mana every 2 minutes = 75 mana/5 (!!)
Dark/Demonic Runes = 1200 mana every 2 minutes = 50 mana/5

Assuming all of the above used, I get a net benefit of 161 mana/5.

That is larger than the gap between mixed tier 1 with suboptimal enchants (no ZG enchants, etc.) and fully-enchanted optimal tier 3 gear. So, in order to feel this amount of character progression as a healer, instead of spending 15 months doing raid progression, I should've just used five consumables. Silly, isn't it? Obviously this is something of an oversimplification, and I do really feel the benefits of the gear, because in practice I am comparing myself fully-buffed now to myself unbuffed or partially-buffed then.

I used shamans as an example due to firsthand familiarity, but any caster will do. Try comparing an unbuffed tier 3 tank to a tier 1 tank using all standard tank consumables, Titans, and drinking stoneshields. Similar result (though defense and shield block value aren't available through consumables, so not quite as precise). If anything, the classes that benefit by far the least from available buffs are physical DPS classes. Mongoose and Juju are great, but they actually are a comparatively minor buff compared to what I just listed above, or compared to a mage/warlock stacking Supreme Power + GAE + Firepower + Oil + mana regen stuff.

Does anyone dispute my basic premise that consumables are incredibly, incredibly powerful relative to the gear progression that is the mainstay of how we are supposed to improve and develop our characters once we are done with the fairly rapid leveling process?

Now, let's turn to raid design. The following visual is a crude approximation of the raid design progression we have seen thus far. As compared to a spectrum of "Raid Power" (i.e., how strong your raid is, in terms of raw stats), the various bars represent the ranges within which those zones are viable. Towards the left end of each bar, where it is brightest, the difficulty is extreme; as you move right and the bar darkens, the zone becomes easier and easier as power improves, until the pure black portions indicate trivial farm content. For the Naxxramas bar, I limit it to "numbers" fights like Patchwerk, Loatheb, Sapphiron, and so forth -- obviously fights like Razuvius, Grobbulus, Heigan, and their ilk, are quite different.

I've plotted out the progression from blues (by which I mean pre-revamp level 60 blues, circa early 2005) to epics of various tiers. The rest should be more or less self-explanatory.

Anyway, most of the raid content in the game was balanced around a largely unbuffed raid at the time it was introduced. Even among fairly competitive guilds, buffs were not part of the raiding culture. Our first Ragnaros kill in May 2005 (one week after Ascent killed him) was more or less completely unbuffed. GFPPs for Ragnaros was the most anyone did, and things like tanks chugging Stoneshields simply weren't done. Some individual alchemists used their own buffs, but it wasn't expected. Over time, however, raiders grew more sophisticated, and various mods simplified the process, and the raiding game became more competitive at the high end. At the same time, the amount of available buffs continued to grow. We got Mageblood potions and weapon oils. We got new food buffs. We got Zanzas. And, of course, we got flasks that persisted through death. The encounter design still lagged behind this to an extent. Vek'nilash was the first boss in the game that assumed some degree of external buffing on the tank. A tank in the gear available at the time (Jan/Feb 2006) simply could not tank Vek'nilash with only standard raid buffs. His death would be inevitable. But still, if not for the untuned state of C'Thun and Ouro, I am confident that Ahn'Qiraj would have been fully cleared within one month. We saw C'Thun Phase 2 within two weeks of our gates opening, in late February. He'd have died a week later if it had been the current version.

Which brings us to Naxxramas. Naxxramas was designed to be "hardcore," and to keep us all busy from June, when it was released, until the late fall or early winter, when the expansion would be ready. In that regard, it succeeded admirably. Compared to every raid zone before it, Naxxramas was a resounding success in terms of encounter design and balance. Whereas before top guilds were accustomed to learning every boss within a few days, and assuming that if the boss still hadn't died by then, it was bugged or untuned (or a "cockblock" -- see pre-fix Ragnaros, Chromaggus, Ouro, C'Thun, etc.), in Naxx there were fights that legitimately took days or even weeks to learn and master despite high levels of skill and concerted effort.

This is partly due to very clever design, but also partly due to the fact that, for the first time, the raid designers were acknowledging that top guilds would use every tool at their disposal to win the race to Kel'Thuzad, and tuning the fights around that expectation. If you don't have flasked tanks with full buffs and a cache of Greater Stoneshields, or healers with a healthy supply of mana consumables, don't bother even looking at Patchwerk. Even on fights like Noth, Maexxna, 4H, and others, having that extra DPS from raidwide consumable use can make all the difference in the world when it comes to salvaging a kill from a less-than-flawless performance, particularly as you are still gearing up in Naxx. I don't need to talk about Loatheb, but I will note that when we tested him on the PTR, the GM/Dev who had ported us there asked me how many Greater Shadow Protection pots we had in the raid. They knew.

As a result of this, particularly in the learning process on these fights, Blizzard unwittingly created one of the worst grinds in the history of any MMO. Yes, any MMO. It's not because of the magnitude of time involved, but rather what that time gets you. In your typical Korean "grindfest" MMO like Lineage II, RF Online, MapleStory -- you name it -- there is a massive time investment required, performing repetitive activities... and yet, after two hours of grinding away in one of those games, you have something tangible to show for it. A bit more gold. Closer to a new weapon. A few more pixels on your experience bar. Something, however small, that represents forward progress. In WoW as a Naxx raider, the result of that time investment is preservation of the status quo, and replenishing what was burned through at an alarming rate in that night's raid. That is the worst part of it, and that is what burns people out and drives them away from a truly wonderful raiding endgame.

It is not the raid designers' fault. The alternative, for them, would have been to balance around few or no consumables, and then we would've seen a Kel'Thuzad killshot in July, and hundreds of guilds rampaging through the zone by brute-forcing encounters via consumable use. Would that have been better? I don't think so.

Once upon a time, the class devs gave paladins a version of Improved Lay on Hands that bestowed +50% to armor for 5 minutes. Such an ability, while reasonable in PvP where burning your full mana pool is a major issue, and where buffing one player's armor isn't necessarily a decisive factor, would have been absolutely impossible to balance around in a raid setting. After an uproar on the FoH boards, that talent was quickly toned down, and I can only assume that the raid designers had a hand in that. This situation is not quite as severe, but it is similar. The consumable system and the array of consumables available to the players, created by unwitting quest designers who want to add cool new buffs and by people who want to give alchemists something to get excited about as they look at their neighbors' 90 DPS BoP 1h weapons, is tying the hands of the raid team. That needs to change. I look at things like Super Mana Potions in conjunction with the Alchemist's Stone (take a minute to compute the mana/5 equivalency and laugh) or a new array of Flasks that give huge benefits to all classes instead of just tanks and nukers, and I fear for the future of the high-end raiding game.

Take another look at that chart up top, and the pink bar. That bar needs to shrink, a lot, or the way consumables are handled in general needs to change drastically. Either take them away or, since Blizzard doesn't like taking things away, make them more abundant and thus less taxing: Double durations on things, make them last through death, give potions multiple charges, etc., while keeping the materials requirements static.* We can argue over the solution, but something has to change.

*(And no, this wouldn't kill Alchemy. You can spend some time farming herbs and make a stack of Major Manas or Mageblood and it will sell, at a large markup, as a matter of certainty. There is absolutely nothing that a skinner/LW or miner/smith could produce with an equal time investment that would sell to any reliable degree. Alchemy's importance can be substantially reduced without creating any imbalance among the professions.)

Just the first few things I thought of after I read the post. I agree that world buffs really should be dispelled upon entering a raid instance. As fun as it is to run an alt through UBRS/Ony/Nef/Hakkar for a World Buff that scales really well, that really shouldn't be an option. However, I do think that "normal" consumables (i.e. non-exotics: nightfin, mageblood, mongoose, oils, runes) are fine. For one thing, they perform a function admirably as a gold sink (along with lolrepairs), preventing most players from having stupidly large purses. That being said, I think that Loatheb is the stupidest fight in the game because you have to farm some stupid potion that you use 3 times in one fight, costs double the amount of a normal consumable and is otherwise fairly useless unless you're fighting Warlocks/Shadow Priests and you really feel like spending a lot of gold. On the flip side, I love Heigan (who is fittingly enough, right before Loatheb) because you don't really need many consumables at all, just people who are paying attention.

But as stated before, the difference between just flasking a tank and flasking the whole damn raid is gigantic, and that does appear to be a problem. I have on idea how you're supposed to regulate that, though.

Actually Gurg, there is one saving grace in expansion Alchemy in my opinion. Having played with Alchemy on the beta server for the better part of a month, I'm actually pretty pleased with the sheer amount of individual herbs required to be farmed up in order to create the new alchemy consumeables. Gone are the days of having to farm up nearly a stack of dreamfoil just to make 6 Major Mana Potions. Every post-300 level Alchemy recipe utilizes Felweed, which is found absolutely everywhere in the expansion. Gilliam has been supplying me herbs all by himself, and I actually have over 5 stacks of unused Felweed still sitting in my bank. Other herbs are very easy to farm up, and the quantities are low compared to old-world potions and elixirs. You can make an Unstable Mana Potion for 1 Felweed and 2 Ragveil (both very easy to farm up within the first two zones of Outlands) and gain the same benefit as a Major Mana Potion but without the higher quantity of herbs to make.

I think they are aware of the necessity of consumeable use for raiding, and they're trying to accomodate this by making consumeables on the whole much easier to make and less costly to burn through.

The problem goes even further than consumables. It's buffs entirely. Without completely gutting the Alchemy profession and nerfing the shit out of world buffs, the only thing they can do is scrap the buffing system, rebalance everything, and start over.

For all their ease of use, intuitiveness, and generally good interface, tradeskills in WoW need a lot of help. But that's an itemization problem. Maybe the master craftsman items in BC will help changes this a little, but I don't foresee tradeskills ever being as significant in WoW as they were in, say, DAOC without completely rethinking the itemization matrix.


(Oh yeah, and please, please, please take flasks out of the game, or at least, don't make them work in raid instances.)

If we're going to talk about broken tradeskills you need to give honorable mention for how long it took to fix those fucking engineering caps.
Here's a little math equation for you:

40 raid members + Green dragon + Opposite faction MC Cap = X

I realize that. What I'm saying is that they're abundant. I cannot stress that word enough. Herbs are all over the damn place. Even with four or five times as many people farming them there will be plenty.

And that aside, the fact still remains that the amount of herbs required is very low compared to old world consumeables. Even if things were overfarmed in the Outlands, it's not necessarily going to become difficult to brew some potions. 3 Dreamfoil and 2 Icecap for a Major Mana Potion vs 1 Felweed and 2 Netherbloom for a Super Mana Potion? The difference is very apparent.

I still don't see that as really addressing the underlying problem here. It might diminish its magnitude somewhat, but the broken mechanic is the "jogging in place" grinding associated with endgame raiding. If it's only 40 minutes instead of 2 hours after a raid, then sure, I won't deny that that's an improvement, but it'll be a bandaid instead of a proper fix. It's still 40 minutes of tedium with no inherent value or purpose. Farming herbs to sell and make a profit is one thing. Farming to purchase or craft something to make yourself more powerful is too. But subsistence farming, as it were? No thanks.

Their not so great answer so far seems to be to lower the requirements for many potions (3 herbs per super mana potion vs 5 for major mana) and flasks (30 total herbs instead of 40). That doesn't really solve anything though now that there are more types of potions and flasks so you'll likely average the same amount of herbs per player, and it may even be increased depending on how they stack.

I'd also like to point out that Ironshield potions are the new temporary armor potion gives 2500 armor for 2 minutes, just 500 more than stoneshield, and yet takes 2 herbs and a fucking primal earth to make. I could understand two or three motes of earth, but requiring a primal is just insane.

edit: Oh god I just noticed all the new protection potions require primals as well. Someone tell me that thottbot is showing outdated information and they just require motes.

I would very much like to see the game progress away from heavy consumable usage. I simply do not have time as a player to spend gathering the materials I need to go over the top and outstrip gear check fights, and much of my guild is the same way.

Actually, I pop runes and potions everytime they're up, plus mana oils and regen food. If I don't do that, my DPS is pretty craptacular and it's hard to justify my spot in the raid in DPS heavy fights. I used to be able to scrape by with Superior Mana Potions but since the patch I've been chugging Major Manas.

However, you are right, I am just DPS, I can choose to not use those buffs and the resulting less DPS won't be as harmful to the raid as a healer going OOM. Plus, as a Hunter, I can farm Runes (even Potions, when I grind humanoids) very easily, whereas healers specced for PvE can't. I can't really think of a solution to this, however, other than just making Super Mana Potions dirt cheap to make by increasing the number of herbs that drop off one spawn, for example. If the problem is gold cost, why not increase the amount of herbs that drop off one spawn significantly? That seems like the most simple solution. Alternatively, tie each raid instance to a certain reputation, since Blizzard loves reputation grinds, and have the vendor sell at Honoured/Revered/Exalted levels, very cheap Potions/Consumables that are only usable in that particular raid instance. I know I'd love to stroll up to the Argent Dawn vendor at Exalted and say "Hook me up with GSPP/Major Mana/Mageblood/whathaveyou at 50s each, please."

Then again, I can't really think everything through on the macro-scale, my focus tends to be on shooting arrows at things and not much else outside of that, as evidenced by my first post.

Other than well, scrapping the entire system, I don't see any way to balance this. We've talked previously about having the crossthrough of epics to 'casuals' in exchange for gold and therefore consumeables, but the game in it's current state is a tenuous balance between the raiding and non raiding entities. In any other game, everyone is on the same playing field (I.E, raid or quit) but there's a whole host of viable activities in this game for people to do other than group with 39 other people.

Perhaps the only other solution, as previously discussed, is just eliminating buffs from the instance. Nothing you can't cast on yourself, but people also LIKE buffing up to the exteme and able to do stuff their gear doesn't usually allow. But again, this translates in the compeitive raidgame as "You have to spend this extra time to be sucessful otherwise it's going to be a cake walk". Even in the most demanding and precise fights, buffs make your lives MUCH easier.

Maybe they need to go ahead and release "World of Raidcraft: Hardcore only" and be done with it for those who like raiding. Or make consumeables more PvP focused.