Blizzard needs to admit that they made a mistake with this and fix it and I would prefer as soon as possible. Very similar to how they just ignored the power of +weapon was before 2.0 then nerfed it to the point of useless. I would like to see a similar toning down of consumables.
I believe there is not much of an issue now with popping potions once every 2 minutes, that is not my major gripe. My big issue is that there are so many stacking buffs that can make your power (as Grug's graph shows) over a full tier higher. I think it is fairly dumb to simply beat Patchwerk even with 3 tanks in 5-7 Dreadnaught we STILL have to buff our tanks fairly heavily. If anything, our 3 primary protection tanks are overgeared in relation to where the encounter is. Yet every week we still spend 4 flasks, 4 elixir of Superior Defense, 4 Chim Chops, 4 fort potions (a level 20 something consumable), and around 20 Stoneshield potions. This is the best case scenario and we one-attempt him.
Do we remember Blizzard's design idea when they made WoW? That is to make a completely different game from EQ in the same genere. Minimize sinks, lower downtime, make leveling fun and with exciting endgame. Herb/Alch being mandatory for Naxxaramas goes against the fundamental idea that made alot of us fall in love with the game. It is NOT fun zoning in and out of three SM wings just so we can beat Loatheb, my entertainment does not come from running around herbing Steelbloom and Goldthorne at level60. I do find Naxxaramas, when I'm in the zone and have done my consumable work for the week, a very fun zone. I do not disagree at all with the idea of zero flasks, potions every 2 minutes, 1 elixir, 1 food with all other "non-native" buffs stripped from you upon zone in. Blizzard can even keep their resistance gear fights, at least thats a single farm that I do once in my lifetime and I'm finished. Although, it would be nice to have the magic absorbtion potoins absorb all schools but I could see major PvP balancing issues with that.
Great post Gurg, I hope the devs see this and fix the consumables issues somehow. The Arenas have it totally fixed (they are banned from use).
There are a lot of potential solutions such as banning them from raids, limiting the potions that can be on a player, or just allowing potion mats to be collected in raid instances.
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I still feel Naxx was the best zone they put out, though it is pretty stressing having to try and motivate my guild week after week.
They put in so much damn time farming, it worries me that they are burning themselves out. We just got done rebuilding a guild that had 60% of the people quit.
If they have their item guys work with the raid team and make the set bonuses mean something progression-wise, it might help a bit.
I agree with you that the power of consumables has gotten way out of hand, it sucks enjoyment out of the game, and at the same time has a very negative effect on the worth of gear upgrades. Using a potion is in the majority of cases more important than gaining an epic armor upgrade.
Regarding Naxx, I do think they did an admirable job at providing a dungeon that really could be an ultimate challenge. Top geared guilds could throw every single advantage into the fights and still have a lot of work to do.
I don't want to see that becoming the norm though. I can handle maybe 1 zone a year, preferably at the end of the cycle requiring that kind of commitment, but certainly no more. What I would like to see is Blizzard think outside the square with regards to challenging raiders. If they can do a zone that tests fully potted raids, why not one that is effectively a naked gear check. No pots can be used. The coding for this must already exist for the arenas. Make a zone designed to have some fights as much of a gear check as Patchwerk, but deny the ability to pot.
I was frustrated when I saw the alchemy lists for BC. We don't need more damn flasks, we need consumables to stop being necessary in such quantities. 1-2 buffs on a player I can handle, but not every attempt needing 5-6 which is where Naxx got us.
Flask of Supreme Power
Greater Arcane Elixir
Shadow Power Pot
Brilliant Wizard Oil
That's 261+dmg.
There's a reason why I called shadow priests pre 2.0 a very very expensive hobby. It brings to mind the Porsche my dad had in his garage while I was in college. He took her out once a month around town, and spent the rest of the month blowing through hundreds of dollars repainting and refinishing her by hand. I spent a lot of time tuning my character for that 7 min pedal to the metal once or twice a week when I was given the chance to dps.
Lets see what that equates to in terms of scaling.
That's all BEFORE churning that +dmg through *1.1*1.15*1.15*1.05*1.1 that we get from darkness/shadowform/weaving/misery/CoS, Let's not discuss shadowbolt procs and nightfall. Every single point of +dmg is twisted through % based formulas until the minor dps increase that it could have been becomes a huge mess of a dps increase that (pre scaling changes) we couldn't survive without in a high end raiding setting.
Of course you also couldn't keep that kind of dps up pre 2.0 without adding in your mageblood and nightfin, along with popping pots every cooldown. 261+dmg+145m/5 can work wonders for your capabilities- assuming you're willing to spend hundreds of gold a week.
With that kind of a pure dps boost I could hit 14th or 15th in dps before 2.0... and I did on a regular basis. It's no surprise to me how many shadow priests shot through the stars when our scaling was adjusted- we were already so accustomed to compensating for abysmal scaling that we chugged down our 6 pots like we'd been trained to to even break even with the crappiest geared members of the raid- and suddenly we were topping the charts.
I have 669+dmg. Pots add an additional 39% increase of +damage. It's even more for people with less gear. It's a massive massive change in our capabilities.
That kind of scaling, in my opinion, is out of line. Now that I don't have to rely on pots to make my spec choice a possibility (thank god), I'd be happy to see them brought back in line. I would only have been sad to see them adjusted before because I could see the potential of a shadow spec in raiding, but without the pots it was less and less of a reality the further the encounter tweaking went.
Honestly, I didn't care about buying 40 major mana pots when they were 2g/5. I'd use them whenever. Upping the cost restricted me from using them for frivolous stuff (I used major mana's in pvp...) but didn't cut out the required pots that I had to ahve for raiding- it jsut increased the cost burden. =(
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Is there a compelling reason why the food/drink buff solution wouldn't "solve" all of this?
That is, make it so there is *one* alchemy buff slot (excluding the already timer linked short alchemy buffs).
Make world buffs single slot.
This opens the door to either prioritizing world buffs, automatic overwrites, and dealer's choice of irate people with once a week buffs. So how about...
If a player has two or more world buffs, the timer on both is reduced to 30 seconds, during which period a player may click off said buffs to reduce them to one in number, or the surviving buff gets autochosen, and reset to its timer pre-30 second countdown. If that's too clever by far, then simply make it a reset.
Although completely redoing world buffs in such a fashion as to mimick in the PVP EPL/Silithus zonal buffs (ZG kill = buff when you next run ZG, for example) might be cool, too. Presumably if you just killed Hakkar/Nefarian/Onyxia/Rend, you will be going back to do so again a few times.
Just a thought. Single slotting was done before, seems to be a fairly reasonable way to contain the damage of an out of control buff system without crippling alchemy. You get your choice of one crazy buff, but it's just the one.
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Just a thought. Single slotting was done before, seems to be a fairly reasonable way to contain the damage of an out of control buff system without crippling alchemy. You get your choice of one crazy buff, but it's just the one.
Will that really contain the problem though? Everyone will min/max for the best buff, and, foreseeably, you'll still have a chokepoint on a particular handful of materials. In that situation you'll still need to farm for a lot of time, because everyone else is going for the same thing.
While I totally agree that something needs to be done about consumables (I made a post a few weeks ago about how 6 months ago EJ posted they were "buffed beyond belief" for C'thun, yet today it would be fairly normal world buffs), a lot of it has to do with fight design as well as the power of consumables. I personally never had huge problems with fights where I burned consumables to beat it the first time, then slowly used fewer and fewer until it was easy. Stuff like Thaddius, 4H, and C'thun. Sure consumables help, but not to the point where you need them forever. What is really the issue here are a few fights that are just not tuned to be done without consumables - Loatheb, Sapphiron, Patchwerk. Working on removing fights like that would be really helpful.
Furthermore, when it becomes way too risky to constantly burn buffs (fights like Heigan), the fight is also pretty enjoyable. The wipe rate is high, but as it's not very painful to wipe the fight isn't consumable heavy.
I also think we will never get out of the "healers chug mana pots" paradigm, it's just too powerful and too simple to get away from. Limiting actual buffs would be great, but certain things just don't seem to be going out of fashion.
If they have their item guys work with the raid team and make the set bonuses mean something progression-wise, it might help a bit.
I really like this idea, the only set bonus I can think of that comes really close to this would be the judgement of light bonus on redemption, and the only fights that has any meaningful impact on are Sapphiron and Loatheb.
World buffs and pots at the moment though do have a rediculous amount of power that they add to the raid though, so powerful that to me it seems like some people don't even know how to do the fight right without them. Last week was our first time wiping to Sapphiron with world buffs due to no ice blocks on a side and a lot of people didn't make it, when we go back and try it without anything it was just terrible. When he flew up and frostbolted so many people were clumped up and took a ton of burst damage, which with world buffs doesn't drop you dangerously low, but without them it can lead to death fairly easily. This basically told me that even though we've been killing Sapphiron since October, that people still don't know how to do the fight correctly since we've used buffs for it every kill. :(
Before our kill on KT this week, everyone was told to bring flasks, but it was just basically saying that everyone should bring as many consumables as they could.
As a paladin, I spent a good while trying to figure out exactly what I could bring to the fight. I was prepare to get a flask for it as well, but when looking at my options, I was just left completely unimpressed. I rarely if ever actually came close to dieing due to low health, so Titans was out. If Supreme Power affected healing, I would have gone that route, but unfortunately it doesn't. Maybe a distilled wisdom might have been useful, but I only ever had mana problems on this fight if I got the mana burst. So I settled on just getting some troll's blood and mageblood potions.
I've often times found it really difficult to spend my mana. I don't think there's ever been a fight that required me chain drink major mana's and demonic runes. Even in the most mana intensive fight for me, Sapphiron, just using Superior's and NDBs, I've never come close to running out of mana. And with the exception of Brilliant Man Oil, I just wish I had pots that would increase my healing power, and not my longevity.
Though it might sound a bit like I'm complaining that there aren't too many consumables that our class can use to really increase our power, I certainly don't think I'd want it any other way. Which is what perplexed so much when I kept hearing Rogues/Hunters asking a dps flask for themselves. Being given that option just means it will become expected in the most challenging encounters, it won't just be a nice bonus.
This might be a little simple, but instead of reducing the cost of buffing for raids, blizzard could just make bosses drop alot more money.
I think BWL bosses still drop the most money, possibly excluding onyxia. I could make 50g a raid without wipes. If AQ40 and Naxx bosses scaled up like MC -> BWL bosses did in terms of $ dropped, there would definately be a smaller problem.
You could say, that because there would be more gold from higher end guilds that the prices of stuff like dreamfoil or black lotus would go up and the system would become insignificant - but this would just drive non-raiders to farm these things for their own gold purposes.
Say you personally got ~6g per boss killed in naxx (240g per boss total), would that be enough money in the current economy to make farming obsolete?
I think this would create an environment where raiders would be quite rich and casuals poorer in comparison, but I doubt it would effect the economy to an extent where it would be unfair.
I'm going to take the opposite tack of most the people in this thread: I think it should be a lot harder to make consumables. Then you can balance encounters to raids without consumables. If you want to go for that world first or server first, it'll cost you. Despite the fact that major mana pots are expensive, they are definitely not difficult to make. It's just demand is so extremely high compared to the supply.
Alternatively, increase cooldowns. Mana pots can only be used once per 5 or 10 minutes for example. Even if you could use only *1* major mana pot in a 5 minute fight, that would be like adding 6 mp/5. Potions to me should be an "oh shit" reaction when shit hits the fan, not a "ho hum, just hit the 2:35 mark, time to quaff another."
I don't see how making consuambles cheaper or more plentiful will help, it'll just make it even more mandatory than it is now. A flask should be something you only trot out because you want to go the extra mile, not because it's absolutely necessary. The price of making one should be high enough so that you view it as such. What would be the cost necessary on a Flask of the Titans right now that would make you or your guild stop and say "No way. We're not using these except for our first serious attempts?" And if the encounters were then tuned so that a flasked tank wasn't expected...
World buffs, OTOH, are a totally different scenario. These should not cross over to instances. These should be cute little buffs that help the masses go out and kill mobs, not a requirement to kill Illidan. World buffs just scale insanely well. That Onyxia buff is incredible for a level 15 in Redridge Mountains, but it's just as incredible for that T3 rogue in Naxx.
Basically I'd like to avoid consuambles being forced into every encounter. Making them cheaper is not going to do that. Alchemy can still be useful for transmutes, and exotic potions like limited invuln, speed, free action, etc. But if you want a big buff, you need to pay a really big price. Big enough to dissuade its use outside of really special occasions. (if a Flask of Supreme Power cost 200g, would I splurge on one for our first KT kill, once it looked like we were starting to get things down? I just might.... at 50g, it's a no-brainer.) I just think there's some merit in perhaps going the other way here, that way the designers can balance around (generally) consumables NOT being used. And as I stated, alchemy will still have uses, it just wont be the mandatory staple that it is now. Can anyone dispute that if you had a graph of useful non-gathering professions, that alchemy would be at the top, then a huge gap until the others? Enchanting might fall closer than the others, but it's pretty well designed at least.
I refuse to believe that the developers have not already at least contemplated changing the impact "buffs" have on the raiding game. I cannot imagine what it is like for them trying to balance newly designed content around both buffed and unbuffed raid groups. It is most likely too late for them to do anything about it now but if they start working on solutions for the problem today, they very well may come up with a practical solution that benefits everyone for a future expansion or content patch.
The easiest fix, in my opinion, is to treat raid instances like the newly developed Arena system. This elimantes the world buff and consumeable issue at the same time. "Buff zones" that eleminate that cost of player casted buffs could be placed at the beginning of the zone as well as rooms after each boss.
The developers have the option to make both their lives and raiders lives a lot more comfortable. I just hope they are able to come up with something soon.
There are a lot of potential solutions such as banning them from raids, limiting the potions that can be on a player, or just allowing potion mats to be collected in raid instances.
Raid-only consumables in which the mats are gained from trash mobs? Yes please!
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I refuse to believe that the developers have not already at least contemplated changing the impact "buffs" have on the raiding game.
After Naxx, I was thinking along the same lines, that they would see how much it drains enjoyment out of raiding. However after seeing all the new and even more powerful alchemy potions/elixirs/flasks... that belief seems horribly misplaced.
This discussion is great for a variety of reasons but unfortunately it's too late. Blizzard has not only made up there mind but have pushed forward into a more consumable heavy version of WoW with TBC. Not only did alchemy get a variety of new potions/elixirs/flasks(I HOPE TO GOD THEY MENT MOTES) but some of non-consumable based tradeskills recieved several overpowered consumables.
Theres also the issue of how difficult and time consuming it is to conjure these buffs. Take dreamfoil for instance; its used in almost every potion used to self buff. Black lotus can also be a relative pain in the ass to farm although most people have timers down and are able to famrm it effectively at certain times.
This was mentioned on page 1 and I think this was brought up on this forum previously but anyway in tbc we have the following herb; http://www.thottbot.com/beta?i=2984 which appears to only be a very low drop from zangermarsh bogs and from spawns inside coilfang. Used in the new stoneshield, the new mageblood, and the new <magic element> power potion. Thats 3 different raid roles from 1 herb found only inside an instance meaning you cant really do one run to cover your tanks and you will be fine, you'd need several farming runs to cover all 3 roles meaning more and more players requiring the herb to meet buff requirements. Maybe it sounds bad in theory to me and in reality it isnt a terrible fuss (i only made it to 66 on beta so far) but really it doesnt look too good.
Requiring a handful of external farmed buffs to even have a chance at an encounter (or buff youself so much that the challenge is removed) is one thing but making the buffs tedious to farm takes it a bit too far.
While this is definitely an issue that I feel degrades almost everyone's (raiders) game experience, I fail to see how it is *really* difficult to fix. If Blizzard tried I have no doubt that they'd have any problem coming up with a solution - if they really wanted one. Call it a conspiracy theory, call it a formal distrust of any large scale MMO producing company, but having terribly "un-fun" grind features like this literally makes the game go round. I won't really get into that because i'm sure most understand what i'm getting at, and thats for a different thread.
With that being said, I really enjoy the potion mechanics as they apply in 5 and 10 man raids. I enjoy having just a few slots of my overall bagspace being devoted to spur of the moment things like potions, net guns, etc that can, and actually do, save my group from wiping in these encounters. Back in the day when 5 mans were actually cleared for upgrades, I had a lot of fun using potions in encounters where they were actually required. Chug a mana pot for three more heals on the tank which was *just* enough to beat the encounter. Granted, this is all pretty common sense because its what potions were originally designed for.
Personally, I think the best method to go about fixing the current problem is to make potions Unique, much like the PvP potions are. Stick a non-visible debuff on the player that disallows them from picking anymore up until a certain time period is over, or simply hook it into the group (or player's) progress in the instance. Definitely not the end-all solution, but a solution none-the-less.
And for the sake of it, I believe that tacking on more and more and more alchemy/food/temporary player buffs is a really bad idea.
Short and sweet: Potions shouldn't work in raid zones. When WoW came out, I, as well as a good deal of friends, took alchemy without ever knowing what impact it would have. Making it useless in raids wouldn't kill it. I consider engineering to be semi useless in raids and yet you can find engineers all over. (Though obviously it has it's uses in pvp.)
You can't simply make potions or buffs harder to farm for, because people will still go out of their way to get them. This board is proof of that. A good deal of us are min/maxers; as Gurg said it went from only GFPP to: Wow, +50 agi pots from BL, mongoose pots, let's go!
Make the items hard to get and you're still going to have a bunch of people doing it and stocking up on the items. Once they stock up, you have a reliable source for them, and then you have the same problem, making encounters balanced around them, thereby increasing the need to farm for them, and with them being difficult and annoying, the burnout rate would be far worse.
Before raiding I used alchemy for a bit of oomph during grinding (granted I was leveling up the skill so I chugged what I made) and occassionally for pvp. (Things like mana/health pots.)
With the raiding requirement every dreamfoil is precious, every liferoot a gift, and every silversage a treasure. They don't get touched for anything else. And god forbid I ever accidentally hit the wrong button on my keyboard and chug a mana pot; I was never aware I knew so many four letter words.
While there weren't overly a ton of people who were both alchemy/herbalism during the days before Rag, there were enough that the skill still had some value.
You could change a few things around in alchemy, maybe make a potion that gave a bit of extra exp for a little while, which would always have a use but put it on a cooldown, or any number of things that people would still want to use it, but wouldn't make it *necessary*.
We had a pretty bad situation in my old guild where once we moved past content and it was on farm we were still expected to use max consumables or else we weren't *trying* hard enough. It burns you out. With my job and school it was next to impossible to farm enough mats for new encounters (Where I was going to lose the items most of the time due to wiping) and then waste them on encounters we wiped to only if we were being stupid.
Consumables should not exist at all, or rather, they should not exist in this form. As many have said, the new potions and mats in TBC are harbingers of doom as it were, because they all point to more and harder consumables to make/use and so far no limitations have been placed on them.
As Gurg said, are we going to have to kill Hakkar to beat Illidan?
Another solution to the problem is more BoEs. If there were some interesting BoE drops from Naxx then you wouldn't be having this discussion.
Molten Core had the correct balance. When we were struggling with Ragnaros, we were selling Tier1 Belts/Gloves, cores, leather, ores and buying Fire Protection pots. Players rarely had to farm their own mats, the bank would buy them instead.
It's balanced both ways. Remember that Blizzard makes the majority of its money from casual gamers, not hard-core-raiders. Casual gamers farming mats will get some raid gear, and raiders will get mats. Of course, the flip side of this is that gamers should not be able to buy a complete raid set with farmed gold, but Blizzard is doing that fairly well. It doesn't necessarily need to be full epic gear.
If we could sell those useless +firedmg rings that drop before Patch, we could pay for all the potions we need for Pathc.
Just to touch on something Cryect said in page 1. Yes, there are more consumables available in TBC than in the original release for melee, and casters. That said, I have yet to find anything where they feel needed, like several Naxxramas encounters, and to a lesser extent AQ40 stuff. Will people use them? Sure, you bet they will - some people are crazy about stuff like that and will go to any viable lengths to be considered the "best" in their guild at what they do.
We'll have to see once the Tempest Keep raid zone is first attempted to be sure though.
Originally Posted by LadyVex
Short and sweet: Potions shouldn't work in raid zones. When WoW came out, I, as well as a good deal of friends, took alchemy without ever knowing what impact it would have. Making it useless in raids wouldn't kill it. I consider engineering to be semi useless in raids and yet you can find engineers all over. (Though obviously it has it's uses in pvp.)
Where would you use potions then? No 5 person content is difficult enough to warrant the use of them, and that would be even more ridiculous than raids requiring them if it were the case.
Another solution to the problem is more BoEs. If there were some interesting BoE drops from Naxx then you wouldn't be having this discussion.
Molten Core had the correct balance. When we were struggling with Ragnaros, we were selling Tier1 Belts/Gloves, cores, leather, ores and buying Fire Protection pots. Players rarely had to farm their own mats, the bank would buy them instead.
It's balanced both ways. Remember that Blizzard makes the majority of its money from casual gamers, not hard-core-raiders. Casual gamers farming mats will get some raid gear, and raiders will get mats. Of course, the flip side of this is that gamers should not be able to buy a complete raid set with farmed gold, but Blizzard is doing that fairly well. It doesn't necessarily need to be full epic gear.
If we could sell those useless +firedmg rings that drop before Patch, we could pay for all the potions we need for Pathc.
I don't think adding income to raiders will really be any solution to the fundamental problem. What it does is create an amount of income for raiders that can potentially be massive, depending on the population on your server/faction. While the income does help to keep up with raiding costs, it might also do more than intended, which is make the raiders very rich, potentially insanely so, if they are not spending a load in consumables at the time. As an example, we started doing BWL/MC money runs a bit over a month ago or so and were expecting maybe 5k or so from a BWL run. Turns out we have people paying 5k for single items, and can sometimes rake in over 20k per run, which is a bit sick if you ask me.
Regardless, making consumables more easily available or adding income to raiders really does nothing to the fundamental problem, which is that consumables are too powerful. Spamming a couple pots should not outweigh a full tier or two of gear, and that's as simple as that.
Regardless, making consumables more easily available or adding income to raiders really does nothing to the fundamental problem, which is that consumables are too powerful. Spamming a couple pots should not outweigh a full tier or two of gear, and that's as simple as that.
Right, it's only really targeting the symptoms. Guilds shouldn't have to be mini-corporations who need to finance themselves just to participate in competitive endgame content. Given the general lack of guild tools and support in wow, its even more surprising this is basically a requirement to have a functional guild.
As others said, Pots should last through death but I think that would make them too good (you save money in the long run) and does not fix the real issue in itself. To be able to fix it you would require a lot of certain pots to just not stack PERIOD. The main questions is which would stack and which wouldnt but I think if they made potions each have their own particular persona and just not stack at all it would change things quite a bit. Instead of "ok let me just pop everything to max dps" people actually have to consider what is the more logical thing to use on an encounter. You really are not going to need that crit pot on a fight like Loatheb. The main problem with this is that raiders end up doing more concentrated farming themselves in order ot maximize their potential DPS by having several of the available pots but I think it would change the curve quite a bit.
In relation to BC, I saw a major problem in TBC when I played from Beta1 and saw current, the herbs available did NOT seem to scale that well and well (to be frank), if they dont spawn in accordance to how many people play on that server then herbalism, as a money maker and a solid provider as a gathering skill, is fucked. Maybe it just seemed like it was low to me but I think with high pop servers like Illidan, Tich, Mal'ganis, etc picking herbs will be really irritating because of the population to herbs ratio. 7 zones, and 7ish (i think) new herbs.
12/16/06, 11:49 PM
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