You completely misunderstood me. I didn't say it was a paladin sword, I don't generalize loot like that. I said it's a method of openning a group's eyes to possibilities, where-in when I see any +dmg one hander the first two thoughts that cross my mind are "mage, warlock."

this is pretty much why 1/3 my guild has quit TBC, not because it's hard but the 10 man lockout shit just isn't fun and with 30-35 people who want to raid but all can't be on for every raid it just gets exceedingly tedious.

I personally think that Karazhan should have been a 25 man instance where as the side-grade instances should have been 10 man giving some start off main raid instance. I couldn't really care about tiered gear for raiding but some nice purples for the 25 man main instance would have been a better idea to start off with. I'm not alarmist here but I see guilds dissapearing by the day and friends and members just getting bored due to this shit situation.

Not "the casuals" but rather "the non-raiding herbalists." A casual blacksmith won't care. If anything that speaks more to the state of balance among gathering professions (herbalism > mining > skinning, as it has been for years) than anything else.

It affects the buyer as much as the seller I would imagine.

Here's a query for you. Why should it make more sense for you to learn alchemy/herbalism than smithing/mining if you want epic weapons and armor? Doesn't that seem a bit illogical?

If it gets to the point where people literally have alts JUST TO FARM, that seems to point to some pretty severe imbalances.

I know I dropped skinning for herbalism on my rogue for Naxx. I figured they'd do something with the consumables for TBC and that herbalism wouldn't be a mandetory profession.. boy was I wrong. I'm considering either dropping enchanting on my priest or levelling my rogue to 70 for the herbalism now. I'd say its pretty bad already.

Eh, they did a very good job on Karazhan I thought. The problem is squarely Gruul/Mag and their difficulty vs their position in the TBC raiding pyramid. When Kara loot gets sharded in our groups, it's usually because everyone has it (due to maybe having one paladin, and having that plate healing item already), or a lack of that class being there. Not because the item was poor or a sidegrade. (we'll ignore the widely agreed poor item level drops off Nightbane for now)

Most people's expectations were for Gruul/Mag to be Onyxia type in difficulty.. then it could ramp up when you entered into SSC. Then if SSC drops were prepping you for Vashj... you get the idea.

I don't have a problem with Gruul's difficulty. I think there's a place for fights like that, eventually. Just not entry level 25 mans.

Why would a casual care about his "revenue stream" anyway?. Money really shouldn't be a problem for a non-raider; you have no costs for repairs, and you probably aren't upgrading your gear very often for new enchants. I know I had 5000+ gold a year and a half ago without herbalism and no money-specific farming (admittedly some incidental cash from rep grinds), so it is hardly the only method, anyway.

Epic mounts? Buying BOE epic gear? Leveling professions? Buying exalted reward gear? Any number of reasons, really.

Who do you think buys all those BOE epics?

Many people who were raiding Naxxramas quit due to burn-out; many more than that were on the edge of burn-out, but stuck it out because they assumed that TBC would bring all-around improvements to WoW, a reduction in the grind from questing to 70 all the way through raiding. Very few people thought to themselves, "gee, this Naxxramas stuff is too easy, I think it's time for Blizzard to bring on the *real* challenges!", or "man, I wish Blizzard would give me even more reason to farm for potions!" (although this thread had illustrated that these people do, in fact, exist).

Certainly, what we ended up getting was different than what most people were hoping for, and no matter what was going on internally, it's clear that the devs severely miscalculated what the majority of raiders wanted. As they approach the retuning of many of these encounters and the various techniques and infrastructure that guilds need to develop to conquer them, I think they need to keep in mind how many of their players were *already* right on the edge of giving up on something that's so time-consuming and, in fact, perceived to be detrimental to their social and professional lives. These aren't just people who were totally happy with pre-TBC WoW and just decided out of the blue that it wasn't for them anymore. And these aren't casual players, either. They are people who were playing 25-50 hours a week (and from the statistics, many of them probably hadn't played an MMORPG before WoW). They have jobs, and have social lives (or had them, or want to have them), and they wanted to come into TBC and not be obligated to spend as much time on it. They're just tired of having second (and sometimes third!) jobs.

The itemization is bad, but in most cases the itemization is just so blatantly bad that it must be an error, and they shouldn't have much more to do than getting their itemization process back in line with reality and retooling some items to fix it. I assume that the most profitable game in the world has the technical expertise present to remedy this problem.

But really, it's a combination of consumables and the extremely steep learning curve that are killing the game for people, and I say it's a combination because I think people find it extremely frustrating that, when they can't kill a boss, they don't know whether it's their guild's skill or failure to pump the expected number of consumables into it. As I see it, it doesn't particularly matter whether you think the time investment and organization required to field huge numbers of consumables for a fight really matters, because I've got people telling me every day that they're sick of it (as well as people who tell me they're irritated that at their guildmates for not doing enough farming so that they can beat encounters, which isn't much better). I know there are people who enjoy the guild politics and the scheduling and marshaling and all that, but most people don't, and it shouldn't be a mandatory part of the "raiding experience".

Well said Nezralix. Frankly I've been running a guild for two years now, and never have I been as unenthusiastic about logging on as I am right now. Spending a few hours each night grinding elementals along with 9 other fools isn't exactly what I was looking for in BC. Bekah's "stack of bandages" comment hit home pretty clearly, and I'm not seeing Blizzard bringing in anything that has reintroduced that for me yet.

I've tried to keep up on the consumables issue, and I'm sure my two points are influenced by a lot of good posts before me, but anyway, here goes:

Buffing hard cap
Right now, you can buff yourself as high as your gear + all conceivable buffs will allow you to go. What if there was a strict hard cap on buffing (set per encounter), that once you hit it, further buffs did nothing.

This would give designers a very concrete point around which to tune encounters (although I don't see choosing which criteria to cap as a trivial process), and also make it so that the first kills require gear + buffs to reach the cap (you could of course try when you're not capped), but when you're more geared out, you're not going to require any more buffs to be capped. I was also toying with the idea that when you've cleared a wing/zone/whatever, you get some kind of key that removes/raises the cap, so you can feel that you can power through the encounter.


In combat duration
This is just a minor thing, to help the times when you've got slow wipe recovery, people log alts to save flasks etc, but just make the elixir duration be "effective time", so it only ticks down when you're actually in combat.

Implementing that in a way that people would actually understand how they could buff on each particular encounter is no small task.

My idea would be some sort of "scrying" skill/spell, kind of how beast lore works, that somehow gives relevant information. But what that information should be is still very diffuse..

I am in the exact same position at the moment. Leading a apathetic guild lacking key classes into karazhan just to equip for higher tier places because we dont have the gear to even think of Gruul's/mag. We have never been cutting edge, l33t or what ever you want to call it, we were 3rd - 5th along in 'how much content have you cleared' race in Naxx only ever clearing up to the entire spider wing so where are we supposed to start now?

We're not the bleeding edge of the guild ladder, far from it ... we have zero chance against even the first boss in Gruuls and mag in it's current version isn't worth the time. So a expansion that was built for more casual side of raiding blizzard have locked us out of both 25 man instances which should be where we are 'starting' not where we are aiming to go. It might be good an cutting edge for all you higher uber guilds but we are the 'average' raider rather than the higher echelons of it and we are stuck running 2 teams in karazhan and usually 1 of those falling apart mid week because we lack key classes sometimes so we never get anywhere much past Curator.

People are logging off ... quitting because of this, not because some class imbalance or some perceived overpowered class for pvp it's because the raiding has just become 10 times harder rather than easier (relative as to get a raid going and formed and competing rather than easier encounters) as Blizzard said they were aiming for. I see numbers dropping like a rock at the moment.

From my point of view and the way ive always treated consumables, this is a very odd thing to say.
Consumables for me have always been things you use when your learning a new boss, they give more room for mistakes when your just getting used to an encounter and you havent got all the execution covered yet. They are not for use when you know you can kill the boss, or when a boss is on farm, because thats just well, rediculous.

I guess my point here is, far from calling you rediculous, is that boss fights should be tuned so flasks and other consumables help you learn it, but then when you have killed the boss a few times, there should be no further need for them. You shouldnt have to plow hundreds of gold into a boss you have had on farm for weeks simply because that boss is hitting for more hp than your tank has unbuffed.
I guess making the gap between teirs of loot bigger would help, having killed the boss a few times and your tank having got some better loot, the flask might not be nessecary. The problem at the moment isnt solely with consumables, if they fixed itemisation to around what most peopel think it should be, i think all the complaints about consumable use would dissapear quite quickly.

Bah! That wasnt very coherent was it? In an attempt to wrap it up ill say: i dont mind buffing up the ass, as long as its only for a few weeks while learning a boss, and for the first few kills, however i do not want to be doing the same thing months down the line because the raids gear hasnt actually improved significantly enough so that we can stop flasking. Fix itemisation and you fix alchemy, basically.

Apart from the fact that you don't. Because you would still be flasking up and buffing up for each bew boss you encountered, so apart from the few weeks when you aren't trying new content and just farming old content, the exact same problem would occur.

People simply don't want to ever have to spend hours farming just so that they can actually play the game. It's not even at the BWl stage, where a few eager souls would flask or pot up for an extra edge and that was cool - we're now at the stage where learning a new boss requires mass consumeable usage by every person on the raid. It's no longer something someone can do for a minor edge, it's something required of every person in the raid. And as long as *that* situation is occurring, then there's something rotten in teh state of Denmark.

EDIT: in answer to the above. You need to read Gurg's original thread on this issue. The power of consumeables has grown to the point whereby itemisation cannot replace them. Fully buffing up results in a 30% increase on the individual DPS of a mage with 1000 spell damage - there's no gear upgrade in the *game* that can possibly come that close, and I hope to god we never see individual power leaps like that, because they are too big. The gap between flasked and unflasked is simply too large for itemisation to cove the gaps - sure, it's part of the problem, but it isn't the solution.

Ah ha, yeah thats something i wasnt considering, pretty large flaw in my argument :P

But i thnik my conclusion still stands, fixing itemisation and making the stat gap between tiers greater would make a lot of these consumable compliants dissapear. They could still be abused, but less people would bother.

Edit: My analogy is this: do you still use nightsdragon breath and wipperoot tubers? The answer is probably no, because they give such small amounts of hp and mana compared to your totals. So if they made the tier'd gear significantly better, wouldnt it have the same impact on mana/healing potions and ultimately flasks?

why all this talk about ridiclulous schemes for allowing/disallowing this buff here and that buff there. why not just make the content.... (warning: heresy alert!) a little bit easier?

we cleared 1.5 wings in Naxx and right now we're struggling on the latter 50% of karazhan. We downed Maulgar last week and Gruul/Magtheridon are not even on our radars. So no TK25 or even SSC for us for the forseeable future... if ever!

Its not the effectiveness of consumables, or poor itemisation thats the problem here - the current raid content is just *too damn fucking hard*, thats the problem. I don't really give a rat's ass about who can cheese an encounter with 25 titans flasks and a zillion other buffs they spent 100+ man-hours farming for - good for them, they're going to stomp over the content anyway - not only by posessing a great degree of skill that i dont begrudge them for posessing, but a good 50% of that "skill" is gained by the 24/7 player who farms all day, raids 4 hours in the evening then farms all night.

I already have an activity where i have to do something i'd rather not be doing so i can do other things that i want to be doing - it's called my job.

To start off, Karazhan should have been made as a 10-man ZG, not a 10-man Naxxramas AND have the whole T4 set drop in it. The SSC attunement should have just been something "moderately difficult" such as a coilfang heroic or 2. Maulgar is actually perfectly tuned in terms of hardness, whereas Gruul's shatter just breaks the game. Can't speak for Magtheridon as i've never seen him, and sadly, probably never will.

If they made pve gear teirs considerably better it will result in a gear gap which will upset the hardcore pvpers. Blizzard has stated that they don't want that sort of gear gap to arise again.

They have also stated that it should take about 8 months for a semidecent arena team to get a full set of arena gear. That is basically the lifespan of this expansion, more or less. This kind of worries me because if I can't have gear that much better than the arena sets, and my gear is nearish to the quality of the arena sets now, is there much hope for better gear?

I dislike how pve is being hamstrung to balance pvp, and pvp isn't very balanced as is. A solution to reduce the need for consumables is to make gear actually get better, like it used to. But gear can't get too much better or it will offend those who play WoW like Counter Strike. Its a catch 22.

I'd like to see the arena system have multiple tiers of gear; the next tier requiring arena points and the previous item to buy. Sort of like the dungeon 0 sets. Give pvper's an upgrade path. Allow both camps of players to actually get gear upgrades.

But what kind of gear upgrades would you need to make the 500~AP, 4% crit, +12 weapon dmg seem trivial? Because that is what i get from 3 elixirs, 1 flask & 2 sharpening stones (i.e. my standard fully buffed state).

*edit* also the Whipper Root analogy isn't really relevant as they trigger shared Cooldowns, whereas elixirs don't. I don't use Whipper roots as i would rather use a felblossum/healthstone.