Anyone else feel that they've gone a little overboard with some of the mat requirements for the T3 sets?

Although I know some people complained about it (really just foolish complaints), personally I thought the AQ40 system was perfectly fine. You needed a faction amount which was fairly easy to acquire provided you went to the instance more than a couple of times, and idols/scarabs once you had the zone down never were a limiting factor.

Now with the T3 sets, they got rid of faction requirements, and instead replaced them with expensive mats. I don't mind if they want to throw in maybe a couple of mats to be cute, but has anyone at Blizzard actually ran the numbers on some of these requirements?

For instance, the rogue set requires:
5 Arcanite Bars
42 Cured Rugged Hides
5 Nexus Crystals

5 Arcanite Bars and 5 Nexus Crystals I can deal with, it's a little annoying but whatever. FOURTY TWO cured rugged hides though?! You can make one cured rugged hide every 3 days, that means on your own if you were to do it, it would take you 126 days to make that many cured rugged hides. To equip 5 raiding rogues with full tier 3, it would take 630 leatherworker days to produce that much cured rugged hide.

Even if you had 2 additional people helping you to make cured rugged hides for your set, you're looking at 42 days before you collect enough cured rugged hides. And don't forget you will need like 15-20 more cured rugged hides to get your FR/NR pieces crafted!

On the flipside, if you just plan on buying stuff there's the gold aspect of it. Cured Rugged Hides currently go for about 10g/each on my server. Nexus Crystals like 70g/each, Arcanite Bars maybe 20g/each. So the full T3 rogue mat costs are: 100g + 420g + 350g = 870g. And no doubt some of these prices will go up, especially the cured rugged hides.

Aren't there already enough money sinks in raiding? Between the repair costs and all the consumables it takes to win, shouldn't we be rewarded with boss drops that we can turn in without further monetary costs?

Honestly I have no problems with current costs, the only issue is that AQ40 has little sellable material and Naxx appears to not have much at all either, which means that the economic generation of MC/BWL is not there to subsidize the costs.

Better than scarabs, idols, bijous and otherwise worthless drops that take up bank space and can never be used for anything else.

well I dont think blizzard figures you are going to make all your own cured hides but how fast do you think you will get 8/9? I mean seriously it wont be a 3 month process for 90% of people in raids. buy up what you can for cheap right now and just keep an eye out for cheap ones. there will be plenty of farmers ready to take your money.

I think it's an insignificant amount. I'll probably spend more on enchanting mats to put +4 stats on my t3 BP than I will on the materials to obtain the BP itself. Yes, it's a couple months' worth of timers. Unless you use some odd sort of DKP that gears up one person at a time at the expense of everyone else, though, I'd say it'll be ~4 months before people are completing full sets, at the earliest. That's PLENTY of time to get the necessary materials together. And you'll see supply of those mats start to go up too, bringing the prices down. Already everyone is converting their alts to be mooncloth mules or leatherworkers. It's really not a big deal.

You spent perhaps 900g on an epic mount that lets you move faster. Spending 800g on mats for a full t3 set seems paltry by comparison. A single BoE epic often sells for more than that. But instead of vanishing into the ether, the money is going to craftmen and promoting a trade economy.

I don't mind it at all, and I'm a leatherworker who let about 8 months' worth of deeprock salt timers go to waste because the damn things seemed useless. :(

Heh it's retarded arguments like this that probably resulted in the current predicament. Who the hell cares about bank space for scarabs and idols. Geeze it's like 16 item slots on one character to store every single idol and scarab, which by the way cost you nothing since you get them just from clearing the zone...


And yes I realize it will take 3-5 months for people to get 8/9 tier 3. It's not really about that but more about the principle. You spend all this time and money killing a boss, it should result in rewards that are acquirable with very little additional requirements.

Yeah but when I got the epic mount I wasn't horribly broke :P.

I know in the grand scheme of things it's not really that high costs, since you're only going to be getting 1 T3 piece a week tops. But it's just frustrating. Isn't the risk which nets the reward the learning and mastery of the encounter?

Tell that to people in my guild who have AQ token pieces sitting in their bags for 2-3 weeks because certain Idols don't drop often enough. At least with this system, it's in the player's hands rather than random droprates.

Shrug, maybe we've gotten lucky then. Beyond like the first week or two we killed Huhuran, we have never been short on idols. Though of course we have more of some idols and less of others, but worst case surely you can find someone to trade idols with.

one of the goals of the wow crafting system is to create a semblance of a real economy. there are a lot of people who enjoy the crafting, AH speculation, etc, in the game, and this is one way to cater to those players. the cost is ultimately a trivial one for raiders IMO, and gives real value to a crafts that are progressively being obsoleted by raid gear as it becomes more widely available. the only things i've crafted in months have been a few Hide of the Wild, one Corehound Belt, and one Onyxia Scale Cloak, and i have two crafting professions (engineering along with tribal LW). this at least gives me a motivation to bother to click my salt shaker every three days. :-P

Like many have said before, it gives money from Raiders back to Causals, and gives a reason to keep using your tradeskills.

I can see why they did this, but really if they just made you take a drop from a boss, walk to an NPC and he says "Thanks, have this set piece" I don't think anyone would mind

I almost vomited with rage at myself when I thought about how many cured ruggeds I could have had.

Of course not. I mean, it makes logical sense that cloth pieces need cloth to create, and so on and so forth. But at the same time, it doesn't enhance the feel of it to have to turn it in either.

A player would be no more deserving of a t3 piece having turned in mats or not. The challenge and reward comes from killing bosses and defeating encounters. I think this hurts the people who log in to raid, and only raid. But overall, I don't see it as a big deal either way.

boo hoo i have to spend an extra hour ingame a week

why is this thread still open

You have scares and knife cuts in hides, I dunno.

You're not "forced" to have an alt, you could just pay for the materials. In the end, to get the gear I suppose you can say you are "forced" to get the materials--just like you're "forced" to spend hours in the instance, "forced" to clear the trash, "forced" to learn the bosses, and so on.

In the end, they've come up with a token system to try and circumvent the horrible frustration of streaky droprates and have replaced that element with a different sort of investment. Instead of time spent killing a boss over and over hoping to at last see your set piece, you can now just buy or craft something yourself. I really, really don't see how that's worse than being able to go two months without seeing a Breastplate of Wrath.

What i mean is that most of the good raiders are min-maxers. And making a tailor/lw alt for this is most efficient solution, unless you are incredibly good with making money. And i'm sure that Blizzard realise that.

What was wrong with AQ40 system, except for inventory issues ? And Nax has more random factor than AQ40, since token drops are random (i.e. boss can only drop 1 token of 3 possible).

P.S. And how about 1 NW robe in 6 months ?

Unless, like me, your gold has always been going towards enchantments, resistance gear, pots, and repairs, and you've never even come anywhere close to having an epic mount. I have approximately negative 110g right now, and the t3 mat requirements are pretty scary since I have no alts.

You know, I don't think the Arcanite transmute was especially valuable either. Even in the peak of the Arcanite Reaper, I never found a time when it was more worthwhile to do Arcanite transmutes than to do just make an Essence of Air every day. For the bulk of my character's life, I pulled at least 15g a day transmuting Undeath-->Water-->Air using my main and my 35 alt. In the past month or so, Air has plummeted, but I'm still getting 11g a day or so, minimum. And even now, it wouldn't be easy to run around in IF trying to sell transmutes for 11g. Most of the price increase due to demand seems to go straight to cost of Crystals, and have little effect on the value of the transmute.

Mooncloth is probably going to be pretty bad. My girlfriend and I both play Mages, so we have to use it for Frostfire and for crafted NR gear. She's been running two transmuters for a long time, and just got a third one, so we have a decent stash, but otherwise it would be a huge pain. Felcoth is generally not in enormous supply. The price spiked heavily when Soul Bags came out, and it's hard to see where it's settling down, but it seems to be at multiple gold apiece. Mooncloth itself is up to 25g or so.

Little trick, since most people reading this aren't from our server: make a char (level 10 Druid for TP:Moonglade is nice), and camp him at this guy:
http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/mob.html?wmob=16015
Check frequently. When he's built up a decent stash, port him out and mail away.

More moderation before we become the FOH boards please. There's already a god damn thread on this that's completely tapped out of anything new to say. We certainly don't need a second.