Flasks, Pots and Mats are too damn expensive: getting burned out

Community General Discussion
1

Blizzard has pretty much brought me to my knees for mats this expansion. My guild is in the Shattered Hand US server and it’s been tough man. One flask sells for 1K. One Battle Potion sells for 1K. Getting 20 sirens pollen can cost 2K. Getting 10 River bud can cost 1K. Anchor weed sells for about 500-1000 for a 5 stack. Your emissary quests and mission table quests don’t give me enough gold to cover the costs of those mats and also pay for reroll tokens, repairs after raid wipes, etc.

I have tried farming the mats but it’s very time consuming and inconsistent to get what I need. I farm mats on my Druid and it can take hours to get everything I need for a raid cauldron. Worse yet everyone in my guild is also going poor with all the things we need to buy. People donate what they can but we all work. And that’s the heart of the matter here. This game is not a game for the working class anymore.

Legion had a decent system where I can reliably farm what I need in the areas I need it. The costs for the flasks were manageable.

With BFA that’s gone. Every flask went up to 4x it’s legion value, your reroll tokens also were inflated. You removed the mission table gold missions. Now I am tired of all the non stop farming.

Farm for AP, do your dailies, do mission tables, farm mats for cooking/flasks, farm honor, farm raid bosses while wiping during progression. It takes hours of dedication and it’s like a second job. Then you have to constantly teach new or newer players what to do and how to do it.

It’s just too much. I can’t keep living like this. Guildies are also pushed to the limit with their amounts of farming and gold spending they can commit to as we all work, have real lives, and a lot of us have kids.

Wow is fun when everything you do has meaning and isn’t killing you. Now it’s becoming a chore that never ends. I’m officially getting to the burnout stage.

The problem is that I have already invested so much time to doing all the above and more with recruiting and keeping Guildies. Great bonds that we formed as friends trying to accomplish the same goals.

I realized that I am tired when I opted to buy a wow token for gold to fund our raids cauldrons. Which makes me wonder if that’s blizzards goal all along. Make things so hard to get in the game that players will be heavily incentivized to just buy a wow token and use that for the mats they need.

I am tired blizzard. My Guildies are now poor. I think it’s time I put up the white flag and surrender to the idea that BFA is not for me. I can’t make people farm non stop. I am done trying to also. It’s too much. Work and life are stressful enough. I don’t need this extra layer of stress. Other games can offer me the fun I need for much less stress and now I am considering dropping BFA all together.

Please Blizzard do something to help out low pop player economies. From increasing the drop rate of mats to giving guild masters of X amount or more members some kind of discount at the AH.

We’re just trying to play the game and have fun. Hard to do if I and others have to treat this like a 2nd job.

46 Likes
2

Give me more money for my herbs, pots, and flasks.

$$$$

2 Likes
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I’m not gonna read all of it, but I based on the title and initial few lines, I feel you.

It started with Legion due to the insanity that was Starlight Rose or whatever it’s called, but alleviated because they added the easy-to-mass-produce prolonged power potions in a patch.

The patch to do that in for BfA should have been… 8.0. Instead, it takes a dozen mats for a SINGLE potion when any decent raider is using 2 per pull. Flasks are fine because they last much longer, especially if you have Alchemy for the 2 hour flasks, but potions just destroy any gold I might actually have.

I either have to buy a WoW token about once a month purely to afford raid consumables, or spend ~6 hours doing nothing but farming herbs every week, which is something I’m just not willing to do. It’s not enjoyable. It’s not worth the time. Consumables should never take as much to make as they do now, especially not the ones we use 30+ of in a night.

Alchemy [and by extension Herbalism] has been a powerhouse profession for way too long at this point. So many other professions are borderline useless for making money and just have some personal uses here and there. Why is the game designed for Alchemy to stand out so much?

10 Likes
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What difficulty of raid content are you tackling? In normals, pots, flasks, food, etc. shouldn’t be absolutely necessary. In heroic, once you outgear the average drop, you could probably do without pots/flasks. Mythic, I can understand.

If things are getting expensive, restricting guild repairs might be a necessity, as well as a daily quota of how many mats/gold needs to be donated to the guild. Might need to start limiting down to only the core group of raiders going in. I assume your guild is running all the guild based content that nets in free gold. Try running folks through for AoTC and charge gold for it. There are many creative ways to figure out a gold/mat issue!

2 Likes
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Sounds like you need to cut some of them costs out to lessen the burden. Probably the reroll tokens.

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Add Mythic plus to that and its insane. If i want to push keys to the best of my ability I am using battle potions for big pulls on fortified, reaping and during tyrannical boss fights.

6 Likes
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You’re not group farming together? Every herb can be picked by multiple people, I watched one group riding on the 3-person mammoth gathering herbs together. They don’t have to dismount because of the Blacksmith utility so they all picked an herb and moved on, the driver is a tank so no daze.

8 Likes
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Every guild should have a couple of alchemist dropping cauldrons for raids. Since 8.0.5 with the herbs to anchor transmute they’re pretty easy to come by. Good 6-10 hours of farming and doing the transmute every day and it’s pretty easy to come up with the mats 10-20 cauldrons depending on if you get lucky with bonus procs. That’s enough cauldrons for a couple months of raiding twice a week for only 6 hours of work, seems like a great deal to me.

Captains feasts on the other hand, those are a serious pain.

In the end it’s all trades offs. Do the work yourself or pay the gold.

6 Likes
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It’s pretty sad, yeah. I’m not that great at making gold and the 500g per shot of BfA Intellect potion is too much. It’s why I am still using Legion Potions of Prolonged Power, and only flasking when the guild drops a cauldron.

3 Likes
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When we can we do but it’s not often enough and doesn’t yield enough. Our raiders all work, a lot have kids and other priorities. We are all good friends and raid together because we like each other. Who am I to say X person cannot spend time with their wife or new born daughter because we need mats. Who am I to tell people who need to wake up 6 hours after raid that they need to stay up an extra hour and help farm mats. The struggle is real. And ultimately this is a game. And the game is just not fun anymore if I have to spend all this time or real life money to get the things I need to help the guild progress. As it’s leader the buck stops with me. And as it’s leader I am getting drained of my energy, resources and time to farm all these things up. There is not enough time to do all that you need to do.

12 Likes
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Remember back in the good old days when we didn’t have a 2 potion per fight limit?

Those were the serious consumable costs.

7 Likes
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I have enough depression with the current state of BFA. Please don’t remind me

2 Likes
13

If you make it one monumental task it can burn you out.

Way I usually do it is queue up for a heroics, and as DPS that can take 10-20 minutes to get in and then go farm some. Do that 3 times a week for an hour or two and after two weeks you got mats for a couple months worth of cauldrons.

Two or three people in your guild doing that and instead of making cauldrons sometimes you’ll end up with 45-60 flasks to sell and 15 to 20 to keep for yourself for M+.

If your alchemist they’re not that hard to come by unless your doing something like flasking for world quests and heroics all the time.

1 Like
14

Do you have war mode turned on when you go out for herbs? They are far more plentiful that way.

2 Likes
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I do, and I also remember the bad old days when they nerfed it down to one potion per fight.

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1000G/Flask or potion is a bit high. However, it isn’t hard to farm up enough gold each week to cover even those high prices. It also isn’t that hard to switch your professions and go farm the mats and create your own and even profit off the madness. Let’s face it alch/herb are the two most lucrative professions in the game at the moment. The rest were ok for when the expansion started but to farm the higher level patterns and create them isn’t really worth it because the ludicrous amounts of materials, especially soul bound items from dungeons and raids required to make those items as well as getting similar or better items from mythics, warfronts, and raids far easier.

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I am an alchemist and that’s not enough. Dedicating 3 hours a week to this plus all the other things you need to dedicate time to is not possible for me. Let’s add the hours up with your example.

2 heroic nights a week, 3 hours per day = 6 hours of raiding heroic.

1 hour for a mythic plus 10 (more of I am helping Guildies in their runs)

3 hours of farming heroics as you say.

Some casual mats farming 1 hour.

Doing Island Expeditions to cap = 1 hour a week

Doing each emissary every day = 20/30 min per day or 2.3 hours per week minimum.

These are the basics. They add up to 14.3 hours per week minimum. If you are the guild master it’s more because you have to actually help people do nearly everything if they are new or risk losing them. And if you help one group with M+ and not others you might be considered a person that only plays with a clique. So to gear up people to spread the love is another time dump.

If you have a 40 hour work week, kids, and other responsibilities this game is not for you.

10 Likes
18

That’s very odd because I only do mythic+ and raids and usually a hour before the raid I can get enough mats for 2 flasks and battle potions. I transmute everyday and use the world quest for anchors. I legit don’t bother doing any other content and still have mats for whatever I need. You might need to change your farm route or have a buddy go out with you for the extra hands.

2 Likes
19

For sure. I actually plan on swapping to alch/herbs in the near future, but right now I’m working on a project to fill out my entire transmog tab, which includes a number of tailoring/engineering pieces from old expansions. So until that’s done I’m stuck with those two particular professions atm.

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If no one in your guild can spend 6 hours a month for raiding mats then that’s that. You might be in the wrong game.

If flasks were any easier to get they risk becoming an always on buff for a lot of people. And if they’re always on they might as well just get rid of them and put a flask choice selector on your Azerite armor.