Theoretically you can get the completion time down enough that it would be a decent bronze/min rate. But, my observed average time to complete one of the easy raids is about 30 minutes. (The two hard raids is about an hour and a half.)
My impression of some that are saying things like “see it’s easy” is that they’re not counting form up time, travel time, time spent melting gear and sorting whatever.
The data I have is from guild clears so it’s a 3 hour block of killing with 0 form up time and minimal travel time. Basically 0 waiting is what I’m saying. AND we also had a couple of guys doing 300-400k dps. (Normal bosses are all trivial at that rate and die in 2-3 minutes anyway.)
I don’t actually know what you can get the minimum completion time down to but I’d guess it’s around 10 minutes. That would include stacking speed gear, basically one shotting everything including bosses, and auto melting everything en-mass once a day. (Around this point just traveling becomes a pita as it’ll take you 3-5 minutes just to GET to the raid in the first place.)
I should get some more data this next week (we’ve a guy who’s almost maxed out his gear and a few others that are pretty close) so I can update the info later.
The higher content you run, the greater your acquisition speed, so leveling up the gear does make some sense in higher content. You just have to figure out what level of gear keeps you alive in the highest level content of your choice and stop upgrading after that.
In my case however, I do zero instanced content, so leveling up my gear would just be stupid.
This is all good and interesting numbers (I do like me some data afterall) but doesn’t really take into account that it requires hella optimized and consistent groups for anything that isn’t solo content (which even also guaranteed unless you got bot or TAS capabilities working for you).
Simply put, I consider the bronze an investment into yourself. I know for a guaranteed fact my fresh 70 DPS alt is more than capable of clearing every raid at max level and outputting at least 400k DPS…way more than sufficient to clear a normal raid boss…but yet I get constantly declined from nearly every group thus forcing me to either make my own instead of joining an already formed and ready to go one thus wasting my time waiting for bodies to show up.
As I’ve said before, investing in your gear is investing in your future gains not only for the simple stat and tinker increases, but because assuming you don’t have a consistent daily group to clear with, you’re chasing down pug slots with a deeply embedded mindset that you “need” to be overgeared/experienced or you are dead weight to the group. I rather sign up to an 8 or 9 man pug group and get that invite over wasting 10-15 or even more minutes applying to them all and/or just end up forming it and waiting for bodies to get together when 3 of those raids can be practically done or at least VERY well plugging through in those same 10 mins.
Most of the information on there is optimized, not optimized. I’m on a high population server so I have to dip in and out to get good results. I’ll end up retesting a few things now that I have a guy on a dead server cluster.
One of the next things I’m working on is a data set of pug raids. I’m just going to keep track of the total time to run each raid. I’m tracking everything, getting into a group, waiting for it to set up, running it, and to some extent cleaning bags. I’ll have a tag for a ward group or not and that’s the only thing extra.
It depends on what your doing this all for. If you just want to play the game (which sounds like what you want) then it can make sense quite early to upgrade. If you’re just trying to farm bronze then it might not make sense at all.
Spending 300k so that you can farm an extra 80 bronze an hour might not work at all. First you farmed at about 100/min over 50 hours. You’d have to farm for an additional 28 hours just to get back to 300k. With 78 hours of base farming you’d have 468000 bronze, or basically enough to buy every mount.
Open a timer and run it during the raid. If your doing a fixed time guild thing start it when you start. If your pugging with some randos or friends start it when you start getting a group together. Tell me the total time it takes, include cleaning up your bags, and what exactly is cleared.
The main problem you guys don’t seem to see is that killing things was never the main bottleneck to actually doing stuff. Its, the pre-game stuff, actually walking around the instance, and then cleaning up. There’s a bunch of reasons right there that we’re all speedrunning with feral druids when we clear old instances for gold/tmog.
I open my friends list and say let’s do this, and instantly have half the raid done. We start clearing trash, by the time we get to first boss we have the group done. We one shot everything, only stopping to loot. The rp scenes are what makes it so long. Each boss fight is about 9-15 seconds. Garrosh is the longest. Mythic garrosh because he has so much rlenis
The biggest thing you get is security and to an extent a degree of autonomy. I know if I have 40 minutes to play WoW I can log into remix and clear all of heroic Tot in that time because I am the carry and I will get invited to near enough the first group I sign up for. If I were less geared I would be waiting around for a group to accept me, or potentially struggling on later bosses due to lack of ability to skip mechanics with cheeses leading to it taking longer than the time I have or potentially failing to clear at all.
Personally I just treated the title from Mythic SOO as a 500k cost cosmetic, got that one first, and now everything else is much easier than if I’d try to do it the other way around.
So what im hearing is ive been right all along no need to upgrade gear cuz the cost outweighs the time saved
Edit: AKA you spend way more time just getting to a point of geared that youd have all the mounts and transmog faster if you just hard focused getting those instead of wasting time on spending it with gear
That’s right. Especially if you’re not after all the items in the event. E.G: I don’t play much other than my DK and Hunter so the cloth set is a waste of bronze
I’ve updated this with more and more current data.
I’ll be doing heroic raids over the next couple of weeks and I should be able to solo farm everything by then. So I’ll update farming rates again, probably for the last time, next week or the week after. I’ll also have finished upgrading my gear by then so I can give breakpoints on when you can do different kinds of content.
The only optimization I have left to explain is speed farming world content with a DH but that’s super specialized information (hence not very useful to many people.)
Great write up. Thank you for taking the time to put all this together.
So assuming all this math is correct. It looks like your looking at 83 hours of play time give or take to farm the 500k bronze to fully upgrade your item level.
So less than an hour a day over the course of the three month event. But that doesn’t account for actual rewards which is 3x that. So to me this data suggests that across the board bronze is probably close to a quarter of what it should be. Meaning that playing an hour a day every day of the event should result in a maxed out toon and maxed rewards give or take.
Worth noting the daily scenarios and dungeons front load roughly 9,000 bronze into the first 20-30 minutes of logging in.
Once you’re geared enough to join a good ToT heroic run, so maybe a little over half way through the upgrades, you can get roughly 30k in just over an hour doing that and your daily runs.
9k for 30m and 3k for the next 30m is 12k for 1 hour. That’s 200/hr an hour a day from the front loading.
That still only gets you 1m and 80k bronze over 90 days if you don’t miss any days.
It’s 2m bronze to upgrade fully and purchase all the rewards.
So that leaves you needing 920k more bronze. That’s 9200 minutes, or 153 more hours… or 1.7 hours a day more.
So the math implies that a fully upgraded 70 and max rewards would require someone to play 2.7 hours a day for 90 days.
I have advocated that this is intended to be an event that last three months and get players to play that entire period however 3 hours a day for the duration does seem a bit excessive.
Let’s assume you ignore the upgrade path…
You still need 1.5m bronze.
The first hour a day gets you to 1,080,000 bronze over 90 days. That leaves us with 420k bronze to farm. 420k / 100 = 4200 minutes to farm. That’s 70 hours. That is .77 hours a day or 46.6 minutes.
So to make it nice and round 1 hour and 45 minutes per day for 90 days to just earn the rewards if your not spending any bronze at all on gems or upgrades or anything else.
I’m still collecting heroic raid data so optimum might change a bit but you make about 200 bronze/min in normal raids. Some raids can give higher rates of return but there’s some outliers in the data that are pretty significant. So I think, only because of that, if your pugging you’ll have some problems at times which push the average down. But expecting to make around 200 seems reasonable. That’s about 42 hours of raiding.
Now since that’s all time gated you’d bee looking about 14 hours a week minimum for two straight weeks to max everything out. A very fast set of raid clears is still a bit over 2 hours so you’d likely see 3 or 4 hours a day in practice. (That’s between 14 and 56 hours.)
If it’s easy to dip into heroic at a certain ilvl (past 400 might be the sweet spot) then you can shift into those past a point. That would reduce the total amount that you have to farm. Income rates appear to increase by 50% but it depends. (It might be higher since the players in those groups screw around less.)
To get everything ASAP you’d end up grinding on wieners on one of the couple of farms out there. I’ve been able to push grinding up to about 200 bronze/min, so roughly as good as raiding, but I’ve super specialized character made just for speed. You’d likely see around 100 bronze/min. Halving the rate doubles the time to completion so in that case you’d expect around 80 hours minus a few hours that you spent raiding. (Getting geared in a week would take around 60 hours for example.)
This is why they made the rewards you really want (tusks, heirlooms) require SOO on normal or higher difficulty…so you’d be forced to do the gear upgrade treadmill.
Well I did it just to do it (I thought it would be fun) so there are other reasons than just grinding for bronze.
Having said that I’m not sure it would be worth it for anything but the heroic/mythic achievements/title. Getting up to about 444 ilvl (around where heroic is easier to get into) is about 250k bronze or about 14 hours of raiding. If you just did normal soo you’d have 14-16 bones already and a bunch of bronze to buy cosmetics with. Getting the last of your gear done puts you around 30 bones. The gear farm strategy I think is best, doing every raid every day, only nets 7 bones during the first half and (at most) 28 bones during the second. So yeah I’d guess it’s worth it if your only concern is bones.
For the record I only have 18 bones and 556 gear in every slot. So maybe it’s a worse strategy than I’m deducing it to be.
