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.