I'm finding it's really hard to find time to write these days, especially with all the farming that I have to do. I've actually got 3 characters (should be more but I've been lazy) all farming for mats while getting some friends to fish for me.
I don't like dailies, I don't like the intense time investment outside of raid. I'm ok with a little, like planting your farm every day for food (which would have been a wonderful idea if not for the extra 5 hours of fishing/killing turtles I have to do for every raid night). I like the idea of making the feasts a smaller stat gain than personal food, this seems like a fine idea. The problem I have is that to get the extra 25 stats for non-stam food takes a completely absurd amount of time to farm. It's probably not worth it.
Second, flasks. I understand that the wrath model with frozen lotus was a decent one. I also understand that the economy on some servers is really really bad. That said, the guild has to drop 60k every week to get it's raiders flasked, minus alchemists and their double long flasks. We could change to elixirs, which sometimes come out on top anyways but there's two major problems there.
1. Alchemists still benefit more from flasks since the double duration applies while death completely negates that part of mixology. This means that for alchemists elixirs are even more expensive than flasks.
2. There are only 2 guardian elixirs. Dodge and Armour. This means that only tanks will get the benefit of using two elixirs and the stat gain from a flask once again beats out the elixir gain.
Sure you can buy golden lotus with motes of harmony, and you can farm motes with your farm. Assuming you only spend so much time in raids a week, it shouldn't be too bad. 1.6 spirits * 7 days in the week = 11.2 spirits exclusively from farming in a given week. 3 lotus per spirit means basically 33 flasks per week. So for the non-alchemists this means 33 hours of raiding per week is covered by you spending your entire farm on harmony...This isn't too bad, but try to get everyone on the raid team using their farm for motes for the guild. I highly doubt the average player will spend 33 hours a week raiding and flasked the whole time. Since I forgot to add alts, you can multiply it by the number of characters at revered or higher. 1.2 for a revered character, 1.6 for an exalted one. Things get pretty easy for flasks at that point. Ultimately you can provide golden lotus for yourself once you hit revered with 1.2 spirits per day, ignoring any lucky picks or immediately ripe plants. That takes care of flasks, but oh wait how the hell are you planning on dealing with food now.
This is sort of the conundrum. Not only do you have to deal with your farm, but as a serious raider you have to get all your dailies done to get the rep to even be able to spend your valour points. This also applies to your justice points. This means that your time investment per day is somewhere in the realm of 2-3 hours after farming for raid mats and getting your dailies done. That has just turned my 12 hour raid week into nearly a 30hr "raid" week. This is ridiculous.
Thankfully, blizzard has provided us raiders with what I think has been one of the best raid instances I have seen. The lore may not be flowing out of the walls, but the mobs and encounter design are. I have no felt this good about raiding in a really really long time. I think sinestra was the last time I was actually excited about a boss kill and didn't just think "It's about [expletive] time." Spine came closest but in the end it the feeling there was more one of finishing a marathon and collapsing to the ground just happy to be finished. Sinestra felt like something we worked hard for an accomplished. Not until doing stone guard on heroic (Yes, I'm only 1/6 H right now, we are having some issues with feng) did I really feel happy about killing a boss. We managed about world 150 25m, US 70ish. This is the best I have ever done while raiding and I feel like this time it was really about being good at the game and working really hard in the raid instance.
All the fights I feel are extremely well designed and, at least on 25m, extremely well tuned. Elegon is a perfect example of getting things just right. Our first 25m kill of that we were within 10-20s of the enrage after having a couple 2-5% wipes. It was what I remembered of raiding back in the black temple or the first time we got kael'thas down, or especially lady vashj. This raid instance is phenomenal, and has really raised the bar on encounter design. I also think, judging by completion rates, that there has been a much better job trying to keep the 10 and 25 raids relatively equal. I don't want to get into that debate because I do have opinions and people will get upset but the reality is they are different raid sizes and require different things out of not only the raiders themselves but out of those who organize the raids.
Thank you blizzard for making me remember why I absolutely love to raid. I can't believe you made an encounter that is almost exclusively about spreading and stacking at the right times, and managed to make it truly difficult in the appropriate gear. I can't wait until heart of fear and terrace get launched, I doubt we'll get all of MV down before it launches but we can try.
Lastly I wanted to remind all of the prot pallies out there that you're not OP. Competing on the healing charts and damage charts while tanking is how we're supposed to be. Keep on being awesome guys.
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