World Of Warcraft: Alchemy Changes and More

So, riding on the tail of the profession change preview earlier this week, there's been some more information posted about the upcoming changes. Particularly Alchemy and the ramifications on end-game Raiding.

Now, everyone keep in mind that these are tentative early changes, and are being heavily revised.

The main post (Here on the Blizzard forums by Nethaera) says the following:

In an upcoming patch we will be changing the way elixirs function, allowing a player to only have two elixirs on them at any one time. The change will allow you to use one offensive elixir, and one defensive elixir. All elixirs will be set into one of these two categories. This also means that although elixirs of the same type cannot be used at the same time, they will now stack with class buffs.

We’re making this change for a number of reasons.

• By allowing players to use any number of elixirs it was necessary that we balance raid and dungeon encounters with the idea that all players in the group had the potential of having all available elixirs on them. In many cases this resulted in the spectrum of elixirs being necessary for dungeon and raid attempts as they were balanced to be more difficult. This put a large strain on guild alchemists and their need of materials for the elixirs they would then distribute throughout the guild. With fewer elixirs being allowed, fewer elixirs will be expected on raids, and less herb and material collection will be needed when attempting raid or dungeon encounters. In turn this change allows us to design and balance encounters around it, keeping the difficulty in line with a clearer limitation of what each group member has at their disposal.
• Since the number of elixirs is now limited, we can also now allow them to stack with class buffs, so intellect elixirs will actually matter since they will now stack with arcane intellect. As mentioned previously we’ll be introducing some new recipes that would have simply been left unused before as they wouldn’t have been allowed to stack with class buffs.
• We’ve seen many requests for new recipes, and to some extent it was necessary that we limit how and when we introduce new recipes as any new elixir added in-turn resulted in a potential power increase for every member of a raid or group. With the number of elixirs on any one player now limited we can add more recipes than we would have been able to in the past.
• Flasks will work in this new system by taking up both the offensive and defensive elixir slots. We of course recognize this as a reduction of total effect of flasks, but as mentioned we will be balancing to take into account the use of a single flask on each player in an encounter.
• Potions (rather than elixirs) will not be affected at all by this system.

This change will generally not impact solo players who currently already only use one or two elixirs at a time, but will certainly be a restriction for players who tend to use a lot of elixirs simultaneously. In the case of raid and small group parties the change is a clear benefit. The need for herbs and materials, and thus the strain on a guild or individual alchemist to collect these items is lowered substantially, in combination with the encounters being tuned with the limitation in mind. This change to elixirs and flasks also allows us to improve and expand the alchemy profession in new ways, and removes the need to design and balance encounters around the potential use of all possible elixirs. We’re currently planning to implement this change in a future patch and we’ll release further details as well as information on the new recipes as soon as we’re able.

This spawned much heated debate both on and off the forums between people who thought the changes sounded great, and others who are afraid that their choice of Elixir Mastery was trivialized and wasted.

One such discussion that was taking place over on the Elitist Jerks' Guild Forums was met with a series of responses by Tigole himself:

Some of you are jumping to pretty drastic conclusions here. The community team posted a tradeskill "PREVIEW". They did not post the entire patch notes. The changes listed are by no means the extent of the changes going into the patch. They are a mere preview of *SOME* of the changes to come.

I'm working with them to release more information or to refrain from posting future previews that cause this kind of uproar and confusion.

--Flask powers have been GREATLY reduced.
--Reagent costs for flasks have been ****GREATLY**** reduced.
--Flasks take up both your offenseive AND defensive elixir slots. 1 Flask or 2 elixirs -- you choose.
--Raid DPS has gone up (Glancing Blow and Class Changes)
--Encounters where DPS was not a "flasking factor" (i.e. tuned around the HP flasks, elixir of mastery, defense etc). will be retuned.

Raiders will have access to easy-to-access flasks in SSC, TK, Hyjal and Black Temple. Dungeon goers will have easy access to potions in Coilfang and TK 5-mans.

For example, 1 Coilfang Armament = 1 super mana potion (zone specific) in the coilfangs.

This should all result in an interesting overall tweaking of both the high end raid encounters and the difficulty of guilds who want to progress through the content with a reasonable (and not frustrating!) amount of effort outside the actual encounters. Or so we hope!