[Tuco]

(Note: This post is made at personal risk of being called '2weak2raid' by the people who enjoyed farming VT keys and want non-instanced content, but I think I speak for the majority of post-patchwerk raiders)

In early raiding, gold was not a heavy concern. BOE epics could be sold to non-raiders, expensive consumable-rich fights were not as prevalent, bosses dropped decent gold, and repair costs were mild. Someone could farm lightly and sustain themselves even while learning MC and Onyxia.

Fast forward today, where the exact opposite is true. Raiders can incur 50g a night repair bills while learning encounters, tanks always use a flask, mana users need to use manaoil/nightfin shit/mana pots/demonic runes to keep mana up, tanks pop +armor pots every 2 minutes, on some encounters(Patchwerk/Loatheb), raids need to be heavily flasked.

Currently there is an epidemic where guild banks are suffering through massive downfalls of their previously rich coffers. My guild is in a bit of a crisis, where in the forseeable future we won't have enough gold to use enough consumables to do encounters like patchwerk/loatheb. We are internally revising our gold-getting process, and will essentially force people to farm for mats, or use cheap tricks such as bringing outsiders on a raid to pay for BoP epics.

The main issue is that encounters are built with consumables in mind. Gothik, for example, all-but-requires that you chug consumables, or else you won't get anywhere without the perfect strat. Some encounters are not consumable heavy(Anub/Raz/Gluth) to learn, others you need them or else you won't be able to tell if your strat is wrong or not. It could be that raids need to spend time gearing up in Naxx before they can continue, which is all very well and good, but the problem is that raids have the option of forgoing that period, and instead spending enormous amounts of resources to offset their lack of T3 with consumables.

I'm not asking for consumables to be removed from the game, nor am I asking Naxxramas to be nerfed so that raids don't need to spends thousands of gold per night on certain encounters. I'm looking toward the future and asking developers to keep the raider's future in mind.

In TBC, will there be upgrades to Flasks? Will major mana pots be upgraded to "Mega Big Gulp Mana Pots"? Will repair costs continue their exponential climb as we reach ilvl 100? Will there be no in-raid way to replinish monetary losses with BOE items? If the answer to these questions is yes, TBC raiders will be hard-pressed to continue raiding without heavily farming for each raid. While this may not seem so bad on the outside, I don't want to spend my Saturdays picking flowers and killing green mobs so I can stay competitive.