Why raiding is so expensive in World of Warcraft: Legion

Players who do raids, mythic dungeons and other high-end PvE activities in World of Warcraft may have noticed the high cost of flasks, potions and consumables in the Legion expansion. While the Warlords of Draenor equivalents of these items cost almost nothing, a Legion flask can cost over 1,500 gold on many servers’ auction houses.
               

I’ve written in the past about the player economy in WoW, and what’s been going on with alchemy in Legion is interesting. Here’s what’s going on and why it’s happening.

THE PRICE OF ENTRY

First, let’s talk about why this is a really big deal.

Warcraft’s PvE content is challenging, especially as you get into the higher difficulty levels of raids and mythic dungeons. This content is designed around the assumption that players will use everything available to them in the game to augment their characters and maximize the amount of damage they can deal, tank or heal off.

TIME IS MONEY, FRIEND!

There are four main herbs in Legion: Aethril, Fjarnskaggl, Dreamleaf and Foxflower. There’s also a special plant called Starlight Rose. Each of the regular herbs grows in a different region of the Broken Isles, and the roses grow exclusively in the max-level region of Suramar.

There are four kinds of flasks: one to increase stamina, one to increase agility, one to increase intellect and one to increase strength. Each flask has a different recipe, but all of them require 20 normal herbs — ten each of two kinds — and seven roses.

While you can harvest as many as seven normal herbs from a single node, you can only get one Starlight Rose from each spawn. Unless you have the highest skill level for collecting roses, which requires a lot of grinding, you have a chance for your attempt to pick the rose to fail. This outcome leaves you with worthless dust.