Raid preparation in vanilla wow

There is this idea about vanilla wow raiding that :

You spend hours preparing for raids, farming consumables, resistance potions, etc

Well, for most bosses up to BWL there are no dps checks or enrages (the closest to that is adds spawning or Vael's debuff), meaning as long as you bring enough healers, avoid unecessary damage and have decent tanks you'll live. On our first Ebonroc kill all dps ranged died after less than 2 minutes of fight yet Ebonroc still fell on the ground 7 minutes later, with rogues doing most of the job. And at this point you can survive in Molten Core without fire resistance gear if you're not a tank.

Wing buffet aggro reset in our face

Let's go by the book, assuming you follow guides the standard raid preparation for a warlock is like that (average AH costs on Kronos, november 2015 in parentheses) :

Elixir or shadow power / Arcane elixir 5x (2g per unit on AH)

Flask of supreme power 1x (45g AH)

Major mana potion 5x (2g AH)

Major healing potion 5x (1g AH)

Heavy runecloth bandage 20x (2g per stack AH)

Greater fire protection potion 5x (1g AH)

Wizard oil 1x (4g AH)

Gold for repairs (5g)

Soul shards 32x

And if you're going for max possible consumables and buffs as a warlock you might think about :

Rallying cry of the dragonslayer

Warchief's Blessing

Songflower Serenade

Food buffs / Lung Juice cocktail / Cerebral cortex compound

Juju guile/Juju Ember

Sayge's Dark Fortune of Damage

Slip'kik's Savvy

Major Troll's Blood Potion, Free Action Potion, Restorative Potion

Waiting for raid buff

Considering I raid 2x/week, that means I need about (20+90+20+10+4+10+8+10 = 172 gold) per week. Now, I am in a guild that doesn't wipe much, as such I use very few of my consumables each raid. Maybe only 3 elixir, 1 major mana potion (Life Tap is good enough), 1 major healing potion (death coil, bandages or a healthstone does the job), 5 bandages, 20 soulshards and 2 fire protection potions. That reduces the cost by (8+16+8+3+6 = 41g), so those days I need (172-41 = 131g) per week. I'm getting all my consumables from the auction house.

I'm also a tailor and an alchemist, which allows me to sell mooncloth (15g, 2g to pay for the felcloth) every 4 days (13/4=3.25g/day) and arcanite CD (5g) every 2 days (5/2=2.5g/day). This is a reliable method, it takes a very short amount of time and ends up giving me (5.75*7= 40g) per week. Roughly.

I farm the soulshards either during the raid or right near the entrance, killing the Searing gorge spiders. That is about 15 seconds per spider, or 8 minutes for 32 shards. But I could also get them while doing dungeon runs or farming. It is not because I'm having fun that I can't prepare for raids at the same time.

If I have to get some gold I tend to go to Arathi Highlands and farm the fire elementals for elemental fires (1g per unit on AH) at late hours where there is few competition. It takes me 3 minutes to kill all of them, I get 3x elemental fires on average and then I have to wait 10 minutes for respawn, so it is 18g/hour. It might seem low but if I consider only played time then it is 1g/minute or 60g/hour which is plenty and there is no risk of dying, no special attention required, low effort.

Elementals dot-farming

Realistically flasks are not needed per se for raiding (not enforced by guilds, bosses die without those) and most dps players don't use them, so you could reduce my weekly spendings by 90g (131-90 = 41g). That is well within what I can get in less than an hour with my professions.

So, does raiding in vanilla require hours of preparation (for consumables & buffs) ? Well, unless you have already got a lot of gold (baron AH), if you're a tank, if you wipe a lot, if you don't have money-making professions and if you want to be a dps prepared to the teeth, yes. But if you are an average dps raider in a good guild with alch/tailoring and don't want to make the extra mile, you could not farm at all (or less than an hour per week) and still raid fine.

It may be somewhat different once we hit ZG/AQ/Naxx and have to get more resistance gear, buy attunements, etc. I'm not convinced because we have plenty of time to prepare and we know what we need, but we'll see. For further posts about raiding see [Facing Nefarian in BWL].

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