We just got cauldrons! YAY!
Now comes the hard part. MATH! Who should click, and how many times? This depends on:
- guild perk levels
- how many clicks you get
- how long the flasks last
- how long is your raid
- how many alchemists you have (cause, hey, they get longer flask times)
- anyone using spirit flasks?
- what herbs do you have in the bank (no, really, I’ll explain).
OK, let’s say you have a 3 hour raid with 10 raiders. 2 are alchemists. Currently, in our guild, we have Rank 1 Chug-a-lug but that is our only cauldron perk. Each cauldron has 7 clicks.
- So each non alchemist raider will need 2 cauldron flasks or 3 regular flasks.
- Each alchemist raider will need 1 cauldron flask or 2 regular flasks (with an hour wasted at the end, so this is a bad option.)
This is what we’re encountering in our first raid. Believe me, my mind is swimming. I think we were all confused.
So… we put out 1 cauldron. 7 people took a flask and chugged. Then we put out the 2nd cauldron. The remaining 3 took a flask and chugged. There were 4 charges left, and we told the non-alchemists to take a 2nd flask for later. Since we only had 2 alchemists (who did not need a 2nd flask), and we had 4 people taking an extra flask, that left 4 people without flasks for the 2nd half of the raid.
We could have put out another cauldron, but that would have been a waste. We opted instead to open up the gbank at raid halftime and dole out some single flasks, which was actually not ideal. In theory there would be a half-hour at the end where the flasks had expired on those who took a single-flask (1 hr) after the cauldron flask (1.5 hr), but we were running late, so it worked out.
Now, if we had been SMART about this, we would have had the intellect-users and tanks have cauldron priority. This is because their flasks are the biggest pain in the ass to make (twilight jasmine). If we have to dole out some single flasks during the raid, it is far better to dole out the cheaper single flasks with easier-to-obtain materials.
If we had been SMARTER, we would have designated some people to be flask-only and some people to be cauldron-only for a 3 hour raid, rather than having a few stragglers chug a cauldron-flask and then a single-flask. Remember, if someone does a cauldron-flask (1.5 hr) and then a single-flask (1 hr), there’s a half hour missing at the end of the 3 hr raid, which would involve chugging another flask.
To simplify, let’s say you have 2 charges left. Joe and Bob have not taken flasks yet. If Joe and Bob each take 1 cauldron flask (1.5 hours), they will each need 2 single flasks (4 single flasks total) for the last 1.5 hours of the raid (actually it’s a total of 3.5 hours because it’s a 1.5 hour cauldron-flask plus 2x 1 hour single-flasks). However, Joe could take 2 cauldron flasks (1.5 hr x 2 = 3 hours), and Bob could use 3 single flasks (1 hr x 3 = 3 hours), with no wasted half-hour bits left on flasks.
Confused yet?
Next time, I may chug a spirit flask myself, which will, of course, screw up the math again.
In the meantime, don’t feel bad if you can’t figure this shit out. I can’t either. I can’t wait until guild rank 20 (Happy Hour) so we get 10 charges and don’t have to think about this junk. Rank 22 (Rank 2 Chug A Lug) won’t be bad either, since we’ll only need 1 cauldron for our short 2-hour raids.
Heh. We actually got to rank 20 before we did whatever it is you need to do to make cauldrons, so our cauldrons have always been 10-packs. Which is good, because I make a fool of myself often enough during raids without screwing up on flasks as well.
What we did was just use the excess +str flasks (because we made so many of them >.<) from the gbank and everyone else just used the cauldron.
Your idea with the expensive flasks using the cauldron is the smart way to go. +Agl and +Str flasks are quick and cheap.
Zel I have done a bunch of math on this for my own guild, want me to post it on your forums so you can see?
You can – and by the time we get it straight, the numbers will change on us due to stupid guild levels, adding an extra half hour to the raid, or other asinine factors. Sigh. I hate math.
For whatever it’s worth, we just dropped 3 cauldrons at the beginning of our 3 hour 10man raids. We had everyone take and use one flask and then everyone takes a second flask. One flask is “wasted.”
For the most part, no one should be using a spirit flask. If you are truly low on spirit, you should forge for more spirit, you can’t reforge for more intellect.
We also have two alchemists in our raid most of the time, we have them grab the second flask and hold onto it. Occasionally we have someone that has to be swapped into/out of the raid and the “extra” that is being held by the alchemist is a nice thing to be able to pass off to the new person.
Even with the “extras” from the alchemists and the single “wasted” flask, you will come out ahead by just dropping 3 cauldrons.
Once we moved to 10 flasks per cauldron and 2 hour flasks, we just drop 1 cauldron at the beginning and 1 at our scheduled break halfway through which means we still end up with an “extra” from each of the alchemists.
We also have a pretty healthy guild bank at the moment though with ~300+ of each flask and 500k+ gold
I do tend to use Spirit flasks when I don’t need more thoroughput but rather need smaller and more precise heals (think Chimi). But good point on holding an extra flask for swap-ins. We indeed had that very thing happen last raid, and a conjured flask might have been just the thing.
It generally sounds like you’re trying to make t more complicated than it needs to be.
The cost of a Cauldron is roughly ~4.2 flasks.
You get 7 flasks that each last 1.5 times as long.
That means that before any other considerations are factored in, including alchemists, you get ~10 flask hours for the cost of ~4 flasks. Let’s just round that 4 up to a 5 to make the math easier and err heavily on the side of all of the smaller concerns about the numbers I’ve already used. Cauldron flasks are worth roughly double the value of “regular” flasks.
If you do what I posted above and for any raid between 2 and 3 hours in length (between 3 and 4 once you get the duration perk) then even with the 1 “wasted” flask and the 2 “extras” from the alchemists, you end up with ~20-30 hours (changing to 30-40 with the perk) of *usable flask time* for the cost of ~12flasks plus whatever value you want to assign to the deathblood venom (we collected enough of this stuff to carry us through the next two expansions I think)
TL;DR
If you are using any more than 4 non-cauldron flasks during the raid for any reason, you should have just dropped an additional cauldron.
Oooh, I like rough math far better than exact math. We’ll just drop 3 cauldrons and be done with it.
I worked out the math for our 2 raiding teams (and asked for flask contributions from raiders of only 2/week to cover all mats), until we had lots of cash in the bank from BOEs it worked out really awesome. Maybe it helps? We asked ALL to use the flasks though, unless someone wanted a spirit flask (super rare).
http://healbot.net/handling-guild-cauldrons-in-your-raiding-guild/
Oh wow, yeah. That must have gone right over my head at the time since when you wrote that, we were in NO way ready for cauldrons!