Time Is Money: Frost Lotus prices and farming
Time Is Money, so I won't keep you long.
Frost Lotus is a component of raiding flasks, and it is gathered as a very rare chance from regular herb nodes, as well as Frost Lotus nodes that appear in Wintergrasp and Freya's room in Ulduar. The price of Frost Lotus has skyrocketed since patch 3.3 on many servers. This is partly due to the large increase in demand for flasks that the new content brought us, but I believe partly because of a reduction in supply.
The supply of Frost Lotus is and always has been low, however as I mentioned in my last column, there are ways to farm it. The most popular one was to get saved to an Ulduar raid ID where Freya's Elders (Brightleaf, Ironbranch, and Stonebark) have been killed, but Freya herself hasn't, allowing the herb nodes to respawn. Getting the nodes to respawn simply requires a "soft reset" of the instance, which means nobody zones in for 30 minutes.
Until patch 3.3, a lot more guilds included Ulduar in their weekly raid rotation, however these days, many guilds prioritize ToC instead. Additionally, patch 3.3 reset everyone's saved raid IDs, so all these farmers that had gotten themselves saved to the perfect farming instance ID could no longer extend their lockouts. Combine this with the increase in demand, and you find yourself in the situation we're in now-- Frost Lotus are much more scarce, and much higher priced than they used to be. This means that raiding flasks are higher priced too.
How can this make you gold? If you are a class that can herb around trash, you can get into a group that clears a path to Freya's room, and keep extending your raid ID to go in and stealth farm a few nodes every half hour. If, however, you can find a few complicit players, you can actually go in and clear the Elders, and this opens up a lot of space where you can pick up nodes. At that point, you won't need stealth, feign death, fade, invisibility, or anything. You can just avoid face-pulling Freya and her trash, and herb the place dry every 30 minutes.
Being an auctioneer is like being able to print money. Or gold, as it were. Wait, that doesn't make sense... you can print on gold, but you can't print gold. That would be closer to transmutation? I can transmute titanium, but that's only worth it if the price of saronite is low enough to justify the time spent making it. I need some sort of analogy here. Whatever, I'll figure it out later. Making gold? periodically, Time Is Money will give you short tips on how to make money.
