ST is out, and the AH has been completely wiped out. Consumable prices have doubled and tripled and even more, but will it remain like this?
Harder raid = more consumes
A harder raid will generally make consumables more desireable. The extra performance boost is more valuable, and on top of that players are more likely to die, leading to needing more consumes if they want to stay consumed for the entire raid. With the final day of the first reset and first day of the second reset past us players have been buying consumes at a massive rate, leading to prices exploding.
Trickle down
Interestingly prices have gone up across all tiers of consumables. As the top consumes get prohibitively expensive for casuals they turn to the second best option. This repeats across tiers of consumables until all of them are significantly more expensive than before. Anyone who stocked up is likely rolling in it. This was further exarcebated by the fact that most players were just running incursions 24/7 to level alts while the XP was overpowered. Less players collecting gathering nodes, particularly for rarer materials.
Normalization?
As payers hit 50 and start needing to buy consumables we will see players turn back to gathering professions in larger numbers. Right now the gold per hour is likely incredible as herbs across the board are extremely profitable. I expect demand for consumables to also fall as there arent that many players who want to shell out hundreds of gold per reset to do slightly more damage.
We should see prices stabilize at a lower price point, but likely still relatively expensive.
Save gold?
If you just want to raid I would suggest just not using consumables, and focus on getting world buffs, in particular the Songflower from Felwood. That’s a larger buff for most specs than any of the consumables, or even all of them. You can also farm the blasted lands turn-ins if you are a physical spec to get a relatively easy to get boost.
Make gold!
To take advantage of the situation you need to mobilize around the reset days. Sunken Temple is on a weekly lockout, which will give material prices more time to fall and prices will spike on the more popular raiding evenings. Reset day and Sunday are both big raid nights at least in EU and are the two main days you want to sell on. You should check materials daily and snag them whenever they are cheap. [JPWorgen.com](http://JPWorgen.com) can be a great help to look at pricing trends, especially now that prices are still not stable in Tradeskillmaster.