This week Method killed Jaina on Mythic as the first guild in the world. The Q&A session afterwards had some really interesting tidbits on how much gold they spent. So let’s take a look at it.
The Q&A
After finishing their broadcast of the raid some of the key raiders of Method made themselves available for a Q&A session.
The key numbers that are quoted in the wowhead post include the fact that they went 40-100 million gold in debt and that they cleaned out three auction houses of materials to fuel their run.
They also bought BoEs across all realms, with Josh paying significant premiums to get the BoEs over to Method’s realm.
Looking at materials
I wanted to get a better idea of what “Cleaning out an AH” might mean. To do that we need to try to figure out how many consumables Method needed. So let’s look at how many pulls they did and what we can expect they used to buff themselves.
The Pulls
I couldn’t find the list of method’s pull count for the early encounters today, but I do know they pulled Jaina 347 times. Limit used a total of 154 pulls on the first 8 bosses. I think it’s fairly safe to assume that Method used a similar amount.
So for ease of calculation we will just use 500 as the number of pulls. Let’s look at the numbers if they used 2 pots on every raider on every pull, flasks and feasts on every pull and augment runes on every pull.
Consumables used
Flasks: I’m going to assume about 14 hours a day of raiding over 6 days as they killed Jaina just before the reset. That would put them at 1680 flasks total, which isn’t that crazy.
Potions: This is where it gets fun. 500 pulls with two potions on every pull would put them at 20 000 potions total.
Then they needed 500 feasts and 10000 Augment runes. We’re going to assume they used Sanguinated feasts for everyone, rather than the lower level feasts or haste foods.
Materials needed
To calculate this we will just use the composition for the Jaina kill and the amounts above, it won’t be perfect, but it will be a decent approximation.
The Jaina kill had 3 strength heroes, 12 int heroes and 5 agility heroes.
The table below summarizes the materials they needed to pull this off as well as the approximate cost. The prices are based on dbmarket on EU Tarren Mill where Method is based.
The grand total ends at 15.9 million gold!
This is also only the consumables they actually used. They most likely stocked for a significantly larger number of pulls. I’d guess they stocked for at least 1000 pulls, which would put their consumable stockpile at 32 million gold. Another point is that they likely stocked up potions and flasks for several alts and potential raid compositions as well, which would put the numbers for herbs even higher.
Obviously this is a significant amount, but we can tell that by far the larger amount of gold was spent on BoEs to get to their 100 million gold number.
BoEs are the killer
Extremely high level BoEs are definitely the killer here. Based on what Josh said I think there is a very real market opportunity in providing high item level socketed items to high level guilds before Mythic opens up. This time it was 420-425 gear with sockets and tertiaries.
Josh actually had a spreadsheet using the API that constantly looked for any BoEs available that fit the criteria on ANY EU realms. So if you are lucky enough to find something like this on the next raid tier make sure you call your regions biggest guilds to arrange a deal!
Summary
The amount of materials they needed is definitely heavy, running through hundreds of thousands of herbs. Their realm currently has less than 30 000 Riverbud, which is roughly a fourth of what was actually used. There is currently just 1.5 million available on EU and Method burned through roughly 10% of that in BoD, which is amazing.
The raw numbers of materials used definitely points towards the material costs being a bit too high.
Another fun tidbit is the rough cost per pull based on my assumptions which would be about 32k gold for the guild in total.