Time Is Money: Frost Lotus prices and farming
by Basil Berntsen 
Feb 16th 2010 at 7:00PM
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.
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.
Filed under: Time Is Money
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
sup Feb 16th 2010 7:03PM
Way to kill that goldmine.
Jamie Feb 16th 2010 7:16PM
Blizzard incoming game balancing alteration!
Jay Feb 16th 2010 7:24PM
Hope this exploit is closed.
Viper007Bond Feb 16th 2010 7:27PM
If it means I can actually afford to buy flasks or lotus off the AH for once, then I'm all for it.
Prices are just plain rediculous right now.
Para Feb 16th 2010 9:38PM
Well this is a double edged sword atm i find because i just cant seem to make money off icethorn and lichloom these days (icethorn down to a new record of 5g today) and lichbloom hovers around the 22g mark, If they make it drop more then we will get less for them, i dunno im some ways i hate how i can farm for an hour and get maybe 1-2 and go 10 mins the next day and get 5, balance it out by dropping more would probably be a good thing i suppose.
The FL drops probably make up most of my herbing income, to see it go would mean mining would make tons more money for much less effort :(
Gothia Feb 17th 2010 2:49AM
This isn't a new story and good luck finding a guild today that is willing to run Ulduar, clear Freya's room without killing her, and leave you a raid to extend. Not saying it can't be done, but it is highly unlikely anyone is farming ilevel 226 gear these days. I suppose that you could pay for the service, but you may be better off farming the stuff yourself since it sound like a lot of trouble to go through for a couple of lotus every half hour.
Thundrcrackr Feb 17th 2010 9:55AM
@Jay
I agree. Farming more herbs does not sound like what Blizz intended the raid lockout extender to be for.
Herb prices are too low on my server already.
Every alchemist, scribe, and druid is a frickin herbalist. >.
zappo Feb 17th 2010 10:06AM
Yeah, I honestly feel like icethorn and litchbloom isn't even worth collecting now. I've got stacks that I have nothing to do with, and it isn't worth posting on AH. So at this point I actually just vendor it. It would be nice if they did something similar to leather working where you could turn a bunch into a frost lotus. Even if it were 100 icethorn I'd be pretty happy.
ashetaw Feb 16th 2010 7:04PM
wow, and here I thought u were going to be posting some new ways to make gold. you basically just told people to go farm. gg.
Falcon6 Feb 16th 2010 7:46PM
Yeah, I feel ripped off.
I mean, it's not like he said in the title that this would be about "Frost Lotus prices and FARMING" or anything.
tarvis2 Feb 16th 2010 7:05PM
"or anything" links to martin fury... made me laugh keep up the good work awesome article
rex2745 Feb 16th 2010 7:05PM
Lmao nice joke with the "anything"
Sleutel Feb 16th 2010 7:05PM
I finally got around to dropping Herb for JC (much better for endgame raiding for a tank, but not so good on the income front). Consider my fingers firmly plugged into my ears while I scream "LALALALALALALALALALALA" at the top of my lungs.
Dragion Feb 16th 2010 7:45PM
JC is actually one of the highest profit professions in the game along with Inscription. The frost lotus shortage is just a phase I believe, it will stabilize when ICC raiding gets stale. warcraftecon.net does a pretty good job of documenting how profitable the JC market can be even through each new patch.
Sleutel Feb 16th 2010 7:53PM
@Dragion:
Maybe once I actually have all the cuts I need. But for now, it's a giant money SINK as I'm buying Damaged Necklaces and Titanium Powder to get the recipes I need for myself.
Basil Berntsen Feb 16th 2010 9:12PM
JC is more money than herbing any day- but this feature is about short, more digestible bits of information. There will be a JC guide coming soon on gold capped!
clundgren Feb 17th 2010 12:57PM
JC=free money! Now that honour and emblems are so easy to get, you'll never lack gems to carve up and put in the AH for a nice profit. People are always gearing up, or starting new alts too gear up, and so always need cut gems.
Also, once you have enough recipes, you can turn your daily JC emblem into a Dragon's Eye, which'll get you 150-200 gold, at least on my server. So my 2 minute JC daily is actually worth about 200 gold by itself.
JC+Mining ftw!
Bizzy Feb 18th 2010 9:27PM
JC not good for income? Seriously? There's free gold just sitting on the AH for jewelcrafters. It's just slow & steady, but it's most definitely there.
Sleutel Feb 18th 2010 9:49PM
@Bizzy:
JC is good for income... EVENTUALLY. But I just powerleveled it zero to 450 in a single day a few weekends ago, which puts me several thousand gold in the red, and I've been buying Damaged Necklaces and Titanium Powder, which has cost me several thousand more. For a fresh JC, as for someone starting any production profession, it's a money sink. A really, really big money sink.
Aardin Feb 16th 2010 7:08PM
Interesting to contrast this with shards and other enchanting mats, which are at record lows at the same time (because of the auto-disenchant options now available with LFD).