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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsTime 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 3 of 3)
Noekh Feb 17th 2010 4:52AM
Great information, but I think you mentioned Frost Lotuses in the last column you wrote. How bout something for those of us who *aren't* herbalists? Like someone levelling dual miners along with engineering, and blacksmithing? That would be nice.
SumDuud Feb 17th 2010 6:11AM
On my server Frost Lotus was hovering at 40-60G per. Since the Lich King came available all of the sudden it has gone up to 70-90G per. I can't get it farming in Scholozar or anywhere else (usually pick 3-7 per hour, which sucks, though at 70G per is decent per hour money I guess)... Maybe I'll have to find a badge run through Uld that stops around Freya...
nieboh Feb 17th 2010 11:12AM
3 per hour would be nice. I farmed Sholozar for an hour and had 1 drop. Fortunately I wasn't mainly interested in the frost lotus. I had to replace 200 adder's tongue I had taken from my wife's account for making 100 potions of speed. But still, 1 per hour? Not good times.
bennytheplough Feb 17th 2010 6:27AM
Thanks for the article. I was getting slightly confused as to why i can suddenly get 68g for 1 frost lotus sale now. On my server it's no longer profitable to sell flasks because of the high price of frost lotus'. Checked the flask prices last night and they were down to 22g each. :S
Korenn Feb 17th 2010 8:42AM
68g for a frost lotus but flasks at 22g each? That's lower than the ingredient price, i.e. retarded. That could only happen if someone's dumping a backlog of flasks or for some reason no-one on your server is drinking them. The former will go away on its own, the latter isn't realistic.
Oldgirlie Feb 17th 2010 9:18AM
Flasks for 22 gold?
Yes, an elixir master can be lucky and proc 3, 4 or 10 flasks instead of 2 sometimes. Nothrend Research can proc some flasks your characters don't need (once every 3 days) as well, but most of the time your lotus + vial + 10 other herbs will only give you 2 flasks.
Flasks at 20 gold when single lotuses are going for 50-60 makes me think sellers have just hacked a guild bank...
thebl4ckd0g Feb 17th 2010 6:43PM
Hopefully Blizzard just adds in higher drop rates of it from all herb nodes in Northrend. Or hell, just adds it as a guaranteed drop from all icethorn and lichbloom. :)
Minos Feb 17th 2010 10:28AM
I think they should give Frost Lotus the same treatment they recently gave Arctic Fur. Make the Alchemy Supplies vendor in Dalaran sell Frost Lotus for some gold and half a stack of Lichbloom or Icethorn.
JB Feb 17th 2010 11:21AM
Did they not nerf the drop rate? I used get fairly frequently. I made the comment in guild chat 2 days ago about it as I couldn't remember when last one dropped for me. Yesterday I had ONE drop after a very long drought.....
TTFK Feb 18th 2010 12:53AM
In the latest update, my newest alt found 3 more today just by picking random herbs while questing in Storm Peaks and Icecrown... Including two in a row.
I'm not even trying, and they are dropping. I don't think I picked more than 15-20 total nodes all day, and have found a full stack over the past week in under 2 hours of total picking time.
LT Feb 19th 2010 1:00PM
So... I went into Ulduar today to do a herbing run and it seems that there are substantially less Frost Lotuses spawning. I only got 3 lotus from 2 clears of the herbs in the room! I blame this article and am no longer a fan of this website. You ruined it for everybody, thanks for selling out.
FYI - I usually got 3-7 lotuses per clear, so this is either unbelievable bad luck or a stealth nerf. I'll know more in a few days.