One of the big advancements in raider quality of life was supposed to be the new cauldron of battle item which spawns an item on the ground in your raid that people can click on to get flask buffs. Last expansion brought food feasts which allowed raiders to get lazy and not farm their own food and instead just eat from the feast that someone else put down. (Ostensibly everyone would have provided equal shares of feasts but we all know that wasn't the case.)
There are a plethora of issues with the cauldron of battle, though. Wrath feasts could be learned from a trainer after doing some cooking dailies. Cata feasts can be learned after your guild fishes up 10k fish from pools which will take some time but is certainly feasible within a month or two. Just learning how to make the cauldron of battle requires your guild to make 10k flasks. How feasible is this?
Well, my guild raids 3 times a week for 3 hours a night. Assuming full flasking through the night (mandatory once we get going) we're probably looking at using 28 flasks a night. (Alchemists use 2 per raid, the rest of us use 3.) 28 flasks a night is 84 flasks a week. We'll miss a few raids over the year for holidays and what not, so probably 50 weeks of raiding a year, so that's 4200 flasks a year. Which means we'll have consumed 10k flasks approximately 6 months into the next expansion which is well after the cauldron of battle will become obsolete.
If we want to make any use of this new quality of life improvement we'll need to have our alchemists mass producing flasks for sale to other people on the server. This only works if other guilds aren't working towards the same guild achievement or if pugging takes off on the server. Or, theoretically, we could try to form a coalition with other guilds. We could set it up so our alchemists make all the flasks for several guilds. Then once we unlock the recipe they send us one of their raiders for a week to rep up and buy the recipe. Then they have to go back to their old guild and rep back up with them. Certainly not something I'd be willing to be on the giving end of, that's for sure, but I could see being the flask making guild.
Moving along, there are more issues. The cauldron by default only makes 7 flasks and there are 10 people in a raid. Unless the guild is providing the cauldrons and the excess flasks (some don't take twilight jasmine to make) for some flat fee (possibly nothing) there's going to be drama about who is paying for the cauldrons and who gets to click on it, etc... Compounded with that issue is a relatively early guild perk makes cauldron flasks last an extra half hour, so one needs with 2 cauldron hits for a raid or 3 flasks. (Possibly we stiff the alchemists and make them drink 2 depending on how their profession perk interacts with the guild perk.)
Eventually with much later guild perks the cauldrons make 10 flasks each and the flasks last 2 hours. There are sites listing how much guild xp it takes to reach each perk, so when would get those buffs assuming we hit the cap every day?
Well, that doesn't actually seem all that bad. In three months the cauldrons will make the full 10 flasks. I could be wrong but I simply can't conceive of us managing to craft 10k flasks by that point in time no matter what our long term strategy ends up being.
One important thing to point out is that the cauldrons themselves take 4 flasks to make (1 of each main type) and therefore we should actually have a big stack of flasks lying around to turn into cauldrons when we eventually hit 10k flasks made. How many should we have set aside?
Assuming we don't get this done until after March 11th (and that we always cap guild xp every day) we need 2 cauldrons per raid. This is 6 cauldrons per week. Assuming a year and a half of raiding after March 11th we're looking at needing 450 cauldrons total. with 4 flasks per cauldron we'd want to have at least 1800 flasks just set aside waiting to be turned into cauldrons. (Note the cauldrons are bop and therefore we'd want to spread them around amongst our alchemists.) This still means we'd need to drink/sell 8200 other flasks in the next 3 months which just blows the mind. Though I guess with a team-up effort a few similar guilds would each need 1800 flasks to make their cauldrons which would make things more feasible...
All in all, I doubt I'll ever be using a cauldron unless it turns out the alchemists in my guild are able to sell a lot of flasks. Unfortunate since it was promoted as such a cool idea. I'll have to content myself with fishing up over 9000 more fish to make feasts I won't even use...
