If your guild is even semi-serious about raiding, then you probably have a policy in place that states that raiders must show up prepared for raiding sessions. Generally, being “prepared” includes arriving with gear at 100% durability, and having enough consumables on hand to last the entire raiding session. Depending on how good your raiders are at holding onto gold (or how much time they have to play outside of raiding), being able to meet these requirements may pose a genuine issue for some. On my server, a single three hour night of progression raiding can easily cost over 500G per raider (3 flasks, 15+ food, and repairs), and many guilds raid 3-4 times a week. Some players may simply not be capable of generating 2,000 gold every week to cover raiding costs.
How do you handle this situation? Consumables are an important component of serious raiding, but excluding quality people solely on the basis that they legitimately don’t have time to farm up enough gold every week isn’t the right approach, either. The obvious solution is to devise a system where your guild bank covers these costs – but where does the gold in the guild bank come from, and how do you distribute it?
Filling your guild’s coffers
First, let’s talk about how your guild bank is going to generate income. For all but the largest guilds, the Cash Flow perk isn’t going to get you very far, so you’re going to need an additional means of significant income. I believe that the best option is to simply institute a policy where all loot collected during raids that isn’t bind-on-pickup goes directly to the guild bank. In practice, this means that you’ll be putting trash BOEs and shards from disenchanted boss loot into the bank. I find that reserving one guild bank tab for deposits works well (we call our tab “incoming items”, and set permissions so that only a couple trusted people can withdraw from it).
You’ll then need to designate somebody in your guild to liquidate the collected items every week at the auction house. The person responsible for this should be trustworthy, but also fairly savvy when it comes to pricing items on the auction house – you want your items to sell for fair prices, after all! As items sell, this person simply deposits the proceeds back into the guild bank.
You may encounter some resistance to this idea the first time that an epic BOE drops that one of your raiders wants. Generally, the benefit that the guild gains from selling a BOE (which covers a week or more of raiding costs for the entire group) outweighs the small individual boost that somebody will receive by equipping it. In all likelihood, a boss around the corner drops a comparable (or better) BOP piece, and if a raider takes the BOE item now, that only means that you’ll be sharding the BOP piece sooner (and of course, missing out on the gold). Of course, there are exceptions – if the trash BOE is legitimately the best-in-slot option (or only option!), then you should have something in place to allow a raider to receive a BOE. In my own guild, in the rare situations where a BOE is the best/only option for a certain spec, we simply treat it like a BOP.
Flasks prearranged in stacks of 3 (or whatever number corresponds to your raid session length) help prevent your raiders from withdrawing the wrong amount.
Distributing the spoils
Now that you have a decent supply of gold and a steady means of income, you’ll want to designate a couple people to stock several bank tabs with consumables on a weekly basis. Hopefully this goes without saying, but these people should be trustworthy, and fairly knowledgeable when it comes to pricing materials from the auction house. In addition, anyone that you give elevated bank privileges to should ideally have an authenticator – remember that if they’re hacked, your guild bank might take a pretty big hit. Basically, these people should aim to have about a week’s worth of consumables in the bank at all times – there is no reason to overbuy unless you suspect that prices are on the way up for some reason.
When laying out your bank tabs and setting permissions, try to arrange things so that your normal raiders can’t withdraw more than they need. This is a good precaution in case one of them gets hacked – ideally your raiders shouldn’t be able to withdraw more than one raid session’s worth of consumables every 24 hours. My guild simply has flasks in one tab, and food in another. Raiders can withdraw a single stack from each tab every raid night. Set the daily repair limit to whatever you think is reasonable (ours is set at 200G/day per raider, and we only hit that on our worst progression nights).
What about cauldrons and feasts?
You might have noticed that once your guild reaches level 22 and has access to both the Happy Hour and Chug-A-Lug guild perks, cauldrons become a much more economical option than individual flasks. A single Cauldron of Battle will cover an entire 10-man raid group for two hours (assuming your guild has both of the perks I mentioned) – you’d need 20 individual flasks to accomplish the same thing! To make cauldrons, your guild will need the Mix Master achievement, but if you’ve been making flasks for raiding that shouldn’t be an issue. Once your guild can take advantage of cauldrons, you should absolutely use them over individual flasks – just store the mats in the bank, and alchemists can whip them up at raid time.
Similarly, once your guild unlocks the Seafood Magnifique Recipe (via the That’s a Lot of Bait achievement), you’ll likely want to switch to using feasts over individual food (although some people may prefer a different food buff than the one that the feast gives you).
My own guild has been using this basic system since the guild bank feature was added to WoW. Other than people sometimes forgetting to withdraw their nightly consumables from the bank before arriving at the raid instance (and thanks to the Mobile Banking perk, this is no longer a problem!), we haven’t had any issues with it. The amount of gold in the bank does fluctuate a decent amount – we tend to deplete it a lot when starting out in new content, and then run it back up to a comfortable reserve once we’re in farm mode, but there has always been enough to cover all of our costs. Prior to the guild bank, we had a few people that chronically “forgot” consumables – now that they aren’t perceived as an individual expense, our consumable usage is always nearly 100%, with no fuss.
Could you show us more screenshots of your guild bank? I recently became the person in charge of ours and am looking for ways of setting it up.
Thanks.
Hi Jessica – We use 4 guild bank tabs to support our raiding needs. Here is how ours are set up:
Tab 1: Incoming items – This tab is deposit-only for everyone except officers. People are expected to deposit any uncommon+ BOE items that they loot during an official raid into this tab. An officer will later sell these items in the auction house and deposit the proceeds back into the bank to fund our other tabs.
Tab 2: Flasks – I posted a screenshot of this tab in the article. Every person in the guild with a “raider” rank is allowed to withdraw one stack from this tab per day. We’ve organized the flasks into stacks of 3 (since our raids are 3 hours in length), and grouped them by function.
Tab 3: Food – Similar to tab #2, every raider can withdraw 1 stack per day from here. We keep full stacks of every variety of raiding food here. If your guild has access to the raiding feasts, then you’ll probably want to instead keep this tab stocked with the materials for that, and give your high-level raiding cooks access to it, since the feasts are BOP.
Tab 4: Misc Consumables – We keep this tab stocked with consumables that might be required on specific encounters, but generally isn’t needed. Stuff like resistance flasks/elixirs, DPS potions, etc. Officers are the only ones with access to this tab, and they will distribute the items on an as-needed basis. In practice, this tab is rarely used, so consider it optional.
If you’re in a 25-man guild, you might want to devote multiple tabs to flasks and/or food. A single tab for each works for my small 10-man guild.
Hope that helps!