World of Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery phase three launched on April 4, 2024, and inflation has hit the servers so hard that you need to spend roughly 75 gold for a single raid buff.
On April 14, a player called k1dsmoke posted on the WoW Classic subreddit explaining how the Sigil of Living Dreams Enchanting buff, which many raid teams demand, costs a whopping 25 gold. It doesn’t persist through death and only lasts half an hour, so for an hour-and-a-half long raid without any deaths, you’ll be spending 75 gold on a single buff.
To make the buff item, Enchanters need one Nightmare Seed and five Dream Dust. You can buy five Dream Dust for around 1.5 gold, and one Nightmare Seed for 20 to 25 gold, depending on your realm. Raiders need to spend upwards of 75 gold per raid on the buff, which makes raiding prohibitively expensive for many players—especially those who missed out on the massive influx of gold from Nightmare Incursions before they were nerfed.
On top of this, raiders have to pay even more gold for mana and healing potions, buff food, and flasks, so they can have the best chances of clearing Sunken Temple while parsing well—not to mention repair costs. Compared to Blackfathom Depths and Gnomeregan, Sunken Temple is drastically harder to clear, since bosses have more health and deal more damage, and the mechanics are very demanding. For these reasons, guilds and even PUGs ask raiders to come prepared with all the possible buffs and consumables—and now, it feels like raiding in phase three is a luxury. Only players with mountains of gold can afford it.
You can trace all this back to Nightmare Incursions that let players to farm excessive amounts of gold at the start of phase three, until Blizzard Entertainment drastically nerfed the rewards. Even though they were hotfixed early, they did irreparable damage to the economy. If you didn’t abuse the event early, you probably can’t afford anything from the auction house.
