One of the things Warlords of Draenor changed was guilds – guilds no longer leveled and a good number of perks were removed. Instead all guilds would have the same perks and a lot of the missing perks would be baked in.
During the beta I made a number of posts about this; Warlords beta – guild perks reduced has the list of the perks removed and Guild perks – the downside to a beta has some details of the baked in perks.
However one major perk wasn’t going to be baked in – Cash Flow, which put an extra 10% of all gold earned by guild members into the guild bank. That perk is partly why you’d often by spammed by guild invites when first creating a character during Mists and Cata. The process was:
- Get a level 25 guild
- Turn off guild repairs & ability for people to take gold out
- Get lots of active members – spam invites, talk up the guild perks, etc
- Sit back and watch the 10% cash flow gold roll in
In raiding guilds the cash flow perk was great for providing funds for repairs; for Warlords Blizzard said they’d have more BoE items drop in raids which could be sold on the auction house to provide the funds cash flow used to.
Now we’re coming towards the end of Warlords, how well has this “BoEs for cash flow” worked?
Summary: we’ve made the 1,000,000g gold cap via alt and auction house sales, but we’ve spent all of it on repairs. And its taken active management to handle the BoEs
Introduction
The Cash Flow perk was awesome in that you didn’t need to do anything – the gold just came rolling in from the questing and drops an active guild player base would do. One aspect of the previous system has remained – guild challenges, where doing things as a guild would reward gold:
- 7x dungeons, each rewarding 250g
- 3x challenge mode dungeons, each rewarding 500g
- 3x rated battlegrounds, each rewardnig 500g
- 1x raid boss, rewarding 1,000g
This does, however, require you to run the above as a guild! From experience I can say that our guild will get the 1x raid boss – the first thing we do each week is kill Archimonde to get the Crystallized Fel to upgrade the legendary ring by another 3 ilvls. The others though? Don’t happen so often – sometimes dungeons are run, but at this point in the expansion they aren’t touched. We’re not a PvP guild so the rated battlegrounds don’t occur and people don’t seem so interested in challenge modes.
How much gold do you need anyway?
However I can speak from the experience of what happens with a normal progression night of working on a boss.
For a while there was a 400g limit a day on repairs. So for a mythic raid group you’d have a maximum of 8,000g going out on a single raid night.
We’d routinely hit that limit during progression nights – especially for bosses like Iron Reaver which have a non-existent run to get back to after a wipe.
With a single group who raided twice a reset we could easily burn through 16,000g in a week. And that’s before you consider we have two raid groups in my guild – one doing mythic and the other having more of a casual view.
The repair limit is now 1,200g a day which we’ve not hit yet.
Handling BoE drops
For my guild all of the BoE items are handled on our forums – encourages forum usage if nothing else!
For progress team drops the process is:
- Offer to the progress team members for a couple of days
- Offer to the casual team members and alts for a couple of days
- Send to the auction house
For items from the casual team the 1st step is missed off. Alts have to pay half the auction house value – as given by The Undermine Journal.
Working this way means that items which could help either team will go to the raid teams – as they progress deeper into the raids they’ll tend to no longer require the BoEs as upgrades. Thus the 1st heroic BoEs from Hellfire Citadel were snapped up by the progress team. Now they’ll almost always offered to the casual team. In turn, they’re getting better gear so now the heroic BoEs from Hellfire Citadel are almost always going to the auction house.
As a result, at the start of a raid tier we’ll see almost no gold income from selling BoEs – guilds must maintain a good level of funds to pay for repairs during this time. And if they don’t, they have to be willing to either reduce or even disable guild repairs.
Gold from BoEs
So far in Warlords we’ve put 1,185,904g into the guild bank. Since the level of funds in the guild bank now isn’t that different from the start of the expansion I’m assuming we’ve spent roughly the same in guild repairs.
Let’s just think about that for a moment – over the course of an expansion a guild which is raiding three times a week over two teams has burned through the gold cap in repair bills. And the expansion isn’t even over yet!
Tier 17: Highmaul and Blackrock foundary
Most of the gold came from this tier; which makes sense right now as we’re only part of the way through tier 18 right now wereas T17 is over and we had the period where BoEs were often sent to the auction house.
| Sold to.. | Total gold | Items | Mean cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alts | 131,125g | 14 | 9,366g |
| Auction house | 676,189g | 47 | 14,387g |
| Total | 807,314g | 61 | 13,235g |
Tier 18: Hellfire Citadel
Not yet over, we’re still seeing heroic BoE drops being used by the casual team and we’ve not seen any mythic BoEs yet. They’re likely to be snapped up by the progress team when they do drop.
That said, the empowered baleful items do mean there isn’t so much interest in the HfC normal BoEs. They have an ilvl of 695, the same as the empowered baleful items. That said, they do sell reasonable well given you know what stats you’re going to get and you don’t have to play “Whack a stat“, burning apexis crystals to get the baleful item to upgrade.
| Sold to.. | Total gold | Items | Mean cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alts | 54,000g | 5 | 10,800g |
| Auction house | 324,590g | 19 | 17,083g |
| Total | 378,590g | 24 | 15,775g |
Total for T17 and T18
| Sold to.. | Total gold | Items | Mean cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alts | 185,125g | 19 | 9,743g |
| Auction house | 1,000,779g | 66 | 15,163g |
| Total | 1,185,904g | 85 | 13,951g |
Summary
However it has taken active management – you must have someone whose job it is to manage them. It is too easy for the items to languish in the guild bank, not handed out to raiders or sold on the auction house. That’s bad from both raid team upgrades and from making gold as the value of BoE items drops down as people start to out gear them.
Something to consider is that on average you’ll need to get at least one BoE a week to pay for the guild repairs – on average we’ve gotten 15,000g per BoE on the auction which almost pays for the maximum guild repairs a week.
Sivation's musings about WoW... and cooking 
I’ve been grumpy about the Guild changes this whole expansion. For us, the BoE selling has not worked because we just haven’t been getting the drops in HFC (Highmaul we got quite a few, though they stopped being worth anything very quickly so were pretty useless for selling once the pieces that were useful for team members were distributed.). I think we’ve had maybe 5 or 6 in total this HFC tier, and all but maybe 1 or 2 have been useful to the person they dropped for. The ones that did get sold I don’t believe sold for the prices yours have.
Thankfully everyone in the guild is very good about making sure they are contributing mats for food and flasks and pots. I don’t use guild repairs because I can afford my own (though it does explain where a fair chunk of my gold goes!) So the guild isn’t having to pay for raid consumables. But it does pay for repairs, and as you’ve shown above, they can be quite expensive. And we’re just not getting the gold in to compensate that.
I don’t see a problem with the 10% “guild tax”. Yes, people abused it and made a load of gold, but I do wonder about just how many people were taking advantage of that. And is it worth screwing over everyone else because of a handful of crummy players? I don’t think it is, and I wish they’d bring it back to make life easier for the smaller guilds out there to be able to provide the guild repairs. Asking guildies to put gold in to the GB is awkward. And how do you determine how much you put in? I don’t keep track of how much gold I make each day to figure out 10% of that to put in. And it feels more “real” doing it like that. Having the 10% tax was invisible – you barely noticed it, but it helped the guild out and that’s what mattered.
I sound bitter. I probably am! I’m just not a fan of the guild changes that were made this expansion. I don’t think these changes encourage guild participation. (That and many other things introduced this expansion – but that’s a whole other rant). Making the BoE drops personal was, I feel, a mistake. To have a piece of purple loot drop for you that you are then expected to just hand over is an awful feeling, and one we ended up avoiding because of how awkward it was. e.g. “hey, I know that loot dropped for you, but we’ll be taking that thank you very much”. It feels icky. Yes there are ninja master looters and I get that this was an attempt to curb that, but I feel like this personal BoE approach punishes the every day player.
I’ve rambled enough. But thank you for posting numbers etc. about something I’ve been cranky about for a while now! Sorry for the rant!
Sorry to Necro an old thread, but i was looking at the bank log and saw Cash flow today. I was wanting to know if there was a new change.
You are absolutely correct. The changes Blizzard made are not encouraging guild participation.
That’ll often be from running dungeons & raids as a guild. But the extra 10% gold from the now gone cash flow perk which came from loot in the world? That’s gone.