some light in the darkness?

For a short time, there was hope. In a recent forum post, Blizzard announced to adjust the way elixirs and buff potions work.

"In an upcoming patch we will be changing the way elixirs function, allowing a player to only have two elixirs on them at any one time. The change will allow you to use one offensive elixir, and one defensive elixir. All elixirs will be set into one of these two categories."

The short glint of a candle in the cold and retarded farming grind. A deadly backstab into the spine of the WoW farming lemmings. And the loss of an e-penis:



Blizzard even admits the buff elixir system forced the players to farm:

"In many cases this resulted in the spectrum of elixirs being necessary for dungeon and raid attempts as they were balanced to be more difficult. ...

The need for herbs and materials, and thus the strain on a guild or individual alchemist to collect these items is lowered substantially, ..."

A late insight, but an insight at least? Not necessarily. Mana, health, and resistance potions will stay the way they are. And even though the change 'removes the need to design and balance encounters around the potential use of all possible elixirs' it does NOT remove the need to design encounters to maintain the item grind hamster wheel.