Legacy Perks Cut Consumable Demand
Most of what we write about Legacy treats it as income: perks that add to a route, points that reward a crafting milestone. This is the other half of the ledger. A perk that removes downtime also removes a customer, and the shelves that lose that customer first are the cheapest ones in the game.
Who buys the cheap consumables
The buyer list for low-level food, water, bandages and weak healing potions is narrower than it looks. It is mostly characters between 1 and 60 who die slowly rather than quickly: a levelling warrior eating between pulls, a hunter feeding a pet, a caster drinking after every third mob, a healer keeping a stack of bandages for the walk back. None of them buy much at a time. The market works because there are a great many of them, all restocking in small amounts, all the way up the level range.
On the other side sit the players who supply it. Cooking, First Aid and early Alchemy all pass through a stretch where the output is worth less than the materials, and the only reason to keep crafting is the skill rank. Those stacks get posted anyway, which is why the shelf is usually full and cheap. The arithmetic behind that restocking habit is laid out in what a restock run costs, and it assumes the habit continues.
What a heal on every kill removes
One Legacy perk heals the character on a kill. Forum posts from testers describe it as removing most of the preparation routine while levelling, which matches what a small heal per kill would do to downtime. We have not seen a published figure for how much it restores, whether it scales with level, or whether it applies to kills a group made rather than kills you made. Treat the size as unknown and the direction as clear: fewer stops, shorter stops, less carried in the bag against a bad pull.
The spending that disappears is not one purchase, it is a rhythm. A character who stops every third kill buys food before each session; a character who stops every tenth kill buys it when they remember. Bandages go the same way, because First Aid is mostly insurance and insurance gets dropped when the risk falls. Low-rank healing potions are the third item on that list, bought by levellers who are not yet in a position to need the good ones.
It does not remove the top of the market. A fight that goes wrong still needs something in the bag that a per-kill heal cannot supply in time, and raid-grade flasks and elixirs were never bought by the levelling crowd in the first place. The loss lands on the cheap end, which is exactly the end that funded a lot of early crafting.
Which shelves feel it first
Cooked food and water are the most exposed, because they are bought in volume and have no second use. Cheap bandages follow, which drags on the cloth they are made from: cloth has other buyers, so the price moves rather than collapses. The weakest healing potions are the third, and they matter less because the herbs behind them sell into other recipes anyway. What does not move at all is the drink a caster goes through, since a heal on a kill refills health and does nothing for mana.
That gap is worth holding onto if you supply the shelf. A mana bar is still emptied at the same rate it always was, and pulling large packs as a mage drinks more per evening than any amount of health regeneration offsets. A cook who moves from meat to fish and from food to water is selling to a buyer the perk never reached. A First Aid supplier has fewer places to move to.
There is also a supply-side echo. Perks sit on the account that earned them, so a second account opened for the opposite faction starts without any, and every character on it buys the old way. That is a small, self-selected group rather than a market, but it is the one part of the demand that behaves exactly as it did before.
What we do not know about this
We have no confirmed wording for the perk: no percentage, no cooldown, no statement on whether it works in a group or only on killing blows. Nothing has been published about which level ranges it unlocks at, and nothing tells us whether it is active on a fresh character or earned after a certain amount of account progress. Until a tooltip or a patch note settles those, the honest position is that the effect exists, its size is unknown, and anyone planning stock around it is guessing with us.
The second unknown is scale. A perk only moves a market if enough accounts hold it, and that depends on how fast points accumulate across a roster. The relationship between account progress and coin is covered in what Legacy points are worth in gold, and the same uncertainty applies here: we do not know the rate, so we cannot say when the cheap shelves start to thin out, only that they will do so unevenly rather than on a single date.
Questions
Does this make Cooking and First Aid worthless?
No, it makes one group of customers smaller. Cooking keeps the mana and buff side of its recipe list, which the perk does not touch, and fish-based drink is bought by every caster regardless of how much health they regenerate. First Aid is the harder case, because bandages are almost entirely a downtime item, and downtime is what the perk removes. Levelling either trade for the skill rank still works the same way; selling the by-products on the way up is the part that pays less.
Should I stop stockpiling low-level consumables to sell?
We would not build a stockpile around the cheap end of the shelf while the perk is undescribed. Stock turns over slowly when the buyer list shrinks, and auction deposits are paid whether an item sells or not. Materials are the safer place to sit, since herbs, cloth and fish feed several recipes each and keep their buyers when one recipe loses its audience.
Does the perk affect raid consumables?
We have no reason to think so. Flasks, elixirs and high-rank potions are bought by characters at the level cap for fights where a small heal per kill is irrelevant, and those buyers were never the ones purchasing cheap food and bandages. The effect described here sits in the levelling range, which is where the thin-margin consumables live.
What happens to this demand on a second account?
A second account begins without the perks the first one earned, so every character on it levels with the old restocking rhythm. That keeps a slice of the old demand alive, but it is a small slice, limited to players who chose to run a cross-faction or separate setup. It is not large enough to hold up a market on its own.
Sources
- Blizzard's official news feed, where any confirmed wording for Legacy perks would be published — World of Warcraft news.
- The official Classic discussion forum, where testers describe the heal-on-kill behaviour we have not seen confirmed — WoW Classic forums.