What a Raid Night Costs in Forever
A raid evening is a recurring bill, not a one-off purchase. Here is how that bill splits between consumables, repairs and travel, and what the loot table gives back now that buying a drop with gold is off the table.
A raid night is a list, not a purchase
A raid night is not one payment. It is a short list that repeats every week: flasks and elixirs for the fights that ask for them, food, a potion or two held back for the pull that goes wrong, class reagents, weapon oils or ammunition, and whatever the repair bill reads at the end. Each line is small on its own. Together they are the steadiest outgoing a character at the cap has, and the price of raid consumables is set by other players rather than by a vendor.
Where those items are bought matters as much as what they are. A raider who buys singles off the shelf on the evening of the run pays the convenience price, because everybody else on the realm is shopping in the same hour. Ordering ahead in stacks changes the arithmetic, and so does being in a group that pools materials, since guild supply lines for raiders cover items a solo player would otherwise buy outright. Five people shopping together also order differently from five people shopping alone, which is why a party's consumable order tends to be placed in stacks.
The bill starts before the instance door. Getting a full roster to the same summoning stone takes flight fares, hearthstone timing and often a paid favour or two, and summons sold for gold is a real line item on realms where the raid meets far from a city. None of this shows up in a guide's gear list, and all of it is charged again next week.
Repairs are the half that moves
Consumables are roughly predictable. Repairs are not. A farm night on content the group has cleared before costs almost nothing in durability, while a progression night with repeated wipes puts the whole roster in front of a repair vendor afterwards. That is the part of the evening that scales with how the raid is going, which is why what a death takes off your gear is worth understanding before a guild commits to several hours of attempts on one boss.
How a player comes back after a wipe changes the number too. Running back to the corpse keeps durability where it was and spends time; taking the resurrection from the spirit healer's offer spends durability and sickness instead to save that time. Neither choice is wrong, but a raid that defaults to the fast option all evening pays for it at the vendor, and the people in plate pay more of it than the people in cloth.
The practical answer is a reserve rather than a budget. Raiders who leave the instance with nothing left over end up skipping consumables the following week, which makes the next night worse. Holding back enough to cover a bad evening is the whole discipline, and the weekly cost of raiding is easier to carry when the reserve is set once instead of argued about after every wipe.
What replaced GDKP at the loot table
On most Classic realms, part of a raider's spending came back. Gold paid into a pot for a drop was split at the end of the run, so an evening could end in profit. Forever rules out that arrangement, and the ban on gold-bidding runs removes the one mechanism that turned raid attendance into income. What stays is the outgoing half: the consumables, the repairs and the travel. The loot table pays in items only.
The systems that fill the gap are the older ones. Soft and hard reserves let players name a drop before the run; point systems bank attendance and spend it on gear; loot councils hand out items by judgement and expect the reasoning to be public. Each has a different failure mode and a different amount of bookkeeping, and how raids split their drops is usually the first thing a guild writes down rather than the last.
Gold has not left the area entirely, it moved next to the raid instead of into it. Groups still sell places in a clear, and reserved drops and carry fees are where most of that spending lands now. Whether a particular arrangement sits inside the published rule is a question for the rule's own wording, which is the text to read before organising anything that takes payment.
What we do not know yet
We are not publishing figures for any of this. Consumable prices are player prices and they move with supply; repair bills depend on gear, on armour type and on how an evening went. Any number we printed would be wrong for most readers by the time they read it, so the arithmetic here is left as a shape: a predictable stack of consumables, a variable pile of repairs, and a travel cost that depends on where the raid meets.
Two things in particular are open. We have not seen a published list of which consumables a given tier actually requires, so the gap between what a guild mandates and what the fight needs is guesswork for now. We also do not know how much of a typical raider's supply will come from a guild bank rather than the auction house, and that single habit changes the personal bill more than any individual price does.
If that balance shifts once raids open, the place it shows first is the shelf, not the raid log. Watching what disappears from the listings in the hours before a reset tells you more about the real bill than any spreadsheet, and where gold leaves the realm is the wider frame this sits inside.
Questions
Does raiding make gold in Forever?
Not directly. With gold-bidding runs ruled out, the raid itself pays in items and in whatever bind-on-equip drops the group decides to sell. Attendance is a cost line for most raiders, offset only by what they gather or craft outside the instance, so a raid plan and a gold plan have to be kept separately.
What is the biggest single line in a raid night?
It depends on the evening. On farm content the consumable stack dominates, because it is bought whether the bosses die quickly or not. On progression nights repairs take over, since every wipe damages the whole roster and plate wearers pay the most. A guild that alternates between the two should budget for the worse case rather than the average.
Can a guild bank cover the consumable bill?
Some do, in part. A guild with active alchemists, cooks and enchanters can supply flasks, food and enchants from pooled materials, which moves the cost from the individual raider to the gatherers behind the bank. Whether that happens on your realm is a matter of guild policy, and we have no data on how common it will be.
What loot system should a new guild use?
Whichever one the officers are willing to administer every week. Reserves are simple and favour the people who called their item first; point systems reward attendance and require bookkeeping; councils are flexible and depend entirely on trust. The common failure is adopting a complicated system and then abandoning it mid-tier, which costs more goodwill than any of the rules themselves.
Sources
- Blizzard's official World of Warcraft site, where Forever announcements and rule statements are published — World of Warcraft official site.