Concerning bee wings

[TPC]

I highly agree with this as well, stems should be in bee wings, preferable more than one per kill. That or something has to be done to get more stems flowing into the market again.

Non-creators really don't seem to get how much time farming AD materials take.

So lets break down how long it takes farming materials for AD for one woe for me (I use up to 500 thrown ADs in an active woe, with moving around and fighting, sometimes, but rarely, more if we're just defending a precast with lots of people moving in). In this calculation I'm going to assume that you gather the materials for 5 casts of twilight, and then use the left-over alcohols to brew, and I'm also going to be generous and assume 100% chance when brewing (in reality its closer to 90%):

1500 empty bottles (1-2 hours at eggs in ant hell, incredibly boring, I usually buy them, which is reasonable since they're pretty cheap, and good zeny for new players to sell)
500 fabrics (no really good spot to farm those, I get 200-300 while farming starsands, and buy the rest, this is pretty reasonable. I'd say 1-2 hours if you're just going for fabrics, but I haven't farmed these much.)
500 immortal hearts (this is pretty fast, not sure exactly but at most 45 minutes at verits, not a problem)
2500 stems (too long, it took me about 8 or so hours total to farm a mandragora card once which dropped after 3500 kills, so maybe 5-6 hours for 2500. Buying them is the only reasonable option. Used to be easy to buy for cheap, but not anymore. Maybe there is a faster way of farming them that I don't know about, but certainly no way that is much faster.)
2500 poison spores (if you're really paying attention and click at the right times for you can get 20+ per minute when shrooming, so about 2 hours if you can really pay attention for 2 hours, 2.5-3 if you're more lazy which is usually the case. This is pretty slow, but acceptable since you get some zeny at the same time from selling the karvos that drops)

So if I would be farming everything, not counting the stems, it already takes 5.25-7.75 hours depending on how fast you farm. If you buy the items that are reasoable to buy that brings it down to about 3-3.5 hours.

This is already a lot of time that has to be spent farming. And it has to be done every week, for just 1 hour of woe. Twice if you do both woes (I don't due to timezone issues). Having to farm the stems too rather than buying them would add another 5-6 hours on top of that. Every week, twice a week for some people. That stems have gone off the market really is a problem.

And to the people saying "just farm alcohols"; Farming 500 alcohols would take even longer due to low drop rate, and with alcohols you can't do half the brewing using twilight rather than spam-click-brewing which makes the brewing take much longer as well.

Before I just bought them, but the last couple of months the price of stems has gone up dramatically, while at the same time there being much much fewer stems on the market, so thats not really an option anymore. I had 30k stems in storage from when they were cheap, but those have almost ran out now, and I don't know what I'm gonna do when they run out because farming them like that isn't really an option if you want to have any time over for doing anything else.