Looking forward to the next patch and the new tier or raiding I think about the whole gearing up process we will have to go through again. Gearing up is part of game and I love grinds but it is my least favorite grind.
I like the change that they are making by having tier gear only drop from bosses even if I hate the random number generator but with each good thing there are always some bad things that go along with it. Perhaps if they are kind enough they will make sure that the pieces drop more intelligently. Last thing we need in raids is having one class with all tier pieces and even all off set tier pieces while another class has still yet to see one piece drop for them.
I think they are moving in the right direction with gearing but a little more needs to be done.
They need to make gearing up easier.
They need to make gearing up harder.
You are aware they can do both at the same time right?
I will use this current tier for example purposes.
First things first. No more valor and justice points. One set of points. Call it whatever you want.
All bosses of heroics give 50 points per drop, end bosses give 100.
No cap on points per week. Want to gear up in one day, have at it. It's your time, spend it how you like.
Now to the gear itself. No 378 gear at all from points. All the gear would be 365 gear and gear for every single slot would be available, even weapons. If you wanted to you could hit 85 and grind your way to a 365 item level with heroics and a serious time investment. This make gearing up much easier if you are willing to invest the time and a 365 item level is more then ample to tackle the current raid content assuming you actually know how to play your class.
So it made it easier to gear up with this idea but how does it make it harder?
Well, if you want your 378 gear or your tier gear you need to raid. Sure there will be some 378 BoE drops, sure there will be some 378 crafting items, but over all, 378 gear is for raiders. No getting raid level gear from points any more.
You can gear up to get into the raid and be in really good shape from points alone but you are not going to be getting your raid gear without getting into a raid.
So that makes the gearing up process much easier and makes the raid level gearing up process harder being there are no short cuts.
I think a design like this is the way blizzard should go. It gives the power to the people. You can get enough gear to raid without raiding, but you can not get raid gear without raiding.
Makes both schools of gear complainers happy.
Raiders could no longer complain that raiding gear is for raiders, because it would be.
Non raiders could no longer complain that it is hard to work your way into a raid because they can get more then enough gear from points for every single slot if they wanted to get into raiding.
It makes the gearing up process easier and harder.
Lets see if someone at blizzard can come up with a better idea, so far most of their ideas seems off, but at least having tier gear drop only from raid bosses now and having all set slot gear in non set versions available for points is a nice step in the right direction.
S09E34: Awards Season
3 hours ago
That would actually be a better model, and if it were up to me Raid Lockouts would go as well (especially on older Raids).
ReplyDeleteHowever, the main issue with WoW imo is that it focusses too much on Raid content in the first place.
When Raids are current, most players don't get to see them; when they aren't current, they're obsolete and people hardly bother with them.
Yet by focussing on the raiding part of the game and trying to make it more accessible (to justify the amount of resources that are spent on it despite the relatively low numbers of players that are focussed on it), other parts, like levelling, PvP balance and the 'world' get sacrificed (Nils has a lot of posts on this on his Blog).
This has always struck me as odd about WoW: almost by accident, Vanilla offered a game loads of people enjoyed despite Raids being only done by a handful of people. But instead of focussing on the content most players actually did, they choose to focus on Raiding, which of course eventually hit a snag: to justify heaping the biggest rewards upon Raiders the content has to be 'hard' but 'hard' means being inacccessible and hence inefficient application of developer resources.
If instead of concentrating on Raid content for the few (with 'last night's dinner' Raid for the masses as some sort of consolation price) they had concentrated on world/quest/levelling/BG content, not only would they most likely have had more subscribers, but those subscribers would have been easier to replace (as the new content would have been relevant to +/- all players, old and new alike) and production costs would be a lot lower (the mileage on e.g. WSG and AB compared to ToC is quite baffling).