I don't think is has to with "Joe McAverage" picking up 141s. I think badge tiering has more to do with the devs wanting to put some sort of progression back into PvE endgame. Right now there is no incentive for Mr. Joe to try anything other than his weekly kara and bear boss. He can sit on those dozen encounters every week without progressing and still get new and exciting loots every few weeks.
<...>
As long as its implemented well I see no problem with this new system.
Emphasis mine.
I think that's unwarrantedly optimistic about gear itemization in Wrath. Yes, Tigole has stated that they learned a lot, and yes, I am optimistic that Wrath itemization will be generally better than in BC. That said, I expect Murphy to pop in and for there to be errors somewhere.
Having tier-locked loot means that you cannot overcome those gaps. And really, if a group wants to farm Kz for a year and then do ZA, what do I care? Oh noes, they got the same loot I did 6 months ago? At 100 badges a pop, that's 4-5 weeks per upgrade per person, whereas a group that's actually running ZA is getting a heckuva lot more than 1 upgrade / 4-5 weeks / person.
Generally speaking, what I'm concerned about in Wrath is not "will the devs screw things up", but rather, "what systems are in place for players to use to overcome developer errors". I assume there will be errors. I'd like to see a more fault-tolerant system where people can progress at a slow rate to overcome errors -- "slow" is a lot better than "impossible".
I think that's unwarrantedly optimistic about gear itemization in Wrath. Yes, Tigole has stated that they learned a lot, and yes, I am optimistic that Wrath itemization will be generally better than in BC. That said, I expect Murphy to pop in and for there to be errors somewhere.
Having tier-locked loot means that you cannot overcome those gaps. And really, if a group wants to farm Kz for a year and then do ZA, what do I care? Oh noes, they got the same loot I did 6 months ago? At 100 badges a pop, that's 4-5 weeks per upgrade per person, whereas a group that's actually running ZA is getting a heckuva lot more than 1 upgrade / 4-5 weeks / person.
Generally speaking, what I'm concerned about in Wrath is not "will the devs screw things up", but rather, "what systems are in place for players to use to overcome developer errors". I assume there will be errors. I'd like to see a more fault-tolerant system where people can progress at a slow rate to overcome errors -- "slow" is a lot better than "impossible".
I guess what it comes down to is, do you feel that someone should be able to farm Karazhan/Heroics enough that they could get gear good enough to jump directly into Sunwell. Because that is basically what you are saying.
The difference in WotLK is there will multiple "Karazhans", by this I mean 10 man content that fits snuggly in between 25 man in terms of difficulty. Farming Karazhan1 for months on end should garner more than enough badges to make at least most of Karazhan2 trivial, it'll take longer than those who move on right away, but that's no different from what is done today. Even though progression will be much slower, at least there is some progress. The other option of having players farm nothing but 10 man Naxx but yet get the best gear in the game seems like a silly idea.
EDIT: I re-thought this at lunch, I guess if you make the second tier of tokens worth something like 5-10 of the first tier, then I guess that will encourage people to try the next level of content.
Back to the point, this change can make it convenient for a few dps'ers that have to switch roles, but it seems like hammering a nail in with a jack hammer. For pleasing a few casters, you're upsetting even more casters because they now have a slew of healers after the same gear. Worse, depending on guild, casters may not even get a chance at a lot of their gear until the healers are geared up if guilds push gear priorities. As I've stated before, even if various items are itemized for casters more than healers, it's not really going to matter much as healers will still see a piece of gear with stats better than what they've got and go for it. It'll be the new pvp gear (ie. sure, resilience is mostly useless in pve, but the stats are good enough that people don't care and use it anyway as it's better than what they've got). Plus, if you're really going to be bouncing specs, perhaps your guild needs to take this into consideration and make some efforts to get you some gear? That seems an easier solution since, as you say, your hybrids have an easy time getting healing gear in the first place.
Keep caster gear to casters. Keep healing gear to healers. People will end up with off-spec gear without all that much difficulty.
I think dps and healing gear will still have substantial differences. Enough to make most gear better suited for one purpose than for the other. The +spell hit stat for example would probably still be completely meaningless to healers. Some dps casters, like Warlocks, don't need any mana regeneration on their gear for example, or they might like crit or haste.
And who knows, maybe there'll be a new stat that does something for healing, but nothing for damage.
I'm very positive about all this. From a healer point of view it can only get better after all.
With gear hybridity there's also the possibility that players will be expected to shift from healing to damage within a single fight rather than between fights. I doubt you'll see it very much, but the possibility excites me.
With gear hybridity there's also the possibility that players will be expected to shift from healing to damage within a single fight rather than between fights. I doubt you'll see it very much, but the possibility excites me.
Me as well. Some of the information folks give me about how healing works in AoC and D&D 4E, where healers are damage dealers and to some extent must be doing damage to heal effectively is pretty interesting. I'd love to see some more fluidity around roles during fights.
Kael'thas might be a good example. As our prot pally, I shined in phase 2, tanking 3 weapons. In phase 1 I did nothing. In phase 3 I ran around after Thaladred, shouting out gaze changes and warning healers if he was waltzing close to their area. In phase 4 and 5 I was one of two tanks assigned to pick up phoenixes, but the other tank was so good at it, I spent both phases doing more cheerleading.
As raid leader, it was helpful to have all that free time to warn folks about thaladred and flamestrikes and phoenixes being near death, but the fight could have been more interesting if I could act as a semi-effective healer or damage dealer during the phases where I didn't tank.
Anyway, I am not proposing anything on paladins specifically, but its an example of a kind of fight where roles can change dramatically from phase to phase, and a system that might allow effective role switching could be fun.
Generally speaking, what I'm concerned about in Wrath is not "will the devs screw things up", but rather, "what systems are in place for players to use to overcome developer errors". I assume there will be errors. I'd like to see a more fault-tolerant system where people can progress at a slow rate to overcome errors -- "slow" is a lot better than "impossible".
I don't think the DST was an error. Look at other items: blizzard have been happy to nerf or buff items (sometimes repeatedly) when they thought their power was out of line (eg many of the totems/idols/librams have seen multiple changes, usually buffs). Other items they've silently buffed or nerfed proc rates and internal cooldowns on.
The fact they've allowed the DST to remain so good, neither nerfing it below higher tier items, or buffing the higher tier items, tells me that it's power level is intended. Blizzard want you running Gruul every week for your item. I think yhey don't want you getting all best in slot easily, they want to draw it out as much as possible so nobody quits.
I guess what it comes down to is, do you feel that someone should be able to farm Karazhan/Heroics enough that they could get gear good enough to jump directly into Sunwell. Because that is basically what you are saying.
The difference in WotLK is there will multiple "Karazhans", by this I mean 10 man content that fits snuggly in between 25 man in terms of difficulty. Farming Karazhan1 for months on end should garner more than enough badges to make at least most of Karazhan2 trivial, it'll take longer than those who move on right away, but that's no different from what is done today. Even though progression will be much slower, at least there is some progress. The other option of having players farm nothing but 10 man Naxx but yet get the best gear in the game seems like a silly idea.
EDIT: I re-thought this at lunch, I guess if you make the second tier of tokens worth something like 5-10 of the first tier, then I guess that will encourage people to try the next level of content.
This won't encourage people to try the next level of content, because by definition they can just farm Karazhan1 for their badges and not go to Karazhan2. The whole point of the stratification/tiers of badges is so they are encouraged to go to Karazhan2 because they can't get the badges anywhere else. I could see something like the higher tier badges being turned into lower tier badges if you wanted to, but not lower tiers into higher tiers.
I wouldn't mind 5 badges from K1 turning into 1 badge from K2 if K2's badge rewards had a reputation requirement keeping people from exclusively farming K1. (Ratio doesn't have to be exact here)
I wouldn't mind 5 badges from K1 turning into 1 badge from K2 if K2's badge rewards had a reputation requirement keeping people from exclusively farming K1. (Ratio doesn't have to be exact here)
Exactly. Allowing tier 1 badges to be applied to tier 2 items does not discourage folks from running tier 2 content if it takes a much larger amount of tier 1 badges to buy items than it would using tier 2 badges. If you gain 20 tier1 badges running Naxx10 and 5 tier1 badges equal one tier2 badge, you'd definitely want to be in the tier2 dungeon collecting effectively 5x the badges!
Yes, you *could* spend all of your riading time in a tier1 dungeon, but it would take you, say, 30 weeks to buy an item instead of 6.
Funny, I have full 20-slotters in my bank and I still have <10 free slots
Sorry, my wording wasn't good. I didn't mean that you couldn't find stuff to put in that many slots - I know people can. I meant that the graphical display of the slots would be too small to properly identify items in them.
I wouldn't mind 5 badges from K1 turning into 1 badge from K2 if K2's badge rewards had a reputation requirement keeping people from exclusively farming K1. (Ratio doesn't have to be exact here)
That sounds like a fair solution to the problem that'll keep 99% of the people happy; it'll both allow smaller guilds who cannot run K2 at the moment--but have in the past and intend to resume doing so in the future--to progress gear-wise, albeit slowly, and prevent the 'welfare epics' problem that is going on with current-day Kara.
Maybe the badges requirements will be handled like the Eastern Plaguelands Insignias, ie. if, for example, you are revered you might need 60 badges for a certain item, and if you are exalted you might need 15 for the same item - it came across my mind when Blizz said they might connect faction reputation to Badge vendors. This would of course assume that farming 10mans cannot get you to exalted, only 25mans could. This would mean that farming a more easily managed instance (10man) can eventually get you an item, but it would take at least 4x more time spent than 25mans. With the same 7 day lockout timer, that (or somewhere along the lines of that) would seem fair to me.
[e] although now I think about it, they did say that 25mans will unlock 10mans, so that might moot my point.
I wouldn't mind 5 badges from K1 turning into 1 badge from K2 if K2's badge rewards had a reputation requirement keeping people from exclusively farming K1. (Ratio doesn't have to be exact here)
Exactly this, How can anyone not like this idea. I really hope blizzard goes with something similar to this.
Exactly. Allowing tier 1 badges to be applied to tier 2 items does not discourage folks from running tier 2 content if it takes a much larger amount of tier 1 badges to buy items than it would using tier 2 badges. If you gain 20 tier1 badges running Naxx10 and 5 tier1 badges equal one tier2 badge, you'd definitely want to be in the tier2 dungeon collecting effectively 5x the badges!
Yes, you *could* spend all of your riading time in a tier1 dungeon, but it would take you, say, 30 weeks to buy an item instead of 6.
That was my thinking exactly. You wouldn't even need rep level associated with it as someone else suggested. Let's face it, if someone wants to farm the WotLK equivalent of Karazhan for 30 weeks to get one amazing item that is easy to get in six weeks by doing the T2 10 man content, then let them.
If we used Kara and ZA as our examples, ZA is harder than Karazhan, but if you have Karazhan on farm, the first half of ZA isn't too difficult. Maybe you can't finish it, and that's fine, but the time wiping and killing just four bosses in the WotLK version of "ZA" (for eight badges + loot drops) is worth much more than the time rolling through "Karazhan" for 22 badges (worth about 4.4 "ZA" Badges if we use 5:1) and sharded loot.
It's encouraging progression, but yet not forcing it.
Apologies for playing devil's advocate here, but i'm personally against the notion of using tier x badges to buy tier x+1 loot.
In my opinion TBC got itself in a muddle with the content difficultly to loot conversion, allowing at the extreme 5-man heroic runner access to loot on par with black temple loot.
Maybe it's just me, but I believe the tier of loot one can attain should be directly linked to the level of the content difficulty one is playing at. The aquisition of loot should not be attainable soley by the committment of time but should require the successful completion of a certain level of content.
If I were to propose a system to be implemented in TBC wherby tier 6 armor from BT/MH was attainable by handing in 3 tier 5 armor tokens it would be shot down. This badge trading up system is the same thing.
As for the reputation idea linked in with badges, this does solve the solution to a degree, however it does have one negative side effect. As an example, imagine guilds in the Sunwell at the moment who have been farming Black Temple for 6 months. Now all this shiny new sunwell loot has come out and the entire guild wants to get the most of this new tier of loot as possible. With a trading up system, to get the most loot possible in this sunwell tier of loot you are forced to clear black temple each week. Quite frankly, this would be extremely annoying. Yes older instances are good to revist, fill in the occassional gap in loot, get recruits up to speed etc, but being forced to reclear old tiers to get loot at the current new tier would be exhausting. The game progresses, new tiers of content come and old ones are left behind. I would hate it to become a necessity to go back to old content to get new content's loot.
Personally, I say make timed events with novel rewards like the ZA run more common, but leave tiered loot to be distributed at the tier of content it was designed for.
Apologies for playing devil's advocate here, but i'm personally against the notion of using tier x badges to buy tier x+1 loot.
In my opinion TBC got itself in a muddle with the content difficultly to loot conversion, allowing at the extreme 5-man heroic runner access to loot on par with black temple loot.
Maybe it's just me, but I believe the tier of loot one can attain should be directly linked to the level of the content difficulty one is playing at. The aquisition of loot should not be attainable soley by the committment of time but should require the successful completion of a certain level of content.
I agree too, honestly the very old content needs to die off (albeit not as fast as T5...) and any conversion of tokens just seems rather... misguided considering how things ended up now.
The question is, why does there need to be a conversion at all? let it be 20->1 or whatever people feel is low enough, what is the point? just have it cut and clean where each tier is allocated to itself, there is no merging at all.
Once you are done with T7 then move on to T8 and be done with it, any option of a conversion has the (high) posibility to be 'enhanced' at some future point in any number of ways which will no doubt diminish peoples feelings of their earlier acheivments.
Do we really want to end up with some awsome 200 DPS sword which requires 20 T10 tokens, or 100 T9 tokens, or 500 T8 tokens?
If people are not able to consistantly complete the tier of dungeon the loot is established at, why do they need it? someone who never leaves T8 content has no use at all for any means of accessing T10 level gear - period.
Reptuation lock-outs are nice, but they are either too easy and/or farmable - or set at a slow (and actually good) rate and then get 'adjusted' to double the amount after <x> amount of time has passed.
Brood of Nozdormu and (pre)The Scale of the Sands showed you actual meaningful progress on something which just felt 'right', Ashtongue Deathsworn felt empty and insignificant - being Exalted was really not any accomplishment at all.
Content should always die off at some point, Karazhan is well past its time, and T5 was only briefly touched by most people - both ended up poorly implemented in regards to design.
Wrath needs to get back on track for giving raiders the acheivements and satisfaction for their invested time - the gear already is rather mediocre to use in PvP so it does not need to be spread out to allow balance that aspect of the game.
Another option for keeping lower tier badges interesting to higher tiered players would be the ability to buy gems and crafting materials with them. Take your surplus "Badge of T7" and get some gear made for an alt, or buy some gems to put in your gear bought with "Badge of T8", or buy either and AH them for cash. Tiers of crafting materials exist in TBC: primal nether, nether vortex, heart of darkness, sunmote. Two levels of gems exist as well, three if you count the unique-equipped gems from heroics.
I'll present an example using a modified TBC badge system. Heroics and T4 drop "Badge of Lesser Justice", which can be used to buy primal nethers and blue-quality gems. T5 drops "Badge of Greater Justice" with which you can buy nether vortexes, the lower tier stuff at a lower price, and maybe the unique-equipped epic gems that currently drop in heroics. T6 badges buy BoE epic gems, T5 stuff at a lower price, and hearts of darkness.
I'm completely opposed to a reputation lockout of content. If I farm up 1000 T7 tokens to get that awesome T9 sword, then let me! It doesnt hurt you and I will never ever be at your level of equipment, but it does put a very small carrot in front of me. Im unable to field the time requirements for a raid level guild, but I would like to have the smallest possibility of owning one thing that has some cool factor to it. Again it could take half a year to farm that one thing and I would be happy. Reputation being attached to it means if I can't participate in the raid then I will never use my T7 tokens for anything other than T7 content and once that is done ad naseum then I have no incentive to keep playing.
Small caveat: Obviously I have no idea how raids will play out in WotLK, so my worries may all be for naught.
I re-thought this at lunch, I guess if you make the second tier of tokens worth something like 5-10 of the first tier, then I guess that will encourage people to try the next level of content.
THIS idea I like much better than a hard lock-out. Make the 141's cost 500 Badges of Justice, let SSC/TK drop Badges of Greatness that are worth 5 Badges of Justice, while the BT bosses drop Badges of Awesomeness that are worth 10 BOJs.
If you make Karazhan2-grade loot cost an absurd number of Badges relative to your Karazhan1-farming income, that's going to be the driving force to push people into Karazhan2, without locking them out entirely. One problem I anticipate with a hard lock-out is that once a core raid force has whatever it they need from Kara1, they won't be as apt to run it anymore.
The current Badge system works well because it still gives an incentive for people to backtrack. A BT-level tank isn't really looking for anything in a Gruul DST run, but hey 2 Badges. By making the next tier of Badge loot exponentially more expensive to buy with previous tier Badges, you can keep the backtracking incentive intact to some extent.
[e] although now I think about it, they did say that 25mans will unlock 10mans, so that might moot my point.
They didn't say this. You can run a dungeon's 10-man and 25-man version separately, and the attunements will not be linked (if there are any attunements at all).
In my opinion TBC got itself in a muddle with the content difficultly to loot conversion, allowing at the extreme 5-man heroic runner access to loot on par with black temple loot.
If people are not able to consistantly complete the tier of dungeon the loot is established at, why do they need it? someone who never leaves T8 content has no use at all for any means of accessing T10 level gear - period.
As a relatively "extreme 5-man heroic runner" who has already accessed Black Temple-raid loot via Badges, I need it because it's my carrot-on-a-stick.
I've maxed out both my Professions, bought all my BOE/craftable epic upgrades, bought an epic flyer, gotten to Exalted with every faction save Mag'har, and so on. The Badge loot is my incentive at this point to keep playing.
I believe that even if they increased the Badge cost of my [Inscribed Legplates of the Aldor] to 300, I'd still be playing and running the dungeons to get them. Sure, let Illidan drop 10 Badges so the real BT raiders can get the BT loot faster, but I'm against completely removing a rather ingenious way of keeping more casual players in the game.
You guys are still looking at this through a TBC filter. Let me start this off with a quick reminder.
There will be easier 10 man versions of every raid in every tier.
It will be entirely possible to keep your super-tight-knit group of friends and progress though the game. All this does is ensure that you actually progress. Just like you said most players will be willing to go to distances to get their "carrots". They are making it easier to progress with a smaller and (most likely) less demanding schedule and guild, but they want to make sure you're not still just sitting in low content and getting gear you didn't work for when you could be doing the content that the gear is intended for. That is all this means.
The problem with obsoleting content is you spread people too thin: the fact heroics still give some form of reward (ie badges) to people who have moved past them in gear keeps a pool of people around to do heroics. Which is a good thing, otherwise people newer to the game just now hitting 70 would have a heck of a time ever finding a group to do anything and work their way up the ladder.
I don't think Blizzard implemented it perfectly, but I do think that keeping things like Kara and heroics relevant to people was a needed move. I also agree tiered badges make sense too. I'm hoping they can compromise somehow: maybe like the PvP system, where certain slots have "rating requirements" (ie need badges of a certain tier), where as other slots are available without a "rating requirement" (ie any tier badges will do) could work.
The problem with obsoleting content is you spread people too thin: the fact heroics still give some form of reward (ie badges) to people who have moved past them in gear keeps a pool of people around to do heroics. Which is a good thing, otherwise people newer to the game just now hitting 70 would have a heck of a time ever finding a group to do anything and work their way up the ladder.
I don't think Blizzard implemented it perfectly, but I do think that keeping things like Kara and heroics relevant to people was a needed move. I also agree tiered badges make sense too. I'm hoping they can compromise somehow: maybe like the PvP system, where certain slots have "rating requirements" (ie need badges of a certain tier), where as other slots are available without a "rating requirement" (ie any tier badges will do) could work.
Hopefully in Wrath they will actually have some tier of Heroics so that the starter 70-74 dungeons are the easier/starter heroics, the 75-79 dungeons are the normal ones, and the level 80 dungeons provide the higher end ones which im sure everyone will relate to the old SH/Arca for T5 attunement level.
It felt really dull having some huge mess of the same difficulty heroics, you end up doing the very easy ones or the ones in the zone your not currently bored to tears of - provide some actual physical boundries for easy, normal, or hard heroics to allow people more of an option - just dont yield on nerfing them all down to the level they ended up now and accept it will take time for people to actually complete the Nexus(80) Heroic mode instance.
Im also hoping that they put more effort into the winged dungeons entrance areas, an area like Blackrock Mountain is just down right more impressive even to this day, heck even Dire Maul feels better than the bland two-screen lobby with a meeting stone at Coilfang Reservoir or Hellfire Citadel for example.
You guys are still looking at this through a TBC filter. Let me start this off with a quick reminder.
There will be easier 10 man versions of every raid in every tier.
Repeating oneself isn't fun, but:
There is no conformation of anything at this point, only indications, and the indications are that 10 mans will have loot that is 1 tier lower and that is all. Aside from that fact there have been indications that 10 mans will not be "easier versions" of the 25 man raids but will follow a similar progression. They'll just be for 10 instead of 25. (Though, they will undoubtedly be easier for those also doing the 25mans, simply because the will be wearing gear one tier higher).
@Playered:
Some of the instance enterances in WotLK are interesting from what I've seen. Northrend generaly looks much better than Outland. (BRM is hard to match though).
There is no conformation of anything at this point, only indications, and the indications are that 10 mans will have loot that is 1 tier lower and that is all. Aside from that fact there have been indications that 10 mans will not be "easier versions" of the 25 man raids but will follow a similar progression. They'll just be for 10 instead of 25.
Repeating myself isn't fun either. Listen to the Blizzcast next time.
Bornakk: Gear is always an important topic for our players. Do we have any specifics of the gear gap between the two dungeon versions?
Jeff Kaplan: Right now we’re going with the concept that 25 person raiding would be a full tier in item progression above the 10 person raiding so it’s quite a jump once you get the extra 15 people together.
I'm sure they can find a way to keep them both challenging, but 1 tier below means easier. Period.
Totems moving to Physical school means more than being able to cast them while silenced. It means that getting your nature school interrupted will no longer shut out everything but two of your shocks. Not a huge buff, as things go, but if it's any indication of what is to come then it's a very good sign.
It's pretty huge that a silenced Shaman can still Grounding Totem that Shatter Combo, especially in smaller brackets. I know what messes me up in duels is the Imp CS->Nova combo
06/10/08, 3:33 PM
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