I still love the idea of quests for killing certain bosses that would give you a very good piece of loot. Kill Vashj to get your class trinket for example or kill Archimonde to get the ring etc.
Problem with 25s the amount of time needed to farm content. The main issue with mmos is repetitive content, which plain and simple is boring. I think that a lot of stuff could be solved the for example the Sha'Tar paying you 1000 gold / month for killing Illidan, free honor gear for Gladiators, special items for guild that can kill the endboss in the first ID available, a very hard soloplayer quest for obtaining the new riding skill etc.
They could still include a lot of money and time sinks for stuff not needed to progress.
But right now such a large part of the game is build around time sinks, like the new Medaillon costing 40000 honor points or very rarely dropping stuff...
Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde
Regarding "welfare badge epix," how exactly does Johnny McWeaksauce and his weekly KZ and heroic farming guild eventually acquiring high ilvl gear affect anyone? Its not like given ilvl kit, his guild will suddenly go from their 3-4 hour KZ's to slaughtering BT. Chances are what's holding them out of the end game raiding scene is not gear. So they can run KZ a little faster and maybe "pwn" that much harder in AV. Raiders thrive on new content to beat and consume it rapidly. Most "casuals" aren't even brave enough to venture into the atunementless BT and MH to take out the first few pinata bosses. They're still throwing their badge 141's at Vashj.
It doesn't affect any real raiders, but it does affect general PvE.
Raiding is about progression through new content. Always has been, always will be. Right now a large portion of people who consider themselves "raiders" do nothing more than kara and maybe a couple bosses in ZA every week, which is clearly not progression, yet they are still progressing their characters in the only way possible (new gear). Obviously this is not what the devs had in mind for the badge gear (I'm pretty sure the reasoning behind it was mainly to help fill in itemization holes and bad RNG luck).
Tiered badges just give incentive to such people to actually work through the progression ladder. Combined with the 10-man versions of all the instances there is no reason Johnny McWeaksause and his guild of friends <Twice a Week> can't progress their characters and experience new content (the thing casuals always seem to be whining about).
Badge loot is the future. With the added 10-man dungeons it will be easier than ever to gear up new players and alts. This is ultimately a good thing for 25-man raids that need to fill spots (or adjust their composition because a fight is poorly tuned).
Regarding "welfare badge epix," how exactly does Johnny McWeaksauce and his weekly KZ and heroic farming guild eventually acquiring high ilvl gear affect anyone? Its not like given ilvl kit, his guild will suddenly go from their 3-4 hour KZ's to slaughtering BT. Chances are what's holding them out of the end game raiding scene is not gear. So they can run KZ a little faster and maybe "pwn" that much harder in AV. Raiders thrive on new content to beat and consume it rapidly. Most "casuals" aren't even brave enough to venture into the atunementless BT and MH to take out the first few pinata bosses. They're still throwing their badge 141's at Vashj.
Whenever the "welfare badge epix" comes up, there is always the question bought up of 'how does this effect anyone'? The fact is it does have an affect on people. It's not an obvious direct link, as it doesnt stop those in Sunwell from raiding or getting the next tier of loot, but it does have an effect. Besides from seeing and beating new content, the aquisition and upgrading of loot is one of the primary factors that push people to raid. The level of gear they are wearing/own is a symbol of their achievement/committment etc. Before badge gear there was a clear link between the level of content you were tackling and the rewards. The statement was clearly the higher the level of content you progress through the higher the level of loot you can obtain. With the introduction of badge loot this is now the case, and you have a choice of getting higher level gear by either clearing higher level content or waiting a certain amount of time and re-clearing the same level of content. This has the effects of demeaning the achievment of the more progressed players, and also is demotivating to them, as why put all the effort/committment in now to get a certain level of gear when they could just wait a few months and get equivalent gear through other paths which are less intensive.
Now I don't want that to sound like a hardcore vs casual argument, as it is far from the case. Hardcores are not annoyed at Casuals in anyway, but annoyed at Blizzard for the way they implemented the system. Pre TBC there was a clear cut of content and loot from 20-mans to MC all the way through to Naxx. Each level had a thriving raiding community based on an individuals choice of committment to raiding, and everyone was happy and had goals achievments to make, and there hardly ever were any whine posts about why cant naxx loot be obtained from MC raiding etc.
The badge system has a) changed the weighting of raiding towards the lower and upper levels with the middle levels far less populated, and b) caused all this friction between casual/hardcore which is bad for the community.
(ps apologies if the use of affect/effect is incorrect. Damn words still confuse me :p)
I wouldn't normally weigh in on this, but I can attest to what Bellator is saying. Trying to break into raiding as a newly formed guild is difficult as badge loot becomes more prevalent, because it lessens the benefits of raiding. My guild fell apart trying to break into SSC/TK becuase clearing Karazhan every week simply offered better rewards.
There are two ways to counteract this:
1) Ensure that badge loot COMPLIMENTS the other gear that drops in associated content, not surpasses it. The new tiered badges are going to help this, but you have to ensure that at least 50% of the gear that drops in raiding content is simply better than the stuff you can get from badges for any given purpose. Nothing in SSC or TK is better than what you can currently get from the badge vendor, so why bother?
2) Focus the badge gear for casuals. What you're doing here is tailoring the stat weights of the badge gear to compensate for bad play. What do casuals have problems with? Personal accountability. Dying. Moving out of fires. Beating the "tricks" that make each encounter interesting. So instead of putting gear on the badge vendor that outputs better DPS/Healing, put gear on the badge vendor that takes some of the edge off those personal encounters. Add some stamina to it (but not resilience), put some passive regen, a little extra armour and generally tailor the gear to be slightly more forgiving to mistakes, instead of being more "powerful".
Good raiders can (largely) walk around in glass-cannon gear and do all the better for it becuase they're disciplined enough to survive in spite of it. Leave the more refined gear on the bosses, and use the badge loot to soften the encounter for casuals. If your melee can't get through Lurker without taking a ton of Whirl damage, the answer is not to load them up with crit or armour penetration, the answer is to add stamina and armour, as well as some extra regen for their healers to heal that damage, becuase no matter what you do - they're still going to be too stupid to move out of Whirl -
Basically, you give the raiders sharper swords and you give the casuals football helmets. Both groups will have better progression as a result, but raiders will never feel stiffed (or at least I wouldn't).
-In our country, any CBC reporter can dream of becoming head of state.
The badge system has a) changed the weighting of raiding towards the lower and upper levels with the middle levels far less populated, and b) caused all this friction between casual/hardcore which is bad for the community.
The weighting isn't only because of badges, though. It's a combination of factors.
The first is that there are a lot of T5 items that are either extremely small upgrades, or not upgrades at all over Karazhan drops. While there are some extremely good drops in the tier, there are a lot of useless pieces. There was very little motivation to run the place after everyone was attuned for Hyjal and BT before they removed the attunements.
The second is that they removed attunements to Hyjal and BT. Vashj and Kael are probably the most complex encounters in the game pre-sunwell. They're also the biggest blocks to progression. They're difficult encounters at any level of gear, and I think that there are many guilds in BT and Hyjal that haven't killed either yet. Archimonde is, arguably, a huge block, but I honestly don't think that the encounter is more difficult than Vashj or Kael. Illidan is similar-with the exception of the tanks, the encounter is fairly simple to learn. Also, basically everything in Hyjal, and most of BT are easier than those two bosses.
The third is that Kara and ZA, for the time invested, are the best way to farm badges.
Badges are here to stay, and that's a good thing. Tiered badges are also a good thing, yielding a more obvious implementation of risk vs. reward than the current system, but I think the idea of a 3:1 or 4:1 exchange rate (going up, maybe a 1:2 exchange rate if going down) is promising as well. Why? Because it presents an opportunity for a "currency" of PvE, that I think Blizzard could adjust over time much as they do currently with Arena and honor points, as a way of bringing new players progressing towards the "middle ground" of raiding that much more quickly long after release.
Consider the low-level badge rewards, like [Warpstalker Helm] or [Tears of Heaven]. Those may have been compelling items on or shortly after TBC launch, but aren't so much at the current time, and I'd doubt that anyone buys them when the alternative is saving up for far superior items, and holding out for Kara/early-T5 drops for those spots instead (even if they may represent significant upgrades over blues). Those prices have remained stagnant (although it is true that badges have gotten easier to acquire).
Now, assuming that Blizzard has a model for badge drop rates that remains largely consistent throughout WotLK (which was not really the case in TBC), it gives them the freedom to potentially cheapen the "low tier" drop rates as time goes on, as the content dropping those "low tier badges" becomes more and more obsolete. Imagine if [Warpstalker Helm] eventually were to cost 20 badges (after 12+ months) instead of 50; for a newer player, whose guild is still working on Karazhan, that would represent a pretty good value, rather than the high cost of it encouraging them to hold out for a roughly-equivalent drop that isn't guaranteed off of the last boss in the instance. As with all ugprades, items like that make the content easier, and potentially give them an edge in progressing into X+1 content maybe even before they've completed tier X content. Rather than struggling through the exact same progression path that cutting-edge guilds were dealing with two years earlier, late-starters instead get a large boost early on in *their* cycle to bring them closer to the "average" level of progression. There's still a wall to break through, but since they feel like they're getting upgrades on a frequent basis, they consider it to be more rewarding and fun to spend the time getting up to speed (rather than quitting the game, or trying to guild hop). And of course, cutting-edge players are happier, because lower-level players are spending their time acquiring decent gear of appropriate level, as opposed to sidegrades to cutting-edge gear.
And, should Blizzard feel the need to give incentive to run lower instances like 5-mans, they always have the option of--at some point along the way--making token drops more liberal in those areas, like for example making regular 5-man bosses drop a Badge of Justice, or making the last boss in tier X drop X+1 tokens. With a level of precision in their currency, they can do most of their "raiding economics" tinkering by cost reduction in existing items, but additionally have the option to slightly increase token drops as well.
A reasonable rate of exchange supplements this, in that overgeared players can spend time in lower level content without feeling that it's a *complete* waste of time, even if it's not the return on time investment that more optimal content would yield for them. And anything that has players happy (and not feeling put upon!) to participate in the same game as lesser-progressed players is probably a good thing for the game as a whole, which is worryingly fragmented amongst differing player groups right now.
Hardcore raiders are, I think, going to mix-max and try and get the absolute best gear they can. If that means working on the next tier of 25 man content, the system is working well. If that means farming Gruul for a DST (*shudder*) the system is broken. I think we can all agree on that much. If badge loot is ever "best in slot" for a hardcore raider, they'll feel compelled to farm badges, and while it may not be a disaster, it's clearly suboptimal. As such, I think Bliz screwed up a bit with the last crop of badge loot; a fair bit - especially the weapons - are too good. Swords, in Merple's terms, not football helmets. I understand why they did it, but it presents all the wrong incentives. Although I'm not sure what the fix is - a perennial problem of raiding is how rare weapons are. Making raiders farm bosses for weapons sucks. Making them farm arena points sucks. And making them farm Kara for badges for them sucks. I think what I'd like to see is a return of the [Imperial Qiraji Armaments].
Incidentally, I'm in something of a similar position to Merple. My guild had a few tries on Vashj before 2.4, but since then it's been hard to find the motivation to progress. Everyone knows that an hour farming Kara has a way higher return than an hour trying to progress - and that the gear we get from Kara farming will make progression easier, when we eventually do it. (If we eventually do it...) Fine, we're casual. I admit it! And to be honest, the badge loot has been a real godsend - upgrades coming nice and fast without the wipe nights which rub so harshly on the fluffy soul of a casual raider. But at the same time, it's been a bit of a poisoned chalice. Casual or not, we were making good progress on Vashj, and now we're not really raiding 25 mans at all. That isn't really how we wanted things to turn out, and I doubt it's what Bliz intended either. Meh.
Edit: Tiered badges should work too, I think; after all what is a Quiraji Armament but a really really weird AQ40-level Badge of Justice? The important thing is to make people need to progress in order to min-max their gear. You should always be able to choose to farm your current tier of content for minor upgrades, or to work on the next tier for major upgrades. It's when you can farm current (or worse, older) tier content for upgrades BETTER than the next tier of content that you've got a really broken system. In fact, let's put that formally. Tier N content should drop Tier N gear, and badges which let you (slowly) farm your way to Tier N 0.5 gear. Hardcore guilds will tear through Tier N and use the drops to clear Tier N+1, and then will have no real incentive to farm Tier N badges. Casual guilds will work through Tier N, then farm for badges to get Tier N + 0.5 gear, and use THAT to start on Tier N+1 content, which will drop Tier N+1 loot and badges for Tier N+1.5. The only downside is, it limits the ability to rapidly gear up alts and recruits, since it cuts down on the number of T6 geared mains farming Kara for badges. ...of course, that's kind of the point, no?
Quiraji Arnaments are not badges though, they are just Tokens which you turn into a vendor at a 1:1 conversion rate - nothing different from turning T4-T6 in.
I'm a casual, if nothing else, and while I personally had no issue with personal accountability, my guildies often do.
While it's true that being casual doesn't make you stupid, being casual does often force you to _rely_ on stupids. Again, I'm not talking exclusively, and there are great examples of serious raiding guilds with casual schedules, assuming you're on a high population server with a deep bench where recruiting people to fill the spots you kick stupids out of is actually possible.
But that's a rare case, and it's not something Blizzard should be designing their content around.
We're talking about globalizing badge loot in a way that doesn't leave casual wipers with gear equal to hardcore raiders, nor does it invalidate content by outclassing the gear of that tier.
As a raid leader of a casual guild, I'll tell you that I'd much rather my guildies had badge loot with survivability stats than the glass cannon gear they inevitably bought, hoping to do "leet DPS" for the 35% presence they managed to pull on any given boss.
I'd love to kick their asses to the curb, but guess what? I can't recruit anyone smarter with the server situation the way it is, and I can't 14-man most bosses.
The "safety" loot would still have a purpose, and for fights with high environmental damage or an HP barrier, the loot comes in handy. And it should still be good gear for the content being done, and would help casual guilds, who ARE forced to rely on stupids to clear the content and get access to that next stage of loot.
It also shouldn't be a bigger reward than doing the content itself, nor should it force endgame raiders to farm content two tiers back, just to get "best in slot" gear.
-In our country, any CBC reporter can dream of becoming head of state.
Regarding "welfare badge epix," how exactly does Johnny McWeaksauce and his weekly KZ and heroic farming guild eventually acquiring high ilvl gear affect anyone? Its not like given ilvl kit, his guild will suddenly go from their 3-4 hour KZ's to slaughtering BT. Chances are what's holding them out of the end game raiding scene is not gear. So they can run KZ a little faster and maybe "pwn" that much harder in AV. Raiders thrive on new content to beat and consume it rapidly. Most "casuals" aren't even brave enough to venture into the atunementless BT and MH to take out the first few pinata bosses. They're still throwing their badge 141's at Vashj.
I have no problem with a raid group eventually acquiring awesome gear through the weakest 10-man. I have a problem where the weakest dungeon is the "best" source of badges, so everyone just grinds their way through it forever and ever. We saw that problem earlier in heroics, where the same 3-4 heroic dungeons were run by everyone because the others were too hard. And during the GM-grind times, where one of the battlegrounds was the best source of honor and all the others were ignored.
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If I were doing it, I'd set it up so that when a dungeon is on farm status, the average badge/hour is the same for every single raid. I'd also introduce a tier system in badges, so people don't save for the final item in that slot. Let people turn in their crappy badge gear and a stack of badges to get an upgrade. I'd also link it to the next higher dungeon tier somehow - via reputation, a token/badge turn-in, a quest, an NPC in the dungeon, etc etc.
One issue that a lot of people are not considering is the bleed-over of PvP progression into PvE progression. As uncomfortable as it may be for farming Karazhan to be the best means of gearing for PvE (to a point), I do think it beats farming the arenas or the battlegrounds.
If the lvl141 weapons were not there today, then more and more new 70's would be sitting in the arena system (or in 2 weeks time the battlegrounds) to get the S2 weapons. I don't think this would be helpful to the PvE system. Now, part of this is because Blizzard miscalculated on the power of arena weapons (both with the introduction of S2 and with S1 weapons going to battlegrounds), and they may not make the same mistake in WotLK. Still given the PvP model depends on gear not giving a crushing advantage to some players, some power inflation from that source is expected, and if the pve model cannot keep pace with it, then problems will develop.
Another reason why guilds are not progressing from Kara to ZA is because the risk/reward tradeoff from the front half of ZA is quite bad, and Blizzard have admitted as much. If your group can't kill an animal boss (and Jan'alai is nasty on people who can't look around them, even more so if you dont have a protection paladin) and botch the timed event, then you get 3 epics (with some likely to be poorly designed or suitable for only one spec of a class) and 5 badges - which is awful.
One refinement Blizz needs to put in earlier in their badge systems is a tradable (like the epic gems now). Otherwise (as happened), people buy all they need from the vendor and then have no incentive at all to do heroics or old content outside of on alts. Outside of that, people may be over-reacting to some of the kinks in the existing system, than to the system per se
Copernicus nailed it on the head there, it's not that you can use badges to buy the "best" (or Top - 1) gear that really is the problem, the issue is the way to obtain it. Karazhan and the Heroic Daily will get you 28 or so badges in under three hours if you have a good group and decent organizational skills. While it doesn't make TK and SSC useless, it definitely downgrades their usefulness.
If they tweaked implementation to encourage moving up to the next level of 10/25 man, I think the system could be near perfect. If a guild wanted to spend an extra two months farming Heroics/10ManRaid1 in WotLK to get a head start (gear wise) before moving to 25ManRaid1 or 10MR2, let them. But make it so that constantly farming heroics and the first 10 man has diminishing returns and they need to start farming the second level of content if they want to keep seeing significant improvement in their gear.
I have no problem with a raid group eventually acquiring awesome gear through the weakest 10-man. I have a problem where the weakest dungeon is the "best" source of badges, so everyone just grinds their way through it forever and ever. We saw that problem earlier in heroics, where the same 3-4 heroic dungeons were run by everyone because the others were too hard. And during the GM-grind times, where one of the battlegrounds was the best source of honor and all the others were ignored.
I agree. I'm a fan of the solution mentioned a few pages back where the badge quantities actually scaled per tier of instance and the costs of the items scaled equally. There is no reason that the first "raid" instance should yield the greatest number of badges and for the least amount of effort. I understand Blizzard wanting to keep content relevant, but this is the wrong way to go about it.
I have mixed feelings on the tiered badges. That pretty much defeats any incentive to rerun older instances, unless there is a system which allows for an turn in for the next tier of badges. Otherwise you're just going to end up with a stack of useless badges. But at that point, how is it any different from just having the next tier drop that many more?
That's not what casuals have problems with, that's what idiots have problems with.
Casuals have problems with 16+ hour a week raiding schedules.
Don't lump people who don't have time to devote themselves to a game together with people who have no brain.
When on many servers the "casual" guilds can't get even the 2nd boss in ZA down and then just quit and never go back to ZA, its hard not to lump them into the same boat whether its fair or not.
As for the 25 man guilds that now skip kael and vashj, I see it as a real shame because they are the only two fights I ever enjoyed in t5, I don't really see the appeal of skipping them just to farm the free loot bosses of early t6.
Edit: Tiered badges should work too, I think; after all what is a Quiraji Armament but a really really weird AQ40-level Badge of Justice? The important thing is to make people need to progress in order to min-max their gear. You should always be able to choose to farm your current tier of content for minor upgrades, or to work on the next tier for major upgrades. It's when you can farm current (or worse, older) tier content for upgrades BETTER than the next tier of content that you've got a really broken system. In fact, let's put that formally. Tier N content should drop Tier N gear, and badges which let you (slowly) farm your way to Tier N 0.5 gear. Hardcore guilds will tear through Tier N and use the drops to clear Tier N+1, and then will have no real incentive to farm Tier N badges. Casual guilds will work through Tier N, then farm for badges to get Tier N + 0.5 gear, and use THAT to start on Tier N+1 content, which will drop Tier N+1 loot and badges for Tier N+1.5. The only downside is, it limits the ability to rapidly gear up alts and recruits, since it cuts down on the number of T6 geared mains farming Kara for badges. ...of course, that's kind of the point, no?
One of the problems with tiered badges is that at some point in an expansions lifetime you will find a segment of time sort of like now where the majority are either far end game raiders (who have continued attrition and recruiting requirements with stiff gear requirements to keep going without being forced to backtrack to gear up newer members) and the low end of raiding/high end of 5 mans. If you tier badges at some point in an expansions progression this becomes a huge roadblock to end game guilds. Nobody wants to go back and redo a bunch of old content to gear up new recruits so they are useful. I think the suggestion that all tiers of items being on the same badge system with the rewards (number of badges per kill) are higher per tier and the cost of that tier gear are comparative to time invested in that tier, then simply adjust downward the costs of items long term based on where people are in progression and what levels are aren't being raided. The only real issue with this might be that a large number of people might simply farm the lowest content for however long it took to get the best rewards. As a side note: I would say that the T6 lvl items should have simply cost more badges than they do currently. The badge vendor rewards could even be unlocked based on a certain number of end bosses killed in the actual corresponding tier instances on that server. Of course this might cause more low pop vs high pop server issues, but who knows.
The rewards should reflect the content they are earned in, Kara bosses should not drop badges which can be used to buy t6 loot. Next you will be suggesting that killing a million lvl 10 boars should give you enough badges to buy warglaives. Thats essentially (although dramatically) the same as saying a whole bunch of kara badges should give you bt loot. Why not just make every epic avaliable from a vendor for a certain amount of gold, and bosses in harder instances drop more gold so that those raiders can get them faster? This way everyone can get the best epics playing the game their own way. In a game where the rewards (gear) are such a big deal, the reward should reflect the accomplisment and difficulty, not how many hundereds of times you ran really easy instances x, y and z.
One major issue I foresee with a tiered badge system is how heroics are going to be handled. I know it has been stated that they intend on improving the value of heroic dungeons but if all of the opening 5-man dungeons all provide [WotLK Tier-1 Badge] from bosses these will quickly lose value as people move onto the next level of raid content that provides [WotLK Tier-2 Badge].
Personally, I'm not much of a heroic runner, but I know a lot of casual players or heavy players with alts that do at least the daily heroic quest if not multiple heroics each night. If there is no way to up convert badges the players who have no interest in content requiring more than five people will quickly hit a brick wall for progression once they buy everything [WotLK Tier-1 Badge] vendor has to offer. If heroics offer badges of different tiers then it wouldn't take long for players to realize that they should run the instance(s) that reward the highest badge tier as soon as possible and nothing else.
If the goal of WotLK is to have parallel progression for 10 and 25 group sizes doesn't this just shift the progression gap that exists in TBC to now be between 5 and 10 group sizes for WotLK?
The heroic instances might drop tier-1-raid badges, though; that would give them a somewhat equal footing in earning "entry-level" loot with the entry-level raids.
The rewards should reflect the content they are earned in, Kara bosses should not drop badges which can be used to buy t6 loot. Next you will be suggesting that killing a million lvl 10 boars should give you enough badges to buy warglaives. Thats essentially (although dramatically) the same as saying a whole bunch of kara badges should give you bt loot. Why not just make every epic avaliable from a vendor for a certain amount of gold, and bosses in harder instances drop more gold so that those raiders can get them faster? This way everyone can get the best epics playing the game their own way. In a game where the rewards (gear) are such a big deal, the reward should reflect the accomplisment and difficulty, not how many hundereds of times you ran really easy instances x, y and z.
To your boar example, you are limited as to how many Badges you can earn a week due to lockouts, so there is a slight (but yet significant) difference.
If it literally took someone farming the first WotLK version of Karazhan every week for 18 months to acquire one of the best items in the game (and nothing else but drops since they are saving their badges/tokens/widgets/whatevers for that one purchase), then really, is that a big deal?
The "problem" now is, it doesn't take 18 months, it is in fact easier to farm Karazhan and do Heroics than it is to run T5 content. Even in TBC they could change it up by raising the price of items and make bosses in SSC and TK drop more badges. So you might get 23 or so for doing Karazhan, but you'll get 50 for doing SSC and 60 for doing TK. People need their carrot on a stick, not because they are greedy, but because they just want to feel they are accomplishing something.
Taking the 'One kind of badge but better items require rep from higher end raids' idea in a different direction, there could be quests to unlock the vendors for higher end badge loot. For example, the BT quality badge loot vendor would refuse to sell you anything until you have completed "The Armaments of the Black Temple" quest. Could require Chunk of Supremus, Shard of the Three Essences, Hilt of Gathios' Hammer. The vendor NPC would then say "Using the knowledge gained from these items I can forge superior items for you, for a price". There might be an issue with guilds selling raid spots for the quest, but they sell spots for loot as it is anyway.
On a similar note; Why do these NPCs want badges anyway? It seems to me that it would be better for immersion if bosses simply dropped a higher tier of currency, say, platinum (distributed like badges of course, not like how gold is currently spilt). Simply put I just think the badges should have a better name.
There's nothing that says that all the "badges" have to be badges. Bosses in Naxxramas might drop Necrotic Glyphs which are used to imbue weapons with unholy energy, or whatever, and so on. That makes some flavor sense ("undeady" badge loot requires scourge magic stuff, etc) and works perfectly with the tiered badge system.
That pretty much defeats any incentive to rerun older instances, unless there is a system which allows for an turn in for the next tier of badges.
Good. Content _has_ to decay. T4 should be a total waste of time for T6 guilds and T4 players should never get gear equivalent to that of T6 players. Ever. They don't need it, and they never will.
And no, under no circumstances should you be able to buy T6 gear with T4 tokens, no matter how many times you ran that T4 instance. TX content should provide rewards that prepare you for TX+1, not TX+3, and the token gear should be complimentary, and designed not to power you up, but to ease the difficulty.
If you really want to provide a reason for T6 players to run T4 content, let them trade their T4 tokens in for gold and consumables. Consumables and repairs covered for the next week. Joy.
The same thing should occur for Arena. S3 gear should require progressively higher ratings starting at 1700. S2 gear should be universally available after a rating requirement of 1600. S1 gear should be universally available for a reasonable amount of honour. 10 hours or so should get you a full set.
And to add to that, PvP gear should not be as viable as it is in PVE content.
As for heroics, I think that's easy to fix. Have various difficulties of heroics. Hell, put heroics in the raid's basements, with linked attunements. Once you're attuned to TK (which requires a certain gear level), you can walk inside, and then through a door to the left (before any trash) that leads you into the TK Sewers, a 5-man heroic dungeon, which drops T5 grade badges and is tuned to a gear/experience level that you get from doing T5 raiding.
-In our country, any CBC reporter can dream of becoming head of state.
Just remember that the Boars in Westfall only have a 33% chance to have a liver. Last time I checked those things are kind of important to living.
Loot is kinda odd like that. Ask yourself "where the hell is Illidan keeping 3 helms, a giant shield, a bunch of old chest tokens (whatever the hell a chest token is), 2 warglaives that disappear most of the time, and a healing cloak?". That is one reason I think "looting a boss" is kind of silly (I prefer chest drops or some sort or lore item that drops that can be turned into a new item, a la Splinter of Atiesh) but its one of those old standby RPG things and I doubt it would be changed. It works, it's not that important, spend time fixing things that are broken.
06/11/08, 11:03 AM
If badge loot is ever "best in slot" for a hardcore raider, they'll feel compelled to farm badges, and while it may not be a disaster, it's clearly suboptimal. As such, I think Bliz screwed up a bit with the last crop of badge loot; a fair bit - especially the weapons - are too good. Swords, in Merple's terms, not football helmets. I understand why they did it, but it presents all the wrong incentives. Although I'm not sure what the fix is - a perennial problem of raiding is how rare weapons are. Making raiders farm bosses for weapons sucks. Making them farm arena points sucks. And making them farm Kara for badges for them sucks. I think what I'd like to see is a return of the [Imperial Qiraji Armaments].
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