orcsgotbooty

Content decaying is a good thing, t6 level gear isn't needed for kara, I know personally it is why my alts now rot, sure they ran kara 2-3 times, but I asked myself, why am I grinding badges, for badge gear just to farm kara and other easy braindead heroics faster? Maybe to level faster if I play next xpac?

I really hope 10 man content isn't just badge farm and easy in Woltk, personally I can't 25 man raid anymore with my friends (job schedule turned to nights), and just doing heroics and the two easy 10 mans just isn't very fun in my eyes.

I to would love progression in heroics, I just don't see blizzard tuning it correctly so that every group for the "hard" heroics isn't in trade LF THREE MAGES for Hard Heroic PST!. (until people overgear it)

 

Ralnar

One of the interviews mentioned that they might make it a requirement that the 25 member version of a dungeon would have to be cleared before the 10 member version opens up. They could easily do that with the five man version also.

And of course, there is still the unfinished "Epix" difficulty setting ( /script SetDungeonDifficulty 3 ) that could be used to increase the replay value of five man content.

 

Sillia

ZA is horribly paced. As stated earlier, the problem with ZA is that most of the rewards are bottom-heavy. Clearing the first four bosses without chest timers leads to four items and 7 badges. Clearing the last two bosses yields four items and six badges, plus [Blood of Zul'jin] which averages out to 7 badges overall for the raid.

For a guild that farms kara and not much else (like how mine started), ZA is a huge ramp up in terms of difficulty. The problem is compounded because there's no real way to gear yourself from it to make it any easier. One can spend weeks clearing the first bosses, but their loot tables don't provide much to move forward. Karazhan provides tangible loot benefits. You get two items per boss in Karazhan, and some reasonable number of badges. The loot tables for the first bosses in Karazhan provide a good spread to work from... weapons, armor, trinkets, jewelry. [Steelhawk Crossbow], [Emerald Ripper], [Shard of the Virtuous], and the chance for [Legacy], [Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle], [Big Bad Wolf's Paw], [Despair] and [Blade of the Unrequited].

Conversely, the first two bosses in ZA don't provide that much, especially in terms of tanking (which is where the gear starts becoming really important - Lynx boss is a pretty big gear check). The four animal bosses drop little useful when it comes to weaponry. Nalorakk drops [Fury], Akil'zon drops [Akil'zon's Talonblade] and [Amani Punisher], and Jan'alai drops [Wub's Cursed Hexblade]. Of these, you have a weapon of limited use (+damage mace), an offhand-only weapon, a fast sword (also offhand weapon), and a really good caster weapon, off the (arguably) hardest boss of the first four. The last two bosses provide eight different weapons between them.

The incentive to go is lacking, because you can't get much out of them until you can start getting the chests, leaving you in something of a chicken and egg scenario. You need better gear to down the bosses faster to get chests, but you can't get better gear from the bosses... so you're pretty much forced to go back to heroics/karazhan/pvp to get the gear in order to progress. That's exactly what my guild ended up doing - we geared from badges and pvp as well as we could, then went back and gradually got better at it until we were able to clear the entire place.

 

Thanaomira

"Now we're just haggling over the price." Exactly. The only people who'll do this are
1, desperate, because they can't get the gear they need because it doesn't exist, or
2, sufficiently crappy players, who nobody wants to take along to the next tier, or
3, something I haven't figured out.

I think the problem people have with "welfare epics" is that by getting 5 people together to dance in the arenas, you get ~310 points/week, so in 6 weeks, you can get a chestpiece. Six weeks to get a chestpiece, even if I'm in a stable 25s group that clears $BOSS that has $TIER chest token... I dunno, if I were at the bottom of the SK/DKP/whatever list, I might not get it that fast.

My point is, allow options, even if they are crappy, because crappy options are better than no options.

Option 1, optimal: do Tier N content for X weeks to get geared up for Tier N+1 content. Repeat at Tier N+1 for Tier N+2.
Option 2, crappy: do Tier N content for X weeks for N+1; spend 2*X grinding Tier N to get ready for N+2.

Nobody wants to spend another X weeks in an instance, but if I have that option, well okay, I'll do it. And the great thing about badges is, I'm not at the mercy of the RNG (DST anyone?). So if Blizzard forgot to put in the DST upgrade in Tier N+1, fine, I can grind Tier N badges and just buy the damn thing. Or if the RNG just absolutely hoses me down (hey, it has to happen to someone, right?), I have a recourse.

Now we just have to haggle over whether it's 2*X or 5*x or 10*X. (Well, okay, we don't. )

 

Cube

ZA is on a 3 day reset, not 7 like Kara. So, per week, you have twice the number of chances to clear the place. Whether or not your raid actually does is a different story, however.

I also don't think that ZA is a huge step up from Kara in terms of difficulty. Dragonhawk is difficult, yes, but the other animal bosses didn't seem to be that much more difficult than Nightbane when we first did them. Don't forget, the instance was intended to fit a hole between T4 and T5, while still giving T6 raids a reason to run it.

The gear quality from ZA is unquestionably better than the gear from Kara-the 4 animal boss drop gear par with drops from the T5 instances, and the rings from the chests are T6 quality gear.

This a hallmark of good non-entry raid instance design, not poor design. There should be a reasonable expectation that some basic gear level is required to clear an instance, and that a raid needs to gear up to that point to be able to beat it. None of the encounters in the instance are impossible to do with T4 level gear. The chests may not be possible to get with that gear, but it's still possible to beat every boss there. Remember, the chests are a bonus for higher-level raids. The fact that you're not saying that you needed to clear SSC and TK-which would be over-gearing the place-to beat the instance shows that it's properly tuned.

 

Thanaomira

To quote someone, "Not again... not again!".

I thought we had killed this horse before. Just because a raid is only done with 10 people does not automatically make it easier than if it is done by 25. You're presuming that Wrath raid scripts will be like BC raid scripts, which is not a given. This is pretty much a repeat of "how can you make really hard 25-person raids? Coordinating 40 people will *always* be harder." And yet, I don't hear anyone saying, "Man, that Garr fight, wow, that was so much harder than anything we've seen in BC. Damn, I wish the devs would step up and throw us a real challenge."

Also, "1 tier below" does not necessarily equate to "easier". It's one valid answer in a sea of many valid answers. Here's another: "We, the developers, need to create an impetus for people to go through the logistical/operational effort of getting 25 people together rather than 10." Note how this answer has no effect on how easy the content is. My impression is that you have the time and access to officers (or are yourself one of said officers) who can coordinate a large group of people: my sincere congratulations. But to me, the developers are clearly moving beyond this single style of raiding as the only valid way to do things, and are supporting other raiding styles.

 

• Endahl

I think you're confusing good non-entry raid instance design with broken progression. Logical content progression places a need on guilds to gear up from one tier before moving on to the next raid tier. If you think of Karazhan as tier 4 and Zul'Aman as tier 5, the curve ball that breaks the whole 10-man content progression apart is pvp and badges granting tier 6 quality items. The same problem exists with SSC/TK as has been mentioned in previous posts. This has to be addressed one way or another in WotLK if Blizzard truly intends for 10-man progression to stand on its own feet. The company can't sensibly say they're trying to make it easier for raiders who don't have the ability, time, or will to raid 25-mans to experience the content, and then break content progression in a way that forces 10 and 25 or to overlap like they do now. At the same time whatever system they come up with should not award players in tier N content with tier N+1 gear (Karazhan/Heroics).

Tangent: In a way it's funny watching PvE and PvP fluctuate between requiring playing ability or time investment. The introduction of badges Battlegroundized PvE right at the same time as PvP brought rating requirements into the mix. PvP took a step forward, in a way PvE took one back.

 

rhea

10raid is easier in the eyes of a 25raider because of gear they are wearing

 

Malleus

Unless they gradiate the introduction of the "N+1 gear", which is what they did. Yes, you can get T6 gear for T4 badges now, but that isn't the point. The point is that badge gearing only advanced one tier at a time. Raiders have been able to gear up for Kara with a few badge items, then later plug gaps in their T4 and T5 sets with badge items, and now the same for T6 - each in its own turn. The only people who are going straight from Kara gear to T6 are the people who started raiding too late in the day to get their gear by farming the tiers.

 

Sillia

That's disingenuous. Why would you make a 10-man instance that requires gear from 25-man instances? Why would you make an instance that doesn't reward you for clearing the instance, but instead rewards you more for gearing up elsewhere before entering it?

I never said that it was a bad thing that they expected a certain gear level, and that it was higher than Karazhan. I'm perfectly fine with that. The problem I have is that in order to succeed at ZA, you don't just run ZA more. You actually run Kara and heroics more, to get badge gear. THEN you run ZA. In order to get the gear you need to succeed in late Karazhan, you gear up from early Karazhan. In order to succeed in late T5, you need to run early T5 and get geared up. In order to kill T6 bosses, you're expected to have a certain gear level from the previous bosses.

However, ZA animal boss loot is not very good. To defeat the subsequent bosses in ZA, you need gear from places other than the previous bosses. Unless you are running 25-man raids concurrently (which defeats the purpose of it being for the 10-man demographic), you need badge gear. Learning ZA is terrible for badges, because it's so bottom-heavy (as stated: half the badges in the instance are dropped by 1/3 of the bosses). You're actually far better off prepping for ZA by running a bunch of heroics and Karazhan each week (and skipping ZA) than by trying to progress in ZA (and skipping the heroics and Karazhan), because you don't get the gear or badges you need to win in ZA from there. That's why it's screwed up. Not because it requires better gear, but because you don't get the gear you need to succeed in ZA from ZA.

 

Shakes

I completely disagree with this assessment of ZA. The loot is good, just perhaps specialised: you can't expect to use more than a couple of pieces of the animal boss loot. Which is fine, because ZA isn't a super heavy gear check instance anyway, unless you're going for the 4th chest.

The first chest in the timed event isn't hard, at the expected gear level you can wipe at least once and still get it. The second chest is a little harder, but something that I've hit even with disorganised PUGs with no vent that wiped twice on the way there.

So realistically you should be getting at least two chests within a couple of weeks of starting the place.

I'd also say there's no boss there that you can't learn by saying "we're going to sit here for a night and learn this guy". The run back to ZA is very short, there's a repair vendor nearby, you can easily put in a couple of dozen attempts in a night and learn the fights. None of the fights are super difficult in execution expectation: stand in spot X and hit ability Y when Z happens is all it boils down to.

As an added bonus, once you learn the place it's better badges per week than Kara, and IMO better badge/time too (less trash and running through a gigantic building than Kara).

I'd say ZA is tuned to about the difficulty of Leo/FLK/Tidewalker/Al'ar, which to me makes it a perfect model of how a 10 man alongside a 25 man should be.

In my previous guild, the reason it was hard to get people to do ZA (pre 2.4 badge gear) wasn't difficulty or drops, but the looks of the gear. For some reason people hate it, even though I think it's some of the best looking loot in the game (admittedly it does suit an orc shaman).

 

flyingtoastr

The problem with ZA is that it came out mid-cycle while all the hardcore 25-ers were bored (BT had been cleared months before) and the casuals were starting to get totally kara'd out. In an attempt to appeal to both sides they made the instance have loot about equal with Tier 5 (to give the casual 10-man'ers the next "stepping stone" if you will) but tuned it tightly to give hardcore raiders something to do that could be mildly challenging.

As such, some of the bosses are a little to hard for the intended audience but the drops are very "meh" (by an large, not counting trinkets of course) for the high end raiders. In their effort to give both the 10-man and 25-man players something to do until 2.4 they kind of screwed up the instance.

I highly doubt we'll see this kind of thing repeated in Wrath.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Shakes

But it should be tightly tuned if we're going to make 10 man raiding "serious business" and not just a walk in the park for charity epics. That's why I think it being tuned in line with the mid-level T5 bosses is where it needs to be.

 

Coel

The problem with this is that there is no true progression to this point. 10-man raiders get early t4 to mid-level t5 with nothing in between. If there were another instance in between geared for people just coming out of kara before they enter ZA, this would be fine progression. That whole 'Gruul/Mag/Early SSC and TK' thing is missing for the 10 man raiders here.

 

Lamaros

As flyingtoastr said, the problems with ZA have a lot to do with the state of the game when it came out, not anything else. A 10 man has to be doable by people with gear from the previous ten man and that alone, otherwise it serves no purpose in being a 10 man. If you make it doable with only 25 man gear you might as well have just made it a 25 man.

This means that 10 man content will necessarily be trivial for people doing 25 man content, unless the 25 man content is balanced against 10 mans at every level. This was not the case in TBC.

My main worry is that it will not be the case in WotLK too, as they are talking about this "25s get 1 tier higher grear" stuff. This will mean that 10 mans serve no purpose for 25 mans raiders, gear or challenge wise.

The solutions to this are not easy.

One way of doing it would be to make gear go like this: 10man 1->25man 1->10man 2->25man 2, etc. But while this would make 10-man gear useful for all it would result in 10-mans being even harder for people only doing 10-mans and not 25s.

If you leave it unchanged, what I currently assume as 10man 1->25man 1==10man 2->25man 2==10man 3, it would simply mean that after the first 10-man 25-man raiders would have no need or desire to do 10mans for anything beyond fixing gear holes that haven't dropped in 25s. 10s will be easy for them and be nothing more than casual loot.

Either way results in 10mans being devalued significantly for anyone who also does 25s. I personaly dislike this solution, being someone who likes doing things not only for rewards but for the challenges.

The other way, that Blizzard has stated they do not want to go, is to give 10mans gear closer to the same tier as the 25s. This would mean that 25s and 10s would remain as dificult for anyone doing both (opposed to 25s being easier for those also doing 10s, and 10s being much easier for those also doing 25s), ensuring value is not lost for those who wish to do both.

It seems Blizzard is still stuck in a less people = less skills = less desire for challenges mindset which dictates that they must make things that require fewer people easier and give worse rewards, so we are unlikely to see any really challenging challenges in 10mans if we also raid 25s.

Alas. Because making 10s as well as 25s challenging would effectivly double the fun content in WotLK and would only be a good thing for those who like playing all parts of the game, and not devalue the experience for people who only like playing one part, whereas their currently proposed system does none of that.

 

Sillia

Did you learn ZA with or without 25-man gear? That makes a pretty huge difference right there. Looking at it from the perspective of 10-man progression, ZA is very much lopsided. Karazhan paces things well, because you can get upgrades for your raid as you learn and progress. ZA doesn't do that; you don't get many upgrades as you progress at all, until you are finally able to cross that hump, beat all four animal bosses and then work on Malacrass and Zul'jin. But once you reach that point, you've already done the heavy lifting. Beating the first four bosses is much tougher than beating the last two, yet beating the last two nets you far more useful rewards than beating the first four. That seems broken to me.

It isn't quite so cut and dry. You're pretty much saying "Instead of clearing Karazhan for 22 badges tonight, we're going to sit and work on this boss. Maybe we'll clear one or two other bosses we've downed before, and if we're lucky (50% chance), we'll get two chests." The comparative return on this is ludicrous.

Karazhan nets 22 badges per person and (assuming an 80% shard rate) four usable loots out of the whole thing. Learning Zul'Aman nets you three and a half loots (50% chance on chest #2), and three badges. Five badges, and maybe a fourth loot if you manage to down a hard boss that you happen to be learning. I don't know about you, but those aren't good numbers for trying to progress. I wanted to have more reason to continue in ZA than to go back to Kara. I wanted to push in ZA as far as possible, and then only go back and do Kara because we couldn't get any farther in ZA this reset. However, from an optimization standpoint, we did the exact opposite - we cleared Kara as the top priority each week in order to maximize our earned gear, in order to progress in ZA, because we got so little from ZA while learning it.

Of the loot introduced in patch 2.3, you can look at the warrior tanking gear for a pretty decent example. Shoulders, shoes and shield are the only tanking items available from the first four bosses. Yet there are also legs, waist, gloves, cape and bracers from G'eras. Check it out. 3 items from the animal bosses (and chests). Five from badges. The last two items are the hat and chest, which evens it out at 5:5, but once again... that's going back to the bottom end of ZA, not the top.

I'm only using tanking gear as an example here - half of the gear for a small guild to succeed in ZA came from G'eras, not from the animal bosses.

We're not talking about farming the place. We're talking about learning the place. By this logic, if Zul'jin dropped all 13 badges himself, and nobody else in the instance dropped any at all, it would still be better badges per week than Kara, but it wouldn't suck any less for people learning the place. This is what I am talking about. The thing is bottom-heavy. You won't do well in there unless you already do well in there, which is unlike every other raid instance in the game.

I've got nothing against the difficulty of the ZA encounters. I think they were perfectly fine. What I do have issue with is the way they pace the rewards, because by the time one gets them, one doesn't really need them to finish ZA. I would much prefer to get steady upgrades along the way, so that I didn't feel obligated to keep going back to Karazhan each week to gear up.

ZA's first four bosses need to have deeper loot tables, and the chests need to have smaller ones. Maybe give the chests badges as well (and remove the blood of ZJ, and 1 badge off of Malacrass). Either that, or make the difficulty curve start off shallow and ramp up over more points. Make it six chests instead of four, and make the timed run go all the way from entrance to Zul'jin himself. The first two, or even three chests should be fairly easy to pick up, and the last two should be much harder. It preserves the difficulty of the timed run and gives the T6 people something to shoot for, but would also give the T5 people something to shoot for (chests #4-5) and the T4 people something to help them along (chests #1-3). Chests #1-3 could be gear that's just a bit better than Kara gear that's properly itemized to give players a better incentive, which would make it not quite as attractive as the T5 stuff. It should have the better pieces of badge gear in them, instead of being sold by G'eras.

When I get into a new instance, I want to feel like I will accomplish more by working at the new place than by farming the old place. Every other raid instance in the game does this except for ZA.

 

Jagiya

It seems (in review of the last half-dozen pages or so) that the major issue people have with the distribution of badge gear isn't the idea of people farming Karazhan & Heroics for Tier6 equivalent gear. Rather, the fact that it's the most efficient way to do so.

Thus, I feel that many peoples concerns would be extinguished if;

- Tier 6 badge gear cost more. (Let's say 500 badges per weapon/combination - adjust all other items accordingly to match scale)
- Karazhan drop less badges. (Although with the aforementioned cost inflation, this wouldn't be so influencial)
- SSC/TK/ZA drop more badges. (Providing a more attractive resource)
- BT/Hyjal/Sunwell drop ALOT more badges. (Allowing ideal access to T6 raiders to fill in the poorly itemised or unlucky drop slots as intended)

Something along the lines of 1 badge per T4 boss, 3 badges per T5 boss, and 5 badges per T6 boss; with 8 badges dropping from Illidan, Archimonde and Sunwell bosses.

This would mean that to obtain the Badge Fist Weapons, Mister Kara-casual would be clearing the instance and doing his heroic daily for roughly 10 weeks to get his offhand, and another 22 weeks to get his main hand. That's 32 weeks; which incidentally would probably represent the gap between Badge Vendor -> WotLK Launch. So by the time this poor fellow finally farmed up his weapons, he'd probably replace them within a week of grinding to 80. But hey, he's grinding with 100 DPS weapons!

Now in comparison, let's say your average Sunwell raider was trying to farm up enough badges for his Fist set. Using myself as an example, I'd be raking in around 92 badges per week from clearing Hyjal, BT and killing Kalecgos/Brutallus. Then if I decide to throw in a Karazhan or ZA for a few extra badges, you would expect me to have my fist set in 4-5 weeks.

Not only is this much more reasonable, but it also extends the lifespan of farm content for a bit longer. When the badge vendor was unlocked, I thought, "cool, BT/Hyjal just became a little more attractive while we spend week after week trudging through it for some Warglaives and alt gear." But alas, it only took a matter of weeks to pick up all of the badge tanking/dps gear and now I find myself spending it on gems and AH'ing them so I don't have to bother doing dailies to fund my repairs anymore.

Anyway, what's done is done, but it would have been a very easy way to keep everyone happy. Applying this model in WotLK (with the inclusion of a Badge Conversion) really is all they need to do. Hard lockouts aren't the solution; it's merely a way of solving 1 problem with another.

(EDIT: Typo)

 

Sillia

Jagiya, the problem with making it top-ended like that again is that there's a certain cutoff point where people will think it isn't worth doing any more. That number will vary from person to person, but at a certain point, most people will agree it isn't worth the time spent.

Further, by making raiding the premiere place to earn badges, badge gear is pretty much relegated to being raider gear again, and we already know that raiders have access to badge-quality loot already without needing badges at all. The point of the badge gear is for people who don't necessarily have access to raid-quality loot (raiders screwed by the RNG or just hardcore player who does not raid as a personal choice). Some folks will treat the badge gear as a fast track to get geared for raids, and others will get them just for personal character advancement. But by making the cost prohibitive to most people (and by most, I mean "people who are not raiding in the high end"), you'd really just be bringing it back to pre-BC wow. I was always a fan of time-released systems. Right now the badge gear makes some of the T5 gear obsolete, sure. But that's ok, because it's been over a year since T5 content was cutting edge. As long as you give the pioneers their time in the sun for a while (a couple of months), you can then fast track the rest of the players along. This accomplishes a couple of useful goals:

1. People who are not cutting edge still get to advance their characters
2. Raiding guilds do not need to spend so much extra time gearing their applicants
3. There's a bigger pool of geared applicants for raid guilds to choose from.

One of the biggest complaints I remember hearing pre-2.4 was the fact that so many guilds had problems recruiting attuned T6 raiders. By systematically removing attunements and providing fast-track gear, it gives guilds more opportunity to recruit.

 

• Playered

People would of moved on to ZA more intensly and left Karazhan alone for a long while if neither of them dropped badges, because thats how item progression would of worked - which would of been the better state.

Its just easier to get the better gear (quality above both KZ/ZA) by farming the weaker instance and thus people do it - its human nature to take the easy way out, especially if there is no down side to doing it.

I dont understand how you can say doing the first 4 bosses in ZA is the hardest part, both the latter two bosses feel much 'harder' than the 4 animal bosses sans Dragonhawk (mostly due to people trying to rushing it..).


There is more to character advancement than just getting better gear too, and if players truely advanced their ability to play their character better then they would be able to tackle the content more easily.

The problem is there is next to no offical or in-game way of knowing how to do this or where to look, if someone doesn't point you to EJ or any assorted half decent blog for your class then you are most likely to end up playing bad due to a lack of knowledge without knowing where to help you fix it.

 

Shakes

We had a small amount of 25 man gear, but we were by no means an elite 25 man raiding guild. I think I maybe had 3 T5 level drops. None of our cloth DPS (which we tended to take 4 of per run) had any. We sometimes had people in not full Kara gear.

So on average, we had a T4 geared group I'd say.

I've heard this but it doesn't match my experience. I found the last two bosses to be significantly harder than the first 4, with the possible exception of dragonhawk.

You can only clear Kara once a week. If you're not a 25 man guild, what else are you going to do? Not log on for the other 6 days? Even most casual guilds raid more than one night a week.

I experienced the same thing of having to push people to go there: we had 25 man raids on the two nights when most people could make it, and other nights getting enough people together from the one timezone who would actually go to ZA was an issue. So I understand that some people will drag their feet and want the safety of Kara. However, once we actually got serious about ZA, we knocked it over in a couple of resets. Being a 10 man instance with a very short run back, you really can wipe and be fighting again in less than 5 minutes.

I'm not denying some people will want to hang around in Kara, I'm saying it's really not rational. I mean who cares about the fact you wont get much loot for the first week, in a couple of weeks you'll have it on farm and it'll be better. If people can't delay gratification for a couple of weeks, then you have bigger problems than the difficulty of learning ZA.

See, here's the perfect example:

5 bits of badge loot = ~300 badges = ~15 weeks of Kara
5 bits of ZA loot = ~1/6 drop rate = ~3 weeks of ZA on average (plus offspec gear, plus nearly 80 badge to put towards badge gear)

Even if you take a month to learn ZA, and got absolutely nothing in that first month, you're still better off doing it than doing Kara. Of course I'm working with the view that you do not need post-Kara gear to do ZA, since I don't believe anything other than the timed run is a hard gear check.

 

Unity

[Brutal Gladiator's Dragonhide Tunic] - PVP. Equivalent quality items from this source can equip an entire character, though most players will be a tier down on several slots.

[Embrace of Everlasting Prowess] - Badges. Equivalent quality items from this souce can fill five slots. Items a tier or more down are available for several others.

Even the very first raid can't be too far behind PVP items or a lot of people will follow the rewards and never learn the basics. Kara does give too many badges but it's a much better introduction to raiding than the Arena is and the game needs that stream of new players coming through for a host of reasons.

 

Macblade

Seems like there are a few issues in the way that people are thinking about things. First, we need to decide which stuff was planned out at the beginning of TBC and which stuff was, oh s&*^ we have a problem quick put something in a patch. For example, it seems clear that ZA, at least to some extent, falls into the later category. Blizz needed content in general and specifically realized that there were a lot of people who liked staying at the 10 person raid size. On the other hand, I would be at all surprised if they had planned introducing the extra levels of badge gear right from the get go. Same with lifting attunements as time went on.

The reason that I bring this up, is that it seems a bit like a straw man argument to say anything about ZA, either pro or con, and assume that that is what the 10 man progression will be like in WoTLK--Simply because the progression in WOTLK with start with a line of 10 mans all the way through.

It is also silly to argue about it the current ways to gear out a character and assume that all of those will be in place right at the beginning of WOTLK. It should be clear to people that there was at least some planning in not releasing the sunwell badge vendor at the beginning of BC (that is, they decided not to, it wasn't simply that they didn't have the art ready or something). Thus, why would you assume that there will be a Tier 10 badge vendor right at the beginning of WOTLK? Nor will the vast majority of people decide not to raid because it will be easier to just wait for the season 6 gear. So at lot of the complaints that people have about progression the way that it is RIGHT NOW are silly in the context of how progression will look at the start of WOTLK.

Just my thoughts...

 

Cirocco

The timescales people are talking about to get items are nuts really. To get one item, people are suggesting periods for poor "joe casual" from 22 weeks to six months, for one item. Blizzard is supposedly bringing out one expansion a year, or that's at least their stated aim, do people in this thread really honestly think that six five to six month's to get one item from badges is a realistic time, by that reckoning the next item they get will be just before the next gear reset.

The only way to progress your character in wow is through gear, the only way, leaving aside the brief levelling period. Some guild's will bang their head's against content for various reasons, geared player attrition being one of them, at some point you have to let the people in those gears start acquiring gear that let's the core of them at least outgear the place so they can drag new people through it easily and at least have a chance of rebuilding guilds and progressing.

What's basicaly being argued by a lot here, through the insistence of making some players never get past x gear level, is that they don't deserve to progress. I'm really not understanding this at all. Why shouldn't they? Who exactly does it affect? PVE gear no longer affects pvp It certainly doesn't affect anyone else in pve, guilds that struggle are going to struggle anyway, it's not going to affect anyone's else's pve progression.

One possible solution is to do the same thing with badge gear as they do with the PVP gear, after a while move thing's down to the lower tier of badges, move the lowest tier of badge loot to rep vendors for gold or reduce it's badge cost drastically.

A lot of people here don't seem to understand that there are players like me out there. People who are not willing to jump ship to a higher progression guild. Despite offers. Who are committed to the guild they joined through loyalty and friendship and through thick and thin. If you restrict the progression path's of people like this then .. Well let's just say, I put in an insane amount of time into wow for various reasons, more than 300 days played on my main, and even I would find it insane to spend four to six months of effort just for one item.

 

Varuk

To the guy going on and on and on about how ZA isn't doable without 25-man loot:

I am a part of a group that clears ZA every week with three chests. Each person in this group has approximately one piece of 25 man loot.

It isn't impossible. There are so many sources of gear currently in the game that, gear-wise, a player can skip the entire array of T5 dungeons and not even blink.

 

orcsgotbooty

I really think you are missing the entire point. Grinding badges just to grind badges faster IN THE SAME INSTANCES for a year straight is not progression. Using that gear to actually attempt Za and not just quit because of one night of wipes is progression despite the lawl 10man comments.