Siddown

I think you may have misread, or misinterpretted what most people are thinking. First off, let's get rid of the notion that Blizzard will release an expansion every year as that's been proven to be incorrect. But secondly, most people in this thread talking about having tiered badges are saying that if someone chooses to not move up in progression, that the best loot in the game will take lots of time, not loot that is approprate for the level of content that they are trying to tackle.

At least my point about 5 pages ago was this, I don't care if someone wants to farm the lowest 10 man in WotLK and eventually get the best item in the game, but I think there should be incentive to want to move to the second lowest 10 man (or lowest 25 man) by making that trip to the best gear in the game much shorter.

 

Sillia

I have a 10-man exclusive guild. We had kara and badge gear only, and it was pretty significant a gear check fighting Halazzi. Look around and see, very few 10-man only guilds are around, since the T4 and even beginning T5 content is easy.

That's your experience. We spent more time learning the animal bosses than the others; Zul'jin died on our third try. Malacrass took a bit longer to beat, but it was mostly a question of getting some shadow resist gear for most of the raid members, and having one player switch to shadow priest alt (pre-2.4 spirit changes). Conversely, it took far longer to gear up and defeat the other bosses in the instance, especially since we felt we needed to prioritize Karazhan over ZA.

You're misreading again. My point wasn't that we could clear kara one night and still have two, three, four, or whatever for ZA. My point was that clearing Karazhan is still a priority over progression content, and that shouldn't be.

But that's not how long it took. We hit the heroics pretty hard in order to obtain the badge loot. My warrior had bracers and pants by the time our first piece of tank gear dropped (shoes from Nalorakk, 1/7 chance). The second piece of tank gear came from Jan'alai, who was the last one my guild was able to beat. By then, I had four pieces of tank gear from badges (bracer, belt, pants, gloves).

Your math is way off. Assuming it took us one reset to learn each boss, with the first boss going down the first time, in 3 weeks we get a total of:

6 kills for first boss (bear)
5 kills for second boss (eagle)
4 kills for third boss (lynx)
3 kills for fourth boss (dhawk)

Let's even assume that we start getting the chests every other reset, starting with third. This means that we get first chest on week two's first reset, and second chest on week three's first reset.

Bear boss has a 1/7 chance to drop an item you want, so 6 kills means ~60.34% (1 - 6/7^6) chance to see said item at least once. Eagle has 1/7 chance to drop one item you want. 53.73% (1 - 6/7^5) chance of it dropping in that many resets. Lynx drops one item you want, 1/7 chance. 46.02% chance to get it from Lynx. Dhawk drops one bit you want, 1/7 chance means 37.02% chance to see it. We've got four chest #1s to try to get the item you want (1/6 chance). 51.774% chance to obtain shoulders after four attempts. Second chest has a 1/6 chance of dropping something you want, so 30.5% chance of getting that.

Chances of obtaining at least 1 item you want: 97.91%
Chances of obtaining all five items in the allotted time: 0.872%. Yes, that is less than one.

And this is assuming that each boss has an item you want (most of them didn't).

Two ZA attempts each week, since one day was for Karazhan. 3 weeks of progression ZA is not 80 badges. It's nowhere near 80 badges. 3 weeks of progression ZA is 30 badges, if we are lucky (6 bear kills, 5 eagle kills, 4 lynx kills and 3 dhawk kills). You couldn't even get 80 badges in 3 weeks is if you fully cleared the damn place twice a week (78 badges). It isn't possible to get 80 badges in 3 weeks going twice a week when you *farm* the place.

That's folly right there.

You're somewhat right. We geared our healers from progression ZA. Robes off Nalorakk, chest and hat off Akil'zon, chest off Halazzi. We've gotten a ton of healing gear from ZA. But cloth damage gear from animal boss ZA is not well itemized. [Fury of the Ursine] is pretty good. Ring from Akil'zon sucks unless you're offspec. Boots from Jan'alai suck unless you're already hit capped. Robes from Halazzi suck since it wastes itemization points on spirit, rather than crit or hit. Spellpower mace sucks for cloth casters, since only a priest can use it. But seriously, you are totally overestimating how good you can get it from progressing through ZA, because you're only looking at it from a farming ZA perspective and have no knowledge of probability.

If this is aimed at me, I suggest you go back and read the posts I made. I clear ZA regularly with 3 chests and no 25-man gear whatsoever, and I've been doing so for months now. I'm not saying that it's impossible. I've never said it wasn't doable. I've never said it was too difficult. I'm saying that the loot pacing for Zul'Aman is unbalanced, because all the good loot comes after you don't need it any more. That makes it incredibly inaccessible to people who are entering from Karazhan without 25-man gear, and it discourages them from trying ZA. All they get for their efforts is a handful of pieces of crappy offspec gear and almost no badges to show for it even if they succeed, which is why so many of them don't bother.

 

orcsgotbooty

Loot that is "offspec" I assume you mean something like shadowpriest? Is certainly not trash, hell if you are undergeared I would think you would always take a shadowpriest to prop up your healers. Just because it isn't 100% optimal for you doesn't mean other people wouldn't use it.

 

• Nisu

People need to stop referring to ZA as an example for one simple reason: it's poorly designed from a 10-man progression standpoint. There's not nearly enough loot being dropped to upgrade your raid to be able to progress within the instance itself; some slots don't even have drops for certain class/spec combos. Despite Blizzard's intentions, ZA is a distraction, not a serious step up in content, because of the Kara/ZA disparity. You'll gear up far faster farming Kara for badges than learning ZA. Now, if ZA was a week-reset instance with 8 or so bosses that dropped 2 pieces of loot each, and had some form of badge mechanism that made it's badges worth more than Kara's (rep, more badges, worth more badges, etc), then it would be a good comparison. Let's hope Blizzard designs 10-man progression in Wrath in this manner.

 

flyingtoastr

You clearly didn't read anything. You jumped to the conclusion that the "big bad raider" is after Joe McCasual and his guild <2 days a week> when that has nothing to do with it.

This isn't the WoWboards. I'm sure almost everyone here is fine with you getting high level badge loot. What most people want (and clearly the devs) is for you to at least attempt to progress while you get that gear instead of the current situation where you run an outdated instance that has no drops you can use except badges. Farming kara and only kara for 2 years is stupid and it defeats the entire purpose of PvE (progression into new content). With the advent of 10-mans specifically to address the issue of "I want to run with my pal guild but we only have 11 people" there is no excuse not to be trying to progress, which means you will be seeing more content and be getting shots at this higher tier badge loot.

Stop looking at this issue through TBC filters. This is Wrath, the game has changed, get over it.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Lamaros

The intention of WotLK 10-mans, as I have mentioned already in this thread (to use your phrase, "You clearly didn't read anything"), is not for everyone to progress. It is addressed at small guilds and people who like to raid with their 9 friends, but it will have a progression and the top level 10mans will be hard. Fewer people will access the later 10mans.

Sure, we want people to try to progress rather than do stuff that is easy and pointless for them, so we want to reward higher level stuff more than lower level stuff (with better drops, better badge gear) etc, but we still expect things to get harder the further you go.

This means that the top of the line stuff that only comes from the top instances, be they 10 or 25 man, will still be unobtainable for the player who isn't that good, unless there is some sort of conversion system where 100T7 tokens = 1T9 tokens. Or a system where the higher badge loot is available with lower badges after a certain point of time.

What we want to discourage is people doing stuff that they've done 100 times before instead of the hard new stuff because it's easier to get rewards from the old stuff. This will still be encourage by a tiered badge system even if that system allows access to the highest level stuff at a stiff conversion rate, as they will still get it faster in the harder area despite the difficulty.

So someone doing a T7 10 man might get 10 badges a week but need 270 for the best item. Someone doing a T8 might get 10 a week but need 90. Someone doing T9 might get 10 a week but need 30. So someone only able to finish the entry level place will still get the best x in the game after 27 weeks, while someone doing the harder stuff will get 9 of them and someone in the middle will get 3.

However there is one problem with s system like this; people may not use their tokens on lower level stuff and will save it for higher stuff from the beginning. Thus I think any conversion system, if introduced, should be done over time much like the PvP seasons.

Personally I think there shouldn't be a conversion system like this at all. If you're not doing the hardest stuff you don't need better gear. But I'll probably be someone who does the hardest stuff, so my position is somewhat biased, and I can see how others might see it differently.

 

Prinsesa

Shifting away from the "loot and badges" discussion a little, I have a question about Warriors:

Has anyone ran the numbers on whether Titan's Grip with a pair of two-handers is ALWAYS (or mostly) going to be better than a pair of one-handers for Fury DPS? It seems to me that making Fury dependent on 2Hs is another step towards reducing loot rot (three 2Hs in T6, but only two specs use them), as well as Bloodsurge making Slam intuitive and usable for the non-Elitist Jerk reading populous, but I'm wondering if we can draw conclusions on how that'll work from what we know now.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Steveharris

Well, the leaked talent tree shows it as 5 points, for a best of 20% swing speed reduction, or increase, depending on how you look at it I suppose. In any event, you swing 20% slower, which I believe can be summed up as about 20% less DPS per weapon. Looking at current weapon DPS, the norm for a BT/hyjal 1H is 100DPS, while a 2H is 130ish. 20% off 130 is 26, making the 2H weapons around 104DPS. I'd say at equal gear levels, the dual 2H will preform better, but it will be largely as a result of more insta-slam and WW damage, and the increased stats that using two 2H weapons would provide.

That being said, I'm not sure Titan's Grip is totally finalized. With my current gear, I can go from about 30-40 rage to a full bar on a WF crit. The spiky rage income is something I've learned to work around, but say you've got two 3.8 speed weapons...without flurry, you're looking at a 4.5 second swing time. To say rage income will be "spiky" is a bit of an understatement.

 

Shakes

Very few 10 man only guilds are around because before ZA you either became a 25 man guild or you died once Kara was farmed out. Blizzard can't change the culture that late into the expansion cycle, they intend to do so in the next expansion.

Given I've two healed the first four bosses with Kara geared tanks, I really fail to see how the standard 3 Kara geared healer team needs the loot from ZA to progress. The experience, sure, but not the loot.

The loot pacing is the same on any instance. The highest ilvl items drop from the end boss. The best weapons drop from the end boss. The most badges drop from the end boss. I really don't see why you think ZA is unique in this regard. And what loot is "good" depends a lot on your class/spec. As a resto shaman, killing dragonhawk for the shield was a big deal. If I was elemental, getting the legs from lynx would have been the highlight. If I was enhancement, getting rage/fury from bear and 2nd chest.

To say there's not major pieces of gear to aim for at the start is just wrong. A mage in my old guild wanted I think 6 drops from ZA but he basically considered 25 man raiding SSC/TK for gear pointless. You couldn't shut him up about wanting to go to ZA for the loot. If ZA is better than SSC/TK for loot for some classes, how can you say it held no motivation for people wearing Kara gear?

As far as the math and the time and all that: I specifically said you could spend a month learning before the three week burst and still be better off than Kara. As for the statistics: I was simplifying because I really don't give a crap what the exact odds are. Yes, the simplification fails on a character level, but you're a raiding guild, you care about guild gear level, not character gear level, and chances are pretty much every drop can be used by someone in the first few weeks of running the place. In that scenario, the numbers are close enough, even though of course the chances you run the instance 6 times and get the 5 items your heart is set on is unlikely.

 

Cranberry

Of course, you'll be swinging twice at that point. We also don't know what the potential miss rates will be.

 

Shakes

This isn't a hardcore vs casual issue, plenty of hardcore people are attached to their guild, and plenty of casuals guild hop. I think the point of having a 10 man progression path is that you can stay in a small guild and still raid and make progression. So your progression path isn't restricted, it's just enforced that you progress in content to progress in gear.

As far as the whole "what's the harm in giving out the staff of awesomeness to everyone", it's a matter of motivation. Imagine everyone sitting somewhere on the scale from "don't care about loot at all" to "would sell grandma for purples". The more loot you provide by easy methods, the further you push the point down the scale where people decide "stuff this raiding thing, I'll take the easy way". One person quitting, or turning up and doing it half arsed, has a flow on effect on the other members of the raid. Raids get called through lack of numbers, or people wiping because a few members don't really care anymore. Push it too far, and nobody is raiding, nobody is creating interest in the PvE side of the game, and everyone gets bored and quits.

Pre-2.4 announcement, I was part of a guild that raided only 2 nights a week and was making some good progress o SSC/TK. Giving out the badge epics in 2.4 basically killed that, as we lost too many people who simply couldn't be bothered working hard (and making progress in 8 hours a week with a roster of whoever happens to be able to show up is damn hard) for gear that would be worse than what they got from doing an hours worth of heroics for a couple of weeks. So from where I'm sitting, giving out epics too easily hurts casuals far more than it hurts the hardcore. The hardcore don't care, they already have the stuff. The casuals are left to wonder why they bother trying.

 

saiyajinmaster

It seems to me that the issue for the last page or two about ZA, Kara, Badges, and their spots in progression, has already been addressed in the blizzcast and other recent interviews with Tigole, has it not?

The problem with ZA isn't that it's too hard, or that the loot sucks or any of that. The problem is people have absolutely no incentive to go when Kara is easy and rewarding. ZA itself is tuned very well for Kara geared players (Yes it is difficult for them, but that's the intention of 10 man progression), but because they can look at the badge gear and see Kara as the fastest way to getting it, there is no incentive to go and wipe in ZA for largely inferior or equal loot (At best similar loot in different slots).

Now with them changing badges to a per tier system, your Kara badges would buy you the kind of crap that TBC shipped with as far as badge rewards, and instead of going "Hey let's grind Kara for my Leggings of the Scryer Retainer" you would buy your Bloodlust Brooch and get all the ACTUAL Kara gear instead of badge stuff, and suddenly have no more room to progress in the T4 10 man, so you'd move on to ZA (The T5 10 man let's call it) and slowly accumulate T5 badges and T5 10 man loot. Yes, it would be hard with just Kara gear, but as long as the incentive is there to learn it it IS doable.

Unless I'm mistaken that's exactly the intention of Wrath raiding progression, for both 10 and 25 man zones, and ergo this huge debate is pretty much arguing a problem that has already been identified and solved by the development team.

 

Chul

Assuming 10-man Naxxramas will drop T7 gear, if what Kaplan said is true, then the 25-man Naxxramas will drop T8 gear.

Now consider this:

So that means people in blue/greens will be able to do an easy 25-man Naxxramas for T8 gear? That would be like getting TK/SSC gear in Karazhan.

One option is that the 25-man Naxx will be tuned for people in T7 gear, but then that forces the 25-man progression raiders to do 10mans to initially gear up. It would also mean the raiders doing the 10man progression route will be one whole tier above the 25-man progressioners. However this option seems to be invalidated by Kaplan's comments of the 25-man version of Naxx being pretty easy.

10-man Naxx could return dungeon quality level items rather than T7, but that doesn't make much sense either as you'd be getting the same loot as 5-mans.

Anyone else thought about how this teired loot approach will work initially ?

 

ildon

The thing to remember is that Naxx in WotLK will be the Molten Core of the expansion that was missing in TBC. I'm sure *skilled* players will be able to walk into the 25 man with quality blues from 5 mans and possibly a few heroic or crafted items and tear the place apart in the first couple nights. They've said they don't want to force people to do the 10 mans if they don't want to, and vice versa. I would guess parity would be closer to heroic epics vs. early Kara epics, rather than T4 vs T5.

 

Anedris

Ya, my guess is that Naxx will simply be the levelling ground, where the 25-person raiders can walk in wearing blues and walk out wearing t8 epics, and the 10-person raiders walk in wearing blues and walk out wearing t7 epics. Then when the next raid dungeon comes out the two groups will be appropriately stratified and the 25ers can set about getting their t9 with wearing t8 gear while the 10ers get their t8-equivalent while wearing t7.

 

Incoherence

There's an ilvl difference of 5-15 between heroic epics and Karazhan epics; the tiers are 13 ilvls apart. That seems like a good model for Naxxramas-10 versus Naxxramas-25, especially because it allows heroics to be a viable alternative loot source for Naxx-10 raiders.

Alternatively, there's this curious idea in this thread that the drops from Naxx-25 must be small upgrades from heroic/dungeon loot if they only require dungeon/heroic loot; yes, a few pieces of ilvl 180 loot or whatever will make the gear checks much, much easier, but I don't see that as necessarily a problem. The hardcore will jump straight in, be able to pass the gear checks with dungeon blues, and move on, and a few months later the 10 man crowd will walk in with ilvl 165 loot, have a much easier time with the gear checks, and ease into 25 man raiding.

 

Grizlor

Currently the only heroic that actually rewards more than badges and perhaps a little more variety in blues is heroic Magister's Terrace. They have said they wish to make heroics more rewarding in WotLK, so perhaps in comparison to BC content, we'll see heroics at about the karazhan level (115), with 10 man naxx being Prince/Gruul/Mag/Doomwalker/Kazzak level (120-125), and 25 man being SSC/TK level (128-133). 10 man Uldaur would be where ZA is (128-133) (thus a bit smaller of a gap between 10 man naxx and uldaur than there is for kara/ZA currently), with 25 man being at kael/vashj and T6 level (138-141).

That would be pretty much the exact "one tier" difference they're looking for. If heroic gear is comparable to karazhan now, people hopping into 25 man naxx (SSC level) doesn't sound quite as outlandish, and the 10 man progression is a bit smoother than current in BC.

 

Nathariel

Just because something has a higher iLVL doesn't mean that the item is that much better.

Blizzard could quite easily be lazy with the Naxx-25 item design in order to soften the spread between 10 and 25 mans initially, and then tighten it up as the Tiers progress.

Hopefully items from Naxx-10 will not be required to progress in Naxx-25, but with only that level of raiding then the majority of guilds will have the time and players available to run both.

 

Chul

But that's the thing, if the one instance will grant you an upgrade of two tiers worth of gear (going from blue "T7" to epic T8) then either bosses scale with the gear, or they get easier as the instance goes on. Noone wants the latter, and the former opens up a whole range of new issues.

For example, the end bosses can't expect the tank to be fully kitted with T8, because they just could've had poor drops, so the boss would need to matched agaist a blue level gear tank and hit a lot softer than it would normally do. Then apply that same logic to healing intensive fights, or patchwork style dps races, and basically you end up with an easy fight anyway. THey might as well just keep it the same as the 10-man, and then open a vendor and allow you to buy T8 pieces as your rep goes up (so chest/helm at exalted).

And how will this affect professions and PvP equipment? Currently the first crafted epics were T4 level which suited the Kara raiders initally, same with PvP gear. But since the 25-man will be T8, professions will need to have T8 level gear, same with PvP. Assuming three tiers of instances, that means people doing the 10-man progression can craft/pvp for the last tier of gear (since second 10-man will be T7, and third and last will be T8). Assuming the third tier is Arthas, like it was for TBC with Illidan, that is a scary thought.

Anyway, I'm sure it will all work out, but still, it makes for some interesting speculation.

 

jilanea

I was expecting then to have it be quite hard for first 4 - 8 weeks (although certainly not sunwell hard) then nerf it meaning that the top guilds get hard progression that they want and the more casual people, who'd be put off by this haven't got 10 or 25 players ready.

Regarding ZA, ZA is agressively itemised with a significant number of drops better than Black Temple loot and 1 or 2 which are best in slot in game, the problem comes from karazhan dropping crazy badge numbers for its progression point meaning it is more profitable and gives better loot per run than almost anything in game per time invested.

 

Oaklin

Even if Blizzard gets their difficulty and item tuning down to near perfection, the fact that 10 mans are logistically easier to succeed at and provide extra chances at loot will mean that any guild serious about 25 mans will have to run at least 1, but most likely 2+ 10 mans in parallel with their 25-man raid days. Its inevitable given min-maxing and path of least resistance. At that point, we'll see complaints about how 10-man progression is a prerequisite for 25-man progression, and how A/B/C team drama is tearing up guilds and its all Blizzard's fault.

It must be really fun for whoever is making these design decisions, no perfect answers

 

Cube

This really depends on the quantity of loot. One of the earlier interviews said that they'll be increasing the number of drops as well as the quality of them in the 25 man raids.

All Blizzard really needs to do is make the 25-man bosses drop about 3 times the loot, and I think this issue will be a moot point.

Of course, this assumes that they don't do a BT/Hyjal style re-itemization for the 25-man drops. If the drops are merely +10 ilvl items-in other words,the same itemization, just better-there shouldn't be a problem if they just increase the drops to normalize the drop rate between the 10 and 25 man versions.

 

Moogul

Actually, Titan's grip is pretty lame at this point. You made a mistake in your calculation, in that you didn't take into account the AP benefit to Auto attack.

Your auto attacks don't just do weapon damage - they do weapon damage plus (attackpower * weapon speed /14). This means that using titan grip means you get 20% less damage from AP, which makes titan grip end up doing *less* damage than otherwise.

In TBC, in a raid a warrior is probably looking at anywhere from 2000-5000ap depending on what tier you're at. Even at the lower end, 2000ap works out as about 150dps, so 20% less of that is another 30dps less with titan grip, which puts it below DW two 1hers.

 

flyingtoastr

The great thing about naxx is that it is big.

They can afford to give a couple "gimme" wings in both versions to give raids fast and easy gear and gradually increase the difficulty so by the time you're hitting 4h you're at the "expected" tier difficulty (Tier 8 for the 25-man, Tier 7 for the 10-man) for the last few bosses.

EDIT: Moogul, the formula for AP conversions is ( ( Attack Power / 14 ) * Weapon Speed ), not the other way around. The slower your weapon the more damage you get out of each point.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

bv728

We don't know if they're going to be basing things off the actual speed or the modified speed, although the math doesn't really change; the impact of instant slams does, though, as they're not normalized, so the artifical slow means that your Slams would be meaner.