Tanoh

Slightly off-topic, but "WotLK FFA" is a really bad acronym. FFA is universally accepted as "Free For All" which is a far different thing than "Friends (and) Family Alpha."


On-topic, and mostly to crimsonsentinel above. There will always be those that believe the grass is greener on the other side and take any excuse to get out of doing things. Is it that much different than if some other game had released a beta of their game and they started playing that? Blizzard wants players to see what's coming in the next expansion and make people want to play it, and hopefully continue playing until then.

Also, we don't really know about the mudflation rate in WotLK so far, of course the items will be better but how much better remains to be seen. Some CM said a while ago that they were pleased with how TBC's item progression panned out though so it might be similar to now, but until screenshots starts leaking out there's no way to know for sure how big impact it'll have. We simply know too little to make any conclusions on what impact a beta would have. Which ironically we don't know until the beta is out.

 

Talgog

The average player gear level has to be a lot higher than it was before TBC. That, and the fact that they already have the current stamina scheme, are arguments against as dramatic a gear reset as seen in TBC. What they will probably do is have Level 68-71 mobs that are tin cans in the WoTLK starting areas, like they did in Hellfire, so all 1-80 and new players and Death Knights can quickly get at least passable gear.

The item progression might actually be similar, it's just that a lot of people are wearing what's akin to Nefarian+ loot, so they wouldn't start replacing items for wholesale upgrades until the later part of WoTLK's Nagrand. Factor in that you can gem new stats for "marginal" upgrades and enchanted, socketed gear that's part of a well-designed gear set will probably mostly last into 80.

 

orcsgotbooty

Hasn't gear already been constantly reset through this expansion? Pvp gear including weapons that for some classes were best in slot besides sunwell/warglaives. T6 itemlevel gear from kara/heroic mech badges. Anyone who wants to be significantly geared at this point can close the gear gap easily.

 

Kumar

Well, whether people get new gear or not could also largely depend on if/how itemization changes. One thing is that we already have a hige stamina pool, tanks hitting 20k+, I really don't want to now see WoLTK tanks at 35k health, I would rather see itemization changes to keep the stamina pool similar to what it currently is.

I would also think T6 and better gear will not be replaced until the late 70s. Warglaives? Not getting replaced till the first end-game raid atleast IMO.

 

Talgog

There is a difference between gear progression and a wholesale reset. No one minds gear progression; people won't play without it. Going up a few iLevels, whatever the route, has little impact. Someone in S1/2 can fight just fine against someone in S3, and even Black Temple can be cleared with far less than complete T5, as the Chinese servers rammed home.

These differences are arbitrary and motivational for 99% of things people do in World of Warcraft, excluding extreme high end Arena and Brutallus.

That's progression WoW-style. You have gearing choices and individual upgrades are minor. Many "upgrades" are optional and not worth the hassle unless you have money coming out of your ears, or are at the absolute peak. It doesn't *matter* which weapon is best in slot by a couple DPS or that you "have" to get it from PvP (is this whining?)

The only thing that is arguably out-of-whack about parallel PvP and PvE gear is that you can get the T5 weapons from PvP to run T5 content in PvE, but that has nothing to do with gear progression per se. Badges ditto.

Gear resets make most of the current gear worthless, which is what happened at Burning Crusade launch, due to both the enormous stamina scaling and widely available green gear that was flat out better than the gear mean on most servers as a result of drastic inflation in iLevel and major changes in gear design.

The only thing that remotely resembles that during Burning Crusade was that epics were worse than blues and some broken greens for some inexplicable reason early on.

 

Nezralix

It certainly didn't make existing gear worthless; it made it mediocre at worst, and comparable to new gear at best. Suddenly changing all agility on druid gear into parry rating, that would make it "worthless".

They're extremely likely to do exactly what they did with TBC, which is (a) upgrade initial expansion item level to the point where people in mediocre level 70 gear (greens or sub-70 blues) get immediate upgrades upon setting foot in Northrend, and (b) make top-end raiding gear be roughly equivalent to level 80 dungeon-level blues. The intended effect was altered somewhat by the change to stamina valuation, but the concept seems pretty sound to me. I can't imagine that there are reasonable people who really want to hold onto their level 70 gear until months into the expansion.

 

Tacitus

Conan is set to release in about 2 months, while Warhammer got delayed back to Autumn 08 release.

Brotherhood, Peace, Unity

Welcome back, Comrade

 

Douglas

TBC had a "Friends & Family Alpha" phase, where many (all?) Blizzard employees had five keys they could hand out to people. I know because I participated in it. And yes, a lot of the mobs were cubes for a while.

We were all under strict NDA while it was going on, but once open beta started, that NDA was lifted retroactively, so we once beta started we could talk about what alpha had been like.

And in case anyone here is currently in WotLK alpha and wondering what's going to happen -- yes, in TBC alpha, when beta started we alphafolk were automatically enrolled in the beta program, and the characters we used in alpha persisted into beta. That's no guarantee that it'll work the same way this time, but that's how it worked last time. (Many of us had no idea if we'd be able to move from alpha testing to beta testing, since the selection criteria were different.)

 

Douglas

I think we have to expect a milder version of the same thing again. Take into account all the people who are going to hit level 70 after WotLK comes out -- especially Death Knights, if the hints we have that they're created at a level higher than 50 but lower than 70 are correct.

Those people are not going to be able to get PvP gear, raid gear, much rep gear, or badge gear before heading to Northrend. So Northrend is going to have to be tuned for people who hit 70 in soloable quest/drop gear, and is going to have to let those people catch up to their more powerful brethren by the time they hit 80.

So, while it may not be as extreme, I'm really expecting the same sort of gear reset that we got at the start of TBC to happen again.

 

crimsonsentinel

I think you misunderstand what I mean. I'm fine with Blizzard releasing F&F alpha. In fact, since I'm not raiding or doing serious arena right now, and I can probably get into F&F alpha, I would personally want to see WoTLK asap.

I just don't think it's wise on a pacing perspective to let some people play WoTLK alpha (even under the strictest of NDAs) before Sunwell is done, at least by the uber-guilds of the world. People complained that releasing SSC/TK too early ruined pacing for TBC, so why release WoTLK alpha this early?

Now, if Blizzard has some marketing strategy that they feel is necessary to compete with AoC or WAR then that's fine. They certainly have a business to protect. However, given Blizzard's perfectionist nature, I highly doubt that to be the case (maybe the vivendi acquisition changed culture more than we though, who knows).

Like I said, unless Blizzard made the automatic gate opening excruciatingly slow, it won't take that much longer to clear Sunwell anyway. So in the end, we may both be right.


edit: And as for gear resets...Unless you really value old dungeons/raids, gear stats are all relative. 100k health may seem like a lot to us now, but at level 100 when mobs hit for 80k, the increased stats wont change the nature of encounters much if at all. Only when the relative value of stats are changed (like stamina from classic->TBC) will this be different. I like this model of gear progression because it easily allows one to ebb into and out of the game without fear of falling too far behind everyone else.

 

Nezralix

I'm fairly certain they'll block access to WotLK raids until near the end of the final beta phase. It doesn't benefit them to allow access to raids early on; it just motivated players to rush through all their content to get more time in on raid content. This is one time when they really want people to be thorough with traversing the content.

 

Boywithrage

Heh, thanks for that.

I don't think letting players onto alpha this early is really a bad thing, the sooner players are testing and reporting bugs and getting WotLK ship-shape the better. The quicker it's ready the longer Blizzard can hold off on the release in terms of matching any competition. I'm not overly fussed as to whether it's right or wrong that testing starts now, a quality product is all that matters to me, and personal preferences aside, overall that's whats going to hit the shelves.

And gear resets, people know what they're letting themselves in for when they start groping for the new level cap, but totally agree with what your saying crimson about the way loot is currently available. One thing I'd mention however is that epics now are much easier to obtain then in vanilla wow and have somewhat lost their 'Epic' feel to them. If there was a tuning down of the ease of accesability (outside of raids) of epics then I'd for sure be a happy person.

 

Douglas

If it's anything like TBC F&FA was, it's more extreme even than that -- they didn't even let you reach the level cap until fairly late. When I started in the alpha, the level cap was just 65 (and most classes didn't have their new talent trees yet). There was no way to hit 70, let alone begin the attunement process for any of the raids (nobody could fly!).

 

Pyros

I believe it was raised to 67 before it turned beta, but yeah, you don't test any raids even during beta until very late. First they work on early zones, and the dungeons that go with it when available, then they add a few more zones, and add dungeons in past zones/current zones and so on. It was the same during wow's beta, when I started playing cap was 39, SM was the only "high" instance and druids/hunters didn't exist. Then they raised to 45 and added tanaris/feralas, then 50 and added sunken temple, then 55 and brd, then 60 and winterspring/plaguelands, then they added scholo/strat and ungoro or something like that, it was a long time ago. MC and Onyxia only opened like a few weeks before release, and were largely untested as seen at release.

So if they started the alpha, or if they did already(seems I won't get in this time since the one guy that got me a key for TBC F&F doesn't work for blizzard anymore ^^), it wouldn't impact raiding THAT much, especially with gates closed limiting the amount of content available, and for most top guilds simply forcing them into a low raiding schedule like pre2.4(2-3days a week).


Oh and I loved cubes. Was so fun when at some point they fucked up and almost everything ingame reverted to cubes(even stuff that had models before). You'd only find weeks later what you were actually supposed to be fighting. Like those demons that have draenei slaves in hellfire, 1cube and 3cubes around it. Or what were the moss guys fighting in those caves, cause first time I went through they were fighting an army of cubes. I also liked the fel reaver as a bear. Spotting him was much harder back then ^^.

 

zoombini

And they didn't during most of the TBC beta. I remember (wasn't in the beta, but I kept up on news) when the level cap was 67/68 and the only people who could get into the TK dungeons were druids (and, it turned out, people with slow-falling epic mounts who jumped from a particular spot)

 

Prinsesa

I don't think the gear reset is going to be is drastic as it was in from Vanilla->TBC, for a couple of reasons:

As Douglas said, even if the availability of badge/arena/early raid gear has increased the general ilevel of a player's worn pieces to 120+ (possibly higher), Blizzard is still probably going to lowball it and design 71-80 leveling encounters (and their subsequent rewards) based on a player who's only wearing quested blues and greens.

Not everyone has had a chance to fill up on S1/Kara epics, as some people will still be hitting 70 just as WOTLK gets out the door, not to mention all the alts that will be going 1-80 and will never get to run Outland dungeons.

Part of the gear reset in WOTLK involved smart itemization. You pick a level 58 Feral staff and your eyes pop out because there's a ton of AP on it. A Paladin spends 15 minutes in HFP and his spell damage/healing doubles or even triples in that time. Now that Blizzard more or less has a better idea of what 'works' for a class, we're going to see more of the same as we go into Northrend, making the transition much smoother.

The other, larger part of the gear reset involved the STA change. You could fit a lot more stats into an item since STA started taking up so much less space. Unless Blizzard implements a similar change in the basic itemization formula, this is itself practically ensures that the gear reset will be softer. Even with my previous comment on the [Might of Menethil] being usable until Kara, if we compare it to an ilevel 90 [Hateful Bludgeon] of the Beast, you'll notice that the raw stats aren't so far from each other. Once we go into WOTLK and the itemization formula remains the same, I fully predict that Sunwell/BT gear is going to go unreplaced well into 80.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

xiaoxin21

I would doubt so. TBC and pre-TBC gear progression have a major difference. In pre-TBC naxx gear is vastly superior thatgear the average player have.

Finding someone in full epics even those low end is pretty hard on any server. Nowadays, it is hard to find anyone not in full epics.

Also with arena and badge/heroic gear, the gear difference between a sunwell geared player and a badge geared player is not going to be very large as it is from pre TBC times.

I would thing the gear reset will happen pretty early maybe in 75 or lower so that the interest in loot, leveling to 80 is there for majority of the playerbase now.

 

frber

I would just assume that a 'normal' geared player will find upgrades to his gear from the first Northrend quests & instances. Its like with the new Magisters Terrace instance really. The loot must be relevant to players since item upgrades seems to be a large motivation to even do the content. Hence Tier 4/5 players may find 'some' upgrades even in the normal version of the instance....

I guess by now the 'normal' geared player has at least most of the Tier 4 items, some Season 2 or 3 PvP epics, and a few of the better Badge items. While not all alts are geared like that most peoples mains certainly are; and its the mains that will go into Northrend first. They'll probably do like they did with Burning Crusade. That is have quests you can get before level 70 that has rewards to boost alts and new players to a normal level of gear.

 

Talgog

The Hellfire model was tomato can mobs that even sub-60 players could mow down for the first few quests, "gimmie" quests that gave very good rewards, and a general gear level that was skewed towards the damage side of T1 loot.

My two characters I took through the content were somewhat illustrative. Talgog, warrior main who was roughly T2 damage geared (FM armor + DW weapons + Spinal Reaper, etc.) didn't replace all that much in Hellfire (I think only Bladefist's replacing Blackhand's) and was able to take on most of the Zanger mobs at 60, although the rapid decay of hit rating forced him back to the Spinal Reaper by the time he turned 63. His mostly T1 tank loot, otoh, didn't last long except for the ZG enchanted Wrath helm and legs.

Spinal Reaper and those two pieces of tank loot lasted the longest, except for the FM shoulders in a DPS role, which I continued to use with the first Aldor enchant until I got S1 shoulders gemmed for +hit and damage with the Exalted Aldor enchant, and Lifegiving Gem, which I used extensively at 70 until it was finally nerfed for the last time.

Talnath, my warlock, was wearing blue PvP set at 60. He replaced about half of his gear in Hellfire and the rest in early Zanger, largely due to the stamina packing of TBC loot and this being a Felguard warlock. The only piece of his gear that lasted to 70 was Felheart bracers, which I just couldn't find a good replacement for in the quest rewards and AH (he mostly ground because of how fast he kills mobs).

If Talnath had not had time to gear up in blue PvP, he would have replaced everything in the first round of quests, as it was all relatively equal to what he had, which was really pretty good by Azeroth standards. And that's just the world stuff. Ramparts and Blood Furnace were pretty easy and awarded great gear.

If I was a paladin, rogue or feral druid, I would have replaced everything due to the dramatic itemization changes. But I wouldn't expect those to be repeated.

So that's Hellfire. The WoTLK starting zones, on this model, would award gear similar to well-itemized iLevel 115 blue gear (for 1-80 players, alts, low end players and Death Knights) for a "baseline", be fairly easy for players below even that baseline at the start, and have some items in the instances or the "end" of the zone that would be of interest to everyone other than absolute peak gear, but its unlikely that even with a TBC approach that the equivalent of very well itemized T3 gear (T7 raid and corresponding S4/crafted PvP and damage loot) that has serious money invested in it is going to be rendered "obsolete".

That really wasn't true for a lot of the best pre-BC gear, it was just that so few people had it. Most guilds were, at best, muddling around in BWL, and really good PvP and crafted gear was nowhere near as pervasive. The mean gear level at the end of TBC is simply a lot higher than it was at the end of WoW 1.0, so "corrective" measures by Blizzard don't need to be nearly as radical and can be aimed more at strictly helping alts, new players and Death Knights.

 

Unity

An astonishing number of players are still in blues or greens. You won't see them often in even a Heroic PUG but have a listen to the guilds that are recruiting in the trade channel. If they're saying "Need [rare class] for Kara, up to [early boss]" it's a fair bet they're still in a lot of blues. I've been told that half of WoW's 70's have never been to Kara, which seems high for "never" but closer for "not often". Besides anyone that hits 70 after WOTLK's release won't be farming up their blue set before neading to Northrend.

My own guess at the WOTLK gear jump is that the first few quests will provide a full set of Kara level DPS gear for everyone, with the first instances dropping around T5 quality. Instance gear will surpass Sunwell around level 75 (ignoring enchants, gems and set bonuses, so a player with lots of Sunwell wouldn't replace for a little longer) and soloable gear will do so by 80.

 

mek

Yes, and you have to understand that our experience of the game and average gear level is very heavily biased by the servers we play on. Most raiders are on high-population servers with a number of raid guilds, and these are exactly the servers noobs are encouraged to avoid, instead ending up in Low or Recommended servers, which are full of these blue/green characters who have no idea how to do Kara.

 

Talgog

WoW has an enormous turn-over rate. I think I've seen it quoted at something like 10% churn per month normally.

This would actually be more radical than Burning Crusade launch in the mid-range, especially if they don't change gear itemization dramatically a second time.

 

Maledict

Erm, this is incorrect. WoW has one of the *lowest* turn over rates of any MMORPG. They don't talk about churn that much, but when they did it was to point out how low it was compared to other games like EQ. Thinking about it logically, with ever increasing population numbers there aren;t actually that many gamers out there to sustain WoW for so many years.

It's one of the myths that peopel like Brad defruiter kept going on about in the early years of WoW - that it was a short term game that would lose people fast. That theory didn't turn out that well...

 

Addled

TBH I disagree with many people in this thread. I think itemization will have to be more radical this time around.

Consider that at the beginning of TBC, Naxx gear was superior to virtually everything at 70, until you got to SSC/TK. Even people in T2 weren't replacing much until entry level instances. I remember that I leveled my pally in T2, and I really wasn't seeing any upgrades until the Netherstorm/Shadowmoon regions, and 70 instances. As for healing gear, Pally T2/equivalent was actually pretty darn good. I recall that I ran regular SV, Kalithresh dropped a pair of mail healing gloves, and I was a bit reluctant to take them, considering they were only a marginal upgrade to my Peacekeeper Gloves from Hakkar.

But, only a small percentage of the WoW population had BWL/AQ40/Naxx gear, so it was OK.

Now, we have a much larger percentage of the WoW population with full epics, whether they are Arena or raiding epics. People in 4/5 S4, plus the honor bracers/belt/boots, etc, are the equivalent of Naxx players. If Blizzard keeps the same mudflation rate as BC, those s4 players are going to have a huge advantage in the first arena season of WotLK. Does Blizzard want that? My gut says no, but I could be wrong.

 

songster

It's the same thing seen from two different directions. You have to ask yourself what you actually mean by "mudflation". Moving from original WoW to TBC, the average player in greens saw a huge jump in item quality as they moved into Outlands. This is one definition of mudflation. A Naxx-clad raider probably didn't receive a single upgrade till level 70. That's not mudflation, that's stagnation! One thing that we can be absolutely certain of is that they will not want the people who "won" TBC raiding/PvP to carry that advantage into the starting raids/arenas of WoTLK. One way or another, the gear gap will be closed by level 80, giving everyone a fresh starting ground. They have to, in order to be able to balance the entry level raids. All that remains to be seen is whether the gear gap is closed at level 80 (e.g. quest blues at 80 ~= Sunwell ilvl) or some time before (e.g. quest rewards at 75 ~= Sunwell ilvl).

Now I'm sure there will be many at the bleeding edge who think this is a bad idea, and that their gear advantage from pre-WoTLK raiding should confer an advantage even in the early Tiers of WoTLK raiding. Frankly, they're deluded and will hurt themselves if they get what they ask for - because what they're asking for is for the early raids in WoTLK to be a pushover for them, to offer no challenge. That is, unless they are expecting everyone else to level to 80, then go back to Sunwell to gear up before starting the WoTLK raids, which seems... um. Eccentric?