Pretty sure that's the heart of the issue. The only real path to epics in pre-TBC was 40-man raiding, and I think that as far as Blizzard is concerned, that model of gameplay has been invalidated. And really, all "epic" means in practical terms is that the gear can scale up indefinitely at a given level requirement (whereas blue item levels, for example, are relatively static in a given level range).

Did you bother to read the last page of posts above you? Of course collecting epics was slow, that's why they were epic. Only the truly dedicated did collect a full set of epics. AFKing in a BG shouldn't earn someone a full set of epics.

And BTW, BC PvE still has the unpredictable element of loot in it, so it's not any better. My alt warrior has run BM a million times and has yet to see the Hourglass.

So if PvP gear was colored red or something, would you be satisfied?

I'm almost certain that Blizzard is not upset or unhappy with the current availability of epics, so I'm certainly not the one making assumptions. As others have pointed out, it was the rarity of epics that made them epic, and by making them more common than blues, Blizzard have made them lose their shine. What I actually said was that, having started down this road, it would be frighteningly easy to take things too far, even if the process was begun with the best of intentions.

Gear progression in 5-man groups, and many alternate paths for gear acquisition are absolutely neccessary, I don't think anyone could disagree with that. But by making epics as common as muck, what has actually been achieved? You get your epics, and then... What more do you have to look forward to? Speaking as a raider, I do of course look towards progressing through and seeing new content. But if I wasn't raiding, what would I do? I don't like PvP, so that's out. That leaves heroics, which is all well and good for a while. But when you finish that, you're in exactly the same position we had pre-TBC, only back then it was with blues instead of purples.

Don't get me wrong, Blizzard have made some fantastic strides forward in terms of gear progression and attainment in TBC. What I'm saying is that these strides were made independently of the greater availibility of epic gear, and that I believe churning out epics in the way that TBC has done ultimately accomplished very little, if anything at all.

Fixed

This would make me satisfied. Color should dictate difficulty of obtainment. not iLevel.

You may feel that PvP gear is easily obtained, but others may disagree.

Basically what the argument comes down to is that you want your monitor to show a different color for PvE/PvP and the tiers of content in each. This is really only a cosmetic change and won't change much about how Blizzard itemizes. I believe Blizzard made this sea of purples so that people wouldn't see a shitty purple and think it is better than the awesome blue they are replacing, which happened quite a bit in pre-tbc WoW. Color indicates rarity/difficulty to obtain? Doesn't rarity/difficulty to obtain imply quality? So, if you're to say that, then color still indicates item power, assuming that you actually want your gear to become better as you progress. *shrug*

Could this also be remedied with better itemization? I suppose. If they were to actually make purples better than blues, oranges better than purples, fuschias better than oranges, polka-dotted-yellow-and-mauve-with-fancy-glow better than fuschias, unilaterally, then there would be no problem with restoring the old system. It seems, however, that such item progression cannot be guaranteed as the game evolves through progression. Not to mention that [x orange item] may be better than [y purple item] for [class a], but worse for [class b]. Blizzard seems to be trying to make it so that when the best of the best have polka-dotted-yellow-and-mauve-with-fancy-glow, the average joe is capable of getting a gear set at around fuschia level.

The reason for this? Ever played a blue-geared character in pre-tbc against AQ+ geared opponents, basically in any situation where a competition can exist(pvp, damage meters, keeping the mob on you as a tank, farming)? You got totally rolled. That feeling of getting totally rolled loses customers, because it's not fun. So where are we? Make an item set for average joe so that he is capable of being somewhere close to awesome raider guy. That requires the addition of new items (badge/honor items if they continue to use that) for average joe to get, and it may be hard to keep them in line with the rest of the fuschias that already exist.

In the end, however, you are getting the same items, regardless of what their name is colored. No, the problem is not with the color of the item. It's with the systems for achieving the item.

QFT. Or even green color. Or a new color, but with an official statement saying "<New Color> is reserved for epic quality items that are given for free to poorer-skilled players."


So you are saying that every person (or almost every person) in AV contributed as much as they would, if instead, they were in Kara/SSC/TK/etc? That they are fully flasked up/food buffed/weapon oil/sharpening stone, with healers ready to pop mana pots on every cooldown and DPS are ready to pop Haste/Destruction Potions whenever possible? That every person is listening to the raid leader and following their directions to the letter whenever possible?

Right. Sure. I'll remember that the next time I zone into a BG for some fun after raid, and I see people dancing naked, and half the Alliance raid is crying for us to lose fast.

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EDIT:

Or if Blizz doesn't want to change colors, I would support making PvP gear usable only in arena and BGs, and PvE gear usable only in raids/5mans, and BGs. Of course, Blizzard would never do this because they want PvPers to bring their epics into PvE.

I think it's obvious that one can participate in BGs and exert more effort than the average raider. You can try to organize things, try to convince the "let's just lose fast" crowd to actually play, coax people into reporting the AFKers and so forth. This is far more work (and far more frustrating) than most of raiding (not talking about the raid leader, just the second mage or whatnot). It also rewards far less.

Do most people in BGs put out this kind of effort? Of course not! If they did, trying to lead them wouldn't resemble Hell quite so much. (And of course, those who are being counterproductive whiners get just as much reward as those who are actually trying, laboriously, to play.)

Let's face it, it all comes down to psychology. There are -still- people that will wear purple items because they are purple, and not because of the stats.

And as far as saying the only progression at 60 was from Blues to T1, that is flawed. The ZG items were blue at first but had superior ilvl to the T1 epics in several instances, technically making them better. Also, there were cases of optimisation which we still see now. Some pieces were better optimized while others had useless stats (spirit on warrior gear ftw!). [Animist's Leggings] (ilvl 71) vs [Cenarion Leggings] (ilvl 66), [Animist's Boots] (ilvl 71) vs. [Cenarion Boots] (ilvl 66)

I don't think anyone at all is arguing that "casuals" or "non-raiders" or whatever distinction you want to make should NOT have gear progression, I think that's something entirely different. I think more of the argument is that the term "epic" no longer FEELs epic. And legendary doesn't really feel legendary either. Getting Thunderfury was a mammoth task and to top it off you had to battle Prince Thunderaan. Hell, the Corrupted Ashbringer feels legendary.

Personally, I wouldn't care if Legendaries dropped from 10-mans or whatever, as long as they felt Legendary. That said, the topic of Grom Hellscream's axe is kind of a sore-spot for me.

So you want a big sticker that you can slap on your character that says "I'm better than you"? Is that really what you play for?

I thought trolling was frowned upon here.

In all seriousness though, the pvp progression system in place is stupid, and they have dug themselves a big hole there. I would love to have gear that I earn in a different fashion than playing the battlegrounds I played in 3 years ago.

[rant] Seriously, they've based 1) the pvp rank grind 2) the s1 grind 3) the s2 grind 4) the s3 grind and soon 5) the s4 grind off the same bgs. Not to mention offset loot. And they're talking about adding rated warsong? Are you serious? [/rant]

I would like to see dynamic coloring of the gear based upon its relevance to the season, like s3 could be epic, s2 blue, s1 green etc. That would make sense within this system, though another color entirely could be justified, as the entire thing is a perpetual grind, rather than one which you can simply beat (like rep) and get the reward.

The problem is that each set of gear is epic, indeed top-notch, at the time you get it, but it becomes common trash by the end of the expansion. It defeats the coloring system when the method of obtaining the gear is itself something that changes in time.

I totally agree regarding how stale the current battlegrounds have gotten.

All of the current battlegrounds are artistically very impressive, and clearly took a significant amount of time to design and create (even if the gameplay mechanics are straightforward). AV alone looks to be about the size of your average zone.

But in spite of that, they really need to try to pump out more of them if they really expect people to spend that much time in them. Even if they directly re-use the existing game types. I think anyone who's been playing for three years can quite directly equate running Arathi Basin to grinding Molten Core for epics for this entire time. It's just not enjoyable.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect at least two battlegrounds in WotLK, given that only one was introduced in TBC.

Why should purple gear feel "epic" any more than blue gear feels "rare" and green gear feels "uncommon"?

I don't understand this line of thinking. Grom Hellscream made his axe powerful, not the other way around.

Epics, and particulary versitile epics, were far rarer pre-TBC. Prior to 2.0, Grand Marshal geared toons were something to be seriously feared. They were very rare and they hit like trains, to the point that guilds who were up to BWL would bring them on solely to do damage. The raid gear was also fairly well defined, and identifiable. Crown of Destruction is the classic.

This, granted, was part of the "problem" with WoW 1.0. GM gear sucked balls to get and was impossible for anything approaching normal play. Raiding was highly stratified and required rosters of 60+, which have serious logisitical issues that are a pain for most people to run and manage in real life, let alone a game. Because PvP epics were essentially out of reach, PvE gear could dominate in PvP just by being so much higher level once you got beyond ZG.

I'm not sure how Blizzard can bring about the "thrill" of seeing exceptional gear again when they have decided correctly that from a business perspective, putting epic character advancement out of reach of most of the people who pay $15 a month is stupid. While Sulfuras and Thunderfury were awe-inspiring, I don't think anyone would call the process of getting them particularly well designed, either. When a warrior in my guild got Thunderfury, it was a server-wide event with our friendly rival Horde guild we had met through PvP fighting and two other Alliance guilds turning out to nuke the "boss" in fifteen seconds and celebrate the blade. This of course overlooks the complete clusterf*ck that Thunderfury was to attempt to obtain - nevermind the difference it made in progression forever.

I don't think it's possible to have gear that is really awe inspiring and to at the same time have it within the reach of most players. Stormherald, as an example, is a very powerful weapon that, at least on paper, requires a large commitment by the player to obtain. But it is really widely despised by the playerbase as "cheap" and "Skillherald", as much as TUF or Arcanite Reaper ever were. And it was already relatively difficult to obtain prior to 2.4, beyond the reach of most players.

As I don't have nearly as much time to play as I used to I don't really mind the wide availability of top-notch gear, but it has changed things quite a bit, and it is not good business to really alter that.

Separate PvE and PvP models to begin with, this is the one thing that was extremely stupid on blizzard's part.

It really was. Everyone walking around, looking like they've fullcleared TK/SSC is pretty ridiculous.

Season 3 was the worst, in my opinion. Try to distinguish a shadow priest in shadowform. Does he wear S3 or T6 ? It's impossible to say. It looks exactly the same due to shadowform preventing the silly recoloring to be distinguishable.

They should make the PVP gear more intimidating looking and the PVE gear more "defensive" looking. Hopefully they will do a sensible release of seasons and raid tiers in Wotlk and thus have enough time to actually create separate gear for those two main paths.

Chars look quite similar anyway, the old "everyone looks the same" rant. That should absolutely not be encouraged by the game and Blizzard. Quite the contrary.

You're making a faulty assumptiion that because everyone has epics now that the next step is everyone has Legendaries.

It isn't, the next step is a gear reset in WotLK. That means replacing epics with blues and greens whilst leveling, and the whole cycle repeats itself again at 80. You hit 80 and you're in leveling gear which is going to be mostly quest greens with a few blues unless you run instances whilst leveling excessively. Then people run heroics, the new 10 mans, start the lower raids and get the new pvp epics.

Dungeons are nerfed, new and better epics are added via badge vendors and the like and then somebody is speculating that Legendaries will be the new epics at level 90 .

Mmm, I would certainly hope that it wouldn't come to that. But already you can see the occasional thread on the official forums about 'Raiders get Legendaries, why shouldn't we get legendaries from PvP too?'. Given that it was that exact same cry of 'Raiders get epics, why shouldn't we get epics from PvP too?' that led to the current situation of everyone and their dog strutting around in S1 gear, one can't help but wonder just how far things will go.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely believe that the ability to acquire top-end gear by PvP is neccessary for the health of the game. But I think that Blizzard may have given too much weight to the masses of players crying 'we want epics', while not realising that the root of that desire was the fact that epic gear was so rare. By making epic gear that much more common, the gear-acquisition aspect of the game has been devalued, ultimately to the detriment of those whose concerns they were trying to address. GM/HWL gear was too hard to obtain. S1 honour gear is too easy to obtain. There's a healthy middle ground in there somewhere.

I recall reading an article some months ago. (I believe it may have been linked on Slashdot, but the search there has failed me.) The article's basic message was that gamers make poor game designers. By that the article meant that the ordinary players of games quite often believe they want a given thing, without realising that having that thing is often detrimental to the "bigger picture" of the game, and even immediately detrimental to the fun they themselves have within the game. The conclusion was that when designers solicit feedback on their game, they sometimes need to take that feedback with an extremely large block of salt. I believe that Blizzard needs more salt.

(And yes, that salt most definitely ought to be applied to this comment too.)

Firstly, this is purely a perception issue. Secondly, note that S1 honor gear was a lot harder to obtain back when it was Season 1? If the intent is to have the colour of the item text reflect rarity, perhaps a solution is just to change the colour of the text as soon as it becomes less rare. That is, when Season 2 starts, all Season 1 gear turns blue (while keeping the same stats etc.). When ZA comes out, all Kara gear turns blue. When BT comes out, all T5 gear turns blue. When badges become more available, all the lower-end badge items turn blue.

OR... we could all stop worrying about the colour of the pixels? You know, there are colour-blind people out there. They must be laughing their heads off at us.

In all seriousness, perhaps the answer is simply to state the actual itemisation budget of an item in the tooltip. That's what its power really depends on. All the other markers (item colour, ilvl, level required to equip) are poor indicators at best. So just give the item power as a number on every tooltip. You could colour code the number if you like - brown for PvP, yellow for instanced PvE, grey for world drop PvE, turquoise for rep rewards, or some such.

That way you could look at any given item and get an idea of (a) its real value in gameplay terms and (b) how to get it.

When a design change is made that many players were asking for, it's fallacious to assume that it was made solely because many players were asking for it.

Especially in the case of WoW, where changes tend to be very conservative and generally well-thought-out compared to other games in the MMO genre.