Yeah I was obviously talking about the previous situation, not the current one. So I'm not sure what you're complaining about here.

As for being average in raiding, thats good. You realize that anyone who even raids 25 mans now is considered the elite? That those people are by far a minimum of the game's population. Even if you're just a Gruul killing guild, you're more progressed than the vast majority of people in this game.

Once again there is too much exagerration in your posts, like many of the previous posts in this thread and the loot thread. A person at level 70 in the best 5 mans have to offer has nowhere near to close to nothing to look forward to. The only one even close to that situation is a shadow priest. Every other spec has tons of stuff to look forward to at T5 and even more in T6. And quite a bit in Kara as well.

Sure we could go with what you say and make T5 a lot better than T4. And then make T6 a lot better than T5 too. And lets say we'll do the same for PVP gear too. What do we gain? A huge stratification of raid content. In the past differences between gear was bigger, but we had world buffs and powerful consumables to make up the difference. Now we don't. How does one make T5 gear good enough to complete tier 5 but at the same time making tier 6 so overpowered that tier 5 becomes simple once you get it. And I have no idea how they'd make such big gear upgrades between tiers with boss difficulty taken into account.

Sure T5 gear is good enough to beat T5. But it also has to be good enough to get into T6. Should Blizzard force raiders to get full T5 before stepping into T6? Or do they make first part of T6 easy enough to do without full T5 but somehow make drops from there possible for you to jump up in power enough to finish T6? That sounds damn complicated, and the only way people did it before was abusing buffs and consumables. I'm glad we're not going back to that and that there is a more simple progression in gear and boss difficulty.

As for your pvp question, titles and more gear sooner (and getting full sets) plus mounts and of course the recognition of beating others I think is more than enough for anyone. What do I personally get out of raiding? Personal pride in beating content, happiness that my character is progressing and the enjoyment I get out of playing with my wife and friends. Being better geared than a certain quota of players by a x% has really no interest to me, because I've been at the bottom before. There are raiders, pvp'ers, and people just doing 10 mans or even only 5 mans and solo content. There should be progression for all, As more people enter T6 and S3 arena comes out, then so should solo and single group content. That is one thing I'd prefer though. That instead of adding new badges that they added tougher 5 mans. But regardless of how its done, all should progress in power.

I view it this way. A month or two after raiding started on most servers, the 5 man crowd had done their 5 mans and got their loot from there. The raiders were in T4 and maybe a little T5. Fast forward 3-4 months. Raiders are now in mix of T5-T6, but the 5 man group hasn't moved. The 5 man average thus needs to move up so the gap between them won't increase.

And yes, a T6 geared player compared to a new 70 is a god. But I don't think he should be a god compared to someone who's done all the 5 mans, regular and heroic.

Agreed. I was objecting to a comment obviously being mis-understood and/or taken out of context and then ridiculed. That situation did exist in the glory days of 'status symbols'.

I am all for greater increase between tiers then exists now. Both to increase the 'wow' factor, and also for someone in my type of guild to add significant benefit to the raid for the next boss and make next weeks kill easier. But if you don't add a way for pvpers (i'm not one by the way, which is pretty obvious if you check my ratings) to get similar upgrades for a similar time investment, we will see a return of complaints of 'raid or die' to pvp. Long term pvpers should destroy new 70s. Long term raiders show destroy new 70s. No argument there.

I do think the rampant reskinning in TBC has taken away much of the wow factor. I get more tells from randoms when i log my old lvl 60 alt on with an [Obsidian Edged Blade] strapped to his back, then my friend in the servers only BT guild gets about his gear.

Blizzard did it in Vanilla WoW. T2 was a large increase over T1 and T3 was a large increase over T2 and there were only about 5 bosses in the game that you really needed World Buffs from and they were all at the end of Naxx.

If they created the exact environment as pre-TBC release EXCEPT having 10 man raids and heroics then it would have been perfect in my opinion. People in T3 would have owned and everyone who wanted to would have gotten up to at least T2.

Edit: And that is where you an I disagree, if you look at my Armory and see my gear - I am min-maxed as much as you can pretty much be for someone in my situation and I believe I should not stand a chance against someone who is in T6, they are 2.5 Tiers higher then I am. Their average iLevel is over 20 levels higher then me, I should have no chance with my current gear even though I have Heroic and Kara gear.

I don't think the gear difference was quite as big as you think it was. T2 from BWL for some classes didn't get surpassed by T3. Heck T1 for some classes was held over T2. Although yes the differences were bigger than than now. What I think now is true is that the game is much more streamlined through publicly published strats and mods for everything under the sun. If MC and BWL had been released under the current climate, both would have been completed in the matter of a week and a half.

I also agree with a point Gurg made in another thread that if T6 hadn't been released before T5 was completed, then there would have been more leeway to make the gear bigger. I have no problem with T4 < T5 < T6 by larger values than they are now, as long as 1) PVP has very similar progression with similar power level gains and 2) 10 man, 5 man and even solo content progress in power as well. But I don't think people here are talking too much about the power difference between T5 and T6. Sure some are, but most are talking about the power difference between T5/6 and the new ZA/Badges gear.

I completely agree. Casuals will be happy as long as there is a progression path available to them. Wow has come a long way since vanilla, when you had to be hardcore in whichever path you chose in order to advance. HWL was probably even more of a hardcore grind than raiding.

I would even go beyond this and say that greater leaps in terms of tier upgrades is actually something that would help casuals. Because to me it seems quite apparent that in order to compensate for smaller gear upgrades Blizzard has decided to implement very stringent attunement processes that are specially hard on casual guilds.

In vanilla, there was no need to clear the previous instance to move on to the next, but they generally needed the gear to do so, and I see the new process as blizzard's way of preventing people from leapfrogging content.

If there are greater upgrades from tier to tier, as well as multiple upgrade paths, boss encounters can be tuned for this better gear, and as such the attunement process can be eased.

Let's say t5 is significantly better than t4 (as opposed to sometimes even being worse), and BT/MH is tunned with t5 gear in mind, as opposed to t4 equivalents. Let's also say they remove the attunement process. This way, we wouldnt have the "void reaver" situation with t5 content (i.e., undergeared people plowing through easy content), you would have a reason to actually run TK/SSC more than a couple of times, and you would also open up the possibility for casuals to eventually catch up.

Blizzard obviously has an idea of what is the desired pace that they want players to move through content. They don't want players to blow through existing content and getting bored before the next big thing hits.

With that in mind, I think that pacing this through difficulty and gear is much better than doing it through extremely hard attunement processes.

The attunement to Hyjal and BT is a much bigger roadblock to casuals than anything else, especially with the arrival os S3, ZA and badge rewards. If they tuned the first few bosses in MT and Hyjal to be a bit harder, requiring at least some t5 gear, and removed the attunements, it would be a win win. Players would not be blowing through content and would actually have a reason to do T5 content.

The alternative is keeping these arbitrary attunement quests, with gear relatively homogeneous, and then arbitrarily lifting them when you think its time to allow more players to progress. Which in turn makes a huge part of raiding completely superfluous months before the expansion. No one does Mag anymore, for example.

I *could* help casual guilds because these are the guilds that tend to be more gear dependent. Having those first three lurker drops offer significant upgrades helps both with the next boss and downing lurker again next week. As it stands those drops are providing minimal benefit.

I've started wondering how much of this is qualitative and how much is quantitative. I really think the TBC system is set up better, and more robust, with multiple progression paths and nonlinear progression within specific paths. I think the failure is mostly in the relative difficulties and relative rewards of those progression paths.

Here's a thought: what if Kara was balanced towards dungeon blues, and droped badges of justice from the outset? Then 5-man progression would have some sort of parellel progression to raid content (up to a point) that could be taken or ignored by the raiding community, just like arena weapons can be strived for or not at will. PvE progression would split after normal dungeons and the kara key line: raiding, and heroics.
Making heroics into an honest-to-goodness progression path, parellel to but separate from raiding, would take a heck of a lot more work than that obviously; ordering the instances in some sort of difficulty in terms of balance and drops. Obviously blizzard is moving away from that and stratifying heroics as directly below raid content, and now making them even more casual. But it's an approach that I think could work for WLK, and solves the problem that people who do 5-mans must at some point choose between raiding, PvP, and rolling alts to continue to have any meaningful progress in the game.


In an unrelated note: there really are two different types of 'status': character enhancements (gear), and cosmetic differences. Blizzard has taken a more leveled approach to gear, but gear in and of itself doesn't come with the cosmetic enhancements that it used to pre-TBC. I think that's partially because all gear is a bit shinier than baseline gear in vanilla WoW, and partially because it doesn't get any bigger and shinier as the gear gets awesomer. There's no one item, not even the warglaives, that particularly stands out like ZOMG NEON CUT YOU BADASS the way that untamed blade or T2.5 shoulders did back in their day, much less TF.

There's a much greater variety in non-gear-related cosmetic differences like tabards, flying mounts, and non-combat pets. They're all cute and awesome and unique in their particular way, but once again they're not particularly stratified, so it comes off more as a form of self-expression rather than a declaration of achievement. PvP mounts and the disgusting oozeling were a mark that you did something difficult (even if difficulty is just measured by time achievement), but whether you prefer a nether ray or a dragon just says which daily quests you prefer doing, or which of the two mounts your /castrandom macro felt like selecting this time. Aside from the arena dragon mount, which honestly doesn't look that different, there's nothing signifying awesomeness in a purely cosmetic but definitely distinguishable (I'm glad they're adding the back banner, it helps this a lot).
Long story short, end-of-instance bosses should drop a noncombat pet that is a small version of themselves.

I am totally sorry if I am misunderstanding your post, it is 2AM here, but are you suggesting that 5mans and heroics be comparative to t6? I would find this quite insulting that after all the time I put into this game to be in an Illidan killing guild, and to progress with them. To have the one visual that helps to distinguish me from other people, be comparative to 5mans that Joecasual, who plays for say 10 hours a week, runs in his free time. It does seem a bit elitist but there it is. That being said I am also annoyed with re skinning t6 for arena gear.

I wonder though if people wish to have novelty items that are amusing, and show that you've been there and seen that, maybe each boss of the major 25 mans (SSC, TK, Hyjal and BT) have a 100% chance to drop 1 costume and/or a mount per kill. Like vashj would drop a naga costume or maybe a strider mount, killing Kael would give the ashtongue costume you used for the BT attunment quest, etc. These provide safe, balanced ways to proclaim what you have done.

The reason T3 was a big jump over T2 and T1 was because the item designers figured out that random bits of resistance and such weren't useful, so they pretty much made the gear exactly what people with those particular specs wanted.

Fast forward to the burning crusade, and you realize that most of the gear at all levels is fairly well itemized. Seriously. Look at the [Breastplate of Valor], [Breastplate of Might], the [Breastplate of Wrath] and the [Dreadnaught Breastplate].

Now compare the [Jade-Skull Breastplate], the [Warbringer Chestguard], the [Destroyer Chestguard], and the [Onslaught Chestguard].

The TBC gear is a lot more similar than the vanilla gear. While the item level jumps were similar, seriously... look at the stat distribution. Had the early vanilla gear been as optimized as the TBC gear, you'd have seen a similar progression path.

I agree with you for the most part, however, we know that's exactly what Blizzard doesn't want to do. Not because they can't or wont, because as you mention they have with some abilities, but because they feel it creates a logical imbalance. They want the game to move smoothly from every facet of the game.

If I were speaking directly with the person in charge of these decisions, I'd point to a couple particular instances that show that already doesn't happen, but the further separation of the various facets of the game may actually be better for that goal. First, as was mentioned, some abilities already work very differently in PvP than they do in PvE. Why can I sap an Orc in Hellfire Ramparts for 45 seconds, but the Orc summing his party outside the instance can only be sapped for 10 seconds? Or I can sap the undead ganking outside Crypts, but I can't sap the undeads inside the instance? There is no clear lore answer to these questions (except, perhaps, something about the Forsaken and such, same excuse for Shackle Undead and Turn Undead), and to anyone that is trying to be "immersed" into the story and experience of WoW, they would clearly jolt you back to reality.

Other abilities are a little less obvious, like diminishing returns. A mage can polymorph the healer in a pack of mobs while 5-manning indefinitely, but while fighting off a group at the summoning stone, the healer can only be polymorphed for 17 seconds before becoming immune for the next 15 seconds. Again, an astute player would notice the inconsistency immediately if they were trying to immerse themselves in WoW.

Finally, and perhaps the most obvious one to any serious player, one cannot simply go from tanking heroic mech, switch gear, and expect to dominate PvP. Instead, any serious switch from PvEing to PvPing must include a trip to the class trainer and paying him 50g to reset your talent tree. Then you re-buy the higher ranks of skills you knew yesterday when PvPing, but apparently forgot in the last couple hours of doing dailies and running a heroic or two. The amount of immersive-ness this activity provides is about the same amount the blue bar loading into the game does.

So go one step further to tie the whole thing together. Make a big thing about the horde (or alliance) becoming a more severe threat, and the necessity of "enhancing" some of the key skills our respective adventurers use in dealing with this threat. We've already got de-facto PvP/PvE specs, just make it formal, and allow people to switch to a pre-made PvP or PvE spec, it can still cost 50g, just make it so you don't need to do the spec'ing and re-buying of skills every time. Then just update tooltips with how the spell or ability is going to work in PvP.
Sap
Incapacitates the target for up to 45 sec (10 seconds on PvP targets).

also retune abilities your PvP to your hearts content, without affecting their PvE usefullness
Mortal Strike
6 second cooldown (20 seconds after attacking a PvP target)

And so on and so forth. The point being that if it was clear that advancing the goals of the alliance via fending off the horde is different than fending off the burning legion, there wouldn't be a loss of immersion when things worked differently in PvE and PvP.

This has gotten slightly offtopic from the original discussion of what makes you play, but it's clear to me that the PvE/PvP interaction is negatively impacting the game right now. If they were separated as much as possible (although both still viable forms of progression), the game would be better off, and the desires of many of us in terms of expressing ourselves in game may become options.

The problem that some non-raiders can't understand is that the less people you have in any given situation, the less complexity there can be. I've seen the General WoW forums where some people were clamoring for epic solo-able content. Well that just doesn't work. With only 1 character, encounter complexity is extremely limited; you just can't make challenging encounters balanced around 1 character (I think the best example would be the Rhok'delar quest - but that was extremely hunter specific).

Now forward to 5 man content. You are still extremely limited. Remember the old Heroics (pre-nerf)? Now those were some pretty hard 5 man content (also had to do with the crap gear people had), but people were complaining. Why? If you min-max 5 man content, you go into situations were some classes were clearly unwanted; especially off-specs (think 2.0 Heroic Shattered Halls - CC was king). In essence, min-max'ed 5 man content was very casual unfriendly - based entirely on group makeup instead of organization. That is why I don't think there should be a 5 man progression line nearly as on par with raiding; the amount of challenging content you can do balanced around 5 people is extremely limited.

So yea, in essence, the status symbol (aka gear) of 10 man raiding should be superior to 5 man instances. And in turn, 25 man raiding should be superior to that of 10 man raiding.* However, I also think that each 3 modes of PvE should have their own progression.

On the PvP side of things, it's similar; 2v2 gets less points than 3v3 which gets less points than 5v5. The only thing they need to add is rating requirements for the top end PvP gear. Less rating requirements (if any) for the "lesser" set of PvP gear. And then honor pts for the out-moded set and consumables/gems. Then there is a sense of progression - get higher rating (aka progressing) and you get better gear - or just wait until another season and get the hand me downs.


*Note that once you get a certain amount of people, it takes too long to develop complex
fights (balanced around 100 people!) and the organization time just skyrockets as well for any given raiding guild.

The Shartuul event stands as a counterexample, in my view. That is technically "harder" than pretty much any individual class role in any raid encounter I can think of.

In Vanilla, you went from lvl 63 blue, to lvl 66, to lvl 76, to lvl 92.

In tbc its 115, 120, 133 and 146.

While the increase in absolute terms is greater post-tBC, if you look at it as a proportion, jumps were much greater in vanilla. When you add to that the more efficient itemization, it becomes easy to see why people feel like gear is relatively the same. 146/115= ~1.27.

92/63=~1.46.

Oh dear lord, not the complexity argument again.

Here's a hypothetical situation for you.

You have five people performing a coordinated breakdancing routine. You have N people hopping on one leg in synchronization. Does there exist an N that the synchronized hopping on one leg group become a more complex task overall than the 5 breakdancing? Will hopping on one leg ever be more complex on an individual level than breakdancing?

Please, don't bother opening this door again. Gurgthock is right, individual complexity and aggregate complexity are totally different beasts. In essence, the more individually complex an encounter has to be, the less possible it is to do in a large group. The challenge of a large group isn't individual, it's aggregate.

Oh I dunno. I think if Blizz wanted to they could have 5-man progressions that focused on different possible group makeups. Hellfire 5-mans would focus on CC while Tempest Keep 5-mans focused on, say, stealth, etc.. Then you could have various required groups for each instance chain and small guilds/groups of friends could progress together.

I think the thing that limits Blizz's ability to make various progression lines is the fact that if you introduce a craftable, PvP-able, 5-man-able, or whatever progression line that gear is useful in all of the progression lines. So the folks on the various lines will complain over whichever route they perceive to be the easiest. But I think there is value in having the ability to focus on, say, PvP and do that and progress and feel a sense of accomplishment.

The problem is you have to limit the ability to cross between progression lines or you devalue the idea of progression along a certain line, which is what I think the root of the dissatisfaction is. People who do 'x' activity don't want folks who are doing 'y' to be able to just come in and crush the content they've worked hard at doing simply because the new folks have finished off their own progression line and are bored. But what is the answer? Make Tier 6 PvP awards that only work in PvP? T6 raid gear that only works in raid instances? T6 5 man gear that only works in 5 mans? This gives you status symbol-type gear without making it necessarily unfair to folks who choose a different progression (and, I suppose, if you want to be great in PvP, raiding, and 5-mans you could equip your gear to show it off at the bank... if that's your thing).

First of all, my argument has nothing to do with aggregate versus individual complexity. My argument was very simple: when there exists more people, the possible design complexity goes up in comparison to less people. Meaning there is more possible design mechanics you can do with more people than you can do with less people (to the extent of feasibility, as noted in the *). The second part of my argument was that, in what I saw from the 2.0 Heroics, 5 man's were extremely unfriendly to certain specs due to the design limitations of group complexity (which doesn't even relate to individual complexity) to the point that I thought it would be extremely unfriendly to casuals - which I would assume this segment of progression would be targeted for.

And AFAIK, I'd disagree with you on the latter point; the more individually complex an encounter is, the more difficult it would be to execute as a group due to more coordination and execution required. Frankly, I don't see that as a bad thing.


PS, Actually, I thought of an interesting counter-example to your dancing while pondering about something at work. I work at a tech company (Any EJ mod can verify this) in a medium-sized team. My work's individual complexity is somewhat low. Yet, we produce some of the most technologically complex and innovative products on the market. So despite the fact that an individual's task isn't complex, as a group we can make a product that is far more complex than any single person or any small group can ever hope to accomplish (I'm guessing within the next decade or so).

To expand upon this point, perhaps have 5-mans that have sort of theme in regards to how the particular instance is done, with corresponding loot. For example, a particular instance may be kite- and CC-friendly but very tank-unfriendly, but the resulting boss loots are heavily skewed towards favoring hunters, warlocks and mages.

In this way, you could cater to 5-man progression, increasing solo- and small group complexity by concentrating on the utility and strengths of certain classes to the exclusion of others. Plus, you could include in loot tables the 5-man "ULTIMATE HUNTER WEAPON" in the hunter instance to encourage people to progress in such fashion. Those who aren't optimal for those instances don't have to fret about missing out on upgrades because the loot tables simply wouldn't cater to them.

The only problem I see with a system like that is that it would leave some classes incapable of experiencing that content.

A prot warrior isn't exactly the king of stealth. A Holy Priest can't really kite mobs.

I feel that they shouldn't make the content difficult by making it something you just can't do, but rather make it difficult by giving you multiple objectives and activities to juggle during the fights. Make it feel like you're not just spamming one button, but that you're actively participating in multiple parts of the fight. It would just have to be balanced so that it wasn't tooooo overwhelming, or otherwise you'd miss out on parts of the fight because you're completely engrossed in the parts you're involved with. That would feel like an epic encounter to me.

But I thought all weapons were hunter weapons?

I'd agree that it wouldn't be optimal, but realistically I don't really see how you'd make it work otherwise without eventually running into a wall of running out of properly balanced ideas for encounters. After all, how many unique encounters can you make that revolve around tank, heal, and DPS until there are no more unique ideas to go around?

On the other hand, concentrating on the unique utilities and mechanics of each class separately opens up a myriad of possibilities from which to engineer encounters.


For those who don't want to be locked out of content that doesn't correspond to their class, I don't want to say it's impossible, but simply that it would either be extremely difficult for them, or they'd have to re-imagine another way to use their class and abilities to supplement the priority classes. Perhaps add off-class items at the end that are sidegrades because of wacky itemization but are there so that it's like a reward for, "Thanks for coming along for the ride." 5-man min-maxers would concentrate on their own instances, and those wanting to experience everything could still do so.

Well, as long as you could still experience the content, even if you're not where you can perform optimally, I figure it wouldn't be so bad.

I just would hate to hear my druid friends bragging about how awesome this stealth instance is and being completely unable to try it, just because I'm a priest or paladin, you know?