Heck, I'd appreciate that even for lower-level dungeons. Sorry to whip out the hoary Deadmines cliche, but who wouldn't be stoked to have "Pirate-slayer" for being one of the first 100 people on their realm to kill Van Cleef? Maybe something more subtle so everyone gets a chance - "Pirate Slayer" for clearing Deadmines in a party of appropriate level, and "Master Pirate Slayer" for being among the first on your realm. And so on and so forth. Plus a full character sheet registering when you first killed each and every instance boss (disallowed if you're partied with someone of too high a level, naturally).

Killing Nefarian was still a pretty big thing, even months after the content had been defeated. More importantly, killing Kael'thas and Vashj, even now, many months after they were first killed, are still huge accomplishments. Guilds that started into the content late are going to have serious trouble catching up to guilds with a three month+ head start - our progression isn't too far off that of the top guild on our server, speed-wise, is it really fair to penalize us for taking longer to organize and get started?

Don't forget that the first wave headed for new content isn't the only one that wants rewards. Throw in a "first!" tag for getting the first kill, but to give titles/recognition only for being on the cutting edge only makes the disparity between the head and the tail of the curve worse. Right now, the T6 guilds at least do have unique artwork (temporarily) and items of unequaled power (temporarily). My guild is just now seeing the point where we'll break into the "awe-inspiring power!" content. We're one tier behind and our gear is already, in many cases, outdated by the current arena gear. As we prepare to step into BT/Hyjal and finally get above the arena epics curve, Blizzard prepares to release another batch of trivially accessible gear that is comparable to or better than the very best gear we can acquire. Isn't that enough? At least let the people at lower levels of content get thee same rewards as you did. One of the things I hated about AQ40 was that I could never meaningfully do the scepter chain myself - my guild at the time formed well after the gates were opened. One-off special events are great for people on the bleeding edge, but they blow chunks for the rest of us.

What really has devalued uniqueness is that the path to accomplishing great things is limited to being only the "best" spec, have the "best" gear, and basically fighting, playing and looking like everyone else who wants to not have some form of limitation for just being what they want to be.

In all of my time in WoW (started a little after release) I've gotten noticed for only one thing and that's the good ol' airplane wing out of Zul'Gurrub (That's [Zin'rokh, Destroyer of Worlds]). And I should point out I got tells about that sword well after BWL was a "common" instance. It seems to me that in everyone's quest to be the best, they have all reached it; and all look alike, talk alike and have found the whole exercise empty and hallow.

I like the idea of an accomplishment page, similar to City of Heroes/Villains badge system which had a visual representation for a lot of in game tasks that ranged form the difficult to the mundane to the bizarre (KILL SKULLS!). Even better if such a system was visible from the armory so you could show off, like to friends and coworkers interested in the game, of everything you've done.

The draw of the people is definately still there and one of the best parts of WoW. The gameplay seems to be getting more polish every patch. The motivation of course being the changing world and seeing the characters you know and love in an MMO setting is still there but feels a bit lacking with its immersion.

Pre BC to even begin to do Onyxia people had to do a long chain that alliance side at least ended with a very cool event right in the middle of SW. The upside of it is the chain could potentially be started as soon as you hit 52 or 54 making it very alt friendly. That chain then lead to killing Onyxia which lead to getting scales, which lead to Onyxia scale cloaks, which at the end of it lead to Nefarian. The scales as long as banked didn't really set you back from doing Nefarian but due to the storyline surrounding it connected the two bosses. To top it off both of their heads lead to a buff in SW as well as the head going on the gates at which everyone in the city knew your guild has slain them. The buff itself was good and worth using on an encounter that you were struggling on just for the extra edge but not required.

AQ40 expanded on this with the War Effort for both factions as well as the extremely long scepter chain that required the efforts of at least your guild as well as potentially others guilds depending on your server. Part of the chain also required you to be efficient at clearing BWL which was reason in itself to improve your times clearing it every week. Then once the supplies were collected there was a one time event which allowed participation from the entire server as the armies attacked in many different zones. The people whom did the quests got rewarded with the title(Scarab Lord), items(the different weapons), and of course the mount. The lowbies got rewarded with BoE's that would help them level faster or could be sold for funds. Fast forward to Naxx due to server stability issues the event was quite different and definately not as memorable. But yet there was still an event.

Continue to BC release Karazhan, SSC, and TK were all open but only the Kara attunement could be started before hitting 70 which lead to quite a bit of time spent leveling doing nothing that helped you later on(not including reputation grinding for heroics). Gruul and Magtheridon of course existed but being as bugged as they were and requiring massive consumeables very few guilds killed either one pre nerf. Most guilds that did kill them only killed them long enough to attune their raiders and then moved on. Due to being open at release none of these had any kind of world events or impact at all when they went down. No item like Onyxia's head, no buff, nothing. Later of course they added Magtheridon's head but the impact it has is so minor it seems more like an afterthought. Sometime around this point they also removed the SSC/TK attunements which while alleviating some of the requent issues and pushing new guilds to work on the content really felt like a slap in the face to the guild that had worked so hard to get everyone attuned.

Continue to the unbugging of content, alchemy changes, gear buffs, and BT release. Illidan awaits and after the world events Blizzard had shown us in vanilla WoW BT has nothing as all. Once attuned there is a minor event at the front of BT but it has no impact at all although the buff making you larger is kind of neat I suppose but it can of course be done just by sitting near the NPC's and letting them do the work. None of which would have happened pre BC. The guilds had to do the work to get access to the content and not all the steps were revealed on the PTR. Testing was done to tune it but work to gain access had to all be done on live. The fights themselves after the months of live tuning are really good and fun but just due to how they affect the world don't seem nearly as epic comparatively.

I guess most of the reasons have been time constraints and worries about server stability but I still don't understand how the end boss of TBC is out there waiting and the people in the world don't care. Vanilla WoW while the events may not have been perfect at least the world felt like it was changing.

What I'm trying to say is that status symbols aren't really needed as long as the way there feels challenging enough. The gear itself and the content defeated had to this point always been more than enough.

I agree with the general sentiment that reusing the same skin for tier sets, arena gear AND non set loot (e.g. green dps warrior kit from SSC/TK) does not really promote showing of your stuff. Quite contrary it strengthens the tendency already seen and critized in wow classic that active raiders (and now endgame PvPers as well!) tended to look very much the same.

Personally I don't get demotivated by this since getting the items might be a motivating factor but its not the driving force to me. On the other hand, more distinctive titles and gear would serve the needs of many to customize their character (my way of doing this is choosing rather eccentric looks for my avatars - just yesterday a buddy told me that my alt rogue looks even uglier than my warrior which is in a strange way a compliment for me :P)

When raiding I raid for progression and for performance (I take a pride for being on the ball for the whole run, trying not to make a single mistake and I'm really annoyed if I fail to perform in a lesser way than I expect from myself to do). Secondly I raid because I generally like the people I raid with (not all of them, but most are pretty ok in my book which is something I value a great deal since I left my old realm due conflicts in my raid evolving to a large general FFA mudslinging contest in which I played a role I'm not really proud about it).

This is even more true for times I'm not raiding. I really enjoy hanging around in the TS2 and having fun with some good natured banter as well as

I don't really like titles as an accomplishment tracker. Like someone mentioned, they feel kind of like boasting, and they're also just not sexy or interesting. I'd much rather have kael drop a funny hat i can wear and look at than have him dub me sir slayer of tier 5. Practical gear with a unique model fills this role, but so would a dated token, a pet, or even just a paragraph in a new accomplishments tab in your character sheet.

Using the same models for pvp and pve sets pleases no one as far as i can tell. Because people who have accomplished either think they should stand out from the people who did the other, and people who have done both think they should stand out from those who only did one. Even if the accomplishments are roughly as hard as each other, people's natural tendency to inflate their self worth will lead them to believe the one they did is harder and be insulted by being lumped in with the other guys.

It seems like a no-brainer that it is heavily in the corporate interest to make people more sentimentally attached to their characters whenever possible. Your identification with your character is one of the biggest reasons you don't jump ship as soon as you hit an encounter you don't like or another good game comes out. At the same time, i don't think it's necessary or even possible to force other people to care about your accomplishments. You can't really make a system that guarantees people with tier x have groupies offering them sexual favors them in shat, but you should be able remember and feel good about the time after all that practice that everything came together and they downed c'thun.

I think Gurg is talking about something that's much closer to what I find a little frustrating about WoW's design, which is that there isn't a ton of opportunity to be a "smart guy" and differentiate your equipment from other people's. This has always been a problem in WoW - from the whole set vs. offsett gear to the relatively linear progression of gear.

There's also the purely visual stuff, like titles and look of items etc. but that doesn't really appeal to players who are in it for the "numbers" - who want to explore the mechanics of the game more than look like badasses.

One thing that I have always thought would be really cool as a "PvE achievement" thing would be to implement some extremely elite "hardcore mode" encounters that would be something along the lines of 5 manning Onyxia at level 60, or doing a boss way, way faster than normal, or with much larger periodic damage output or something. Essentially a challenge that required you to approach the encounter as a puzzle you had to beat using gear, group makeup, the talent trees, etc. as your tools and then you sort of have to figure how to best set up your gear and group to meet those requirements - but do them outside of the context of the normal raiding system so you don't have to genericize them so "anyone can do them". If that makes sense. Maybe make several and then tokenize the loot so they can be ultra specific. I don't know - but essentially make some sort of high-level PvE outside of the context of 25 people, X healers, X dps, etc.

Oh, also, from a game development standpoint, you've got the advantage of re-using assets and content so you don't have to spend an absurd amount of resources catering to the minority. But I think those high level challenges excite rather than turn off casual players - I'm pretty C-team when it comes to EJ but I definitely get excited when I hear about cool stuff happening in the high-end game.

It's not a problem in WoW, it's a problem inherent to the entire idea of a RPG with stats. In a min/max environment (which the raid game is), then everyone will pick the same optimal gear and the same optimal spec.

There are three possible ways round this:

1) Make lots of sidegrades that offer exactly zero advantage. If the advantage is greater than zero, minmaxers will take it, and will all have the same kit.

2) Prevent people acquiring the items they need in order to maximise their character. No, you don't get $Weapon or $Trinket, because it's got a ludicrously low drop rate.

3) Make toons intrinsically different, so that the optimal gear choice for one toon is not the same as the optimal gear choice for another.

The only way option (3) could work would be to give real, powerful differences between characters which are set at the time of rolling and cannot be chosen or altered. You happen to have rolled up a rogue with extra +hit? Well then you'll need to wear +AP/crit gear. That will distinguish you from the next door rogue that rolled up AP/crit bonuses and needs to wear +hit gear. Importantly, you have to not allow the player any choice in the matter. If they have choice, they will theorycraft the optimal option and take it. Hello 1 bazillion tauren tanks, gnome mages and dwarf priests.

The latter idea obviously can't fly. You can't force diversity onto people when they'd all rather have the single best min/max option. By and large, people hate (2) as well. It sucks to farm MC for a year and never see bindings, while Joe Scrub guild gets TF on their first clear. And (1) doesn't fly because people want upgrades, not sidegrades. Hence the demand for other sorts of differentiation which don't have a bearing on progression - titles and such like.

If it has a bearing on progression, everyone will take it, and all the snowflakes will be alike.

Reading this thread made me feel slightly more like quitting as well, I must confess. Now I didn't play Star Wars Galaxies, but for the last 2.5 years I've been surrounded by guys who did, and everything in this thread makes it sound like that is what people are pining for - more depth, more player customisation, just more "fluff" basically.

Would it be so hard to let crafters choose the look of the gear they craft a little bit? It wouldn't be gamebreaking, just give them a couple of skins, and some colour choices on the stuff. Make the skins cooler/less cool depending on whether it's BoE/BoP and the reagents required. At least that way if you make something for someone, not only does it have your name on it, but it'll look a little different (probably) to the same item worn by someone else.

I won't even get started on the lack of ability to customise the non-armoured look of my character, but that's a whole seperate argument.

I really do think the slate needs to be wiped every expansion, it keeps the game alive and helps new(er) players integrate into late game content.

That said I wish the title system or an inspect tab with accomplishments existed. I have over 80 days played on my druid. That's a significant investment of free time and I don't understand why it would be wrong to want little medals or something to remind me of the times I've had. I smile to myself whenever I see a Scarab Lord title because it reminds me of my guild progress through AQ. It was several weeks of learning, dying, and eventually succeeding at beating some really tough content. I don't have anything on MY character to commemorate that though...

It doesn't have to be bleeding edge only and I think people are understimating how much people would use the titles. Sure having a title that signifies you killed Prince Malchezzar may mean nothing to a T5+ raider, but to a person who has only done kara it is a big deal and they are not going to consider it a lower class title... Why not let people be proud, and yes brag a little, about their in game accomplishments? Being proud of what you've done in game does not automatically translate into thinking how much better you are than the next player. I'm going to wear my champ. of the naaru title because I remember how hard that shattered halls heroic was, how many groups it took to complete and the fun and hell we shared in vent getting it done. Not to be better than joe casual.

Now thats a damn fine idea. I always disliked the pre TBC rank system where ranks decayed and you had to inspect to find peoples rank, but for bosskils and such it would be great way to flag players for their bosskills.

I had a thought while reading through the last few pages.

One of the more common complaints-
The average player is unable to distinguish top rank gear. It looks like a sea of recolored art. Pre TBC you could look up to the top people and envy- now you can hardly tell.

I think this may link back to the staggered release of content in Classic and the full release in TBC.

I have difficulty remembering which set is which. Consider this: In classic there was a 2-3 month break between instances where you saw the new sets slowly creeping into your city area in a natural trickle down from the top guild to the bottom guilds. More and more of Tier-whatever showed up and it was very distinctive at the time because each set had a several month long period in which it had clear superiority and marked the wearers as "something special". then Boom! The new instance was released and it started all over again. My (priest) Tier3 shoulders with the glowing wings was incredibly distinctive when I got them- we were the only guild with Patchwerk down and I was the only priest on server with wings.... then as time went on there was a slow increase in the number of wings that floated through IF until eventually I stopped getting tells about them because they had become "normal".

TBC wiped out "normal" for about a month, and then the race to Illidian began. There were no major breaks between T4 and T5 for the masses to get acclimated to the new artwork. There was the dark age before 2.1 where it was hard to GET to T5, but it was always known that T4 was just a stepping stone to T5. T5 didn't have more than a few weeks before T6 was released and at THIS point there's 3 tiers of gear and a mountain of off set loot that entered the public eye far too fast to be easily distinguished.

With a staggered release and a forced wait for the fastest- you get the ability for several folks to show up in near to full Tier-whatever and be recognized for that achievement before that gear is set aside for progress as you step up into the next tier. Without that pause, you will very rarely see people in full tier gear until they've reached the end- in this case through 3 tiers to BT gear.

I ran into a dwarf priest in full T4 a few days ago and I was struck by how unusual he looked. Not because it was a great set or even the prettiest set (frankly T4 priest was not impressive to me) but because it *was* a set. Most people capable of putting together a full T4 set are also capable of breaking it for the next tier up.... and have been for a long time.

Maybe two concerns can be fixed with one fix. Stagger content releases distinctly- allowing both a personal sense of accomplishment from killing an "end" boss and allowing a "status" sense of accomplishment from the completion (or near completion) of distinctive gear sets between tiers.

Throw in some extra titles (Champion of the Naruu), a couple of non-combat pets(Sinister Squashling, the ZA frog), a few new very distinctive non-set artwork(ZA gear and heroic gear is certainly distinctive. Ugly, but distinctive.), and maybe a tabard that makes you dance the twist and /flex (TBC release tabard) and it's a pretty good mix.

I think they recognize the problem and have actually put some definite thought (and some preliminary work) into fixing it. It surprises me more that they've really started towards fixing it already. It shows surprising amounts of foresight that we (the playerbase) are only starting to complain about it now- as the changes are starting, so the recent changes weren't as reactive as so many (Hello consumables) seem to be.

Another general thought. It says something about WoW that the complaints we have are getting more and more superficial. There is always room for improvement. Always. We are no longer, however, demanding stable servers, more casual/raider content, fewer queues, or bemoaning how it is impossible to progress if you don't put in months or screaming about how bad X grind is..... and our complaints seem to have moved on towards how many silly tabards, titles, and pets we have to distinguish ourselves (well, that and the ability to transfer to another ruleset.). It's the mark of a good product. Always something to fix- but we're dealing with details.

Because you can make a mistake. Would you like to get to 70 and realize you had screwed up your skillpoint allocation?

And if you can reset your skillpoints, everyone will min-max and look exactly the same.

To be fair, I think Blizzard realizes that all the old ranks are now a mistake. They were good in the old system, but the new system is completely different. I suspect that they probably would prefer to remove it or alter it, but they'd catch holy hell for removing people's Grand Marshal titles.

Perhaps with the new personal PvP rating in 2.3, we might eventually see a system where your rank depends on your personal PvP rating.

I might remember this wrong, but I think it actually was this way back in one of the beta versions of the game. So yeah, for all the reasons already stated they changed that. Having all characters really similar does make the game very easy to balance though.

I play Warcraft mainly for two reasons:

- Beating encounters with my guild.
- Customizing and 'dressing up' a character.

Like many others in this thread have said before I find the customizing part lacking depth. There's simply no way -yet- to really make your character stand out anymore. The lack of distinction between PvP and PvE gear is just the tip of the iceberg though. Especially in a raiding environment, people will minimax their stats and therefore go for the same gear once it drops. Everybody looks very much the same and even if the outfits Blizzard creates for us look plain ridiculous you're still forced to accept the look - there's no choice.

I keep telling myself that their item designers and model artists are really busy making tons of new pretty things for the next expansion and therefore have little time to really create different models for the old gear. But it's not really an excuse for the recent armor recolorings which really consist of pressing a keyboard shortcut in Photoshop and adjusting a few sliders and saving the texture file. It's just not right.

On the topic of achievements and titles I can't say I agree with those who ask for more titles and achievement tabs. What does a title do for you? If your guild kills an important boss most of the server who're interested in raiding progression will be aware of that accomplishment anyways. To a 'newbie' player a fancy title floating above your head will not mean much either since he/she might not even know what the title describes.

Instead, Blizzard should implement concepts which are actually useful and meaningful at the same time. How about giving players who killed a certain boss/cleared a dungeon/achieved a significant pvp title/achieved a certain arena ranking some kind of aura which can be triggered by the player and actually have gameplay effects? Think of paladin auras. Of course, those aura effects would have to be fairly weak so game balance would be kept. It could be a little more mana regeneration, some shadow resistance, some golden sparkles, whatever. As you progress through the game, you could collect these auras and even allow for certain auras to combine or stack. Possibilities are pretty endless and it would be a simple way to allow players to feel distinguished.

We need more trinkets like onyxia's book, c'thun's tentacle and the meteor. This spyglass is weak.

Yes, combining the 'auras' might be problematic. You're right. So we toss it out of the window. I still like the concept though. Sometimes on slow Saturdays I do 'pro bono' PuGs and heal a few casual people through 'tough' dungeons. While I do that for several reasons it certainly would provide me with a bit of a giggle if I could cast auras with silly or even useful effects, just because my character has been around for a while now and has messed with Nefarian, C'Thun etc.

It would be a fun thing to do and WoW needs a bit more of that. There's too much grind and too few smiles.

It's also possible to make more situational abilities, or abilities that are harder to convert reliably into effective AP. It's basically impossible to create a controlled experiment to determine exactly how much dps or or survivability an x% runspeed buff is worth (and it's highly variable by encounter). It would be possible, but very difficult, to make worthwhile abilities where the right choice is either unprovable or subjective/variable. So there is some wiggle room before there's a consensus best choice and everyone makes it.

As feral in pve i don't think there's necessarily one right answer to primal tenacity vs the cat mangle buff vs brutal impact vs intensity [i think that natural shifter is inarguable, at least post-2.3]. Of course, like in almost any game the hardest choices are the ones that make the least difference.

With gear on the other hand, especially for non-healers, everything right now readily converts into a metric and can be directly compared pretty accurately.

I've had an idea that has been crawling in my head for some time. This is deffinatly something that would give the raiding site of the game more depth and certainly touches the subject of distinguishing yourself from the average joe in a semi-hardcore raiding guild.

I played the final fantasy series as some of you have and one of the things that I really liked about it was the secrects and optional bosses. So when you finished everything, there were still cool super-bosses that you could strife to beat to improve your character. Well, why not implement something like that into WoW?

Let's imagine a boss placed on an island or cave somewhere on a remote place. He would not be part of raiding progression and not even lore for that matter. He would be a super-boss, incredibly challenging. He would have the complexity of a 4hm fight(only more complex) would require everyone in the raidgroup to have top notch gear, like requiring certain amount of raid dps or you won't keep up. And then have a despawn timer(so guilds like Nihilum can't spent 10 hours a day banging their heads on it)

So here is the question. Why would anyone want to beat the boss for some crappy 3-4 purples? Well, it's not a typical boss. Once killed a door behind it will open up and the raid will gain access to vendors that can greatly increase their gear. Add name tags, give the guild an Artifact that throws an aura on everyone that has the guild tag. It can be anything really, so feel free to toss ideas around.

But here comes the catch, implementing something like this without hurting game balance is really gonna test the strength of the developers, even might not be worth it in the long run. But i really like the idea and if it's possible to somehow take the idea further and try to balance it out i think it would really benefit the uber-raiding department and possibly the casuals aswell.(expand the lifetime of the expansion?)

I truly agree that there is demand for more fun things to do. There is just the resistance for change where everyone expect all things to give them direct item rewards, instead of thinking that for once something could be just funny or fun. Many games have mechanics that give absolutely no direct benefit to anyone, yet they are extremely addictive and fun. Some things just should be separated from the item grind system, not all things should feel like work.

I think I fall under the "Elitist Bastard" (Avoided the pun) class. Having played with the leading community (and now guild) of the server ever since Ragnaros (we're the only guild at Illidan now), I yearn for the days where walking around in Tier2 gear was indeed awe inspiring. For me, being the best is what I play for, and there's no use being the best if no one can see and be inspired by it.

I'm sure this all reflects badly on me, making me look like some attention seeking e-peener, (and indeed I am sure I have a reputation as such among guildies and perhaps even other guilds on my server), but it's just my reason for playing. Perhaps I've just been spoiled over the past 3 years.

With Season 3 gear looking like T6 (and in the case of Feral Druids such as myself, equally or more powerful) I feel that everything I value in endgame raiding and a large chuck of my reasons for playing WoW are shattered. More than once have I considered "Why the hell am I still playing this game?"

Don't get me wrong, I have a great time raiding, and I enjoy defeating endgame content even without the recognition and status that raiders used to have. It's just that things are starting to acquire a bitter taste when I see non-raiders with gear close to or better than mine.

I understand Blizzard though. With Arena being a competetive E-sport, they simply have to avoid raiders getting gear that is too powerful in Arena and thus creating imbalance.

As for possible solutions, buffing T6 gear would be a nice start. The Sunwell containing proper raiding itemnization for all classes and not being accompanied by a new Arena Season would be awesome.
I just doubt it'll happen.

The most annoying thing about the tiers looking the same is that we actually did have a distinctive look for pvp gear and raiding gear before. You were able to tell who did what simply by peeking at them from a safe distance. This has been taken away and I honestly can't understand why.