CD

I think there's only one barrier left in terms of being able to tune content really tightly- endurance. If the endurance issue is addressed then it would be possible to make a boss with dps, healing and spike survival requirements.
There has been a real lack of gearchecks thus far in the expansion- the BT release and consumables change happening at the same time was always going to make it hard, now healing and damage limits should be known and it should be easier to tune things harder.
I'll be disappointed if SP is finely tuned and endurance is ignored- it's something that's a bigger issue now than in the past and will only get worse in the future as hp pools scale up further and now would surely be a great time to find a solution.

 

• Snowy

How is this any different than the previous levels of attunement? i.e. have to kill Vash/Kael to access T6, now you're saying you have to kill Illidan to access Sunwell. It's the same thing, you're just disguising it in a different way. I guess it does mean you don't have to go back to key someone to catch up though, which is something.

For the prevoius poster regarding endurance -- this is tricky these days with shadow priests thrown in the equation.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

• Playered

Regarding this point, while a FP is generally going to be enough for people, no matter the pleads for a Teleport in Shattrath City.
It would be nice if, as a perk of defeating Kael'Thas in TK, you could either loot an object that works like the BT neck once you kill Illidan, or if there is a new quest implemented which provides you with the item as a reward after you defeat him.

While I personally wince at every mention of raiding TK, this would atleast be something that would inspire me to want to do it again, and as most guilds have around 30-40 raiders in them it provides another 2 weeks of 'content' for people to re-use atleast.

 

Lavode

Tanks, at least, can gear up to a reasonable (ie: healable) standard for heroics purely on quest awards and crafted gear. Faith in Felsteel and heavy clefthoof are very, very, good (and dirt cheap) sets, and focused questing will set you up with workable gear choices for the rest. This worked for me before the nerf rounds of the heroics, and it still should work for any tank, since blacksmiths and leatherworkers are still dumping faith in felsteel and heavy clefthoof gear on the AH for factions of the worth of the materials they take to make.
Back when we were starting kharazan the raidbank bought every last platewearer in the guild full faith in felsteel at something like 140 g per set. It's not quite that cheap anymore, but its not far off... Of course, the problem is that the hopeful tank has to know that the ah is itching to sell him the bargain of a lifetime, or you wind up trying go farm bold or something silly like that.

 

Acacia

No, nothing in regards to crafting at all.

That said, please send a trackback with your comments to my blog (Acaciaizm.com | New Sunwell Details – Part Three) or post a comment there if you have any further questions and want an answer. My time spent trolling forums during the holidays will be down to a minimum

UI's: Acaziaizm Original | Acaciaizm MiniMe | Acaciaizm MiniMe: Healbot Edition | Acaziaizm Semi

 

Krazen

Oh, I fully agree. Naxx had the advantage of being a huge instance. But they could have done this with Illidan (possibly the original intent of the 15 minute berserk?), but chose not to.

The same could have been done with Archimonde, requiring you to go 4/5, 6/9 before you had the gear to fight him. But Archi is a rather underwhelming fight IMO for such a powerful lore character. I wish they had incorporated Malfurion in a meaningful fashion.

 

Lohmarn

Umm...Kil'Jaeden? Guldan? Bosses in ZG and ZA? Just to namea a few

 

• Playered

Not to mention The Lich King ? as a created entity he was brought forth with a purpose of evil intent, Arthas aside it's the Lich King who is in control.

Forgive me if I'm mistaken on this point, I have not been into lore much in the last year after it got butchered so much.

 

Emeraude

Kil'Jaeden used to be a Drenaei and is Valen's brother, that entire race was peaceful before Sargeras according to the NEW lore, now the old lore had them as evil and demonic and the cause for Sargeras' insanity, but alas we're going off of the new stuff

Gul'dan and the Orcs were corrupted, none of them started off evil, savage maybe, but not evil.

Zul'Gurrub Trolls were desperate and turned to Hakkar after the fall of their empire due to the Elves/Humans, they weren't evil, in fact I think they thank you for releasing them from their torment upon their deaths.

Zul'Aman Trolls are the remnants of Zul'jin's trolls from the 2nd War, the Elves have joined the Horde, the expansion just as well could have given the Horde Forest Trolls and made the High Elves of Silvermoon your enemy, and we'd be 10-manning Silvermoon. Trolls are hardly evil, but they sure have gotten the short end of the conquering stick over the past thousand years.

Tra la la, Lich King = Ner'zhul, Ner'zhul was tricked by the legion into attacking the Drenaei, when Kil'Jaeden appeared under the guise of his dead lover. By the time Ner'zhul had figured out what had happened it was too late, his people were corrupted, and Gul'dan began leading the Horde behind the shadows.

After the Horde lost the 2nd War, he attempted to open portals to escape their dead and dying world, however he ended up opening a portal directly to Legion HQ, and Kil'Jaeden ripped him to pieces, and forced him to become the entity known as the Lich King.

Arthas was a Paladin before his decent into madness, his intentions were never to become evil, but the extremes he had to go through due to the Undead's relentless attacks on his homeland led to his downfall.

 

Kazanir

Don't forget the whole evil sword leading to madness and undeath part.

'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. I told you. This is bigger than a war. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.

You can come with me. I can protect you.

 

Starfire

Pit Lords? Shivarra? Are they truely evil? Worgen?

Dark Iron Dwarves!

 

Zipher

Everyone in World of Warcraft is "evil" to another faction. The orcs are evil to the Night elves because they're cutting down the Ashenvale forest. The dwarves are evil to the tauren because they're digging up sacred grounds.

These villains were not some sort of altruistic heroes that were then corrupted. They were only "good" to their own people. And it wouldn't really make sense for a human to be born as evil as Arthas or a night elf to be born as evil as Illidan, so of course there would be something that turns, corrupts, or enslaves them. How else would they become a villain?

Arthas wasn't trying to save the world, he was only trying to save his people. He was a threat to the horde and forsaken long before he became part of the Lich King.

If every villain was from some inherently evil race of creatures we'd be fighting a lot more demons than we already are.

 

• Mjollnir

If not this patch, or next expansion, I'd still enjoy seeing a BG/arena that requires an attunement process. Bring exclusivity to the PvP world.

 

Mirajj

What kind of meaningful attunement would you put on PvP? Must kill X number of players before you can pass this gate? Must have attained Y rank? Must successfully complete a WSG PuG? Must have been a GM previous to TBC? Realistically now, if you put some kind of attunement into pvp, you'd see it dying pretty quick, too. Attunements are killing raiding (refer to any number of topics here on it). One of the sole draws to pvp (remember how popular it used to be...) is that it's accessible to anyone. You don't have to be in an uberguild to see it, you don't have to play 5 hours a night, 3-6 times a week.

Are there really that many higher rated pvp players? If you put some kind of attunement in there, would you end up facing off vs the same 3 2v2 teams every time you played, for instance? Thing with PvP is, anyone can do it. I can log on to any of my toons, jump into any BG or arena, and play. I may or may not get steamrolled, but I saw it. I played it, I was there. If I enjoy pvp, that makes me a happy customer.

Unlike raiding, which I have to dedicate a large portion of my free time to do, if I'm any good or want to get anywhere in it. I'd love to finish SSC and TK. I'd really, really love to see BT/Hyjal...but I know that realistically, it's very, very unlikely to actually happen due to circumstances I can't really control.

Be careful of what you wish for. Say there's some hot new 20v20 BG that only the 1337est of the 1337 can get into. You may play it once or twice before you start to see recycled opponents. Then things go quickly downhill from there.

~Not all who wander are lost~

 

Renew

That's not really going to help arena move forward. I would rather see an automated matchmaking tourney system like war3. Have rewards only the best can earn through there if anything exclusive.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

Hate Monkey

Really now? You need to let your imagination flow and just think of all the endless possibilities for what kind of PvP attunements are available.

Those are the wrong words to use. Back tiering attunements is what is hurting raiding, not attunements.

Heres a question to ask yourself: If they worked a bit more on the network coding, would you object to having the top whatever # of teams in each arena category, from each BG, being able to play amongst all the BGs? This would act like an attunement for PvP. They would have to do a different point system for this, at it would vary week to week, but would give the high end teams more to do than facing the same teams each match, or having to farm the lower ranked teams.

Is it not realistically going to happen due to you not wanting to leave your current guild because of friends and loyalty? Or not going to happen because of any other reason?


There are endless options for PvP attunements, you just have to stop being so bold headed and let your imagination flow. The options you pointed out are bad because they've been used, not exactly, in other areas of the game, and shown to not work entirely.

The one idea I would like to see used is some sort of King of the Hill type arena'ing. As long as you keep winning, you stay in the arena and keep playing, lose, and reenter the queue. This would lead to some very interesting matches over time.


Back to Sunwell;
We know very very little of whats going on with Kil'Jaeden, but the ONE thing we do know is that he is being summoned to Azeroth, what exactly isn't summoned yet though?

As for the reputation required to enter the later part of the instance, and the dailies, why not put a cap on how much can be done per day, something low that the low pop servers can reach it easy enough, but the high pop servers have no trouble getting to it, and people don't get stressed out with the crowd at the area?

 

Copernicus

I'm kind of interested in the shifting of the baseline for a level 70 character. With Patch 2.3, both the PvP track and the PvE track got bumped up one tier. PvP characters could honor their way to full season one while PvE characters could, with effort in the Kara/Heroic tier, obtain Tier 5 gear.

I'm suspecting that the new 5-man and/or dailies might even get up to BT/MH gear. It sounds like their main goal is to allow a completely new-to-70 character to get around 1.5 tiers behind the top of the line characters at 70. Personally, I like this a lot more than the situation in vanilla WoW. Catching up via pugging is a lot better than bringing along a green guy to BWL/AQ40 to AFK and grab disenchanted loots.

 

Masq

I much prefer "recycled" opponents, it adds a much better community feeling knowing who you're playing against, rather than just playing against "lolfrostmagex" and "mswarrior475" . Didn't you prefer the pre-cross server battlegrounds? I certainly did.

http://www.aftermathlb.com

 

Vaccine

Mannoroth and the Anhillian are, as far as current lore (and pre-TBC fumbled lore) state have always been evil. I mean its tough to define it in a purely black and white fashion but those guys would be on the far right of the scale whichever way you look at it. They don't kill for survival or hunting, they kill for pleasure. I'm sure we'll see a lot more of them in the future now that Azgalor is in charge as hes more bloodthirsty than Mannaroth was, they are still the Burning Legion's most powerful weapon.

As for bad guys that have been good, well its not that they were good essentially, just that most of the mortal characters aren't born one way or another. Influence from events in their childhood/life can change them one way or another. Whilst I'm getting a little tired of the demonic corruption/Old God corruption etc... its not a terrible thing to happen lore wise, WoW has always been heavily intergrated with the idea of demonic taints and corruption. I kind of started to like the ones where theres no demonic corruption involved, no Old Gods whispering in their ears, they are just a generally nasty fella out for personal gain like VC.

 

Mirajj

As Alliance? Oh, hell no. Why would I just love queuing up and waiting 1-4 hours before a match, which may or may not have been long in process already? Cross server BG's were the best thing to happen to PvP in a long time, I felt, as I could finally now actually PLAY in the BG's instead of logging on, and wondering if I'd get in a single match before logging for the night.

As well, unless I am misremembering, recycled opponents give you no honor. Now, like PvE, there are some who PvP for the sheer pleasure of it, but without the carrot of Honor dangled, how long will things last in there?

~Not all who wander are lost~

 

Duodecimal

For purely evil beings, or at least amoral, there's at least three supply pools. Twisting Nether natives, denizens of the Elemental Planes and their lords the Lieutenants, who in turn serve the Old Gods.

The lore also makes foreboding and ominous references to the return of the titan Pantheon, but if they're hostile it'll just be a continuance of the ultimate icing on the "went crazy" cake, Sargeras.

 

• Mjollnir

@Mirajj @Renew: So you think a quest to kill one of the opposing factions leaders, coupled with attaining 2000 personal rating (under the upcoming foolproof system), would be too taxing to complete?
Once completing the 2 requirements, whenever you face off with a team who has also successfully completed the aforementioned, rather than play on a usual arena, you face off on the 'secret level'. People would rush like mad to form PvP raids to down the opposing faction's leader, not to mention fight for 2k rating.
Now Blizz's design team can go nuts- bringing the beauty and awe for PvE zones to the world of PvP.

 

Duilliath

Sorry to disappoint you, but even VC didn't start out evil

After just handing in his head for umpteenth time (seems like he's some lizard, constantly regrowing it), again I was presented with his history - he (and his Stonemasons) rebuilt Stormwind after the War. Then the nobles screwed over the Stonemasons and didn't cough up the dough. Ole Eddy decided to get even with the Nobles.

Even someone as quintessential as VC was corrupted along the way.

 

• Playered

To that end you could say no 'humanoid' started off evil as they must of been born, and as a baby you cannot be technically evil (except to small animals), only corrupted as time goes on.


Regarding the line of an Arena Attunement, while it would be nice to have some 'higher' tier of Arena, do you not get that from Tournaments and so-forth which is only available to the very top end of the Arena population? (regional laws withstanding)

If anything all they need do is simply add miniture tournaments like they did in War3, then they could perhaps invest some time into some bonus Tournament Arena's as there would be more use in them.

 

Pyros

Just a small thing, killing leaders is PvE. You kill guards, and a npc, and you can't kill players until they start attacking you even on PvP servers. There's an equal number of "fun" pvp occurance when killing leaders that there is unfun ones, where the alliance/horde just mass up around you until they're sure they'll be able to one shot enough people, and engage all at once, while you're fighting stupid non stop respawning guards and AEing bosses.