[Blue] Epics will be epic again in Cataclysm!

[Knighthonor]

Well, hopefully this comes as good news. We're actually working on restoring the epic feeling to epic items in Cataclysm. Epic loot should be epic, and something to be very proud of. Our plan is to try and get the Heroic -> Blue Gear and Raid -> Purple Gear balance back.

This is further proof that not everything Deathwing does is entirely a bad thing. =) (Source)

There you go

LOL Iam not sure how that really changed anything at all other than the color of the name.

Better gear have always come from RAIDING. Nothing ever changed about that.

[Mistress Elizabeth]

I'll believe it when I see it. As it is, running the daily heroic every day will still result in epics raining from the sky.

If the starting "Heroic Point" gear is anything like how we had it in WoTLK, The no limit cap on Heroic points (only valor points will have a cap I believe for the week) coupled with the new LFG and the ability to repeat Heroics again... I think will allow people to gear up in a few days.

Heck, even without the whole Heroic Point buyables, you'd still be able to chain heroics like crazy, I know I'll be a happy tank with a 1 sec queue time, gearing up as I wish while doing what I love, tanking.

[ChildeRoland]

You are all aware that in the end, either blues gonna compete with epics, or it gonna be just like it is now, but emblem bought items are blue instead of epic? Just sayin'.

[Rafrok]

So you skipped the 23 page argument on it or somthing? 0o

My tongue critted my cheek.

[Zeniff]

I am super stoked that they will be restoring the balance. I remember working to get all blue gear. Stoked to have that gear progression make another appearance in game.

[Kaneiac]

What's otherwise the point of playing a game?

To enjoy myself and have fun.

I'm the guy who has tens of thousands of hours into FFVII. I wouldn't consider myself casual, for example.

It's just kind of a disturbing trend to see people spend so much time on something they don't enjoy and/or scrutinize so fucking much, just to be better than another group of people or specific people. It seems a little misplaced.

[tanked]

its a nice idea, but it will never happen..

the reason epics were epic in vanilla was b/c raids were a pain in the ass to get into, and they dropped blues.
raids in LK on the other hand were accessible and dropped all purple gear.

so unless cata raids drop blues its going to be the same situation all over again.

[Brittany]

Excuse me, but how is it at 'your expense'? You did the content and are done with it, you claim you don't care about the gear that other players can get that are similar to yours, yet it's at 'your expense' when someone else gets to see the content that blizzard designed?

What is wrong with having players who aren't as good as you see the hardest content in the game, even if it is nerfed down so they can actually do it? Why does it bother you so much? It honestly shouldn't because you shouldn't give a shit why or how other people play the game.

It's at our expense when we have spent a week or so on Steelbreaker last, finally get him down, go top of our realm progression to find out he's nerfed the following day and every other guild on our realm one shots him then.

It's at our expense when we work relentlessly at getting down a boss only for it to be nerfed after a 2% wipe and being able to do it with our eyes closed which feels pretty cheap.

It's at our expense when all of the challenge is taken out of the game and the content we're left to farm for 3 months poses no challenge at all and is boring as hell.

Why can't they just keep the heroic mode hard, thats all I'm asking. Why must it be Pug'd. Why? They can kill the boss on normal, they can get pretty much identical loot, they can see all the lore.

What more do you want? You want them to make it so you can solo LK next? :-)

[americandavey]

Fact that a Cm makes an vague statement without going into detail, I don't care what some Europe CM states on the forums. Till I see a Ghostcrawler or Chilton post about that "epic feeling" It is all nonsense.

[Mith]

What more do you want? You want them to make it so you can solo LK next? :-)

Hell yes! because I pay the same monthly fee you do! edit: on hardmode ofc.!

j/k :3

[Frozenbeef]

Brittany - So you are moaning because other guilds worked hard on a boss in order to beat them?

If you are talking about the optional icc buff then it comes out like every month...a whole month for you to down them and claim glory/ gear.

Its to give other people a chance , stop being selfish and let them have a go

You saying that all pugs can do every boss is stupid, no matter what, if the buff was to go to 100% people would still wipe.

[sicness]

It's at our expense when we have spent a week or so on Steelbreaker last, finally get him down, go top of our realm progression to find out he's nerfed the following day and every other guild on our realm one shots him then.

It's at our expense when we work relentlessly at getting down a boss only for it to be nerfed after a 2% wipe and being able to do it with our eyes closed which feels pretty cheap.

It's at our expense when all of the challenge is taken out of the game and the content we're left to farm for 3 months poses no challenge at all and is boring as hell.

Why can't they just keep the heroic mode hard, thats all I'm asking. Why must it be Pug'd. Why? They can kill the boss on normal, they can get pretty much identical loot, they can see all the lore.

What more do you want? You want them to make it so you can solo LK next? :-)

Again though I ask, why do they have to keep it hard? I'm not saying every single person in the game should be able to see heroic LK and down it, but expecting to have content just to yourself is selfish. And again I ask, why do you care how other people see it? You saw it at the point you did, nothing more should matter. You shouldn't care if someone else did the same content two tiers of gear later and the only difference in your and their achievements is the dates.

Either way you're going to clear the content, whether it's hard or not, and honestly I'm in the same boat as you clearing content for 3 months and it being any harder or easier doesn't' make it any less boring for me. In fact I like the constant ICC buffs because it allows us to slack more and enjoy the raiding rather than have to focus 100% during farming.

You shouldn't worry too much about the content being the way it is in cataclysm because a few of the things you dislike will be 'fixed'. Guilds will be much more important so less pugs will go on because of that, and gear won't scale so outrageously like it did in this expansion, making it more difficult to go back and do old content for drakes than it is now.

[Brittany]

Yeah!! Lets make it so you can all solo LK.. On hard mode! With no buff!!! And lets have him drop Frostmournes for everyone!!!!!! You can all be LK woot!!!!! Oh and lets make him drop identical hats and scarves for all so noone feels left out!!! And a pink fluffy bunny pet all round!(Source)

Seriously when did MMO-Champion become full of casuals?

[Lorellto]

I lol'd and stopped reading at "...ZG, the first raid...." ah that was good.

[rabbimojo]

...
What motivation is there for us to not take 2 weeks off and just wait for the easymode?

I think that's a question you need to ask yourselves. As GC snarked recently, why not just wait for the next xpac entirely and come back and beat everything with that new stuff?
Essentially, what's happening is as follows.

The RPG formula is a check, "Is X + Y > Z?", where X is your stats, Y is your skill, and Z is the encounter difficulty. (It generalizes to raids pretty trivially.)
In a normal RPG, you are able to improve Y through repeated attempts, and X through grinding. Z is fixed.
In a multiplayer RPG, players often derive value from having beaten it with a lower X or higher Z, because that implies their Y (skill) is superior to other players.
In WoW, we have nothing in-game to acknowledge that achievement, whatever it was. You get Kingslayer whether you did it with 5% or 30%. This bugs people, but I haven't seen an elegant solution to it proposed.
In WoW, we also have a cap on X, based on what gear can be acquired.

ICC's setup, in this context, is to leave X + Y as it is, and instead reduce Z over time (via the buff... technically this raises X, but that's a meaningless interpretation).
This has set a lot of people off, because it means that content is nerfed automatically, making it so that you can't even just say "We did Z pre-nerf, you did it post-nerf." There's at least the 7 different levels of the nerf to discuss (since doing it at 10% is better than 15%, and so on), meaning people tend to just ignore it entirely.

Fundamentally many players are not going to increase Y. They require that with time, X increases. Most don't really care if Z decreases unless the max X + their Y will never be greater than Z. (IE, if no matter what gear they get they will never beat the encounter) Those players want to beat Z at some point. Blizz chose to reduce Z gradually, though they could have just gone into uber loot pinata mode, released a bunch of EoF ilvl284 gear.

Basically there's no easy solution to this. It's hard enough having:
1) Players who want Z to be high (IE, want all encounters to be really hard) so they can prove their skill
2) Players who eventually want X >> Z (so they can see the content no matter their skill)
But nowadays we've got
3) Players in (1) who want a strict max on X and a strict min on Z (limited gear, and no encounter nerfs) so that their accomplishments remain distinctive.

Seems Blizz needs to spend more time riffing on how to reward those players without upsetting the rest of the community.

[snowblind]

Seriously when did MMO-Champion become full of casuals?

When did raiders become such vindictive, whiny babies?

[Frozenbeef]

Seriously when did MMO-Champion become full of casuals?

You assume the people that are arguing against you are casual? Just because they have a differing opinon and can see more than their own point of view?

[Alraml]

Strictly speaking, it is NOT just a cosmetic thing. Go look at an ilvl 200 blue and an ilvl 200 epic. You'll note that the epic has better stats. Epics have a bigger budget than blues for the same ilvl. I'm sure things will be balanced accordingly, but I want to make sure people don't go off thinking that the only difference between a purple and a blue is the color. That's not the case.

I'm referring to best in slot. Of course I know that, but some blues strictly speaking I didn't get rid of for ages because no matter how shiny an epic was, I couldn't afford to lose the high-hit rating on my blues.

In the same vein I don't want people to go = Oh that's an purple and i'm wearing a blue, that automatically makes it better.

[Mistress Elizabeth]

Yeah!! Lets make it so you can all solo LK.. On hard mode! With no buff!!! And lets have him drop Frostmournes for everyone!!!!!! You can all be LK woot!!!!! Oh and lets make him drop identical hats and scarves for all so noone feels left out!!! And a pink fluffy bunny pet all round!(Source)

Seriously when did MMO-Champion become full of casuals?

Toad: Sorry Brittany, but the serious, min maxing hardcore posters are in another website.

[Brittany]

I think that's a question you need to ask yourselves. As GC snarked recently, why not just wait for the next xpac entirely and come back and beat everything with that new stuff?
Essentially, what's happening is as follows.

The RPG formula is a check, "Is X + Y > Z?", where X is your stats, Y is your skill, and Z is the encounter difficulty. (It generalizes to raids pretty trivially.)
In a normal RPG, you are able to improve Y through repeated attempts, and X through grinding. Z is fixed.
In a multiplayer RPG, players often derive value from having beaten it with a lower X or higher Z, because that implies their Y (skill) is superior to other players.
In WoW, we have nothing in-game to acknowledge that achievement, whatever it was. You get Kingslayer whether you did it with 5% or 30%. This bugs people, but I haven't seen an elegant solution to it proposed.
In WoW, we also have a cap on X, based on what gear can be acquired.

ICC's setup, in this context, is to leave X + Y as it is, and instead reduce Z over time (via the buff... technically this raises X, but that's a meaningless interpretation).
This has set a lot of people off, because it means that content is nerfed automatically, making it so that you can't even just say "We did Z pre-nerf, you did it post-nerf." There's at least the 7 different levels of the nerf to discuss (since doing it at 10% is better than 15%, and so on), meaning people tend to just ignore it entirely.

Fundamentally many players are not going to increase Y. They require that with time, X increases. Most don't really care if Z decreases unless the max X + their Y will never be greater than Z. (IE, if no matter what gear they get they will never beat the encounter) Those players want to beat Z at some point. Blizz chose to reduce Z gradually, though they could have just gone into uber loot pinata mode, released a bunch of EoF ilvl284 gear.

Basically there's no easy solution to this. It's hard enough having:
1) Players who want Z to be high (IE, want all encounters to be really hard) so they can prove their skill
2) Players who eventually want X >> Z (so they can see the content no matter their skill)
But nowadays we've got
3) Players in (1) who want a strict max on X and a strict min on Z (limited gear, and no encounter nerfs) so that their accomplishments remain distinctive.

Seems Blizz needs to spend more time riffing on how to reward those players without upsetting the rest of the community.

At last someone understands. This is exactly what I meant. Haha, where did you pull that math from?

I do believe there are a lot of people who want to be special snowflakes. I believe theres a lot of people that want better gear than "casuals" or less skilled players. But there are the group that are simply looking for challenge and a reward for that challenge.

In the past it was always there and not just in raiding. You used to find reward in Timbermaw rep grinds even. I enjoyed that stuff and it's been taken away and replaced with easy grinds so everyone can have.

It's been hard for this group because this expansion took a complete 180 on raiding and design planning in my opinion.