I don't have anything against it, I'm just not sympathetic to it. The rest of us spent 6 months gearing up on that content, I don't see why its such a terrible thing for new players to spend a month (or less) on it. You say that it took your Monk a month to get to 480, with the increased loot drops, increase elder charms, reduced valor prices, faster rep grinds, and new tag/spawn timers for the world bosses... its unlikely that you'd take anywhere near as long in 5.2
Of course it was easy in 5.1, you only need to grind dungeons to have the gear to be Ready for MSV, and grinding dungeons where you have no weekly cap on the amount you can run is Easy.
Getting a fresh 90 now in 5.2 when most guilds have moved onto ToT and generally don't run previous content results in the Heroic->LFR MSV->LFR HOF->LFR ToES->LFR ToT, gear circus, Not really an Enigma, but I understand some people do have 12 hours a day to sink into WoW.
I'm not going to tell you to grind Elder Charms, I'm going to ask how good it is for the longevity of the expansion when a new set of dungeons is introduced, with improved rewards, that make older dungeons obsolete. Great, now you have 3 dungeons instead of 9.
Active WoW player Jan 2006 - Aug 2020
Occasional WoW Classic Andy since.
Nothing lasts forever, as they say.
But at least I can casually play Classic and remember when MMORPGs were good.
Negative, Saved up as many coins as I could previous to 5.2 drop. Since I figured higher Loot chance was going to be Higher than it actually is, and was Lucky to pick up a whole tonne of coins from my first Trove Scenario, and Arcane Trove rewards.
Managed to blow them all in the past week already. all 27 :/
MgT was an experiment,
ICC 5mans offered too good rewards
Same with HoTs
New dungeons reduce the amount of 5mans people do, it's not a very good way of catching up in my opinion. If anything I'd probably like less RNG in 5.0 LFRs, but what effects does this have? Bosses dropping currency, and suddenly all the items you need is guaranteed? "oh hope it drops this time!" becomes "hurry up you retards I need to kill 7 more bosses for my Starshatter."
Players seemingly never consider these things.. or maybe they do, but then they have no reason to complain and you won't see them in the "I HATE RNG" threads. Blizzard wants to pump out content faster but this isn't anything new. Frankly I sometimes wonder if their standard of quality is too high (loud snort from quitters), to the point where all the different parts of putting together a raid starts to take too much time. Some older raids have a near cult following despite actually not being that good, except having something new in them, like activated HM modes in Ulduar or very memorable bosses
Last edited by MasterHamster; 2013-03-12 at 03:07 PM.
Active WoW player Jan 2006 - Aug 2020
Occasional WoW Classic Andy since.
Nothing lasts forever, as they say.
But at least I can casually play Classic and remember when MMORPGs were good.
This is an over exaggeration, with a new character you can take him to the isle of thunder and get a key in no time and not even need to do dailys this gives about min 10 golden coins. The queue times are only 25 mins usually if your a dps and up towards 40 mins if your doing it at an off time. You would only need to run MSV about once to get into HoF and Toes with the new drop rate, and HoF and Toes and those drop all the gear you need for Normal lvl of Thunder raid and if you want you can do the lfr coming out today and have better than heroic ilvl of last tier to get into Normal. EZ PZ no need to sit in Org and press i and farm boring dungeons non stop. (which still have long queue times for DPS)
"I hated hating Garrosh before it was cool."
FOR THE HORDE!!!
It isn't so much the "No catch up gear", it is the amount you need to go through just to get up to the "current" tiers LFR. I think Silverblade put it into a good layout.
Instead of in previous expansions where it was maybe: New Dungeons for Slightly higher than Normal Heroics Ilvl to Normal Mode Previous content Raid to Current Content Raid, sometimes even missing out the Middle part. I.e ICC 5mans > ToTc > ICC all within 19 ilvls of eachother, the 5mans gave 232, TOTC gave 232/245, ICC gave 251/264. Now it is 463 > 476(LFR/REP/Crafted) > 483(HoF/EOTS LFR) > 489(Rep) > 497(REP/Normal MSV) > 503 (Normal HoF ToES) > 502 (ToT LFR) just to get to 522 ToT normal mode.
Haven't checked, but I think the VP gear cost was also halved, so you should be able to pick up an item each week really... And probably 2 items in every third week....
Week 1: 625 VP item (that was 1250) 375 points left
week 2: 625 VP item again now you have 750 points left
So you could get another 625 item then in week 2 or save the 750 and go for two(!) 825 points item (was 1750), since the first would leave 175 VP plus the 750 from before.... that's really not bad.... considering you get drops also from LFR, you should be quite well geared in a matter of a week or 4.
The one Key I got only netted me 4 coins, from those 4 coins and a Full run of MSV, I got 2 pieces of Gear, I also managed to get 1000VP this week and bought 1 ring. I am now at ilvl 464. My Battlegroup is also Part Oceanic/US meaning I get around 30-35mins as a normal Queue. I spent 3-4 hours doing these MSV queues/runs.
I don't have too much problem with the badge vendor style rewards, like mentioned, this was the go-to design starting with late BC and most of Wrath.
I just don't think players need to be skipping tiers completely (even if it's just doing LFR, sadly). The game only has so much to do, and as soon as you're just jumping over raids, you're selling yourself short as far as what content you are consuming.
Last edited by fangless; 2013-03-12 at 03:30 PM.
Okay great you are an exception, next time have a layout for chest run or watch a youtube video because you did something wrong. Second of all just because you got 2 pieces out of a full msv run (Still not bad + more coins would've helped) doesn't mean since the buff your in the average. Third if you're desperate for gear they implemented the new sunreaver/ kirin tor vendor for helping gear alts. Do you're dailys and plant for them and run a single heroic for them and you should be able to buy atleast a piece of 476 gear with gold. Also you could've saved your valor for a 522 necklace (1200 valor) from shadowpan assualt and just waited one week to skyrocket ilvl.
"I hated hating Garrosh before it was cool."
FOR THE HORDE!!!
There's a difference between putting reasonable time in, and being dragged through pointless bullshit as a way to extend content for no other reason than to get people to play more often.
BC also had Badge gear for Inbetween ZA > T6 and on Isle of QD, which only cost Badges of Justice that you could basically cap out every day, unlike having 1000VP max a week, Other Epics from Rep vendors were also just bought with Gold after getting the required Rep. Gear Disparity was also a LOT lower, a Weapon you got in Kara was maybe only 50-75 damage different than one obtained in Gruuls/Mags/Eye/SSC, whereas 1 tier of content now there is a couple of thousand damage difference.
TBC barely had any catch-up mechanics. MGT dropped T4 gear, and not even enough for a full set. After that it was badges and raids. And badge gear was not cheap. If you were not raiding already, it could take you multiple weeks to get a single piece.
Wrath had emblem gear, which still took quite a while to get because you could only run heroics once per day. LFD did not exist until 3.3. The first dungeon added was ToC, 9 months after the expansion release. You could still only run the heroic once per day. Normal dropped Naxx-10 gear, heroic dropped Uludar-10 gear. Patch 3.3 introduced the catch-up mechanic style that Cata would employ throughout, with the inclusion of 3 new heroic dungeons dropping upgraded gear, and the LFD tool which allowed heroics to be chain run for the first time.
Cata was the only expansion to include an instant catch-up mechanic each tier, via heroic dungeons and the LFD tool. It is also the first expansion that suffered a subscription loss. Such losses actually started prior to the launch of Cata but were not reported until post launch. Granted, there were many factors that led to the sub losses, but I am confident in saying that it was a factor in at least some of the dropped subs.
So saying that instant catch-ups did not hurt any of the prior 3 expansions is fairly incorrect. The first two did not really have any at least until the end of Wrath, and the third (which was the only one to actually have them) was the worst performing xpac Blizzard has released to date.
Last edited by Gurbz; 2013-03-12 at 03:28 PM.
I found I enjoyed the game significantly more when I stopped paying attention to all the people on the forums telling me how much I am supposed to hate itAll this complaining is simply further proof that Blizzard could send each and every player a real-life wish-granting flying unicorn carrying a solid gold plate of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in hundred dollar bills, and someone would whine that Blizzard sucks for not letting them choose oatmeal raisin.