#0 - Aug. 9, 2009, 1:29 a.m.
I'm personally one of the people who dislike this "emblem of conquest to heroics" change. But I don't dislike it because I'm jealous of other people getting my precious epics, or anything like that. The reason why I'm against it is because this change fails at it's primary function - to help casuals gear up.
Allow me to explain. Ever since WotLK came out, progression in this game was kinda loose. Sure, you could have done it the proper way - normals - heroics - Naxx10 - Naxx25 - Ulduar (Yes, I know that Blizzard officially considers 10 and 25 people raids to be on separate progression paths.), but many people have skipped some of that stuff - like, the majority of non-tanks skipped normals entirely, many people have even skipped heroics and got straight into raids (Members of Ensidia being the most famous example, clearing all raiding content on normal just a few days after WotLK was released, but also a lot of other, less hardcore people did the same. A guy I know maintanked Naxx without stepping foot in a single heroic soon after WotLK was launched.). Yet, person would always be able and choose their own way of progressing - they could have gone on a more casual route and decided to go through normals, then heroics, etc. etc. or they could have gone "hardcore" and quickly powerlevel through all that, join a Naxx25 pug to get "boosted" and get easy epics, apply to raiding guilds and then carry on as normal raiders. But the thing is, you had a choice.
That is how it was before. With 3.2, the things changed pretty radically. Heroics used to be a place of gearing up characters - mains or otherwise, or maybe getting a few badges for BoA gear for people who want to level their alts as fast as possible. But today, heroics are practically "endgame" content. This means that a lot more people are going to do heroics from now on, and while on the first glance it might look that this actually benefits the casuals - more people to play with, right? - anyone who spend some time online post 3.2 will know that's not the case.
A lot of those people who now farm heroics aren't interested in heroics at all. They could have done it months ago, or they maybe were never much interested in them. So these players would want to get over it as quickly as possible. And what's the best way of clearing an instance fast? Overgearing it. Which means that people start to demand others to have the same gear as them - gear that is by far better than the ones people who want heroic gear have or even the heroic gear itself.
At this current point, the problem isn't that big. Yeah, sure, in the past few days, you've had people complaining about others demanding [Epic] achievement for heroics, but those were usually very few in numbers. But that's only going to get worse. As time passes, people are going to get better and better gear. And people with better gear naturally demand either the same gear level or an even better one from other players. It might not be fair, but that's how it is.
Allow me to demonstrate with an example. I got to level 80 fairly quickly when WotLK came out, by the end of the first week. I visited the AH, bought a few blues - just enough to have 535 defense and ~18.5k health. Then I joined the LFG channel and went on doing heroics. And I managed to do pretty much all of the heroics either in that gear, or in the slightly better gear I got from those heroics. And I never got a single word of complaint from anyone else about my gear. Everyone had bad gear back then, so there's no point demanding something that isn't physically possible from others. But check at the situation today. Any tank with less than 20k health is going to be laughed out of a heroic group. Even though the healers and the DPS are far better geared than those who went with me back in November to those same heroics. So even though by some logic the tanking requirements should be lower today, they're actually higher. It's got nothing to do with instance difficulty, it's simply human nature.
So, even if a new player recently got to level 80 pre-3.2, he had to suffer through some of these "injustices", but by buying good BoE gear from AH, gemming and enchanting his gear, he would've been able to pass through the gear check and actually progress in this game. But with this patch, the gear requirements are skyrocketing. In a month or so, I'm pretty sure 30k health unbuffed will be the standard for heroics. And how is a new player supposed to get that? That would simply not be physically possible, unless the said player can get a friend to give him tens of thousands of gold so he can buy Ulduar BoE epics and all that, and it's even then a question if that gear will be enough.
So, to shorten in up. Pre-3.2, progression went like this: Normals - Heroics - Raids. You didn't even have to go through the progression and you could skip some parts, but doing those parts definitely helped.
Post-3.2, that progression is gone. To do heroics, you need the gear that is only available in either heroics or in higher content, raids and whatnot. So there is going to be a barrier preventing new players to gear up, and they simply won't be able to get that kind of gear, since everyone will be demanding the [Epic] achievement and 30k health for tanks, and all that.
Blizzard's main intention with this patch was to reduce the gear cap between the "older" players, and those who just recently got to level 80. But I personally believe this will only make it worse. It will be good for now - the first month or so, but when the current batch of players already get done with it, those who will remain to still do it will have absurd gear demands from other players, and the new level 80 players simply won't be able to cope with that. The mess they're creating with this patch is by far greater than the mess created before it.
(This is a repost from the topic I made on GDF. Hope the mods don't mind, the topic fits both of these boards.)
