Mordiceius' Gaming Blog Flying Away on a Wing and a Prayer

The History of Tier Sets in World of Warcraft and Mudflation in Cataclysm

I am really curious what the effect of mudflation is going to be on the items in Cataclysm. But first, I wanted to take a look at the history of the tiers of armor sets within World of Warcraft.

The first tier was gained from Molten Core. The characters were level 60 and the item level was 66. Tier two, from Blackwing Lair, was item level 76 and vanilla WoW's last tier, in Naxxramas, wrapped up the game at item level 88.

When the Burning Crusade expansion was released, mileage varied on the gear. The rebalancing of stamina made green quest rewards quickly replace armor and weapons. Weapons were the fastest replaced. I doubt anyone used vanilla WoW weapons past level 65 or 66. As for armor, set bonuses often made it worth it to keep the armor for another level or two instead of upgrading for an upgrade to stamina. Tier one was replaced by level 62-64, tier two was replaced by 64-66, and tier three was mostly replaced by 66-70. This is mostly when dealing with green quest rewards. If you did dungeon diving and were lucky with your blue drops, gear was often replaced even faster.

Tier four was item level 120 and gained from Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and Magtheridon's lair. Tier five, from Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep, were item level 133 and tier six, from Black Temple, was item level 146. Much of the gear from Sunwell was around item level 159 and finished of the Burning Crusade.

With the release of Wrath of the Lich King, there was not the stamina rebalance like in the Burning Crusade so gear often lasted longer. Most weapons however were still replaced by around level 76. Most people kept tier four until level 72-74, tier five until level 74-76, tier six until level 76-79, and Sunwell gear all the way to 80. I knew many people that walked into Naxxramas the first time still in their Sunwell gear.

The problem then comes with the way gear has been handled with this expansion. Originally, each 10 man was going to have gear equivalent to the 25man before it. Thus, 10man ulduar gear would be the same quality as 25man Naxxramas gear. 10man Icecrown gear would be the same quality of 25man Colesseum gear. This did not pan out. I do not know if it was due to complains or whatever, but it it came to pass that the 10 man gear would end up superior to the 25man gear before it. Had this gone to pass, you would have had five tiers of gear for this expansion: 10man Naxx gear at item level 200, 25man Naxx/10man Ulduar gear at item level 213, 25man Ulduar/10man Colesseum gear at item level 226, 25man Colesseum/10man Icecrown Gear at item level 239, and lastly the 25man Icecrown gear at item level 252.

While in looking to the future this would still cause problems, the rise in item levels would be a bit more manageable. But instead, now we are treated with eight nine tiers of gear. We have 10 man tier seven at item level 200, 25 man tier seven at item level 213, 10 man tier eight at item level 219, 25 man tier eight at item level 226, 10 man tier nine at item level 232, 25 man tier nine at item level 245, 25 man heroic tier nine at item level 258, 10 man tier ten at item level 251 and 25 man tier ten at a speculated item level 264.

This is all well and good at the moment, but I question when I look forward to the future. With both the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, you did not need raid armor to continue. You could hit level 58 and head to Outland or hit level 68 and head to Northrend without much of a hiccup in difficulty and the gear you got would progress nicely (aside from the massive stamina boost you got the second you start wearing Outland gear). Gear from quests scaled at a rate that after ten levels, people who were wearing the best gear from the previous iteration of the game would start replacing it and the people who had were just leveling fresh characters would have a generally even progression with quest/dungeon loot.

But with Cataclysm, the expansion is only going to be five levels long. That gives us only five levels to have a gear reset. Had the expansion been ten levels long, I would have expected Naxxramas gear to last to 82-84, Ulduar gear to last from 84-86, Colesseum gear to last from 86-89, and Icecrown gear to last until 90. But we are only going to level 85 now. To get from Karazhan quality quest rewards at level 71 to Sunwell quality quest rewards at level 80 does not seem as crazy as going from Naxxramas quality quest rewards at level 81 to Icecrown quality quest rewards at level 85.

So this means that either the gear reset will not be complete by level 85, we will have significant quality jumps in quest rewards between each level, or the difference in quality between quest reward gear and the gear from the first raid are going to be astronomical.

The reason I put this point forward is because if the first heroic and raid gear in Cataclysm is not superior to the best gear in Icecrown, what incentive is there for people to run these instances.

If the quest rewards scaled like they did for the previous expansions, we would only be to around Ulduar quality quest rewards at level 85. That would mean the first heroics and raids would either present loot on par or inferior to the loot in Colesseum/Icecrown or have to have a huge jump in loot quality from the questing gear so that it could be better than the Icecrown/Colesseum loot.

Either way, it is going to be interesting to see how Blizzard rectifies this situation because it seems like quite a delicate one to me.