Solving the Problem of Group Quests
Posted by Mordiceius at 12:14 pm
I like group quests. No, I love group quests. I think properly implemented group quests can give a great sense of immersion. The problem is, so few group quests are properly implemented.
I was thinking back to Lord of the Rings Online. I love the game world, but the amount of group quests was wholly depressing. It was not because there were not enough but instead too many and mostly were poorly implemented. On the other side of the coin, when Blizzard revamped some of the leveling in World of Warcraft (I think it was around patch 2.2), they removed practically all group quests from the vanilla world.
Generally, the three main problems I have seen with group quests are:
- Flow
- Enemy Saturation
- Population Density
Flow
A group quest should be a culminating event. In Lord of the Rings Online there would be multiple times when the quest flow would be Solo->Solo->Group->Solo->Solo->Group. This can create massive roadblocks for the player. If you are doing the questline with some random PUG players and a tank or healer leave half way through the quest chain, it becomes a lot harder to fill that spot.
Proper flow would hopefully go something more like Solo->Solo->Solo->Solo->Group->Group or Solo->Solo->Solo->Solo->Solo->Group. All the group quests should be at the end of the quest chain so that everyone can get up to that point together. Furthermore, I think group quests should only be the final quest in the chain. Having multiple group quests in a row can be tiresome and still create player roadblocks.
Enemy Saturation
Dol Dinen (at least how it was when I used to play) in Lord of the Rings Online is a terrible way to design an area. The area is filled with literally hundreds of enemies and all of the enemies are elite. You need to have a full group to even venture into the area. If one person gets separated, they will die and you will have to clear the way to their body to resurrect them because they will not be able to run back to you due to respawns behind you.
Areas filled with elite enemies should only be in instances where you by design will be with a full group at all times. I do not believe that any area in the open world of an MMO should be filled with elites. The best solution would be to have the area filled with normal enemies and then just have the "big bad" of the area be elite to coincide with the group quest to kill them. This way, it helps the players fill powerful themselves by being able to solo the generic trash but still make the big bad seem a powerful foe.
Population Density
This might be the biggest problem with group quests. When new content or a new expansion comes out, it is usually simple to get a group together for quests as thousands of people will be doing the content. Six months later or even years later, it is much different. When leveling in the time after the initial rush of people, most players will just skip the group quests. It is just too much work to try to find a group for it. If there is a quest reward they really want or need, they will just get a high level person to run them through the quest.
There are multiple ways you can handle this. You could just not put any group quests into the game, but I think that is a poor solution and can easily be thrown out. You could, after six to twelve months turn all the group quests into solo quests. I do not like that solution since it generally ruins the "epicness" of the quest. The third option, and my personal favorite, is to give companions.
I am not a fan of full time NPC companions. I do not want everyone having a full party of companions all day every day and forever only running around in a group of companions. Instead, a few months after a new game's release players should be given something like a "companion summoning horn" or something of that nature. When used, it would summon companions to fill out your party. The caveat is that they would only last for ten minutes and the horn would be on a one hour cooldown.
With this solution, players can still get the epic feel of the group quest even when the main mass of players has moved on to the level cap. If it had been implemented in World of Warcraft, it could have initially been usable only from levels 1-60. Six months after the Burning Crusade expansion came out, they could extend the item to work from 1-70. Six months after Wrath of the Lich King's launch, the could once more extend it to work from 1-80. People in the initial rush would be forced to group with each other, but new players to the game after the rush or even alts of players would still be able to accomplish group quests without sacrificing the integrity of the quest.
Like I said in the beginning, I think group quests are a fun and immersive part of MMORPGs, I just think the implementation needs tweaking so everyone can do them.
Nostalgia Shattered
Posted by Mordiceius at 12:54 pm
If there is one thing playing these new alts in WoW has done, it is make me want Cataclysm more. I do not play alts often so I often forget how mind-numbing the old content can be. I think fondly back of leveling when I first started playing WoW and since the game was so new and fresh, everything seemed awesome. With each expansion, the questing content has gotten better and better.
Going back and playing the old content really makes me excited for when it is all destroyed. I am glad Blizzard optimized questing with each expansion. So many quests are so spread out with little to no reward. It takes me more time to run to the quest giver to get the quest than it actually takes to do the quest. Having to run from zone to zone just to talk to one person for a single quest is terrible design.
We hit level 23 last night and I was working on my "Call of Water" quest for my shaman. In this quest, you go from Thunderbluff or Orgrimmar to the central Barrens to the southern Barrens to Tarren Mill in the Eastern Kingdoms and back to the southern Barrens in Kalimdor and then to Ashenvale and back to the southern Barrens and then to Silverpine Forest in the Eastern Kingdoms and back to the southern Barrens and lastly back to the central Barrens. This is all for the ability to drop the water totem, a central skill of the class.
Having to take an hour and transition continents five times for one quest is terrible design, especially for a low level quest. I can understand having option epic questlines like this at the level caps. There are many leftover epic quests at 60 and 70 as well as some great ones at 80, but having a quest like this for an essential class ability at level 20 is ludicrous. I am glad they moved mounts to level 20 or else it would have been unbearable. I am hoping Cataclysm rewrites this quest to something along the lines of "go collect water from each Oasis in the Barrens, okay here is your totem". That is something more along the line of what a quest for that level should be.
One thing I have noticed, however, is that while the questing is incredibly boring and monotonous, it is still on par or better than most quests in any other triple-A MMO release recently. Burning Crusade did some great things with quests and Wrath of the Lich King just continued that to make questing more fun and enjoyable. I hope that the changes Cataclysm brings are sweeping and hit all these sore low level areas.
Bring on the beta already!
New Beginnings
Posted by Mordiceius at 9:46 am
I have never been a fan of alts. They always seemed like such a waste of time for me. Whenever I would get the urge to create an alt, I would always think how I would much rather spend that time either doing more to enhance my main character or spending time in another game for some variety. In the past, I created alts when I needed something from them. For example, I created a warlock alt when Rynala started playing so that we could level together. We leveled from 1-70 together so she could be ready for Wrath of the Lich King. When the expansion came out, I leveled from 70-80 with her on my paladin. To this day, that warlock is still level 70.
Well, this week her and I both created new alts. This is her first real alt ever. She wanted to be able to try something different. Being a hunter, the new Dungeon Finder tool always took a while to pair her up into groups. She would see how I would get 1 minute queues when I played and did random dungeons, but when she played it would take 15 minutes. She wanted to create a new character to try something different.
So as of this week her and I are leveling new characters together. She is leveling a feral druid and I am leveling a shaman. At 80, she will use the druid to tank and I will use the shaman to heal (yes, I use my paladin to heal too - I just don't like DPSing). In the past, I have always burned out on alts at low levels because I have done the 1-70 content so many times now. But, things are always better when experiencing it with others and I am really enjoying leveling with Rynala. I can understand why people form "leveling groups" with friends.
My Auction House Addiction
Posted by Mordiceius at 10:08 am
I had quit playing World of Warcraft for the most part around April of last year. I had been heavily raiding and my guild was working on 25man Yogg-Saron in Ulduar. We were probably the 2nd or 3rd guild for Horde on our server. Though that is not saying much because Bleeding Hollow, while populated, is still a back water server. The #1 guild on our server was only about #500 in the US and they had the top players so that the drop off between them and all other guilds was quite significant.
I just could not taking committing to raiding so much each week. Between 25mans and 10mans and working on getting the raiding achievements, I burned out. After four years of heavy raiding, I burned out hard. I am honestly surprised I lasted that long. I had taken a couple month long breaks in the past, but I always jumped head first back into raiding. I never closed my WoW subscription since I liked to occasionally pop on and talk to people and see if anything interesting was going on, but I never really played much. When patch 3.2 was released, I did the dailies for the coliseum so that I could get the Crusader title, but then I stopped playing again. In my time off, I explored many games. I went back to LotRO and I played Wizard 101, Aion, as well as spending a little time in some single player games.
World of Warcraft's patch 3.3 changed everything for me. It hooked me hard. I absolutely love the three new 5mans and have had a blast with the dungeon finder. I still have not formally returned to raiding. I have done the Coliseum once in 25man and once in 10man, the same goes for Onyxia. I still have not even stepped foot in the Icecrown Citadel raid. One thing that caught my eye like never before has been the Auction House.
I have never been good at making money in WoW. In vanilla WoW, I had my epic mount but I never really had more than a couple hundred gold at a time. I remember having 500g and staying at that for a while made me quite proud. In Burning Crusade, I bought epic flying for 5000g as well as paid 4000g for a Sunwell engineering goggles recipe. Other than that, I stayed around 1000g most the time. In WotLK, I have most of the time just hovered around 1500g. I did get addicted to dailies for one month and made the 13000g+ needed to make the motorcycle mount, but after that I burned out on dailies and never went above 1500g again. When I came back in patch 3.3, I had about 5g to my name. I have no idea what I ever did with all my gold, but it was gone.
When returning with patch 3.3, I decided to give the Auction House a shot. In my 5 years of playing WoW, I had never put a major focus on the auction house but now, I finally get it. I got up to about 500g from using the dungeon finder and used that as my base capital. Between ammo, enchanting mats, and enchanting scrolls, I was up to 4000g in about a week and a half. I then realized I had a level 70 warlock alt that I could be utilizing. The warlock was at 375 herbalism but nothing else. I spent 4500g (I had to borrow 500g from Rynala) and power leveled my warlock to 450 in Alchemy. I sold the potions, flasks, and gems that I had made while leveling alchemy as well as continuing in my other markets and was back to 5000g within a week.
In under one month of the patch, I had essentially made 10k gold (though the 4.5k was spent on alchemy) and it did not take nearly the work that the relentless daily farming did. By the time Christmas rolled around, I had 15k between both characters. Visiting family in early January stopped me from being able to log on to WoW and when I came back, I put a bit of time into Darksiders and Mass Effect 2. I spent a bit of time playing with the auction house, but it was not my focus.
As of this post, I have 25k gold between my two characters. I know it is not a lot since so many people are at the gold cap nowadays, but this amount makes me proud. It is more money than I have ever had at one time and though the economy in game has slowed down after the post patch rush died out, I still have a steady cash flow coming in every day.
My loftiest goal would be to reach the gold cap by Cataclysm, but I do not think that will happen. Even if I just reach 50k or even 100k gold, I will be happy. I am tempted to start buying things that I could never afford before like one of the Dalaran rings or one of the 3-person mammoths.
I know the real money is in Jewelcrafting and Inscription, but I do not have the patience for either of those. I have seen people like Gevlon or Tobold using inscription and listing thousands of glyphs a day. It gives me a headache just thinking about it. As for now, I am happy with the business I have and I am addicted to getting more gold.
How Should You Deal With The Launch Rush?
Posted by Mordiceius at 1:46 pm
The launch month is usually a tumultuous time for new MMOs. In the post-World of Warcraft landscape, there is one undeniable pattern in the first month of new MMOs: probably about 50-75% who play your game for the first month will not be staying past those first thirty days. Whether it is because they are going back to WoW or to whatever other game is not important. The simple fact remains that more people will leave in the first month than stay.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Some may blame the "WoW tourists" and others may blame game breaking bugs while some others may blame hype and the game not living up to the expectations set by it. However, none of that is really important to this topic.
Let us just pretend for a minute that the universal rule for new MMOs is that after the free thirty days, you will lose one-half to three-fourths of your user base. Let us pretend that there are no ways about this rule and no matter how complete and polished your game is, it will always happen. How do you plan for that? There are three methods that come to my mind that recent games have used.
Warhammer Online decided to launch with about fifty servers. With the amount of boxes they sold, the servers were decently populated for the first week or two. Once the people started leaving, servers were shut down en masse. There were multiple server merges and now the game is down to about five servers. All seem fairly decently populated, but it is about one tenth of what they started with. They saw a lot of bad press for the mass server closures, but would have also seen bad press had they only started with five servers.
Aion went the opposite route. The game opened with ten servers. Some servers saw queues of between four and eight hours. After about two weeks, NCSoft opened up a handful of new servers as well. The queues settled down after a couple weeks when the people started leaving, but for the first week or two there was quite a bit of negative press on how NCSoft should have better prepared for the launch. Now, however, all the twelve or so servers they have are sitting at a relative stable population.
Darkfall used a different method when they started their game up. Being that they are not releasing a triple A title, they used unique means of distributing their game. Purchase of the game was only done through their online store and for the first few months, they only allowed a certain amount of copies to be sold a day and only for a small time-frame each day. They received a bit of negative press for this because it seemed like they were not letting people who wanted to play to even buy the game. Also, since it was more of a niche title, the exodus numbers might have been different. In the end, they limited the amount of people able to buy the game per day so that they could better handle the server population from day one.
Are any of these methods superior to each other? Are there any better methods to handle the launch rush and exodus?
To me, it seems like NCSoft did it best with Aion, but even still I wonder how many people were turned away from the game because they heard about the terrible queues.
If you were to go play a new MMO on launch day, what method would you prefer?
Holiday Update 09
Posted by Mordiceius at 4:00 am
Somehow I got in the Darkfall Spotlight on the forums. I do not personally read the forums, but it is not because I am lazy. It is simply because I am afraid (that, and I cannot access them at work).
Being that it is the holidays, I hope you do not expect too many posts from me over the coming weeks. I am going to be working all this week but I will have all of next week off work (though Rynala and I may be driving up to see her folks around New Years). I will be gone for the first week and a half of January to fly north and care my mother while she has surgery.
I have been devoting a majority of my time to Darkfall and World of Warcraft. Since Darkfall is not a system resource hog, I am able to play both simultaneously. This works even better for me since I can set up my character in Darkfall to mine or log and go run an instance or work on auctions in WoW. In WoW, I have had to find unique ways of making money as enchanting and engineering are not huge money makers right now. I am thinking of taking my level 70 warlock out of retirement and making them an alchemist.
As for Darkfall, I have been spending majority of my time in small scale PvP. The Goons have largely moved from Aerngardh to Darkmoore since Aerngardh was not so newbie friendly and apparently the spawns are broken all over the frigid north lands. The journey was absolutely terrifying.
When we moved from Janhalek to Aerngardh, there were about ten of us on a raft making the trip, this time there were only four. A third of the way through the trip, there was a cry of pure horror on vent. Closing fast on us was the kraken. One of the people on the raft tried to push me off as a sacrifice but was instead knocked off the raft himself by the kraken. We could not rescue him so we made haste out of there. Fifteen minutes later we saw the kraken once more on the horizon pursing us. One of the other members of the ship sacrificed his life to save the raft. The raft owner and myself made it to landfall safely, never forgetting the sacrifices our two brave comrades made.
I found the move to Darkmoore very amusing because it is about a ten minute mounted journey north of Mir Bellith, the elf area I started at. I had gone from Mir Bellith down to Janhalek and north to Aerngarde only to end up ten minutes north of the start of my journey. Since I was so close to my origin, I returned to Mir Bellith to work on getting some skill ups (and to look for some PvP).
My favorite targets so far have been people in the NEW clan. NEW is the clan for people new to Darkfall, but has lately received some scorn. When they were originally created, Goon Squad declared war on them as a joke, and made a couple enemies from other clans in doing so. Since then, I have seen many clans declaring war on NEW. In clan chat, people were explaining that there were some players exploiting the clan and using it as a safe haven to avoid PvP so a lot of guilds were getting sick of it.
I have had a lot of good PvP in Mir Bellith. Since I am still quite new to the game it is nice finding people that mostly match my skill. I have lost quite a few times though. Luckily, beside my mount, I have not lost anything of any importance. As for the mount, that situation did not make me happy. I was running away from a guy that was killing my mount with arrows and so I ran into the city to safe corner to try to desummon my mount and then bank it before I died. While dismissing it, some blue player came, jumped on it and rode it off. Since they were blue, I could not attack them due to the guard tower and an alignment hit. There should be penalties to mount thieves. It would nice to see them take an alignment hit or go rogue for a while. If that guy had gone rogue, the guard towers could have taken him out. Other than that, it has been a lot of fun in Mir Bellith.
All of this good MMO gaming has made it hard for me to go play any other games. I have yet to finish Borderlands and I still have a load of games from the Steam sale I need to play including Last Remnant, Overlord 2, WH40K: Dawn of War 1 and 2. Plus, the good games are going to keep coming with Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, and Final Fantasy 13 coming out in the next few months. What is a gamer to do!
The Best of Both Worlds
Posted by Mordiceius at 1:02 pm
I am playing two MMORPGs right now. World of Warcraft and Darkfall. It would seem like those games are polar opposites of each other and that they would not go together. Well the do not go together and that is why I like it. I could be playing World of Warcraft and LotRO or World of Warcraft and Aion or World of Warcraft and Warhammer or Darkfall and Fallen Earth but in all of those cases, the games are the similar style (themepark and themepark or sandbox and sandbox).
Now, I have a great themepark game and a great sandbox game. If I want to go socialize, leasurely group with others, kill some random things, see purples fly, or even just sit in town and idle, I can play World of Warcraft. If I want to travel a harsh land fearing for my life and expecting death around every corner, I can play Darkfall. I think it is a logical fallacy to believe someone could only ever want to experience one of these feelings. Variety is the spice of life.
I generally save my larger play sessions for Darkfall now so that I can get more accomplished in that game, but I still will often alternate between the two. The other day, I ran an instance in WoW, then went to Darkfall for a few hours, then went back to WoW to run another two instances to take a break, and finally returned to Darkfall to do more gaming.
Having both of these games satisfies almost all of my MMO urges and lets me better game to my mood. I do not want to fear for my life every time I log onto a game, but sometimes I do. I do not always want to have rewards raining from the sky with zero risk, but sometimes I do. I think that playing both games helps me develop a greater appreciation for the differences in the two.
Both games tried to do something different. World of Warcraft took the Everquest model and opened it up to the masses while Darkfall went back to the MMO sandbox roots like Ultima Online.
All of this just hammers in the point that we do not need more of the same. We need more new ideas. Do you want a good themepark game? Play WoW or LotRO. Do you want a good sandbox? Play Darkfall or Fallen Earth. Now give me something different (here is to hoping Planetside 2 is good).
Patch 3.3 – Present and Future Outlook
Posted by Mordiceius at 1:24 pm
Patch 3.3 is the best thing to ever happen to World of Warcraft. The looking for group matchmaking system is spectacular.
Within the last three days, I have run almost twenty instances without any major trouble. The new instances are fun and challenging but the best thing is just the efficiency of groups. It is also really nice playing a holy paladin because it never takes me more than about 15 seconds to find a group.
I know that I will eventually have some bad experiences, but currently it has been nothing but fun. The matchmaking system also does a good job of pairing people with wide varieties of skill and experience. I am decently geared. Most my gear is on par with Ulduar 25 and now a couple pieces of tier 9 quality gear. I have had some groups with lesser geared tanks but great dps and other groups with over-geared tanks and lesser DPS. Either way, the matchmaker strikes a balance so that the group can make it through the instance with little difficulty and everyone can have fun. Hardcore geared players get their successful instance runs and the lesser geared players that would not usually be able to find a group get to actually just run instances.
The other thing that has struck me is just how friendly everyone is. Everyone has been very kind and considerate. If someone accidentally pulls or makes a mistake and wipes it is not a "NOOB!! LERN TEH INSTANZ!!!1!" but more of a "Everyone makes mistakes, do not worry about it" attitude.
This is all great in the short term but what about the long term. What does this mean for the future players?
Rohan wrote up his thoughts on the patch as well as predictions about players leveling characters.
"You know, in a few months there are going to be some sick skilled tanks available. Imagine levelling to max purely by running dungeons with PuGs. Those tanks who come out of that are going to be really good."
I completely agree with him on that. Before patch 3.3, when people would level characters they just quest their way to the level cap. It was the most efficient way. You could always list yourself under the looking for group interface but depending on your server, there might be no one running instances. Plus, you had to deal with the travel to and from the instance. If you are leveling in Hillsbrad, why would you want to make the journey all the way out to Blackfathom Depths and back? Simply put, it was a pain to find the group and with travel it was simply inefficient compared to solo questing.
At max level, people would complain that since other players soloed their way to the level cap, these players had no idea how to function in a group.
Now, there is no reason not to always be listed in the matchmaking tool while leveling. You get automatically paired up and can teleport to and from the location. It has taken all the work out of forming and instance group as well as given a larger pool of players to pick from.
This should push more and more people to run instances while leveling (but WoW is such a solo game, right guys?) and since more people are grouping while leveling, hopefully the skill of the average player will increase.
Between the immediately positive results I am getting now and the impact I believe this patch is going to have on the future of WoW for years to come, I have no doubt that this is the most important and well done patch in the history of this game.
And yes, I am still playing Darkfall on the side.
The History of Tier Sets in World of Warcraft and Mudflation in Cataclysm
Posted by Mordiceius at 2:20 pm
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.
Patch Anticipation
Posted by Mordiceius at 1:32 pm
Yes, I am still playing Dragon Age. Yes, it is hard to think of any other games to talk about while I have Dragon Age. No, I am not an addict. I have only put 45 hours into the game over the last week. I can quit any time I want. I swear I am not an addict. Now I just need to finish up this blog post so I can get more time for Dragon Age.
I am rather excited for Patch 3.3 for World of Warcraft. To me, the most exciting thing is probably the new Looking for Group matchmaking interface. While I still maintain my subscription, I do not actively play WoW currently but patch 3.3 should bring me back for at least a couple months.
Since I quit the raiding treadmill, I am glad they added three new five mans since it is doubtful if I would ever see the Icecrown raid - not that I would desire to start raiding again. The Icecrown raid only entices me for the lore aspect but I can get that without experiencing it first hand.
From everything I have been reading, it seems like the badge gear you can get in 3.3 is on part with and often times better than the best Coliseum loot. Between that and being able to buy a lot of the tier 9 loot with badges, I should be able to have my character fully equipped in a new set of gear for 400-500 badges (just a random guess) or maybe less. When I quit playing my character's gear was nothing to scoff at, mind you. I had some of the best holy paladin gear from the non-heroic 25man Ulduar bosses.
Many people call them welfare epics, but I like being able to get badge loot to round out my gear. I have always had terrible luck on getting items for certain slots. Back in the Burning Crusade, in over six months of Hyjal I never got the holy paladin mace from the pit lord boss. It dropped a few times but many other paladins won it over me. The shield from Supremus in the Black Temple took almost eight months until I got it. I used the mace from Prince Malchezzar for the entire expansion.
I like the new route Blizzard is taking with this. It seems like with every new patch the goal is "bring everyone to the gear level from the last patch". I know people complain about having their accomplishments trivialized by this but it allows more people to see the content than ever before and makes gearing alts easier than ever. I do not see much a problem with that.
And getting badges is going to be easier than ever with the LFG interface. Even though I am a holy paladin there are still times when it would be really rough to find groups. Hopefully with this interface, groups should form quickly. I hope that in a month of casual play I will be able to get all the non-raid upgrades possible.
So I look forward to getting back in to WoW for this patch. Coming back to WoW always feels like coming home no matter how long it has been since I have been gone. Things may be a little different and a wall may have been painted or the furniture may have been moved, but home is still where the hearthstone is.