I got this horrible feeling in my gut that Blizzard is doing this simply because of statistics. It was shown back in The Burning Crusade that only a tiny, tiny percentage of the playerbase got to enter the highest raid instances and clear them. The percentage was way higher than in vanilla WoW, but it was still very low.
Now we are in Wrath of the Lick King and nearing the end of the development cycle. Icecrown Citadel – the home of Arthas the last raid instance to be released in this expansion – is just months away, and I guess Blizzard is looking at some numbers on a paper that they don’t like.
When Crusader’s Coluseum was released Blizzard let Emblem of Conquest be dropped in heroic instances and low raids like Naxxramas. Previously Conquest had only been available from Ulduar 25 man, which was the highest instance until Coluseum. By enabling these to drop all over the place and be farmable, normal people got quickly access to gear that allowed them to raid Ulduar… and Coluseum.
That was quite a strong hint that Blizzard wanted to push people into the high raid content, and not enjoyed sitting back and just looking at the low numbers.
Now it seems even those numbers were not enough for them, since Emblem of Triumph – that only dropped in Coluseum, 2 from a daily heroic, and a few from Onyxia and Vault of Archavon – is now trading place with Emblem of Conquest like what happened in patch 3.2. Now people will be able to farm Triumph from heroics, and access tier 9 gear. In fact you can get an entire set of tier 9 just from the emblems.
Painfully obvious is a major understatement. Blizzard want everyone to run Icecrown Citadel when it comes out. They want everyone to kill Arthas – the big bad guy of the expansions like Illidan was for TBC – and they don’t care if they have to push them kicking and screaming into the instance to get them there.
Because Blizzard wants to look back at the percentage that got to finish the final raid encounter of the expansion and be satisfied.
Doesn’t matter if people have to lose all dignity when they do it.
Trust me, if I would post anything like dislike to the article on WoW.com you would bet I would get downrated. People want their tier 9, even if they don’t even have to work for it.
The only reason you would raid these days (except for the joy of killing bosses) is to get at least some satisfaction of earning your gear.
Rivs
/ October 7, 2009Well I wouldn’t call the 250+ badges you need for a full set “no work”. Coming up through the ranks and raiding everything from Molten Core to Ulduar. I don’t think it’s all that bad. For a long time I said, well I can’t tell the good players from the bad anymore. Ya know what I couldn’t tell it very well in Vanilla either, so what makes a difference.
Matt
/ October 8, 2009Actually it’s 210 emblems for the 5 pieces of T9 gear. Yes it’s work, but the kind of stupid repetitive work that you could do in your sleep. You can get a maximum of 53 emblems each day just by running heroics, so it’s doable to get a full set in a week. That is hardly comparable to effort from raiding.
Conquest awarded two pieces of tier 8.5 gear for 58 emblems each. Unless they change Triumph values it will be easier than ever to get gear since tier 9 pieces are 30-50 Triumphs.
There is a reason that so few people are successful in getting to the endgame raids. The majority of people seems to have problem not standing in fires, and getting tier 9 gear won’t fix that. It will just piss raiders off. (Not that they shouldn’t be used to it by now.)
Rivs
/ October 8, 2009I want a wand, and some other stuff. :P
There will always be bad raiders, Huntards is not a new term..Now there’s just a few more that’s all.