I’ve migrated to a new server. Sorry if anyone experienced outages over the last day or so. You should see great increases to the site’s speed and perfomance. :D

In WotLK, Blizzard changed their design philosophy regarding gear progression. Items dripping in 5 man heroics, are of equal “quality” as items dropped from ten man raids.

Now granted I see the design conflicts with the way they have set up the Emblems. If heroics and 10 man raids (referred to simply as raids further in this post) dropped differbt quality gear but the same Emblems, one would devaule the other. Either heroics would yield “over budget” Emblems, able to obtain raid quality gear at heroic level of effort, or raids your drop undervalued tokens that would be a waste of time.

However making them both drop equal gear and equal Emblems has it’s own issues. With heroic reset timers being 1 day and raid timers being 7 days, you can start to get a picture of what a new 80 is going to be doing more. Once the heroic gear is obtained, and (under the BC mantra) they are now “raid ready”, they are quickly let down that the raid gear is either a small upgrade at all or simply a side-grade (if at all). This leads to player boredom (I’ll touch on that subject in my already foreshadowed post regarding raid motivations). Once the bosses are killed once or twice the content stagnates and tension arises. Raid live off of progression (mostly).

My solutions to the problem are either:

1) increasing EoH item costs, and additionally rewarding better loot in raids/EoH, while also increasing the number of EoH dropped from raid bosses.

2) implementing a seperate Emblem for heroic content. This option would be more time consuming and isn’t really worth the effort.

To explore option 1 some more. Blizzard is introducing a new Emblem for new tiers of content. This will mostly settle the issue of 10 man raid rewards not competing with existing player gear. While I do think this is a good idea, I do not like having to live through 6 months of a single tier of content with people as frustrated and bored as they are.

Oddly enough, I didn’t have anything to write about until I opened the Wordpress app on my iPhone.

Then suddenly my mind was flooded by several topics. I just barely got them all written down before my fruit fly memory swept them out the door.

So I guess I can tell you to expect soon, but not really how soon, posts on the following topics:

• Ease of raiding content
• Heroic vs Raid iLvl
• 10 vs 25 man raiding
• Players desire to be best in slot
• Raiding for gear, or raiding for fun