My third opinion.
Ok, so now after a long thought process after the release of 3.2, I’ve finally come to a conclusion. I don’t so much mind that Blizzard revamped the Emblem system to make older content more appealing to “geared” players, however I feel the addition of the daily heroic (and soon to be weekly raid) quests are bad for the game.
I don’t want to feel that I must run old content to get current tier gear. I think the addition of EoTriumph’s to the weekly raid heroic was a mistake, and should have just been two extra conquests. If you run one ToC lockout, you get 15 Emblems of Triumph. Doing the daily heroic each day, net’s you 14 EoTs each week.
I think its perfectly reasonable to offer “free access” to the previous tier of gear, having heroic emblems be Conquest and ToC dropping Triumph.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not being elitist. ToC isn’t hard and its pugged several times a day on my realm (I usually pug it 2-3 times a week on my alts), but I don’t feel that a players gear progression should be held to how many heroics he runs each week.
*rant over*
PS – Trying to get up the material for my Tank Grid/UI post, but having started a new job, I’m a little inundated with work right now.
Blizzard’s folly
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.