There's still next to no non-raid progression

| Monday, June 14, 2010
Level up
Do some regulars
Do some heroics
Max out with heroic Halls of Reflection.

Then do randoms endlessly for gear.

Is this 'alternative' progression? I see very little progression. I see loot. There's certainly loot. But that's not progression, or at least I'd not call it that.

I could just as well run random regulars and collect gear from those. The content is so low that whether I'm wearing triumph gear or frost gear, or 200 level blues, or lower, it's not going to be very hard. Sure, the ICC heroics require some gear and HoR isn't a mindless AoE-fest, but they're hardly comparable to even the challenge of Naxx.

10 man raiding will finally get somewhere. Can 5-mans get somewhere too?

7 comments:

Mike said...

Agreed. I like your point. I've always just assumed that 5-mans have to progress to 10-mans, and on to 25 mans, but I guess not. I'm not raiding yet, and not sure if I will be. I've also just hit 80 on my current priest alt, and it's reminding me what happens each time I hit 80. I get bored pretty fast. It's really fun for a while to cruise through all the heroics picking up loot, and spending emblems like crazy on tier gear, but then I start to wonder what comes next. Usually the answer is another alt, but I don't want to start another till Cataclysm. So I very much like your idea of more 5 man progression.

Backthief said...

No

the problem is that Blizzard screwed up progression. You can go from a brand new lvl80 to ICC10 in onde day just farming ToC5man, regular HoR/PoS/FoS than Heroic HoR/PoS/FoS.

You would skip ALL classic WTLK dungeons, Naxx, Ulduar, ToC, EoE....lame.

Backthief said...

Oh, if you wanna put professions and AH into the mix, you can have ilvl 232+ avg in one day with a little cash.

Green Armadillo said...

If you remove the logistics of obtaining a group from the equation, I've had far more trouble pugging HHOR than I had pugging Naxx and Sarth back in the day. Most of the entry level bosses could be killed by half the group if need be, so the odds of failure were generally far lower.

But yes, the main reason why I was still running heroics was to gear up for soloing level 70 heroics. I think I'm good to go for that project though, so now I'm not sure what I'll do. Spend emblems on heirlooms that will trivialize my alt leveling in Cataclysm I guess?

Leah said...

its the main reason I'm leveling alt after alt - there's a very definitive progression sense when leveling - new lands, new skills, new storylines.

Anonymous said...

Then do randoms endlessly for gear.

Do randoms endlessly for gear for what?? There's little to no point.

Klepsacovic said...

@Mzungu: That's roughly how it worked in BC. Now 10 and 25 are semi-separate progression paths and 5-mans are a source of emblems and some gear in the newer ones.

@Backthief: I'll write more about this in a future post, but linear progression was part of the cause of late raiding in vanilla being so exclusive. It was very discouraging for new raiders to know that it could take months or even years to work up. On the other hand, spamming randoms and knowing a new player might never see Naxx, Ulduar, or ToC (no loss there) isn't very encouraging either.

@Green Armadillo: Maybe to make heroics more legitimate Blizzard just needs to make it harder to form groups for them. :P

@Leah: There's also 5-man progression, of higher instances as you go. Then we hit 80 and the progression path switched dramatically.

@Bri: Exactly.

Post a Comment

Comments in posts older than 21 days will be moderated to prevent spam. Comments in posts younger than 21 days will be checked for ID.

Powered by Blogger.