Revolution 9

| Friday, January 3, 2014
For years, the zero has reigned supreme over WoW. 60, 70, 80, 90, all part of Club Zero. 85 snuck in, but that was the worst expansion in WoW, so that somehow supports my point if you squint a lot. All the raids were tied to the zeros. Starting at 60, you hit a zero and you got a raid. Without that zero you got nothing but hints and suggestions of something to come.

Shintar raised a good point the other day:
Oh, and I really wish they'd make the Shattrath cooking and fishing dailies available at level sixty. That "must be level seventy" restriction is very out of touch with the way the game works now, only giving people access to something that is effectively leveling content just as they are leaving for the next expansion.
The zeros used to be the cap. You stayed at them and therefore they were the ideal place for content you spent a lot of time in: dailies, raids, reputation. But these days the zeros aren't the highest, but the lowest. 60 isn't the big number after 59, but the smallest number in the 60s.

By the 8s or 9s players might be sick of an expansion. They were probably cherry-picking the best zones and have run out, unless they really like old content. Or with the odd leveling curves they've finally finished a second zone and need just a little tiny bit of a third, and then they'll run off partway in and spend a day trying to not fill up their quest logs before they finally dump the old zone in frustration.

Why not lower the raid requirements to the 9s? It's not like the old days when special abilities arrived at the 0s or new ranks every 2 levels. Odds are you won't even get a new talent point with those only appearing every 15 levels. With the raid requirements lowered and the already-functioning cross-realm raid-formation tool players could easily do a few raids during their last level before starting a new expansion. Players who want to raid at that level would see more players, of slightly lower power, but more than offset by significantly faster queues.

2 comments:

R said...

Just my experience but I don't see much at-level retro raiding happening on a casual basis and those who are doing it with intent likely wouldn't benefit much from being able to do it at *9 vs (*+1)0. Most of the retro raiding being done is tmog or achievement raiding where they wouldn't want to have to "carry" someone who's actually appropriate for the instance. I mean, hell, I'm seeing heroic runs for the earliest MoP raid being advertised as requiring i545+ gear... for comparison, the gear that dropped from those heroic raids was i502... the same as dropped from the next-tier LFR.

There's obviously an element of "people are stupid/lazy" in that but I just don't think allowing someone in at 79 instead of 80 would serve any real purpose. Besides, raids require a decent amount of gear that you can usually only get at the *0s so the level earlier folks would be at a severe handicap... not enough health to survive basic unavoidable mechanics, for instance. Bad enough to see an 89 tank show up for a holiday boss queue, those are a lower-difficulty level of content than a raid.

I'd fully support it for things like dailies, though, just not end-game content, at least in the current exponential gearing paradigm. Once it goes linear post-squish? Might be a different story, when in theory 80 gear will only be incrementally better than 79 gear.

Klepsacovic said...

The transmog people and the lowbies wouldn't be in the same pool. As far as I've seen, transmog groups aren't using LFR. Much of the difficulty in these fights was due to characters that were, at the time, much weaker, with fewer abilities. I'm sure a raid of 59s could do what 60s did a few years ago. Throw in some LFR-based buffs and they should be good to go.

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