[WoW] Panel @WWI

[Cybsled]

When most of the heroics were initially designed, there was no badge loot worth a shit cept the fire resist gear, which was only useful if you were raiding fire dmg bosses. The loot has always been pretty sucktastic.

[Antoine]

the trinkets and offhands!

[Cybsled]

Maybe for some classes. You could still get better crap via PVP.

[Antoine]

Originally Posted by Cybsled

Maybe for some classes. You could still get better crap via PVP.

All of these items were excellent and available right away.

[Cybsled]

Well I had come from Naxx/AQ40/etc, so I guess maybe thats why I remember the items not being such hot shit ;P

[Cad]

Originally Posted by Antoine

All of these items were excellent and available right away.

The number of badges they took, combined with the shit-tastic difficulty of heroics compared to the difficulty of karazahn meant that these items were rare, and generally not worth the effort. If they are 40 badges today and you get 22 badges per full kara clear; thats great. 40 badges at TBC release was a heroic every day for 12-14 days straight, which is 18-20 hours of very difficult 5-man work for 1 trinket which itself is a marginal upgrade over the blue trinkets or epic trinkets you can get in karazahn anyway.

Basically, they were available, but gay.

[Pyros]

Yeah heroics at release weren't really worth doing unless you had a lot of free time with your guildmates and were trying to get better gear before season1. I did heroics non stop for erm, was it 3weeks before season1, and it was even more a waste of time to do any of the "harder" ones. We'd just do mech, slave pens, steamvaults, ramparts and that one in auchindoun with all the ghosts popping, it's easy if you're in a guild group and know how to kill add before they MC your tank, and was fast since you can skip a lot of trash.

Everything else was a waste of time, even more so with most of the dps classes being much worse than they are currently because of shitty gear. Nowadays the first thing any dps does is get a S1 weap(or is it S2 now?) right after hitting 70, or in my case, I AFKed AV during the night while still leveling so I ended up with 70k honor, or whatever the cap is before lvl 65.

They made badges worth it later on, but I'd say for the first, hmm was it 6months or so, heroics were a fucking failure. Add to that the insane rep prereq, and the raid keying chain, and it was just pure retardness. However, one thing blizzard seems to know how to do is, not repeat the same mistakes. They usually find new mistakes to make, but they don't make the same ones again. So I think heroics in WoTLK will end up being good, or at least really worth doing, without being so tedious that you have to have 4guildmates at least to finish 3/4 of them.

[Thengel]

If you mean face smash to epic loot when you say 'good,' then I agree.

[James]

Originally Posted by Pyros

However, one thing blizzard seems to know how to do is, not repeat the same mistakes.

I want some of what you're smoking. BC release was basically 1.0 release done a little better. Useless rogues because everything AE'd, clumsy protection warrior mechanics, a small amount of raid content available and entirely too goddamn difficult for entry level, COMPLETE ASS for items...it's a fairly long list of *the exact same shit* that they've done before.

[Modo Icecrown]

However, one thing blizzard seems to know how to do is, not repeat the same mistakes.

I dunno, I kinda feel like this is partially true. Blizzard has changed most of the things I don't like about this game over time, and there's only a few things I really complain about anymore - particularly PVP invading PVE and the LFG tool. It's a much better game than it was when TBC came out, and TBC is much better than it was when vanilla was a 6 months and a year old.

[Pyros]

Originally Posted by James

I want some of what you're smoking. BC release was basically 1.0 release done a little better. Useless rogues because everything AE'd, clumsy protection warrior mechanics, a small amount of raid content available and entirely too goddamn difficult for entry level, COMPLETE ASS for items...it's a fairly long list of *the exact same shit* that they've done before.

Done a little better. That's the point. It wasn't release again. It had more raid dungeons(SSC TK Maulgar and Magtheridon, at least I think SSC and TK were avail?), which were also much more complex, and arguably fun, even though half of it was broken. You could say, broken as usual, but sunwell has proved since then they can actually QA some fights without anyone ever doing them if they don't do it for every fight, and let a good portion just be playtested by people. Rogues sucked, prot wars were the usual, happens all the time when you reset gear progression and raise level cap, there was to be adjustements. They made them, and rogues/wars are now better than they were before BC.
Itemization was shit, probably again because of little testing.

Overall Blizzard still does make mistakes, pretty often, but they do manage over time to prevent some of those mistakes. BC mistakes were mostly because of the lack of testing in beta of the raid content which led to many mistakes in design and itemization. If they actually get a team of raiders on WoTLK beta to test the early shit, I believe they'd end up better than with BC. It was still much better than wow release though, just not much better considering it has been 2years. There's a progression in the game quality, and to be honest, if you remember early wow, it was pretty close to being shit. If you compare it to last major patch, Sunwell, it's bounds and leaps better.

Also they have a rather big pool of players willing to do the math and tests for them nowadays, moreso than they had even after naxx. For sunwell, they had people weighting all the items that were dataminable or available, to find out if they were worth using or not, and they had to adjust quite a lot of stats to make some of them good. They still don't seem to grasp itemization concepts too well, but there's enough non retarded "fanboys" in wow to actually compensate for devs mistakes.

I can predict balance right after wotlk will be shit though. You could say they make the same mistakes again, but you can't get a large scope balance out of a few months of beta testing content. A few months into the expansion, people will figure this or that class sucks, and this or that class is so much better and everyone will stack their fire warlocks or moonkins and just tell their rogues and hunters to fuck off. Then they'll balance it. That's the whole MMO thing.

[Northerner]

Originally Posted by Cad

The number of badges they took, combined with the shit-tastic difficulty of heroics compared to the difficulty of karazahn meant that these items were rare, and generally not worth the effort.

They were pretty nice for early people that were doing heroics for attuning to Kara-Nightbane and later SSC/TK though. I mean, they were not insane or anything but when you had to run HSH timed runs dozens of times, you got a little something out of it.

Don't get me wrong, early TBC was very strange anyhow but that flametongue seal gave me more mileage than almost any item in the expansion.

[Lejina Bloodbath]

Originally Posted by LadyVex

I'm just now leveling up a tankadin (Level 46) so honest to god question but...

Shouldn't some of that shit have spellpower? It looks like protection warrior gear and less like tankadin.

I realize it's immensely necessary to be crit immune first and to have good mitigation and avoidance, but I'd agree when someone said "Hard to find Tankadin gear" as none of that seems catered to protection pallies.

Is it that necessary? Righteous Fury seems to make it so doing more holy damage = more threat etc, so therefore you'd want spellpower somewhere along the way?

Am I on crack, is it not that big of a deal, or what?

Your spell power is directly linked to your threat.

Once you are lvl 70, farm honor right away and get a S2 cudgel. Then slap 40 spell power on it. Once you have decent gloves and bracer, spell power on those too. Then just pure tanking (warrior gear) for everything else until you can get your hands on some badge/class set gear. Keep some wizard oil on yourself for when you will get to group with very high dps folks and that will get you covered in the thread department.

More spell power than that is only really useful when you are doing AE's against large groups of mobs and consecreate is nearly all you have for threat against your mages/warlocks.

[Lalala]

* You will be able to earn reputation toward a specific faction by becoming its "champion", for example by wearing a Cenarion Circle tabard while running Hellfire Ramparts you will earn reputation for both Honor Hold/Thrallmar and Cenarion Circle. Obviously tabards reputation requirements will be changed to something like friendly/honored.

--> yeaaaaaah....... more bag space wasted to hold out all these tabards now..

[Tred]

Further proof people will complain about any and everything.