Risk vs. Reward

This post is a followup to posts made by Nihilum, Risen, Ciderhelm, Satrina, and several other people and guilds. (some posts and some links can be found at TankSpot). Basically, the gist of it is that, with the new gear from MGT and h-MGT, the new ridiculous badge gear, the new rep gear, etc etc, the value of epics in general, and raiding epics in particular, is becoming devalued. Y'know, who cares that you slogged your way through the toughest encounters in the game to pick up your [Glory of the Defender], here's a tanking chest that's as good or better, and all you have to do is run a weekly kara and a daily heroic for three weeks. And, oh, you get badges from just about EVERYTHING now. And you can get pvp gear through pve. Etc etc etc.

In addition, raiding is becoming fundamentally easier. No more farming thousands of gold worth of consumables for every attempt. No more wiping a handful of times and having to clear through an entire corridor of trash. No more spending all your free time farming millions of twilight texts in Silithus. All you have to do is show up to the raid, do a half-assed job and walk away with dkp and epics. Ever since the 'alchemy nerf,' (which I do think was a good thing, btw), consumables have just become flask, food, potions, which are really quite easy, especially compared to the flask, food, potions, world buffs, multiple elixirs, etc required to be fully buffed in days of yore.

Let me say that casuals do NOT deserve epics. Before you begin flaming me, let me elaborate.

Casual and hardcore are mindsets. You can run only a nonheroic 5-man every week and still be hardcore. Likewise, you can clear BT weekly and farm heroics on your offnights and still be casual. It's all about the way you approach the game.

The real difference is a casual expects, while a hardcore gets. Passive versus active. A casual expects to be able to farm badges and lose arena games for all his gear, while a hardcore looks at his options, finds the best for each slot from everything he has available to him, gets them, gems them, enchants them, and most of all, works for them.

A casual uses green gems in epic gear. A hardcore does not.

A casual uses Silver Spellthread. A hardcore uses Golden Spellthread.

A casual whines about difficult instances. A hardcore craves the challenge of a difficult instance.

I could go on forever.

Now we come to the kind of people who run heroics and 10-mans, who by choice or not cannot run 25s. I don't think that they should be excluded from epics just because there's not as many of them. While a 25 on the same tier of difficulty as a 10 or a 5 should give slightly better loot simply due to the organisational challenge of getting twenty-five people online at once and all doing their job properly, this should be a, say, five itemlevel difference at the most.

I think ZA is a great example of this. It's on the same level of difficulty as SSC and TK, drops less loot relative to its size but resets faster, and has good loot. One might argue that it's better than the equivalent 25 man gear, and they would be in many places correct. However, ZA is hard compared to heroics and Kara. Malacrass especially.

Another awesome example of a way non-raiders could get epics was the old Tier 0.5 quests. Back in the day, not many people had their 8/8 0.5 set. It was a real mark of prestige. Those quests not only required an obscene amount of gold, but were hard. 45 minute Baron runs and Lord Valthalak were brutal for their intended audience - people geared in tier 0. And tier 0.5 was awesome for where it was placed at.

So what I think is that in WLK, there should be a progression in heroics similar to what there is in raids at the moment. Everyone starts in nonheroics and the easy heroics, which don't drop epics at all. Then the raiders move away to the first 25-man, which does drop epics, and the first 10-man, which drops half blues, half epics. (Think ZG). The non-raiders move into the difficult heroics, which have a chance to drop an epic from the last boss, and into the first 10-man if they can. And so on and so on, with a 10-man and 2-3 heroics corresponding to every tier of difficulty of 25s. 10-mans always drop half blues, half epics. Heroics never drop more than one epic. The badge system is revamped so that instead of having one lot of badge gear for the entirety of the game, each tier has again its own separate lot of badges, and 2-3 heroics drop about the same as one 10-man or as one 25-man. The blues and purples in the 10-mans and heroics should be 5-10 ilvls apart (a la current heroic epics vs. blues), however everything will scale up with difficulty. So a nonheroic might drop 195 blues, an easy heroic might drop 200 blues, a T1 heroic might drop 210 blues and 200 epics, a T2 heroic might drop 220 blues and 210 epics, etc. A T1 10-man under this model would drop 210 blues and 200 epics, except for the last boss which would drop 210 epics. A T1 25-man would drop 205 epics, and 215 from the last boss. Badge gear gives loot with ilvls equal to the ilvl of the loot from the majority of the 25-man in that tier.

And lastly, there should be a quest exactly similar to the tier 0.5 quest. A lot of gold and time must be invested in it, along with some special tasks that are particularly difficult. However, instead of immediately upgrading your gear when you finish a section, each section will unlock the ability to exchange a piece of your class's (8-piece) dungeon set for a specialised piece of tier 7.5 or w/e it ends up being, a la the TBC specialised sets. And this goes up the tiers, so you can upgrade your 7.5 to 8.5. At the end of the quest for each tier of difficulty, you're also given a weapon or shield.

And then, at the end of the day, the hardcore raider is decked out in his full Tier 10 gear, and the hardcore non-raider is decked out in full Tier 9.5 gear. The difference between the quality of the two sets is slight, and the raider and the nonraider can meet in Dalaran and respect the gear that they've each accumulated, though the raider might have never tried Heroic Azjol'Nerub because it's a real bitch to get attuned to and he'd rather raid on his raid nights and relax on his offnights than try and slog through learning genuinely hard encounters. Likewise, the non-raider can look at the raider's gear and respect the fact that he has both overcome the massive organisational block that is 25-man raiding, and that he's been progressing through difficult content. And the non-raider will never get attuned to Icecrown, but he'll be satisfied in the fact that he and his tight-knight group conquered instances that are on the same level as the ones the raider is clearing.

And where are the casuals? The ones who slack in raids, 5-mans, and pvp alike? Simple. They're back where they belong, scraping the bottom of the barrel for what little purple they can get without doing difficult instances, or (unfortunately) piggybacking their way to epics with a more talented group. Sad but true.

There is, however, a problem here.

How do you make 5-man fights truly challenging?

You can't simply make mobs stronger, have more hp, do more raid damage, etc. All of these can simply be overcome with gear. Likewise, you can't transplant mechanics from 25s or even 10s into 5s, because the group makeup of tank, healer, three dps limits what can be done. So complex tank transitions, splitting the group up, Saber Lash, etc, etc are all out.

So now you have to come up with some really crazy ideas.

Like, for example, you're fighting a pair of bosses on a pair of platforms, which are on rails in an active volcano. One of the bosses is a caster and the other is a meleeist, and dps must be swapped between them rapidly - however to get to the other one you must jump across a gap above a massive drop into a lava lake. Stalactites on the roof get in the way of line of sight periodically, and the caster tosses people (other than the one tanking the meleeist) randomly back and forth between the platforms. Both platforms are periodically engulfed in flames one at a time, forcing the entire group to leap from one to the other, with the provision that the tank must get back to the meleeist before he, say, breathes fire on everyone for ten million damage because nobody's in range of him. And the rails end in the middle of the volcano, creating a natural-feeling hard enrage timer. Once the bosses are defeated the lava at the end of the rails cools, making a platform and a bridge to the next part of the zone.

And there. The outline of a 5-man boss with a raid level of complexity.

And good god, I really went off on a tangent there.

/sigh