Patch 3.3 – Emblems, The Other Currency
Posted on 2009 under Cataclysm, Emblems & Badges, Patch Notes | 6 Comments3 Nov
As Icecrown is released in Patch 3.3, a record amount of players for the first time have an opportunity to pursue the final boss in the expansion, all other bosses in 5 man’s and raids will no longer drop Emblems of Conquest and will drop Emblems of Triumph according to Bornak’s Blue Post in the WoW Forums.
As emblems are a form of in game currency, we thought this was noteworthy. The change is great way to afford more opportunities for people to get the gear they need to get into Icecrown and take their shot at the Lich King. However one thing we have to look at is the Law of Unintended Consequences, can Blizzard have its cake and eat it too? More after the break…
Although one can only speculate, it’s likely that it will be 6 months or more from Patch 3.3 to the release of Cataclysm. There has been no mention of Alpha testing yet so we have to assume we are a ways off. The end result will be an enormous amount of Emblems of Triump available to the players and the direct result will be the average gear level of the player base being higher.
Where the Law of Unintended Consequences comes into play is the balancing act or the great divide that is created between WoTLK players and new players in the game. Historically Blizzard has only had to account for a very narrow set of players with top level item gear when planning the expansion. Each server only had a handful of guilds on doing Nax in vanilla WoW and similar numbers in TBC with Sunwell. Will Blizzard have to amp up the quest difficulty to account for the fact that players are generally so much better geared than previous expansions? A more important question: Should the leveling content even be a challenge anymore?
Blizzard historically created leveling content as accessible but nothing that is just steamrolled. But accessible to a new player and still an entertaining for the masses where the average gear level is going to be much higher is not an easy fix. Perhaps this represents a change on Blizzard’s philosophy that “it’s not about the trip it’s really about the destination”. One possible solution is to actually make leveling content a bit more of a challenge where players who ding 80 post-WoTLK be more reliant on gear coming from professions to start working the Cataclysm content. This might be a solution that would provide a lift to those who want to make gold selling gear they craft and would probably be the easiest fix to bridging the gaps. The other option, like previously is to just give the players a dozen or so gimmee-gear quests that we’ve seen to make things easier (a likely option, to bad I thought professions would be the way to go).
Stepping back a bit to wear my RL hat here fore a second, when you combine the change with Emblem upgrades policy and Cataclysm’s leveling cap change taking us only to 85 this time, it leads me to believe that it may very well be a shift to where future expansions may be “more about the destination” leaving Blizzard to reduce the number of resources required to develop new content therefore improving bottom line for the World of Warcraft balance sheet. It wouldn’t be a bad business decision.
What do you think?
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by duffry, on November 3 2009 @ 8:29 am
I think that the time and effort required to progress from 80 to 85 doesn’t intrinsically need to be less than 70 to 80. The reduction in levels probably has more to do with spellbooks and talent tree’s than content covered.
It’s almost certain that the new 80 will be gearing up in intro quests; worked well enough the last couple of times.
by Darkbrew, on November 3 2009 @ 9:56 am
This is something I’ve wondered about myself. My thoughts are this. If I were to logoff today (wearing mostly iLvl 232 and 245 gear) and not logon again until Cataclysm, that I will be more than geared to start the leveling process.
I doubt that Blizzard will tune the quests to accommodate folks having Icecrown gear as that can penalize a player who dings 80 just as Cataclysm arrives. Certainly those Worgen and Goblins can’t be expected to raid Icecrown in order to level to 85.
I think the reward of having Icecrown gear will be you get to keep it a lot longer and just get extra gold from vendoring or DE’ing your quest rewards.
by LargeRichard, on November 3 2009 @ 3:33 pm
I wonder if the changes to stats that are reportedly coming with the expansion (no AP on gear, no SP etc.) will cause this current gear to be obsolete, forcing all of us to upgrade when we start questing. This would put all of us on pretty much the same page once Cataclysm comes out as well as not forcing them to make the quests that much harder. However with only 5 levels to gain harder quests or forcing groups etc. will lengthen the questing process.
by Java, on November 3 2009 @ 4:02 pm
@ LargeRichard. Seriously I just laughed. That would be pretty funny actually.
by Jarnow, on November 9 2009 @ 2:11 pm
Wouldn’t the solution just be to tune the quests for lvls 80-82 or so such that they could be do-able with Northrend questing greens and blues (and therefore laughable for WotLK raiders), and have the quest rewards from those quests be IC-level? Then from 82-85 the difficulty could ramp up sharply, with all players being on fairly even footing.
Isn’t that more or less what’s happeneed before? I wasn’t around pre-Wrath, but it seems to me that people discussing leveling, for example, tell you to go straight to Outland at 58 rather than trying to do the Vanilla instances b/c the quest rewards are so good.
BTW this is my first time here, I think I like it!
by Java, on November 9 2009 @ 5:03 pm
Correct, that was the option taken previously one little difference today being that it’s not 10 levels it’s only 5 this time around.