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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