Monday, February 11

The Good, the Bad and the Achiever

You work hard to achieve something, in my example an attunement for the 25man raid instance Serpent shrine Cavern... after several prequests and Heroic Dungeon runs you get your reward and are able to to actually enter that dungeon. It's a guild wide struggle as just me being attuned doesn't really help.. we plan extra Heroic runs until 90% of our people are attuned before it happens: Blizzard makes it so that you no longer need an attunement to enter SSC or TK.
Well, that kind of killed that sense of achievement! Then again our less active members are able to join us on those raids once in a while now as well, that at least is an enjoyable thing.

We fast forward to present time: 80% of the guild is attuned to Hyjall Summit (CoT:MH) and a 70% to the Black Temple as well. It won't be long before we have majority attuned but will still have some people we're leaving behind. We're not leaving them behind on purpose but some just don't show up often enough, just time their absence badly or simply haven't bothered to do any prequests and will not be able to complete the attunement to enter the 25man Caverns of Time raid dungeon.
Again this feels like a great achievement but will once again leave some of us behind.. as well as limits our choice of people who could strengthen our forces from outside of the guild. And then we get to read the 2.4 patch notes which will hit us shortly (prob in 3-4 weeks) where they will remove the required attunement for MH and BT. Once again Blizzard gives me the sense of having done everything for nothing.

Everyone loves to be a Hero, for many of us it's the reason why we play games... to feel important by saving the world or by destroying it if that's more your thing. But what if you're in a world full of Heroes?
Back before TBC gear was a sign of achievement.. walking around with massive shiny gear in Ironforge/Ogrimar would surely give you some respect.
You were also able to see how a player would have obtained it by the looks of it, whatever dungeon that person was raiding or what rank he was in PvP.
Nowadays you don't need to raid at all to get Epics, PvP offers a very easy way to get which are of equal quality of 25man raid instance drops but also Heroic badges from 5mans/Karazhan/ZA can buy you some very nice gear. 2.4 will even introduce more badge gear, of Black Temple quality even...

So if the gear wouldn't set me aside from Joe Average at least i was MH and BT attuned... i could go where no boldly man has ever gone before, or at least not the masses. But i suppose that has been taken away from me as well, i'm a Hero that stands in line to get a shot at that Dragon.
At least i achieved to fill another blogpost with this, three cheers for the Hero of Internet pollution!

3 comments:

Paul Tietjens said...

I have to agree with the sentiment. It definitely does make it feel less epic when they start giving out the gear in cereal boxes and crackerjacks.

I'm not sure if the trend started with the change of the old honor system (no more High Warlord/Marshal grind, epic weapons for all) or not, but that's the first one I remember.

Ah well. It's still fun, it's just sad to see some of the pinnacle content get snatched out of the more casual players' grasp at the last second.

Vishero said...

I have mixed feelings about the attunment issues. I am only a lvl 60 toon and I am excited to play end game instances. But i totally agree that the status symbol aspect is out the door now... total trash if you ask me!!

SuraBear said...

I'm not sure if the attunements bug me or not. I think given the more laid back attitude of the guild I'm in, its probably a good thing for me, as we'd struggle more than we already to do fill 25-mans if we had to have everybody going to a raid do all of the Trials of the Naruu and kill Magtheridon first (mostly the former thats an issue, heroic Arcatraz is, IMO, harder to get people to do than Mags)

The gear, on the other hand, I 100% agree with you on, to the point that I myself recently posted on the subject, in regards to rumors of T6 quality badge gear coming to the 2.4 patch (none to be seen yet, but there are still unlockables to be unlocked on the PTR).

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