Hello all curse-gaming.com fans. This is my article I promised to write when submitting “TBC Attunements” guide. This shows how the PvE world in TBC will/has changed. Hope you enjoy it :)
Regards,
Kamikazeelf
NOTE: THIS ARTICLE IS TALKING ONLY ABOUT PEOPLE/GUILDS THAT ARE DEDICATED TO PVE.
Along with The Burning Crusade, Blizzard came up with a way to neutralize the so called “hardcore PvE guilds”. Through that I mean more 5-man groups content of greater importance and reducing the amount of people needed to complete a raid-dungeon. This, however, may cause problems that the game designers might not have thought about.
First of all, let’s make it clear how World of Warcraft end-game content has changed. To even enter (!) a 25-man dungeon an attunement is needed. And to acquire that, tons of quests have to be done. Let’s give an example: The Eye, a wing of Tempest Keep and probably the most difficult dungeon in the game currently with Kael’thas Sunstrider being the last boss, requires an attunement, or more precisely The Tempest Key, which is awarded from a quest. The quest for the key has 3 parts where you have to enter other attunement-needed-dungeons, for which you need to enter other attunement-needed-dungeons etc. etc…which ends up in following results. To become attuned to The Eye you have to have done: 3 long quest lines and 3 level 70 dungeons which will take you a really long time to have it done. So where is the end with the hardcore gaming? Of course this might be seen as a good thing as Blizzard makes it impossible to skip the enormous amount of PvE content prepared for us but maybe it’s just a bit too much.
Secondly, just imagine that after 20+hours spent on the “getting attuned” you have done these quests. However, then you finally realize “Wait a minute…I have an alt!!”. What now? Are you going to grind that whole thing again for your alt? Or maybe you are going to dedicate your alt to PvP? Hmm…tough one isn’t it?
Another thing is that not everyone in a normal guild will have done these in the same pace and more and more people will get frustrated waiting for the “slow people”. At that point there are two choices, where the hardcore guilds come in again. You are going to wait as you are casual (well if you have done them before other people that would mean differently most of the times) or you are friendly OR you are going to join/create a hardcore guild where all the people will get the quests done quickly.
Now we know that hardcore guilds will exist at least in the beginning of the Burning Crusade and will probably extinct as the players on the server progress with their attunements. However, another problem arises for PvE guilds. What are the recruitment criteria going to be like? Gear? Experience? …or Attunements? Until TBC that was the order (from most important to the least important) in which people were recruited. Now it’s probably going to be more like Attunements? Gear? Experience? where gear and experience are going same important (why? Read on).
However, the changes in the game might result in more good than bad. The first and most important thing that is going to come with the attunement system is something we wanted to happen for a long time. By that I mean “NOOB EXTINCTION”. Just think: which noob will to survive the challenges ahead of him when trying to complete the attunements. They will either “morph” into very good and experienced players, dedicate themselves to PvP or quit WoW. This might seem like impossible and idyllic to most of us but now it is very (!!!!!) probable. Some people might thing that this is a catastrophe as the world (of warcraft) will be boring, predictable and will just become simple routine but to most of us it means no more frustration when trying to do something serious and some “unexperienced player” makes the whole raid fail.
Finally, now the PvE content is designed in such way that we progress smoothly through the harder and harder dungeons, which also means smooth gear upgrade. In addition, the fact that gear drops as tokens which you exchange for the actual armor makes it impossible to have too much of one class drops and too little of another.
To sum up, the Burning Crusade will come along with some negative features which are, however, completely neutralized by the positive ones. Moreover, the PvE system is actually much better than it was before the expansion was released. Good Job Blizzard :).
