mendax.org

It doesn’t take a casual observer to realize that World of Warcraft (WoW) is not a casual game. The emphasis, quite clearly, is on end-game events, be they raiding progression of PvP. This isn’t purely the fault of the developers, however, because players will simply end up at the level cap eventually, and therefore the bulk of content needs to be created for the majority. That said, the game doesn’t exactly provide for the less hardcore, because in order to keep up with all that’s cool in WoW, one needs to put in a minimum amount of time to stay attuned to the latest and greatest.

What I mean by this is that most major patches provide new content, but this new content is mostly for players who have end-game characters. For example, the Hollow’s End event allowed characters to summon the Headless Horsemen, who dropped, among other things, an epic plate helm for end-game characters. The event itself was nicely done, but unless a player had a level 70 character ready, one was pretty out of luck. This same thing occurs time and time again, and while it doesn’t affect many of WoW’s loyal gamers, it’s a rather depressing circumstance.

This gripe has become somewhat personal for me, because the steady progression of dungeons means that I’ll likely never see content that has since been abandoned by WoW’s developers. Those who’ve been reading mendax.org will remember that I had two level 60 characters when I initially retired from WoW over half a year before Burning Crusade (BC) came out. Back then, I had few qualms with the succession of dungeons, as I was happy earning PvP titles and gear, else going on the occasional raid to earn my tier-set armor. With the exception of Naxxramas, every other dungeon was reasonable to get to, including Zul’Gurub. That is to say, one didn’t need their characters to be impressively geared for this type of content, while post-Molten Core content generally required pretty serious gearing considerations. Even those dungeons, however, were somewhat accessible for players seeking raiding opportunities, because not everyone in a 40-man raid needed to pull their weight. This was often annoying, but since 40 people could participate, “elite” teams weren’t necessary. Contrast this to dungeons like Karazhan, where everyone in the 10-man raid needs to be playing their role at close to maximum efficiency. On top of this, successful Karazhan raids need their respective participants to have acquired pretty good gear in order to survive.

Patch 2.3 brought a new 10-man raid dungeon, Zul’Aman, which is a post-Karazhan area which requires even better gearing. The problem here is that Karazhan is already not runnable by many players, which means that Zul’Aman is even further inaccessible. This is a fairly straightforward issue, but one that Blizzard has no choice but to ignore, since so much of WoW’s subscription base is composed of players plowing through end-game content.

The problem is only made exponentially worse when one looks at gamers who don’t even have end-game characters yet. As noted earlier, before BC was released, I had two characters ready to tackle Outland, and if I had done so immediately upon BC’s release, I would have seen no shortage of players looking to run BC dungeons. Like many others have now, I would also have characters capable of tackling Karazhan, and likely now, Zul’Aman. Unfortunately, I didn’t pick up BC until months after its release, and rather than run my 60s to 70, I instead rolled two new toons.

Today, the second of these new characters is midway to 70, which means I not only have a far ways to go, but by the time I reach 70, I suspect that not many guilds will still be pushing forward through Karazhan, let alone have room for characters who need to run Karazhan and heroics a bunch more times to fear up for Zul’Aman. In fact, I wholly expect that by the time Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) comes around, Karazhan and Zul’AMan will both fall into abandonment, just like so many of the pre-BC dungeons are no longer explored.

The nice things is that WotLK means I’ll have a new opportunity to gear up, and run whatever new dungeon replaces Karazhan in the level-80 end-game. So really, my problems are temporary, even if it means I’ll never experience the entirety of BC content. Nonetheless, the fact that Blizzard isn’t making it easier to get into end-game BC dungeons than they have is frustrating, even if they are taking baby steps in this direction (such as requiring less reputation to acquire heroic-dungeon access).

What does this mean for me and my character’s plans to be ready for WotLK? Simple:

1. Reach 70.
2. Max out my professions.
3. Acquire my flying mount(s).
4. Gear up via PvP and the occasional heroic.

I should be able to achieve these goals easily by the time WotLK arrives. My gear will steadily be replaced as I progress to 80, and without rerolling (even ignoring Death Knights for now), I can burn to 80 and be ready to participate in the end-game experience I’ve been missing with BC. Since the aforementioned goals will likely leave me with some bonus time, I can level my BE Paladin in the meantime, perhaps getting her to 70 as well. Since I’m dual-boxing part time, this means that for WotLK, I’ll have three characters within spitting distance of end-game content, with my main objective being to push my Hunter to 80 first. Best of all, I should be able to do this with continued casual playing, ramping up my game-time only after WotLK is released.

Popularity: 8% [?]