The Weekly Marmot - The Grind

[Bovinity]

Of course, I also didn't feel that was the case in 2.2 either, but everyone seems to think I got lucky in TBC by starting a guild and working my way up with them from Kara to Sunwell.

Well yes, you were an outlier. As demonstrated by your own "Only 1% saw Sunwell" comments earlier in the discussion in shoutbox.

[Thels]

The "unable to ever catch up" worries me as well, especially with the Valor system being as it is. If someone was on hiatus (a lot of people were since Cata), and comes in at 5.2, he should have a chance to catch up. Even if he's online 10 hours per day 6 days a week, he can farm himself to full 471 blues, get 496 head and gloves crafted, get perhaps an epic or 3 from LFR, and is then stuck. He is not ready for 5.2 raiding, but has nothing to do but waiting for LFR to reset and hope he gets a few more epics for several weeks.

In the meantime, he's probably spending his valor to buy a few 496 items to bump up his ilvl as much as he can, valor which others spent to upgrade their 5.2 drops. So if he finally gets to the level where he can join 5.2 raids, he will still always be behind, because he then only starts to farm his valor to upgrade 5.2 drops.

Of course you can tell him to raid MSV/HoF for gear. That might be nice on some of the biggest servers. On my server we have problems keeping 4-5 guilds running for 10 man content. There just is not enough playerbase to support lower tier raiding guilds on most servers.

If Blizzard really wants lower tier raiding guilds to work, they really need to merge a lot of servers before that becomes anywhere close to viable.

[Theotherone]

There was a tweet from GC the other day that, in effect, they understand the need to catch-up and it will be possible, but not at the break neck speed that was available in WoLK and Cata. What he said also was they don't want to repeat the "mistake" of ToC making Ulduar irrelevant. There's been talk of buffing the LFR drops and I'm sure they have some other ideas.

I entered MoP with 12 85s; 6 are at 90 and I've sort of focused on gearing them in a certain order - I found when I focused on an alt the gearing when pretty fast; then again the bogey was only 460; I can see issues with the others once 5.2 hits. Gearing for raid will be a longer haul, but I don't think it will be insurmountable.

Blizz kind of brought this on itself by making the game about end game raiding and making it alt friendly (being a altaholic I didn't have much of an issue with it one way or another) - leading to content being chewed up too fast. Now they want to adjust the paradigm, give people reasons to log on other than raiding and as a result they need to detox the player base. I think it will work out.

Personally, I kind of like the pervious tier not becoming obsolete. Then again I don't know that they can really do this without the "squish", gear stats seem like they'll have to keep over inflating to make raids challenging - unless we're going to be flooded with gimmic/dance encounters.

[feralminded]

I personally would welcome 2 active tiers at a time but I am not certain that can actually happen because of LFR. Who wants to actually put in work and struggle with the first tier of raids when 5.2 will bring an LFR that will almost certainly be faster, easier, and drop higher iLvL? LFR combined with dramatic iLvL jumps between tiers (or even between normal and heroic) really makes this a non-starter. When 5.2 comes out this tier of raids will be more or less done for 95% of people, at least on normal or heroic.

[Theotherone]

I can see that, but with 486 as the entry ilvl for next tier, I'm wondering if you're going to have to get some 489/496 gear out of the current normals to make the grade. Maybe not, but then we're back to VP grinding to impove the 483s to 491 and getting some 496 VP gear.

[feralminded]

I bet the new quest hub/zone will hand out at least 502s (13 iLvLs higher than the release hubs). 486 won't be hard when you can quest yourself into 4-7 502s (if not 509s).

[Thels]

Question is, when 5.2 hit, what will happen to the VPs and JPs. Valor is intended for current content.

If the 489/496 vendor items cost JP instead of VP, and 470/476/483 epics can be upgraded with JP instead of VP, then that's not much of an issue. People that can throw some time at running the 5 mans and farming JPs then have the option to catch up.

If the stuff keeps costing VP, then people are basically getting bottlenecked by the weekly VP cap to advance in content. (Unless indeed we can grab a couple of 502s from quests alone, but wouldn't that make Tier14 practically useless?)

[Theotherone]

Yeah, I forgot the new hub since it's new tier will have more than three pieces like Shieldwall; and I assume the older 489 will be JP gear at that point. Thinking about it, if 489 gear goes to JP and we have no weekly cap on JP, getting to 486 will be a dungeon grind. Forgot about doing that at the end of Cata, you're just not getting the increaesed ilvl gear drop to supplement. Then again you could basically fill every slot with 489 from JP (except 3 or 4) if you're willing to grind the hell out of dungeons.

The catch-up may not be that slow after all.

[Theotherone]

Blue post on European forums saying ilvl for 5.2 lfr going to be 480 - that's a chip shot for getting into there.

[Thels]

If that's correct, I assume it's the entry level, not the drop level. With MSV dropping 476 and HoF/ToES dropping 483, that works well. Still wonder what the ilvl of gear will be.

[Tengenstein]

Probably 496.

[Theotherone]

480 is the entry level as of now, they say it could change.