PST - Episode 110

[Toypop]

Have to say, that 50% and 25% reduction has done nothing to tempt my alts out of retirement.

This could backfire in a big way for Blizzard. They have now put huge pressure on themselves to provide enough content to keep folks Mains entertained for an entire tier....

If player's mains runs out of content then they will start cancelling subs for months at a time between tiers.

I personally wouldn't buy the 5.0 items anyway. I'd do 5 mans and dailies to VP cap each week and buy the 5.2 VP gear instead. Yeah it would delay my access to RF but who cares? Looking at my main now after running RF for months I only have a few drops equipped. The rest are VP items and would otherwise be blues...

No thanks to wasting VP on 5.0 VP gear only to have to spend more VP replacing it with 5.2 VP gear.

Where does this leave JP? With plate PVP gear costing 70 to 100g on my AH or 20g per piece if you buy the mats, I'd ignore JP and just buy a full PVP set. Even with the buffed drop rate of JP it will still be worthless by the time I can buy anything.

Or am I missing something?

[The_Pancake]

I personally wouldn't buy the 5.0 items anyway. I'd do 5 mans and dailies to VP cap each week and buy the 5.2 VP gear instead. Yeah it would delay my access to RF but who cares? Looking at my main now after running RF for months I only have a few drops equipped. The rest are VP items and would otherwise be blues...

No thanks to wasting VP on 5.0 VP gear only to have to spend more VP replacing it with 5.2 VP gear.

Where does this leave JP? With plate PVP gear costing 70 to 100g on my AH or 20g per piece if you buy the mats, I'd ignore JP and just buy a full PVP set. Even with the buffed drop rate of JP it will still be worthless by the time I can buy anything.

Or am I missing something?

Actually it'd probably be a waste to buy 5.2 VP items instead of 5.0 VP items with the proposed discounts. You'd effectively be able to buy 3 pieces of 5.0 VP gear for the same cost as buying 2 pieces of 5.2 VP gear. So if we're assuming that you're upgrading from 471 blues then buying 5.0 VP gear would get you 54 ilevels compared to the 50 ilevels you'd get from buying the 5.2 VP gear (and if we look at upgrading from 463 blues then the comparison would be 78 compared to 66 in favor of the 5.0 VP gear). And since we're talking about catching up to get into T15 LFR we're talking about items that will ultimately get replaced (relatively) quickly anyways so it just doesn't really make sense to spend the extra valor on the 5.2 items.

And as to what you said regarding the crafted pvp gear, if it really does become a viable way to gear up quickly then the prices will undoubtedly shoot up too. As to where JP is left in all of this.....*shrug*, I really don't think blizzard is sure what to do with it anymore. They started with those straightforward system where valor was for current tier rewards and justice was for all prior tier rewards but for some reason they keep bleeding valor down further and further into the system to where JP is virtually worthless to everyone.

[theodisius]

The upgrade system in 5.1 gave a use for JP, especially for alts or newly leveled characters as you could make dungeon drops good enough to get into HoF LFR (471>470). Given how few JPs you tend to have on your characters in MoP, this made them quite valuable - certainly too valuable to squander on mediocre 458 gear. I can understand getting rid of VP upgrades for 5.2, but think they missed a trick by dong the same for JP upgrades.

[tawnos]

The real question most people will be asking with regards to valour upgrades is: upgrade this 463 to a 489 in the hopes that it helps getting into a pug raid, or upgrade this (potentially weak slot) 483 and hope for a lfr drop in the slot with the blues. Now if someone's only goal is LFR's then taking the long view of upgrading would make more sense, but thats different from someone who is currently only running LFR (which is a large number of people and what it sounded like the question implied).

If weapons or tier pieces are in play then those are the obvious target for valour, but at least on my characters i have way more potential upgrades from valour than I do weapons/tier pieces. I think its less clearcut when the option is between upgrading a ring/neck/cloak or even belt/boots vs upgrading a 463 to 489. In the long run and if getting into normals isn't an issue going with the upgrades is probably the better idea, but then you are gambling at keeping a severely weak slot if you don't get fortunate with LFR drops.

For the Titan question, as posed it was silly but the concept is not. Obviously Blizzard would never intentionally try to 'drive players away' but they may very well (and some claim already have) start to reallocate resources aggressively. EQ did this when SOE was developing EQ2 - they certainly didn't encourage people to quit playing but they largely put EQ1 on maintenance and most of their focus on EQ2. From what I can tell, EQ continues to this day with a "dev team" that probably fits around a single table albeit with the use of a federated art team used by all of the SOE games. Once Blizzard is convinced the trend for WoW is inevitably downard they will start scaling back development resources in response, and it is likely that would coincide with allocation of those resources to a new game (even if its not Titan).

As far as new characters/lore, I remember someone from Blizzard remarking that they had a difficult time generating new characters people cared about. I definitely think the ones added in WoW have been less compelling than those that came from WC3, but there is no more a guarantee that characters from a new IP would fare any better than the ones Blizzard has tried to introduce in WoW.