I am surprised nobody has thought of this topic, but it is worth talking about. I know with Classic, Blizzard was keeping low on what gear would be available in Ony and MC at the beginning of the game as well as making it clear that very specific gear would be delayed. With TBC, this may matter much more in figuring out if there are certain gear that should be delayed, albeit when it comes to the raids themselves. The raid gear isn’t going to be an issue this time.
Specifically gear that may need to be talked about is crafted gear, Badge of Justice Gear, and Darkmoon Faire Decks. I don’t particularly have any way that I would like to see the gear be present. Probably the only thing is for Professions to matter as much as possible early on with exceptions like the JC drops in Sunwell. So feel free to give input on what you think gear progression should be like for a game that originally had Hyjal available from the beginning, but now we only have the 3 raids to start with.
I think TBC has fairly natural item progression? Blacksmithing weapons for example can’t be upgraded because they require items that drop in content that wouldn’t be released yet, like the Level 3 Weapons requiring items that drop in Black Temple.
In Vanilla some items plain didn’t exist as drops until later on in the game, namely the Idol/Libram/Totem accessories that were added with Ahn’Qiraj.
Zul’Aman patch added a lot of Badge of Justice gear, I imagine we wouldn’t have access to those from the start of the game.
Yeah, but with it being 2.4.3. It is good to communicate these differences. Otherwise you get gear that should release with ZA in the game at the beginning. There is also something like Darkmoon Card: Crusader which is a very powerful trinket that was present in 2.1. And that is where you have a problem to be solved. 2.0 and 2.1 had content available all the way up to Hyjal. But we are starting with only Kara, Mag, and Gruul. Should something like the Darkmoon Cards be in from the beginning or when SSC/TK release?
I never liked the idea of catch-up gear. If people miss content they never get to experience it. For example why run TK when ZA and The isle dailies have better gear.
I actually like the retail version of upgrading gear. But that wouldn’t fit in BC.
Catch-up isn’t bad. I do get what you mean though and in the past I likely would have thought the same. Without catchup, TBC is notorious for guilds struggling to keep a roster. Albeit that was also in the past with most players being new. The reason I think it is fine to have is that you are able to have a better pool of players to play with rather than creating barriers for entry.
Yes of course. But what about things that were available in 2.1 as I mentioned above? There are some things that are pretty powerful early on. So do we do them in phase 1 or 2?
Which is a good possibility. But there are also crafted gear like the engineer epic head which is also 2.1. The context in this is that TBC released on January 17 and 2.1 released on May 22. So that is a four month period where really good crafting gear like that were not yet available. Although personally I would favor having crafting being as good as it can reasonably be early on would be a good thing.