I posted this question in another thread, but it was sort of off topic and didn’t get any responses so please forgive the duplicate post but I am still curious as to why and when this change occurred.
When did raids become obsolete as soon as the next one showed up?
Seems to me that back was I was raiding (Through WOTLK) we were always doing two to three different raids every week, a couple or at least one on farm and one on progression. Sometimes there would be four raids that were able to give loot for progression.
I don’t believe that this one and done design of raid tiers is a good, and I am not sure when it became a design philosophy.
Idk specifically when it started, but it’s definitely been exasperated since legion when the world and dungeons (and their rewards) started scaling up each patch. Before that, you needed to farm gear from the previous raid to stand a chance in the new one, since there was no other way to get the appropriate gear. That said, I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. I would hate to have to go back to farming old raids just to progress in the new one.
Whenever they started adding in catch-up gear so that alts and new players weren’t forced to go through all the previous raids in the expansion to start in on the new ones. Not a bad thing.
When they decided to add catch up gear from open world sources that are either equal to or better than the previous raid normal and/or heroic mode. Raids no longer needed to be a stepping stone between one to the next, you can skip it entirely with catch up gear. The removal of set bonuses also makes it less appealing to do older raids as they worked as an incentive to do older raids to help get over the hurdle of new raids while slowly gearing upgrades along the way.
It’s probably because they want the focus to be on the current content. They probably want more people in the end game participating to make it feel alive and thriving rather than have everyone spread out across multiple raids. This could also make it much harder to form raid groups for current content with past content still competing for peoples attention.
I vastly prefer the “one and done” address to raiding tiers.
the wrath model, where you had to get geared and attuned in kara before you could step into BT, then needed BT gear to step into Sunwell… no thanks. get a new raider? too bad he’s not attuned, now your whole raid has to go back to run an older raid to get him attuned. or, just poach from other guilds.
sucks to be that guild who can’t get out of kara because BT guilds keep poaching people as soon as you attune them.
Many guilds became stepping-stone guilds because they constantly worked to get people geared/attuned only for them to move on to more successful guilds…or get poached
Thanks everyone, I had not thought about it in the terms grinding old to get to new. Point well taken.
But I still think it gave a bit of variety to raiding and was fun knowing that a couple of raids were easy for the guild and could provide loot that would be usable not only for new guildies but also for folks that were geared for the next level raid.
Guild and community culture used to be a little different back then. There were a lot more casual guilds that still ran older content just for the fun of it. When I first joined the game, I had my GL run me and some others through vanilla dungeons and it’s one of the best memories I have of the game tbh
Some people actually liked attuning and gearing through previous raids to get ready for the newest raid tier content. However, ease of access won out in the end. I wouldn’t say the old way was worse necessarily, it was just a different system for a different player-base. What seems like a waste of time for most is a challenge for someone else. Most of those players are playing Classic and TBC right now.
I’d say it really got started in the second half of WotLK when you could just run dungeons to skip over T7/8 raids and jump right into ToGC, and then again with ICC where you could skip everything else.
Some guilds might have run the older raid tiers for fun or mounts or something, but WotLK was when you could basically just go hit max level → run dungeons → jump into the latest raid.
Attunements definitely were, it’s one thing to have to gear through old raids, its another to force them.
TBC attunements lead to an epidemic of feeder guilds that couldn’t get anywhere because further progressed guild would snipe players who were attuned so they didn’t have to attune them themselves.
I think part of the issue is the recent “feeling of progression” baked into the iLevel bump associated with one raid to the next.
In the past, the iLevel bump wasn’t intense, but still noticeable. 5 iLevels difference from one “tier” to the next (maybe) instead of 15 for each tier.
As it stands now, the increase is so insane (with catch-up gear occurring every patch) that any raid which isn’t the newest instantly becomes obsolete from an iLevel reward perspective.
The problem though is that the eternal catch-up-gear system that Blizzard uses now actively encourages people to quit the game periodically.
Why bother doing the current raid when you can just quit for a few months, then come back and be showered with tons of catch-up-gear the first week and be at the exact same spot as somebody who raided the entire last tier?
Blizzard bemoans the “cyclical player” but it’s their changes to the original game design that have brought that about.
It’s also strange for Blizzard (and players) to bemoan a “lack of content” when Blizzard deliberately makes all previous content utterly obsolete every few months. And then people cheer them for doing so. And then complain about “lack of content”. The playerbase is eating its own tail on this one.
do u go in a lfr caset narnia , u can get 187 gears , do u go in actin hose , u can get 200 gears , i think 200 gears more then 187 gears so not alotta pepole gonna do LFR of it
