We’ll likely be deep into War Within season 1 by the next time Love is in the Air rolls around again next year, so what’s the point of making the Renewed Proto-Drake: Love Armor manuscript so rare like X-45 Heartbreaker? By the way, everything about this could just as easily be applied to Hallow’s End and Winter Veil, seeing as how the exact same thing happened with two other manuscripts and Arfus.
More broadly speaking, there have been a lot of discussions online all over every Warcraft community and on Wowhead item pages for these kinds of items every time they pop up. It’s hard to avoid them if you frequent any of these communities. The solutions always seem so obvious and easy from an “armchair developer” perspective that it’s a wonder it keeps happening. So I would love to hear why it’s actually not as simple as it seems (or any kind of insight honestly) from a developer following up on the community council live chat from two months ago that briefly touched on this ongoing subject (video linked below). However, given the absence of that and the continued development and implementation of such things, I assume Blizzard is perfectly okay with continuing the trend and, unfortunately, seemingly completely ignoring repeated player feedback from both live gameplay and PTR testing. The deafening silence from Blizzard surrounding this topic also only serves to reinforce the belief from players that they only do this for hollow engagement metrics and that it is disrespectful of their time in the game. I would love to have those theories assuaged if they are, in fact, untrue.
Also, on the subject of Love is in the Air, updating the event but not the Chemical Bros encounter in the same vein as the Headless Horseman was super disappointing; and, honestly, pretty annoying as a player when combined with the above and not only the hourly instance lockout restriction but also queue times that are, mind you, longer than the encounter itself the overwhelming majority of the time.
My two cents? For the Love Armor, at least, they could have just simply made the manuscript a reward from Support Your Local Artisans and called it a day, avoiding at least half the pushback against that achievement at the same time.
Honestly they should just make the manuscript pruchasable via costing the same amount as the other Valentine mounts, yet have a chance to drop from the bosses – Thus saving anyone saving up from having to purchase it out of the three mount options.
Blizzard has made the ‘standard’ price for event vendor-bought dragon armors 50k gold; which makes the ‘donate 50k to get nothing’ thing this event baffling: Just have them send it to you after doing that.
i think it’s okay to have some items that are rare drops. the majority of rewards are not rare drops. the majority of dragon riding manuscripts are also pretty common too.
Dragonriding/dynamic flight is going to be an evergreen feature, as far as I know. Not every normal mount is going to be compatible with it right away, so chances are some people will still be using the DF drakes. I have to assume they’re going to continue adding customizable mounts going forward, if the WW pre-purchase mount is anything to go by.
This will never happen, it makes too much sense to give a 50K manuscript an achievement also. It’s also a very dumb holiday to be putting that achievement in, what’s the significance to valentines day?
As for the RNG and all that, until Blizzard come out to tell us AND make significant changes to prove otherwise, the whole /played metric is basically it, there is no other reason they have ever said as to why things are a garbage drop rate, it’s just money at the end of the day.
And fact is this, no matter how many times people say it, giving us things faster does not mean we will play less, if anything it means we will have a chance to move on to things faster and in fact play more.
Like how I want to run alts through M+ and raiding, but by the time I ‘finish’ my main I am burnt out. I have ran upwards of 15-20 M+ dungeons a week in most weeks from the start of each season, in S3 I am STILL running that many and was only ‘done’ with my main about 2 weeks ago, that’s 14 weeks of M+ doing way more than 8 per week, I just cannot be bothered running alts after all that.
Now if I could run say 4 M+ a week and be done within a few months that would mean I could run my 4 a week, do other things in the meantime, get everything done by the 2-3 months mark and run some alts on the side without feeling like I have a second job.
So, I don’t, I just raid 1-2 times a week, do my M+, maybe farm some older content if I feel up to it and call it a day. I am not doing what I want to do because RNG is so bad I am stuck on a single character constantly turning the hamster wheel and not feeling like I am making progress, that turns people away from the game. It may be what Blizzard want for me to be stuck on the hamster wheel and I would gladly keep running, but I want to do something other than M+ and raiding and doing it with more than just 1 character.
Because you will still be able to use Dragonriding mounts in The War Within; dynamic flying isn’t going anywhere and on the contrary is expanding to other mounts just as traditional flight will be coming to Dragonriding mounts.
WoW is the only MMO I know of that locks time limited holiday rewards behind rng
Every other MMO either gives you the holiday rewards essentially for free, or you earn them through an event that has little to no rng involved, and certainly no hard rng like this, where you can participate every single day of the event and STILL not get the item you want.
I have a limited amount of time to play each day. By the time I run my alts through the holiday boss, (delayed by an arbitrary and useless lock out for “too many instances entered” by my account) I have no time left to do any of my weekly progression. Low RNG drop rates for holiday rewards just feels bad.
Once again, the Dev’s have made a claim “we want to respect player’s time” but their actions speak otherwise. When your biggest obstacle is trust, you should start by making your actions reflect your words.
This. It’s bad design they keep using. They almost had it right with the revamp of this holiday. They put new things on the vendor for high currency prices. That’s perfect. That’s how it should be. But then they added more RNG and shot themselves in the foot.
It’s like they just can’t help themselves. Always two steps forward and one step back
Edit: Thinking on it, it’s more like 1 step forward, 1 step back, but sometimes Blizz manages to trip over themselves and inadvertently end up going slightly further forward than they intended.
These very same forums ranted about spending 50k for tokens cause they can’t afford it. You think they’ll suddenly be ok with it on a vendor?
And let’s be real you’re not gonna use it 24/7 as blizzard already stated other legacy mounts would be able to do dragon riding in the next expansion. You have plenty of choices that you would no longer be restricted to dragon riding mounts
So if you get it great if not, go use one of your other mounts like the Phoenix mount
No one is asking for it to be given to anyone. If you’d read instead of just acting snarky and dismissive, you’d see that two options were given: make it the same as the other manuscripts that cost 50k gold, thereby we have to earn the gold to buy it or get the achievement… or add it to the vendor for high currency cost like they just did with the new mount, pet and toy, thereby having us consistently run the event every day to do the dailies and earn the currency to eventually buy the reward.
You want to tell me again how that’s giving anyone anything?
Bad excuse is bad. There are already several manuscripts for that price.
Necromancer 
