TBC gear progression compared to Classic

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

I’ve been thinking about TBC Classic gear progression lately and…I’m not sure how Blizz will end up doing it. Since they are probably in the planning stages of TBC Classic, now may be the best time to have that discussion.

My primary concerns are PvP gear and Badge gear. There is a tl;dr at the bottom.

PvP Gear (primarily Arena)
In the original version of TBC, Arena was available early on (from the start?) and players were able to start earning Season 1 gear. This did not require any skill as all you needed to do was play 10 arena matches per week to get points. It didn’t matter if you went 100-0 or 0-10, you would get points. Winning (increasing your arena rating) only increased the amount of points you obtained. The Season 1 weapons were particularly strong as they were item level 123.

That’s equal to the 2nd tier blacksmithing weapons (requiring 375 BS, an extreme amount of costly mats, and 8 primal nether from the end of heroic 5-mans) and only 2 item levels below the weapons dropped by Gruul, Mag, and Malch (The end bosses of the Tier 4 phase).

If we follow a #nochanges policy, then all people have to do to get some of the best weapons available is lose 10 arena matches per week. I mean, there is a reason that a Blizz employee referred to Arena gear as “welfare epics” on the Blizzcon stage during TBC’s time.

Maybe that’s not bad, you say. So what if people can get easy gear in the first phase. It’s not like MC was big barrier to getting gear in Classic.

Well…it only gets worse. As soon as “Phase 2” releases, we would have Arena Season 2 as well as SSC and TK. For blacksmiths looking to upgrade to the final tier of their weapons, they will need to wait for 5 Nether Vortex drops from the raid. But anyone that just banked points from Season 1 will have a weapon of equal item level within seconds of the phase going live. Yep, true #nochanges means that Arena points don’t reset. I remember friends logging off at the arena vendor the night before the patch and buying their shiny, new item level 136 weapon the moment they logged on the next day.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Blizzard realized this wasn’t a great reward structure and made a change for Season 3: Arena weapons and shoulders would require a player to reach a specific rating IN THAT SEASON in order to purchase the gear.

Now, I’m not sure if my memory is the greatest, but I believe Season 4 brought even more restrictions for purchasing gear in the form of adding lesser rating requirements to the other gear slots. There was a true sense of progression as you got access to more gear as your rating increased.

Badge Gear
Badge gear was the true catch-up mechanism of TBC, but with advanced player knowledge, everyone will be banking badges to prepare for future badge releases. There were three levels of badge gear introduced during TBC:
-Initial badge gear that provided some really strong trinkets and some other fill-in rewards.
-The second wave of badge gear that was ZA themed and really emphasized Haste and Expertise becoming common secondary stats.
-The third wave of badge gear that was Sunwell themed and was extremely powerful.

This worked well for a player base that didn’t know better rewards were coming in the future. There was a rush for badges each time a wave was released. But again, Blizzard realized this wasn’t a great reward structure and changed the Badge System in WotLK to have progressive badge tiers (Justice, Valor, Frost, etc…).

In a #nochanges environment, badges earned at the onset of TBC classic can be used (at a later date) to purchase Sunwell badge gear. Its all the same badge.

On top of that, there is the issue of badges from raiding. When TBC was releases, Heroic 5-mans were the only source of badges. With the release of the second wave of badge rewards, Blizzard made a change so that all raid bosses regardless of tier would drop badges for everyone in the raid. Kara was run almost to the end of the expansion as it was the most efficient Badge Factory in the game.

I don’t even know how this works with #nochanges. Do raids drop badges from the start? Never? Do they add them in for a later phase?

TL;DR

So here are my questions:

  1. Should Arena gear have the Season 3 or 4 rating requirements in place during Season 1 and 2 even though this would represent a change? Or should the early seasons gear be purchasable without a rating (#nochanges)?

  2. Should Arena points reset at the start of a new season? Or should points be able to be banked for immediate gear access (#nochanges)?

  3. Should a tiered badge system like WotLK be introduced as a MAJOR #change for TBC or should badges from 5-mans/Kara be used to purchase T6/T6.5 gear (#nochanges)?

  4. When should badges start dropping from raids? At the beginning of TBC? During a later phase of TBC (#nochanges)? Or never?

2

The thing to remember is that a lot of mid-core guilds relied on that extra gear to progress their raids. Raids were tuned a lot tighter than Vanilla, and outside of the top end raiders, a lot of guilds didn’t start making real progress in the T5 content and T6 content until after that Sunwell badge gear was out.

It’s not just about a “nochanges” purity, the sort of changes you suggest would have wide-ranging consequences that would impact the spirit of BC as well.

Hording could be an issues although it might not be much worse than it was in BC. If you’re waiting for that next tier of badge gear to come out, you’re missing out on gear you could be using right now. The hording won’t really start until people are geared up with the current gear, and well, that happened in BC too.

When it comes to the PvP gear, if you were losing your 10 matches a week, getting the gear was a pretty slow process. It would take you a whole season to get a full set of gear.

3

I’d expect things to go down much like they did with classic if we go that route. 2.4.3 itemization with staggered item releases that mimics progression.

5

From what they’ve said, BC wouldn’t necessarily have to start with a 2.4.3 patch of itemization. They actually have the various full patch data for BC, I think, and so could run the actual patches for progression. (That wasn’t possible for Classic as they didn’t have complete patch data before 1.12.)

If they do run 2.4.3 at the start, I’d be way more concerned about things like how the massive 2.4 spirit changes affect healers vs. gear itemization.

2 Likes
6

The reason I think that is because classic has mimic’d the way private servers have went about doing things - taking a final codebase and mocking the release cycle as closely as possible. I do not recall them saying “we have patch-by-patch data for tbc” just that they had a backup of 1.12.1 “that came with a backup of bc”. I wouldn’t be surprised if tbc classic was just a funserver at this point.

7

I understand your concern with season 1 gear being on par with t4 gear. But remember…t4 and T5 release with the game. It won’t take more than a couple weeks for the top raiders to be neck deep in t5 content, making the “pvp gear > pve gear” argument moot.

As for your questions, I’m going to go with 1. no, 2. maybe (can’t remember what tbc did), 3. hell no, and 4. during a later phase (I think it was the bt patch that started that?)

8

Not sure a tiered system would work the idea is that a raid would in general require more investment and a higher risk but would reward more badges. In general people would ignore first two waves in favor of final wave and thus would be able to do what is smart. It is like wow classic if you played before cata you know what you are doing or there is a database to tell you what to do but the game is mostly the same.

In general that would be a terrible idea as players would be motivated to play heroic dungeons more than classic at least as there would be an in game motivation.

9

I remember dropping a lot of gold to re-gem all my gear with 2.4