Following a live chat between the Classic Devs and the Classic Community Council members, I wish to start a thread to discuss one primary topic that should not be entertained.
iLvl squish for T9/T10/S7/S8
The proposal of reducing the iLvl (and in turn the stats) of items from ToC and onwards (That is T9, T10, Onyxia, Ruby Sanctum, S7 and S8) was made.
The stated goals of this change were as follow:
- To give more relevance to Ulduar once ToC is released.
- To increase the difficulty of ICC by reducing power creep.
Let’s break these down one by one.
“* To give more relevance to Ulduar once ToC is released.”
Ulduar (T8) will still be run by nearly every single raiding guild during T9 (ToC) as the T9 raids are very short in comparison to other WotLK tiers and Ulduar still has potent gear without an iLvl squish even into the late game. Any notion that T8 gear and raiding becomes irrelevant once T9 drops could not be farther from the truth. Trinkets, weapons, rare hard-mode loot, and especially the legendary mace are more than enough reason to keep running Ulduar well into T9 (not to mention how fun the raid is). In essence, Ulduar remains entirely relevant even with Trial of the Crusader being current content.
For the second concern…
“* To increase the difficulty of ICC by reducing power creep.”
Power creep seems like an unnecessarily long way to say “scaling,” so I’ll use the term scaling instead. Every iteration of competitive and non-competitive WoW raiding has dealt with scaling as a current or past raid’s release seeps farther into the past. It’s inevitable - always. Huge gear scaling always occurs in the last tier of a certain expansion, especially in the two previous iterations of classic WoW. Naxxramas in vanilla WoW had incredibly strong gear compared to everything that came before it, and the same comparison exists for Sunwell Plateau gear in comparison to nearly everything previous with exception to certain trinkets and warglaives. This is part of the excitement and wonder that comes with the final big raid of an expansion. While I can understand wanting end-game content (ICC) to be more difficult, nerfing T9 and T10 gear to achieve this goal is lazy, shifts the scaling class/spec meta in a massive way, and will inevitably fail to achieve the goal of “making ICC difficult.” If the community does in fact want ICC buffed, (I have no idea if that is the case and have no opinion regarding it) then why can’t we see straight buffs across the board for ICC like we’ve seen with the 30% Naxx HP/damage buff? Another simple recommendation could be holding off on the progressive ICC nerfs that were seen in the original version of WotLK. As raids get more high iLvl gear, the bosses of that raid will become easier - even if the available gear becomes less potent. If we truly want to make ICC a tough raid for WoW raiders, I’d recommend one of the other two routes suggested which would likely result in less backlash.
Based on discussions I’ve heard so far, it seems that the general idea here is to reduce high iLvl items found in both ToC and ICC down by 12+ iLvl in order to incentivize players to run Ulduar more, especially during T9. The point is, Ulduar incentivizes itself during T9 and the opening of ICC is when players would likely stop running Ulduar, at the earliest. ICC is a very long raid, and players will definitely be running ToC well into ICC for some of the bigger and highly contested pieces that drop in ToC. If gear is scaled back past T8 in terms of iLvl, many min/max guilds will be forced to run Ulduar well into ICC for big pickups due to small iLvl disparity between T8 and T10 gear. Ulduar and ICC are both long raids - players would spend a lot of time hitting Ulduar, ToC, and ICC within the same raid weeks well into T10 (Vashj belt farm PTSD, anyone?).
Certain classes and specs that scale incredibly well into late WotLK while being lackluster in the early stages will fail to pack the expected punch with such a big drop-off in gear strength. Fury warrior, fire mage, and marksman hunter are three of the big ones that come to mind. While I don’t plan to play any of these three classes at all, we could be looking at a large revamping of ICC raid comps at the higher level of gameplay if these classes fail to get the gear that propels them into greatness at this stage in the game.
This proposed iLvl squish idea is a terrible suggestion that should not have made it into a Community Manager thread. It is a lazy recommendation and the goals that it sets out to do are either misinformed or will be entirely unfulfilled.
TLDR: A T9 content drought does not exist due to Ulduar being important during ToC. If we want to make ICC more difficult for everybody, there are far better approaches to take than simply nerfing the gear found in the final two raids.
Curious to hear the community’s thoughts on this - please feel free to share your thoughts below.
Update: Just read that Blizzard responded to the Community Council post and I am now very concerned they plan to do this. Blizzard, I understand that you are worried that you will lose subscribers in T9, but I can assure you that T9 will have plenty of content for us in both ToC and in Ulduar.
