Expansions, Patches, Raids, Progression

Yes, this insane wall of text is planning on covering it all... I want to talk about how expansions and patches change the game, as well as, how raids and progression has evolved through said expansions and patches. Last, I want to speculate on how all of this relates to the future/Cataclysm.

Expansions:
I love expansions and I love keeping a game that deserves it going and alive with expansions. A big complaint about the expansions in WoW, is that as soon as one comes out, all the end game in the previous version is obsolete. When an expansion for WoW comes out, they try to bridge the ilvl gap quickly and some items that were once epic are replaced quickly with blues or greens. Granted, in Wrath of the Lich King the ilvl gap wasn't closed as quick as it was in The Burning Crusade, but it is still a valid point to make. Honestly, I don't have a problem with expansions making gear and content obsolete, I believe a lot of people play for the moment and are ready to move on by the time an expansion comes out. So the complaint I mentioned before was not mine, just one I have heard. A complaint that I have, is when content is not left in it's original state. Example, Naxxramas and Onyxia. While I am glad they amped them up so they are relevant to a max level now, I wish they kept stuff the original way so future players could see it, should they choose to. An example of this, Karazhan, a really crazy and fun raid and I am glad I can go steamroll it at 80 so I can show my girlfriend, who didn't play during TBC, cool stuff like the Opera Event and Chess.

Patches:
People pay $15 dollars every month with the promise of new content and maintenance. I am very pleased with how open Blizzard is about the details of patch development, the rate new content is implemented, and the quality of said content. My only current complaint about patches is something that I will also address further down the post, the fact that patches are actually making content obsolete now and not just leaving that to expansions. For example, in patch 3.2 a 5 man dungeon, Trial of the Champion, was implemented that dropped ilvl 200 epics on normal and a fresh 80 (technically 78) could go run it and get epics, actually making the need for any other 5 man normal (or heroic), and even 10 man Naxxramas/Sarth+0, obsolete. However, there are certain drops that are really good in those dungeons and might warrant a run in them, but you could in all actuality, run the 5man ToC normal until you gear up enough for Heroic, then only run 5man ToC heroic until you gear up fully in there, and then go straight into 10man Trial of the Crusader. Therefore making normal 80 dungeons, heroic 80 dungeons, 10/25 Naxx, and 10 Ulduar obsolete. In the next patch, 3.3, 3 new 5 mans will be coming out that will drop ilvl 219 on normal and 232 on heroic. So if they are not any harder than the other normal 5 mans and heroic 5 mans in the game currently, the next patch will make almost every dungeon and raid in the game obsolete in terms of gear, save for Trial of the Crusader 25man and Trial of the Grand Crusader 10/25 man.

Raids:
Raids have gone through A LOT of change since WoW was released. I wasn't raiding in the original WoW, although I had a lot of friends that did, I don't want to try and sound like I know everything about it since I wasn't doing it personally. What I do know is this, when you got to about 57 - 60 you started running the high level 5 man dungeons to start gearing up for raids. You would start putting together a dungeon set of gear, while questing to get attuned to raids, and while trying to get rep with certain end game factions like the Argent Dawn. Back then the raids varied in size, from I think 10 to 15 to 20 to 40.

Fast forward to The Burning Crusade. Now you hit 70, run normal dungeons and quest to try and get rep up to "Revered" with certain factions so you can buy the key to the Heroic version of their dungeons. So basically new heroic dungeons were introduced and that is how you started to gear up for raids. Also, you had to get attuned for Karazhan, so attunements were still in. Also they tried to standardize the raid size to 10 and 25 man raids. I wont go into the drama it put some guilds in but you can imagine I'm sure going from a 40 man to a 10. However, the problem was that you had to gear 25 people up in Kara to progress to Gruul's Lair and Mag's. 10 + 10 = 20, so where are the other 5 people getting gear? then after that you had 25 man raids in Tempest Keep and SSC, but then they added another 10 man in ZA. Then the finished it off with a 25 man Black Temple, then a 40 man Sunwell. SO AS YOU CAN SEE, Blizzard was all over the place.

Fast forward once more, to Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard stuck with the standard in The Burning Crusade of Heroic dungeons to gear up when you hit 80, but they dropped the rep requirement. Also, no attunements to run raids in Wrath. They also standardized the raid sizes to 10 and 25 man, which makes it to where you can actually run with a raid group and not have to worry about who is geared and how you are going to gear them up if the raid members are consistent. Not much to say about raids in Wrath, chances are if you are reading this you already know all about them. My personal opinion is that the way they did raids this expansion is by far the best and I hope they continue this. From what was said at Blizzcon, they are going to keep this format.

Progression:
Although I touched on this a couple times in previous segments, I want to make myself more clear. When you hit max level in every version of the game, where did you go for gear and where did you go once you got all that? WoW has a tiered gear system. You get a certain level of gear, then you are ready for a harder level of raid. Tier 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 and so on. In the original WoW, progression was pretty straight forward once you knew what the path was. The Burning Crusade progression was similar, except when they released the Sunwell patch, then you could obtain high level gear by running lower level dungeons and raids and buying the gear with badges. In Wrath of the Lich King, they have actually changed the progression path more than once and are continuing to throughout the next major path as well. Honestly, there has been so much time between the patch changing that the only people really effected are Alt's (for the better) and slow levelers not max level yet. Like I said before, I have a problem with patches changing the progression path, because of the making of content pretty much obsolete. However, as I am writing this one of the big changes of Patch 3.3 is weekly raid quests that will send our heroes back into lower tier raids to kill a boss and get a phat lewt turn in. So Blizzard is already trying to fix the patch obsoleteness.




I wanted to cover all of this to say, I think Blizzard is on the right track how they are going, and I hope a lot of what they have learned over the past 2 expansions they are putting in Cataclysm. You can see things have changed quite a bit, so who really knows how they will handle the 4 things I mentioned above? I would like to think it will be more like Wrath. They made all content available for all players which is good. However, I hope they don't kill progression paths every patch. Basically, I hope you don't just have to wait until patch 4.3 to kill Deathwing even if you only gear up in 5 mans up until that point (which is how it will be come 3.3 with the Lich King). My final thought on that is, just because Blizzard is making many modes of the content so everyone can see it, doesn't mean you shouldn't have to raid and progress to get the gear before hand. Thoughts? Opinions?