Feb 6, 2009, last modified on Feb 8, 2009
Hidden in an otherwise bland post on the next season of pvp rewards, game designer Kalgan let slip how emblem progression is going to go for the rest of Wrath! Here’s the relevant quote:
it won’t be quite as easy to get deadly items via emblems of conquest as hateful items currently are via emblems of valor
Well, that’s interesting. So what have we learned?
First, unlike some well-meaning folk have recently advised, don’t horde your tokens. Hey, I guessed wrong. It happens.
Emblems are intended for that level of content, and there likely won’t be new rewards trickling down. I actually like this system better; raiding Naxx every week won’t be “mandatory” the way that raiding Kara was.
So, from this one sentence, we can derive that there will be an Emblem for each tier of content:
- Heroic/Naxx10 : Emblem of Heroism
- Naxx25/Ulduar10 : Emblem of Valor
- Ulduar25/ThirdWrathRaid10 : Emblem of Conquest
- ThirdWrathRaid25/FourthWrathRaid10: Emblem of Zomgepics
- and so on
Thus maintaining the steady progression of both 10 and 25-man raiding, and also sticking with their stated design objective that managing twenty-five players in a raid should yield higher rewards than managing ten.
This also eliminates any save/spend strategy regarding emblems, which is probably for the best anyway. If you see something you like at that tier, grab it.
Oct 6, 2008
Seven weeks after we started our Horde side project (leveling being friendly to frequent pauses and sudden stops), my wife happened to walk by my computer while I had my character select screen up.
“What are all those Horde characters?!” she said.
“Oh! Well, here’s my auction house alt, and my grinding alt, and–”
“I thought this Horde thing was a side project?”
Blink blink. “It is.”
“Are we giving up our Alliance toons?”
“No! But we’ll need support for our horde mains, too.”
“Our L32 mains?”
“We’re going to need gold for epic mounts and–”
She didn’t actually say anything to interrupt me, but her look cut me off. It’s the “you’re missing the point” look.
“Um… yeah,” I said.
She’s right, of course. Without even realizing it, I had begun duplicating the entire infrastructure that I have in place to support our Alliance mains. Crafting alts, auction house alts, and so on. That blink blink above is my brain suddenly becoming aware of a pattern I hadn’t seen before.
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Sep 9, 2008
Recently, Kikidas reminded me of a popular thought in how to make guilds stronger: a guild house/stronghold of some kind, with various customizable decorations from trophies from kills and accomplishments.
The problem with guild housing is that the room is communal property. A brand new guild member walks into a room that has everything populated or empty, just like someone who has been there the whole time. Just like guild banks, you can’t have everyone editing a room, right? I mean, I don’t let my wife edit my office desk arrangement (the mess is just so, thanks). Plus, you can’t take a guild house with you: if your guild goes south, you have to leave the house behind.
But why don’t we make guild success personal, like the new Achievement system is?
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Jul 24, 2008, last modified on Aug 2, 2008
I went on my first pug raid in quite a while: a full Kara clear with my mostly-battleground hunter. It was decently fun; Kara’s a good time although by now I’ve spent entirely too much time there. This being summer and all, the raid chatter tended to center around genitalia and bodily functions.
Over the course of the 3.5 hour run, a total of five of the ten initial raiders left during the raid, every one of them by disconnecting without warning.
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Jul 11, 2008, last modified on Aug 2, 2008
This is a thought in progress. A little rambling.
My wife is a combat rogue. Always has been. When she joined the game she fell in love with being a rogue, and she asked what the highest damage version of rogue was. I went off to the internets, and came back with the answer: Combat Sword build. So that’s what she chose. When we got to the endgame, she did the most damage in our 40-person raids, virtually every raid. She gave the other dps people fits. (although she never spammed damagemeters) She flourished in that role.
When TBC was released, the raiding game was suspended and everyone is back to the beautiful leveling game for a while. In TBC leveling, there are quest daggers given throughout the leveling process, with rogues in mind. She thought, “why not experiment?” and then rebuilt as Combat Daggers.
Guess what? Combat Daggers is simply more fun to play than combat swords. Managing position and Backstab is more fun than mashing Sinister Strike x1000. To non-rogues, I’m sure this sounds like a minor distinction. It sounded that way to me, and I told her so.
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