Beaten to the punch

After thinking about what to write about recently and what exactly I really wanted to dive into, I was beaten to the punch by Theck and most of what I'm about to say is really just echoing his points.

Back into the concept of content design and who gets to consume it blizzard has added several feats of strength to the beta. These feats are entitled "Cutting Edge:..." They are for completing the final heroic encounters without the nerf to content. Lets dive into that a bit.

Currently the plan is to continue the DS style nerfs in future content. After some undetermined amount of time they will start nerfing content the same way they did during DS. They will start with 5% and move on to 10% and so on. I'm not going to comment on these nerfs as they are right now as that's a whole new can of worms I am sure I'll have plenty of time to expose but the point is they are doing these nerfs and we can expect them to continue.

These FoS are for completing the raids without this buff. They are feats because, and I don't have an official source for them but the implication seems to be, they will become unavailable once the tier of content is no longer considered "current." An example: Sometime in March maybe tier 15 gets released, if you don't already have your t14 "cutting edge" feats then you will not be able to get it any longer. This means you can't go and outgear the encounters later to have the same achieve. This essentially puts the feats on a timer, which imo can be compared to arena seasons loosely.

As I mentioned in earlier weeks, I don't really like the nerf but I do agree that it serves a purpose. It solves a problem that has no real simple or beautiful solution. The problem that I, and if the forums are an indication, the majority of the raiding population sees is the argument that we can just turn it off. It's pretty clear why that's not a good argument but blizzard really doesn't seem to see it the same way. I mean we could go into a raid encounter without enchants and that would be the same as turning the "enchant" buff off, but is anyone going to do that? No. We aren't going to make the encounters arbitrarily more difficult for ourselves. Sure you can say something about the way the encounters are designed, especially regarding player stats and whatnot but when you start talking about nerfs that concept goes straight out the window.

I'm going to say again, I don't hate the nerf, I just wish they would time it better if possible. I don't like being where I am in the raiding game with the nerf going live when it does. That, unfortunately, is going to happen to some group of people and it's nearly impossible to get around that. There are some alternatives thrown out there like "targetted" nerfs to abilities or whatnot though I think that's asking too much of the devs.

But I digress, I wanted to talk about these feats and some other matters regarding raiding in mists. These cutting edge achievements really give raiders something to push for in raiding outside of third party ranking websites. I didn't always think about it this way but one of the major things lacking in WoW was an in-game way of marking your progress. Sure there was gear but gear may not always drop and due to group dynamics and shared resources it doesn't always go to you (whether it should or not is not something I'm really concerned about). Sure there's time stamps on achievements but in my experience nobody looks at those timestamps unless they're pointed out.

In summary, I think these are great. They're great for the raiding community and they're a great incentive to join the raiding community. Currently I think some people who want to do really well think of joining really high ends guilds that push for world ranking, which while totally acceptable is somewhat unrealistic in the majority of cases. I consider myself a good player but I just don't have the time to devote to guilds like vodka or blood legion or premonition. I may or may not be skilled enough, I'd like to think I am but I really have no clue what it takes to compete at that level, I also enjoy playing with the friends I've made where I am now. These sorts of things lead to a lot of people wanting to join the raiding environment and then getting fed up with not doing all that well, it's sorta like pvp when you start and expect to hit a 2k rating right off the bat but get stuck around 1700 and improve slowly.

So what is it that these feats do? They provide a goal for people that is a lot more realistic. Something you can see that might be just out of reach but still obtainable. It's something I think is great for the game in so many ways. Now if only blizz could do something to incentivize 25m raids so we see some parity between that and 10m or at least some way to seperate them.

That was a bit more than I was expecting about the feats so I'm going to call it a night there. I still want to get some thoughts down regarding the raid release schedule and what exactly it means for heroic mogushan specifically. In any case, hope you enjoyed the long weekend for those in Canada, and keep looking forward to MoP.