Patch 3.2 - Part 1: It's Raining Badges

Before I begin on the topic of Patch 3.2 and the badge change, I’d like to first give a massive middle finger to Blizz and Direct TV for their middle finger to the fansites. For those who aren’t aware, Blizz announced (10 days before Blizzcon…) that Direct TV effectively had been granted a monopoly on all coverage of Blizzcon, screwing over the fansites that had been preparing to give their own (and from what I’ve heard, better) coverage. I understand that, yes, they are a company and that they’re there to make money, but ten days notice for something that has been allowed up until now is just ridiculous.

Speaking of ridiculous, I’ll get to the main topic. Patch 3.2 was released a few weeks back and now I’m going to give you my perspective on what we have so far. Let’s begin with one of the major factors; the badge change.

Progression, wonderful is it not? Apparently it isn’t. Let me begin by saying this, in this game, there are many types of players, from the almost 24/7 players to the ‘couple of hours a week’ players. If you wish to have such a wide playerbase you need to cater for all of them. This patch sees Emblems of Conquest dropping from all bosses outside of the Argent Tournament raids, and Emblems of Triumph from the new raids and from the daily heroic quest. Let me also remind you that the only way of getting any sort of tier 9 gear through tokens is 25 man hard mode, all the rest is bought with Emblems of Triumph. So, to purchase tier 9 gear you have to get badges from both the highest level raid content and the lowest level endgame content. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a pretty crazy concept to me. This gives the opposite effect to what I said earlier, instead of catering to all, this shoehorns all the players back into heroics. And we already know the sort of conflict between the playing styles, ‘casual vs hardcore’ anyone? Almost forcing the progressive raiders back into the land of the more casual players is going to cause trouble. If the aim was to get players back into heroics, it certainly worked, but not in the most desirable way. Most raiders see heroics as an early step up the ladder of progression, methods of gearing up for the starter raids. And now we have to step back down again to progress at the top. This is creating a rift of so called ‘elitism’ between not-so-well-geared players and the high end raiders because of a gear and possibly skill deficiency. Raiders just want to get it out of the way in a short period of time so they will only take players geared as well as they are to achieve this. This benefits casual players about as well as before the patch, instead of not being able to find a group, now there are loads of groups but no-one will let you join.

The next issue is aimed more at the casuals, and is the eternal debate of lesser geared players getting easier access to higher level gear. The progressive raiders complain about this and the casuals complain that all the change does is ruin the epeen of the hardcore. You can probably guess by now where I stand. A player who comes online to do only the heroic daily every day can expect to be able to purchase the cheapest piece of tier 9 gear in 15 days. That is very little work for such a large upgrade. But the question is, why? Why do you need top level raiding gear if your schedule restricts you from raiding? Do you really want to make the only content available to your time ridiculously trivial? Ok, so maybe you’re a new 80, in the position a lot of us were late last year, a fresh 80 looking forward to the raid content ahead. This really leads onto the matter of progression. To save myself from repetition I’ll save this for the new dungeon segment, since it is more prevalent there.

So far, all I’ve said has been directed at the Emblems of Triumph. And now here’s the Conquest side. Now these drop from most raids, heroics, the sky, everywhere really. Admittedly there are only two pieces of Tier 8 that can be purchased with these, but they also give access to non set waist, leg, hand and neck items of a similar quality, not too mention runed orbs for sometimes best in slot crafted items, and the huge quantity of high level PvP gear available. Of course to get all these you would need a hell of a lot of badges, to totally gear up this way would require more time than the average casual could put in. But this is more of a skill issue. Heroics don’t require much effort really; the hardest part is finding a group to go there. But if you farm these easy places, then the badges can pour in thick and fast. And this is what people complain about. Again, I’ll cover this in more detail in the next post about 3.2 and the dungeons.

So, to conclude the badge topic, I do not believe this is a good change since it ruins the natural progression of the game and grants players running low level endgame content to those who really don’t need it. The standard progression path was good enough, why change it so drastically?