LFM: ZG!Follow

One thing I think most people are missing about ZA/ZG dropping epics in heroics, is that you will probably need to be close to raid geared at first to clear these, if balanced correctly. It clears up the BC left behind problem while making WotLK problem obsolete.

BC we had the problem that we did normals then heroics then raids in tiers. Coming in at the end you needed to be carried or spend lots of time to go through each tier (Normal> Heroic> T1>T2 etc) causing lots of people to burn out or see the grind as not worth the effort. This form caused players that had more 'time' to be the only ones to see later and later content.

WotLK had Normals for Leveling mainly and basic gearing for heroics, then Heroics then raiding. Then Blizz started bumping up the rewards (badges) of these heroics to the previous tiers badge while keeping heroics balanced around starting Heroic gear. So suddenly you had great gear from easy heroics.

Toward the end of Wrath they released new heroics that were actually rather challenging to raiders in previous tiers gear lesser geared people still had a chance to catch up Instead of doing each tier completely before moving on.

Cata is trying to hybrid this process while still giving players more freedom. Instead it feels or seems like were going to have heroic 'tiers'. Hit 85 start off with the first 5 heroics to get gear/badges til you can access '2nd tier' Heroics" to gear up faster using them to get to the current raid content. If the 2nd tier heroics are hard enough where fresh 85s cannot clear them until they reach approximately T11 gear standards, then we won't run into the problem of great gear for easy heroics.

One thing I'm GUESSING at is I think our current heroics will drop less badges then the new heroics therefore creating a semi-balance. Those with more time could spam earlier heroics to get previous tier gear through grinding, while those who have better gear/skill can clear the later heroics and gear at a bit faster rate.

And for those out there who are all about "But epics have no meaning". Honestly who cares, you know you earned yours through hard work and 'skill' while they might not have. It allows more choices for guilds/raids/players to complete current tier content. Besides you will still have your achievement as your badges of honor. Yes the people who get gear from an easier method might have a slight gear curve but just like Ulduar wasn't a push over in T10 they will have to work at getting those like you, it was easier for sure but still required finesse for the harder fights.

I don't know I'm just hypothesizing here, maybe a little wishing, but in the end this feels like maybe the best in terms of getting content cleared and making it more accessible. IDK I might be completely wrong too.

tBC had the same easy on epicness (heh) as today. Kara, although a lot of fun and of the best raids so far, was easy, puggable and farmable to no end. So you got epics there, quite a lot, in fact. And, later in the expansion, we got BoJ. Wich was = easy epics.
Oh, don't forget PvP. They were easy epics too.

Epics are no longer conceptually epic since vanilla, when you had to roll against 39 other people and the raid were actually a burden to organize, though a lot of fun to actually play. And PvP was another burden, since you had to PvP all the time to even get anything (meaning titles). After that, epic is just a purple tooltip, nothing else.


About people queueing only for new ones, you will have to queue for random, so you can get your Valor Point (or whatever will be called on 4.1) to get the new Tier items. And to actually do the new ones, they said they will implement an ilevel cap (350?), so new toons won't be able to queue for them and just grab epics before heroic blues. IMO, on the beggining, you will run your random as usual and then grab some guildies to do the new ones. After you get what you want from them, you will go back to just queue for random.

At the end of the day, I just want epics to feel epic. That's it. I want people to look at my gear and say "wow, that's sweet."

Like I said, I use to marvel at peoples gear until I started getting it, then I though "well that was easy."

I want a sense of achievement, to be proud, that I have something 'epic.'

People are saying this will just become another ToC, free epics for nothing. But it seems blizzard is trying to prevent that. If you read the full post, you would see this little quote. "The minimum average item level to enter this Heroic dungeon is 346" That means that who ever enters it must have atleast done a good chunck of the original Cata Heroics, to become geared enough. Plus they are only droping gear equal to regular current raids. Doing the old heroics will still give gear thats better (Just 3 points under the regular Firelands gear too, so it would still be usefull for people having trouble on Firelands bosses.) Personaly, I don't think it is bad enough yet to call it ToC 2.

Seems to me that, at worst, it's gonna be another ICC 5s. Sure, those fights were faceroll if you had a couple already raid geared folks in em, but they were a fair challenge when all the drops from the instance appropriate to your class/spec was an upgrade for you. Add in the current Cata heroics paradigm(CC/Interrupts important, moving out of fire required, etc) and they have the potential to be quite fun, IMO.

Several of the fights in particular I'm quite looking forward to seeing.