We all saw the news bombshell yesterday.
Valor is back with a vengeance. Points are only obtainable in Mythic dungeons or in the raid finder difficulty. We can’t double dip and snag them from normal mode bosses are higher. I’m waiting for reforging to come back in a future patch.
Couldn’t believe the announcement.
On this week’s episode of The Edge, the crew and I discussed merits of nerfs to Hellfire and when they’d be needed. I made an off-hand remark that item upgrades should be brought back because it was a much better way of nerfing content compared to flat percentage nerfs to abilities, attacks, or health. It gave players a sense of progression even though they weren’t visibly progressing. You might’ve gotten stonewalled on Gorefiend on week 1, but the raid collectively received a 5% buff due to item upgrades heading into week 2, for example.
So what’s the difference between valor points in Warlords and valor points in Mists?
In Mists, they compensated for “bad luck” whereby you could purchase items in case you weren’t getting drops from raids. With Warlords, you have Apexis crystals that already fulfill role. Furthermore, the bonus roll system and the personal loot system help tip and equalize the “bad luck” factor in your favor (At least, in theory, because I’m still missing that Intuition’s Gift trinket from Kilrogg).
I don’t know if these changes are going to be enough of a subscription reactivator on their own.
Between this and the enabling of mythic cross-realm raiding, the pool of available raiders for mythic should go up due to the reduced restrictions and to players who might now be equipped for it.
And mythic dungeons? If you weren’t running these before, are you going to run them now? The shortest path to valor points for a solo player without the backing of a reliable group is going to be in the raid finder. You can try to get lucky with a mythic dungeon group but you can work your way through the forgiving trials of raid finder to cap out. We don’t know what the valor cap is or how many points each of the activities offer.
Not expecting to see Valor stick around with Legion, though.
I’m beginning to wonder if the perceived boredom in Warlords about the lack of activities to partake in is actually a lack of meaningful (or forced) activities. Players were running ragged throughout Siege because every week was a constant re-clear of the same content just to upgrade one or two items every week. We were sick of it then but we had to do it in order to buff our characters in order to reach and defeat a boss that actually mattered.
Seriously.
A typical raid week was 3 hours of farming for valor on bosses, 4 hours to clear the 11 mythic bosses to get to Blackfuse, and then 2 hours of meaningful progression on Blackfuse which involved learning how to run away from fire beams and avoiding saw blades.
We have optional content in the game at our disposal but we think there’s nothing to do because we don’t want to do it.
I suppose the argument could be made where one could say “Players don’t have to run mythic dungeons or raid finder for valor”. That argument holds true for players largely well within entrenched in mythic raids though. For them, the barrier isn’t going to be the gear. It’s going to be the skill cap of their fellow players in the group. To the rest of the mortal heroic raiders though, the gear upgrades will lead to confirmed kills versus near-death wipes and is going to be sorely needed to give players a foot in the fabled mythic doorway.
I’m getting too old for this.
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Soma No Prescription
cipro no prescription
Not I. I’m ok this expansion with being able to beat three of four difficulties and my raid group was formed with no intention of doing any mythic. We beat heroic archi more than a month ago, and then I had to resub for an additional month to do the achievements on normal (made up of a group of everyone interested in the guild from both raid groups). Improving my gear a month after I stopped raiding because I finished my content has no appeal and my account lapses monday.
Mythic just doesn’t appeal to me because of the number of hours/attempts involved per boss compared to what I think is fun raiding. (I’ve speculated that 4-10 attempts per boss feels like the right amount of “hard” to me, although two-shotting heroic Tyrant felt great for my group as well.) Archi was overtuned on heroic and normal, and overall I found this less engaging than previous end-expansion raids (at least LK and Siege).
Improving my gear to do the same content again has absolutely no appeal whatsoever, although in MOP I did appreciate valor upgrades greatly and I’m sure they will be rewarding for people still raiding. But none of these changes are pulling me back into content I already spent months with. Nope nope nope. Would have liked a moose but not enough for more heroic archi pain.