Would you rather farm resist gear? Really, I only had to farm one staple resist set in EQ but it was minorly upgraded (which became mandatory for members to do) with Velium jewelry. Frog crown, cloak of ice bear (yeah white dragon cloaks, but this was on live EQ not the 5-6 years of Kunark on p99) etc carried through and you really only hadta do it once.
People (Joe General) went ape shit I think over having to farm nature resist gear for AQ. There's repeatable content that's fun (arenas and world pvp for me) and repeatable content that sucks (battlegrounds 90% of the time). You do have to have some kind of repeatable content in your game. Maybe a resist gear farm could rear its head again and be valuable throughout the xpac and upgradeable as you go. Find ways to enjoy doing this repeatable stuff like challenging yourself with a fun to play yet less viable spec.
The one good "repeatable" thing imo, is farming ingredients for consumables while content isn't on EZ-farm status which goes away as you get the fights down. I think having to gather materials of some kind to prep for progression is good design. I'm sure a thousand shit pies and rotten vegetables will be thrown my way for this comment. But it's also I'd rather they spend more time making quality raid content and stapling in resource farming than taking time out of making raid content to make fun progression required by each individual. But maybe they make enough money and have the resources to do both. I'm not them and even though I'd run my gaming company more like an artist than a businessman... you gotta draw the line somewhere. Another thought on this, is something the dumbs can be required to farm that will give them the edge to take a few extra ticks from the raid wide dot, or their dispels heal too to make up for them being slower on the draw. You're trying to play at a more relaxed pace on raids? Okay, go farm all this shit on your own time to buff yourself for the fights in advance. But of course we all know how trying to get the slackers to farm their own shit goes. It doesn't fit in with their "play to have fun" model
. I personally think having all my consumables and ducks in a row to beat some progression content is fun, but I'm not a flake when it comes to this shit either. I'd also be way more forgiving if the guy that couldn't get his shit straight every week farmed a few potions to keep him alive to make up for it.
Enough from me; if you're tired of this, what should they have instead?
Ok, there are a lot of misconceptions in this post so I'm going to be thorough.
1) The issue with resist gear was that you needed it for two fucking fights in AQ (huhuran, which was tanks/hunters and maybe rogues, and then whoever was the "soaker" for when c'thun's eye beam when you entered the room) and the majority of the gear came from maraudon. Do you have any idea how asinine that was? I mean, thank god the green dragons were out for awhile, and our guild had all 4 spawns on lockdown so all the required people had the crazy NR ring, and a few other pieces, but my NR set as a hunter was mostly from maraudon. All roads lead to MC -> BWL -> Maraudon -> AQ40? What?
2) Repeatable shit is fine, but the issue is that repeatable shit SHOULD NOT BE NECESSARY. That's why dailies were such a hit in TBC and the like. Ogri'la/Sha'tari/Netherwing; they did SHIT ALL for you except mounts, pets, tabards and a few items. If you didn't farm them, no one cared. If you did farm them, you netted extra stuff, as well as vanity items. Shattered Sun rep stepped it up a bit, by giving decent gems (admittedly they were pvp based) and access to a new vendor. The difference was it unlocked things you might consider necessary early on (like the armor vendor, certain recipes) and anything past honored was mostly just flavor. Granted, northrend and cata introduced reps that most of us considered necessary - helm and shoulder enchants etc, but you had a lot of quests leading into that rep, as well as only one or two factions with dailies that required it. Easy peasy.
What they should have done instead was not tie armor gear to vendors. Keep the old model of reps only being tied to flavor items OR certain items unlockable early. When you did Guardians of Hyjal, at friendly/honored/revered/exalted you unlocked an armor item for most specs/armor types, whose ilvl progressively got better. It wasn't VP/JP armor, it was just tied to that rep. So if you got it, hey good for you, that's one less armor you have to spend JP/VP on. Didn't get it? No probs; other than Therazane you were perfectly fine not really fucking with them. Recipes were obtained by spending mats and not an eternity doing dailies. Have JP/VP bind to account, NOT character, so at the very least when you do heroics/dailies for alts, you can still max out valor on your main. Allow recipes to BOA as well. We have this technology now, why are we picking and choosing what we apply it to? Scale back dailies, or increase rep for each daily. Let things like coins not duplicate items and allow you to set the spec you want to coin for. (Don't want to go in as a sub par dps but want dps gear? Go in as an epic geared healer, your coins grant you dps gear, bam.)
Also, the dailies how they were presented is wrong. I would have bitched less, and not cared as much had every rep been 3 quests a day for 500 rep each. You could have done every rep for the amount of time it took you to do golden lotus in it's entirety.
The other issue is how reputations were handled. Don't we remember in the past, how things necessary unlocked between friendly-honored, and the flavor items (other than heroic keys in TBC, which they scaled back on) at revered-exalted? How those reps were gained as soon as you entered the zone. Honor Hold/Thrallmar? Hellfire quests, then hellfire dungeons. They followed this pattern forever.
What you have is the very WORST situation in both respects; dailies that are necessary and reputation that gates things far into the rep where your only way to gain it is via dailies.
And then, to have them say, hey we know this xpac is hard on alts now. Really? Just NOW? So 4 xpacs later and 8 years, and you don't think most people have alts? So everyone does the same grind? Whattt?
You're not getting it. They're pulling the wool over your eyes; you're accepting it for some ungodly reason.
I'm sad because this is a new direction they're heading in, because they took all those years prior, and went back on promises, and ideas that fixed things people were bitching about. You grind valor endlessly. You grind rep endlessly. Your alts will grind it. It's like a loop of stupidity that if you give a shit about wow you'll do, and therein lies the deviancy. I can't even talk because here I am leveling my priest to hit 90 and do golden lotus/august celestials/shado pan so I can be an enchant mule again.
It's a shit idea, and people keep making excuses for it.
Disclaimer: I received a bunch of collector's boxes of chimay beer for xmas so my ire is probably exaggerated due to intoxication. Apologies.
