attunements
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WoW Archivist: Warlords of Draenor hates The Burning Crusade
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? In many ways, The Burning Crusade was the birth of modern WoW. Most of TBC's innovations are still going strong in WoW today and have been ever since their introduction. Looking back, it's striking how many key features of WoW were absent in classic, only unveiled during the game's first expansion. Even more striking, however, is how many of these innovations Warlords of Draenor seems poised to undo. Just as Garrosh will undo the transformation of Draenor into Outland, Warlords seeks to unravel most of what Blizzard innovated during TBC. The next expansion will take us through a portal into a very different WoW. Archivist has now covered all the major patches of The Burning Crusade: patch 2.0.1, patch 2.0.3, patch 2.1, patch 2.2, patch 2.3, and patch 2.4. Now it's time to review the expansion as a whole -- and explore how Warlords will make most of TBC's innovations disappear into the nether. Dawn of the quest hub The idea seems so obvious it's hard to imagine that classic WoW actually didn't have quest hubs, at least not in the strict sense. WoW was the first MMO to promote the idea of leveling mainly through quests rather than grinding mobs. So Blizzard had no model to look at when they were designing the original quests. In classic WoW, quests were put into the game wherever the developers thought they made sense, mostly from a lore perspective. Quests didn't necessarily guide you through a zone area by area. Quests were scattered, and their objectives were, too. They weren't breadcrumbs -- they were meant to be discovered. They didn't hold your hand -- they sent you on an adventure, like it or not.
WoW Archivist: The keys to content
WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold? Keys in WoW have come in many forms. Some hang around our neck. Some hide in belts. Others open aircraft hangars or other, very special places. Some let us pretend to be rogues. Some never made it to the live game. Some we eat or play with. Some help us get the mail or reach new heights. We find some in unexpected places. A few are just trash. This column is not about those keys. This is about the keys that used to be a Big Deal. The keys that people went to extraordinary lengths to obtain. The keys that put you on everyone's friends list. The keys to content. Literal gates Today, content is rarely locked. Players take it for granted that when a new dungeon or raid goes live, they will have immediate access. For the first half of WoW's history, however, this was not the case at all. Vanilla WoW locked away virtually all of its end-game content. Raids required attunement, which means that every single person in your raid had to complete a certain quest line. Keys worked differently. Content that required a key wasn't gated according to some arbitrary release schedule, such as the Heart of Fear -- but by actual gates.
Attunements and why they must never return
I loathe attunements. When you mention how fun old attunement chains were, I hiss and flee into the night like a werewolf from a cross. That is werewolves, right? No? It's vampires? Oh. Well, whichever. The point is, no. No, they were not fun. No. My lord, how much nostalgia must you be inhaling to argue that the Onyxia chain was fun? The Alliance version had a cool payoff, yes, but my word that thing was a slog -- and the Horde one? Pure, concentrated boring slop. I included the Wowcrendor video above because it's not an exaggeration. I did that quest chain. Twice. At the end, I hated all that lived, and you are all very fortunate that I don't have a death ray because just thinking about that quest makes me want to wipe out whole cities. All of Draztal's points about attunements are valid. I salute you, brave EU CM, for your willingness to say what so many people seem to have forgotten about them. They're content barriers. That's all that they are. The people remembering them so fondly are, so far as I can tell, drunk out of their minds on the sweet and heady wine of nostalgia or just really invested in creating artificial ways to keep other players from seeing the content. I don't understand the mindset that demands extra hoops outside of the content and its actual difficulty be added to arrest progress. I like a challenge. I do hard content in my raids. That's fun for me. What I don't like or want is a barrier to entry that has nothing to do with skill, just time and the ability to get other people to help me get through a series of stages that serve no other purpose but to delay me, especially when we're already delayed by other aspects of the game anyway.
The Queue: Shameless
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.In today's episode of The Queue, I give our Facebook page another shameless plug. Have you seen it? Yes? Good! Let's move on, then.Jonny Dale asked...I seem to remember a post on where to find all the +hit rating gear for casters, but I can't find this anywhere on WoWInsider search or Google. Anyone care to help?
Ask a Beta Tester: Attunements, achievements, more low level quests
Welcome to another edition of Ask a Beta Tester, wherein we all sit around, drink ale, smoke cigars, talk about our awesome hogs and then tear up the road of Dalaran, risking our lives with extreme stunts just for the thrill and the feeling of adrenaline flowing through our veins....Wait, that's not what we do at all. Swiss asked...I'm interested in the Low Level Quest Tracker. Does this replace other trackers such as Find Herbs or Find Minerals? Or does it stack with other tracking as well?It does not stack with other tracking, but you generally wouldn't need both at once. Turn it on in town, grab your quests, turn your other tracking back on when you leave. That'll be problematic for finding low level quests out in the wilds, but does your level 80 Death Knight need that Peacebloom while you're off looking for quests?Read on for more of your Wrath of the Lich King Beta questions!
The future of Heroic attunements
Eloren over on WoW LJ wonders if Blizzard didn't go far enough when they reduced the required reputation for Heroics to Honored level. Personally, even though I'm much closer to the casual end of the spectrum, I never had a problem with Revered reputation -- with my normal questing to 70 and a few instance runs in each zone, I didn't really have a problem grabbing most of the Heroic reputation keys. But even with Honored, some people with different playstyles (solo players, for example, since lots of reputation comes from running instances) are still having trouble.The good news is that Eloren is basically going to get her wish -- as we talked about last week on the podcast, Blizzard is planning to mix up the ways you can get attuned to a Heroic instance. Heroic Countenance is the first example -- to get attuned to Heroic Magisters', all you've got to do is run the regular once.In fact, I would be surprised if they didn't play around a little bit with attunements -- for one instance, they might require reputation, for another, turn-in tokens, and for another, a good old-fashioned quest chain. Most of the attunements in Burning Crusade were based specifically on reputation, but there's no reason that has to be the same way in Wrath of the Lich King -- why not give players lots of different ways to reach the different Heroics in the endgame?
Officers' Quarters: No poaching!
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.If the wildlife in Nagrand didn't reproduce faster than rabbits injected with Viagra, one could accuse the genocidal Hemet Nesingwary, or even the Consortium (with their endless need for ivory tusks), of funding poaching on a massive scale. And of course, we would be the perpetrators, guilty of the annihilation of entire generations of species. But fortunately, those elekks, clefthooves, and talbuks never seem to become endangered. This week's e-mail is about a different kind of poaching, but one that is no less nefarious. Hey. I have been reading your blog for awhile now and I am an officer in a small casual guild (66 accounts) that one day hopes to have some endgame on farm. The problem we seem to have is people just leaving with a stealth guild quit. When asked they normally say they left for a friends guild or something along the lines of "just wasn't working out." About a week later I see them in Shattrath with a guild tag of another guild that I know just poached them from us. I understand that it's their $15 a month but is there anything that we as a guild can do to keep them? We seem to lose one once a week.
Why Karazhan still requires attunement
Here's a good question from Strykt on the forums: why does Karazhan still require attunement? Blizzard has already dropped attunements on SSC and TK, and patch 2.4 will bring the removal of attunements on BT and Hyjal. So why are we still being forced to get those key fragments and attune people to Karazhan?Bornakk shows up in the thread and says simply that it's a good way to find people to run Karazhan with, implying that Blizzard wants guilds to help each other get attuned, and that in essence, it's not so much a gear check as a group check-- you can't get into Karazhan as a guild unless you've helped each other to get in there first. And I actually like that idea-- if your guild wants your help in Karazhan, they've got to lend a hand first to get you into the instances to get the key fragments. "No guildie left behind," if you will.I don't have a problem with having an attunement quest to enter the endgame (and you'll probably remember that Onyxia, BWL, and Molten Core attunements are all still in the game). And it seems that Blizzard doesn't either-- they're willing to open up the later endgame as time goes along, but you've still got to get some help to enter it in the first place.
No UBRS key for you!
Call me crazy, but I am still collecting Azeroth keys and attunements. It's this thing I have with needing to complete things. I realize fully that I will hardly ever go to UBRS now that I am 70 (it's a Murphy's Law thing), but should any of the lower members of the guild need entrance for attunements or gear of their own (my guild is full of collectors just like me), then I will be able to help them out. I have two out of the three gems needed, and have in my spare time been running the instance with our guild leader trying for the third. So imagine my irritation when I read today on QJ.net that the quest line is bugged, severely. Vaelen, the schmoe who gives you the quest in the first place, is now in the habit of deleting the quest and your quest items when you talk to him. Now, this isn't right by any stretch of the imagination. Vrakhris mentioned in the forum post that Blizz knows about the problem, and are working on fixing it in an upcoming patch. Meanwhile, there's a workaround to tide us over.
