Two things I was sorry to hear.

The first was that T10 isn't going to be straight tier tokens. Tier tokens were great for BC, Naxx, and Ulduar, I'm not sure why you are requiring us to use badges to buy tier gear, then get a token to update it. Go back to plain old tier tokens.

Secondly, sad to hear that content will come in super easy and really hard. Its great that content is more accessible to the masses, and its great you are trying to provide hard content for the best raiders, but what about the average raider? Are we really going to be doomed to a place where progression is like running into a wall, where normal mode is a face rolling joke? Raids need a medium mode, and maybe even a nightmare mode for the really top end guilds.

I get that you want better loot for harder modes, and maybe the amount if time needed to make the gear is a roadblock, but maybe just more loot would be acceptable? Easy mode gives normal loot, medium mode gives 1-2 more drops of normal loot per boss, hardmode gives hardmode loot, and nightmare mode gives 2-3 more drops of hardmode loot, and maybe a chance at some rare mounts or other such things.

This way you can offer more options, and the better the group performs the better the rewards.

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Q u o t e:
Two things I was sorry to hear.

The first was that T10 isn't going to be straight tier tokens. Tier tokens were great for BC, Naxx, and Ulduar, I'm not sure why you are requiring us to use badges to buy tier gear, then get a token to update it. Go back to plain old tier tokens.

Secondly, sad to hear that content will come in super easy and really hard. Its great that content is more accessible to the masses, and its great you are trying to provide hard content for the best raiders, but what about the average raider? Are we really going to be doomed to a place where progression is like running into a wall, where normal mode is a face rolling joke? Raids need a medium mode, and maybe even a nightmare mode for the really top end guilds.

I get that you want better loot for harder modes, and maybe the amount if time needed to make the gear is a roadblock, but maybe just more loot would be acceptable? Easy mode gives normal loot, medium mode gives 1-2 more drops of normal loot per boss, hardmode gives hardmode loot, and nightmare mode gives 2-3 more drops of hardmode loot, and maybe a chance at some rare mounts or other such things.

This way you can offer more options, and the better the group performs the better the rewards.

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this.

like toc for the player thats a bit more then casual but not as hardcore as top end guilds.. toc regular is a joke.. but to find a group for togc to get through.. what a pain in the ass

ToGC has medium modes and hard modes.

Most Medium guilds will be 4 of 5 right now.

The top end guilds are 5/5 with skill/Mad Skill/Insanity achievements.

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Q u o t e:
ToGC has medium modes and hard modes.

Most Medium guilds will be 4 of 5 right now.

The top end guilds are 5/5 with skill/Mad Skill/Insanity achievements.

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Show me in the UI where I set it to "medium"?

ToC is stupid easy, ToGC is hard, my argument is there should be something between stupid easy and hard.

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Q u o t e:


Show me in the UI where I set it to "medium"?

ToC is stupid easy, ToGC is hard, my argument is there should be something between stupid easy and hard.

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ToC is stupid easy. The first four bosses are hard but doable even for casual progression guilds. Anub and the achievements are stuff to keep the high end guilds going.

Sounds to me like you need to get into a better guild, not have blizzard give you a medium mode.

Early rising crab is early rising :(

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Q u o t e:
I also have a hunch that some of the bosses on normal mode are going to be more challenging than the final boss of ToC normal for the same reason.
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As it should be probably, but isn't it a bad idea then to only allow people to go into hard modes if they've downed Arthas in regular first?

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Q u o t e:
As other players have pointed out, the "medium" difficulty comes at doing some of the easier bosses in heroic mode. ToC only has 5 encounters, so there isn't a ton of granularity. Icecrown has more (though not 31) so we can provide more granularity.

I also have a hunch that some of the bosses on normal mode are going to be more challenging than the final boss of ToC normal for the same reason.

We have a couple of tweaks to the trophy system for Icecrown that we think capture the best of both the Ulduar and ToC systems.

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Nononono, EVERY boss in ICC should be harder on normal than anub25man on normal, not just some. If they drop better gear they should be harder than people that drop lesser gear... Id say that the ICCnormal25 some should be harder than the ToC heroic modes...

GC what do you mean by the tweaking of the Tier system?

Does that mean

10-man - Bought with Badges (ie: 30 Emblem of Frost for shoulders and gloves and 45 for rest)
25-man - Upgrade 10-man tier to 25man tier with normal token that drops from bosses or 10-man HM token drops?
25-man HM - Upgrade 25-man gear with 25-man HM heroic drops?

I disagree with the OP that the token system was fine through BC, Naxx and Ulduar. If I have to hear "omg vanq dropped again, shard it" it's one time too many.

One thing I liked about the tokens in BC, however, is that the classes you shared them with changed each tier. Some guilds happen to have lots of the 4 classes on the current Vanq tokens and some have very little. Changing it up each tier would be helpful for those guilds.

They could also do something like having the 4 pure dps on one token (hunter, mage, rogue, warlock) that way when that token drops, you know you're upgrading your dps so there's not much angst over whether to give it to the dps or the healer or the tank, just who is the person most deserving without it being a crucial raid progression decision.

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Q u o t e:
GC what do you mean by the tweaking of the Tier system?

Does that mean

10-man - Bought with Badges (ie: 30 Emblem of Frost for shoulders and gloves and 45 for rest)
25-man - Upgrade 10-man tier to 25man tier with normal token that drops from bosses or 10-man HM token drops?
25-man HM - Upgrade 25-man gear with 25-man HM heroic drops?

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It's in the developer Twitter Chat:

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Q u o t e:

Q: With T10, are we going to see tokens like in Ulduar? or like CC? CC style had every class and spec rolling on same thing.
A: With t10 we're going to see a hybrid. The tier 10 items (the ones with item levels you'd find in the 10-player raid) will be purchased with Emblems of Frost.

The tier 10.5 items (the ones with item levels you'd find in the 25-player raid) will be obtained by getting a token (one that is specific to 3 or 4 classes, much like the ulduar tokens) and using it to upgrade the tier 10 item that was purchased with emblems of frost.

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Sounds like it requires that you have the 10-man tier item first and use it as a trade-in with a token to upgrade to a Tier 10.5 item. This would be like the Isle of Quel'Danas trade ins, sort of.

I like that idea. One thing that really ticked me off was people just waiting for Trophies of the Crusade to spend their Emblems of Triumph rather than buying the iLevel 232 Tier 9 items first. There are so many Emblems of Triumph available yet they were afraid that they would not have any to buy their tier items when they were fortunate enough to get a trophy. I bought all four iLevel 232 items and now have four iLevel 245 items, had no problems gathering those Emblems, and still have a ton of Emblems left over. Think I'll just buy PvP gear with them.

Personally I LOVE the idea of the 25 man relics being used to upgrade the basic gear.



I'm currently hurting my raid by sitting on 150 tokens because it's a ridiculous waste to buy the basic T9 then have to earn even MORE badges for a minor upgrade when I get a Trophy.

While I'm waiting for my turn at a Trophy I could be buying the basic T9 stuff and getting better stats + set bonus... but if I do that then get the trophy next week I've got to wait another 2 weeks to get the badges again? To re-buy the (practically) same piece of gear at an increased price.


Especially with Heroic mode loot it makes a lot more sense from a progression perspective to buy the first version of the gear to have the stats to beat the heroic mode, then to trade in the token + the original gear to get the heroic gear.

Yea the twitter thing has the new tier system. It's confusing though. It seems to suggest:

- Buy tier 10 with emblems of frost (drop in IC-10 & IC-25)
- Upgrade tier 10 to 10.5 with tokens from IC-25 bosses

It begs the question - what do IC-25 HM drop in terms of tier loot? More of the same? Offset pieces?

The new tier emblem+token system is great; people have been asking for "upgrade" style tier advancement for a long time and I think this is a nice blend.

I'm also a big fan of the difficulty-by-boss approach, like having the option to hit Mimiron's big red button for every encounter. I think the key for this approach is having a robust enough instance with many bosses. Not every boss is created equal; therein lies your "medium" difficulty.

I was disappointed that the chat had little to no PvP substance. I feel this is where the game has strayed the most during WotLK and want to know what Blizzard is going to do to try and get their mojo back.

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Q u o t e:

I'm currently hurting my raid by sitting on 150 tokens because it's a ridiculous waste to buy the basic T9 then have to earn even MORE badges for a minor upgrade when I get a Trophy.

While I'm waiting for my turn at a Trophy I could be buying the basic T9 stuff and getting better stats + set bonus... but if I do that then get the trophy next week I've got to wait another 2 weeks to get the badges again? To re-buy the (practically) same piece of gear at an increased price.

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There's so many Emblems available I don't see how this is a problem. You can get 50 a week just for doing both 10-mans, the normal 25 man, Onyxia and Vault. Add heroic dailies on top of that and you can get a tier piece each week. If you're getting one trophy per week I'd consider that fortunate. Many guilds' raiders do not receive a trophy per week. So if you get a trophy every two weeks, that's 100 Emblems you've saved up while waiting for it. That's roughly enough for both the 232 and the 245 items, so you might as well spend the emblems, get your 4-piece bonus and then you'll receive trophies at about the same rate as you receive enough emblems to cash in the trophies.

I'm not a big fan of the changing the Hard Mode via UI for each boss. One of the things I hated about Sartharion, and about Ulduar, was that you had to eventually kill the boss before the raid lockout so at some point you had to "give up" on hard mode and go easy in order to get the loot your raid needed to increase your chances of winning next time. It also was officers telling their raiders "You're all bad so we have to put this on simple mode for all you slackers," which was a crappy message to send. It was like a vote of no-confidence in the raid by the raid leader, which was always a hard thing to do. I like how TotC and TotGC is set up. You're not costing yourself anything and you can still clear easier modes to get gear to gear to gear up, but your raiders never have to see your lack of confidence in their abilities. I do think the curve needs to be smoothed out a little as far as difficulty goes (there's a rather large jump between normal 25 Anub and hard mode 25 Beasts - I think the last two fights on normal 25 shou;d be made a little more difficult and maybe Beasts made just a tad easier to smooth this out). Look at all the guilds that are 5/5 easy mode but are 0/5 hard mode - it's a wall right now and it's probably frustrating aa bunch of people.

Sure, you can extend raid lockouts and keep trying, but I don't see many guilds doing this when they can easily clear to that boss on Tuesday anyway.

I just want to say that I much prefer the creative bosses and encounters you made in Ulduar, and the interesting mechanics of Hard Modes. The binary heroic/non-heroic setup is quite boring, but I can see how it would be easier to design and, perhaps, more rewarding for the hardcore since it gives them a whole raid of extra loot to get. I think some people complained in uld that hard modes didn't really feel like they were worth doing. I've yet to see someone say the same about ToC.

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Q u o t e:
One thing that really ticked me off was people just waiting for Trophies of the Crusade to spend their Emblems of Triumph rather than buying the iLevel 232 Tier 9 items first. There are so many Emblems of Triumph available yet they were afraid that they would not have any to buy their tier items when they were fortunate enough to get a trophy.

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Yep, this is what I disliked most about the ToC system too. Now we can buy the badge tier gear right away like the non 25 man raiders, rather than feeling obligated to stockpile badges waiting for a trophy drop.

I dont really care about TOTGC, and I hope they learned from the mistakes

- It's short
- It's has bugs, (anubarak switching targets for no reason)
- It's easy to exploit some of the fights
- The rewards are crappy, in that is has no tokens until you kill the last boss, sort of like how kelthuzad was the only reaason to do naxx

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Q u o t e:
One thing that really ticked me off was people just waiting for Trophies of the Crusade to spend their Emblems of Triumph rather than buying the iLevel 232 Tier 9 items first. There are so many Emblems of Triumph available yet they were afraid that they would not have any to buy their tier items when they were fortunate enough to get a trophy.

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A lot of people have no choice. Read up on the t8 set bonuses and you will understand.

However, the t10 system will fix this. it's the same cost but you need to invest emblems for t10 before you can use a t10.5 token. It also kinda discourages taking the token now and sitting on it, holding back people that have really put in the hard work.