The Queue: Alts, transmog, dungeons, and BfA

We’ll hop right into the Queue today.

So I’m not at your level of 16 classes, but I do have 8 class order halls and mounts finished, and hope to knock off the rest between now and the end of Legion. I’ve found, for the first time, that the leveling of alts just isn’t something to do out of boredom or “because it’s cool,” but instead because there’s an actual benefit to doing so.

You get to see some really amazing story telling for each class — and that story telling is incredibly beneficial to understanding the entire WoW-verse. There are also clear hints at what future story lines might develop (I’m looking at you <REDACTED>) — if you don’t know what <REDACTED> I’m talking about I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I am firmly in the camp where HE is up to SOMETHING SOMEPLACE with his THINGS.

Going forward into the next expansion, with both a kiddo on the way in November and starting some new job here soon-ish, I’m not sure that I’m going to play more than one or two alts. Certainly an Alliance and Horde, but alas that may be it.

That’s correct, you’ll be able to pick what weapons to use with a greater variety than you have now. That isn’t to say that some specs still give high preference to certain weapons, but it’s not going to be as if you only have once choice.

That said — things are still too early to tell how everything may shake itself out. A lot can happen where Blizzard makes this a false-choice, and we’ve seen them do this plenty in the past with gearing decisions.

This was an interesting artifact of the old leveling system I noticed that still existed post-scaling. I’m not exactly sure what Blizzard can do here other than always drop materials that are relevant to your assumed profession level (ie: Netherweave Cloth from 58 to 68) and continue to expose the steps forward like that. The problem with that solution is at max level, or when the content turns trivial, you’d have a different set of item drop potentials than when you leveled up in the first place.

To be honest I’ve been thinking more and more that Blizzard just needs to overhaul the entire profession system, including what materials drop that would be used during the leveling process. To a new person coming into the game absolutely none of this would make sense.

Blizzard has previously said no to this, but with BfA coming out they’ve changed their stance a bit and are considering things on a case-by-case basis it sounds like. Ie: Shadow Priests may have a bit of flexibility.

My guess is that they’re not going to allow it for a while and just stick with their original answer of “no.” Then in a couple years they’ll finally say “yes” in a mini-patch to make everyone happy.

In some ways I think this is OK: players that hit a high level of gear and skill should be rewarded for that. If the content they can consume isn’t 100% necessary for the story of the game or understanding key facts of the game, then it’s an added bonus that those players can access it. This provides incentives for players to work to progress their and their friends’ characters.

Now if it the completion of the dungeon is central to the story, then I’m not really okay with it being behind something that you can’t queue up for in the dungeon finder. That is going to make it more difficult for players to get into and experience.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that while the initial mythic version of the dungeon might be hard when the expansion first releases (well, at least hard for pugs), the content becomes much easier as the expansion progresses, to the point where, while I don’t want to use this word really but alas it is true, the mythic version of the dungeon becomes trivial and people focus on mythic +10, etc…

In other words, no matter how this plays out,  it won’t be “gated” forever.