Disclaimer: Normally I refrain from things that I classify as “PTR news coverage,” but there are a good many things I have jumping around in my head that I would like to toss out and get feedback on. Note that this is not a news post per se, but an analysis of the changes and what my idea of what they mean is as a result.

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Contents:

1. Emblem Changes
2. Raiding Progression
3. Raiding Lockout Periods
4. Tier Nine (9)
5. Future Changes
• Faction Changes
• Ramifications of 3.2
• Expansion (?)

Emblem Changes

In light of recent news announcements, the emblem changes make more sense than they did when first looking at the patch notes. I still feel that the change should be to have Emblems of Valor drop in all content prior to Ulduar, and Emblems of Conquest drop in Ulduar 10/25.

Many have mentioned the nature of small guilds not seeing anything beyond Heroics, and so these changes provide them an opportunity to obtain some of the gear from content that they may never actually get to see (some have mentioned alt gearing as well, which I’ll address momentarily). While I understand that such problems do exist for a number of guilds, including those that actually have more members than would traditionally be classified as small, I do not think this should be the basis of anyone’s support of the emblem changes.

I should clarify: <devnull> is a small guild. We do consistently have ten people online to raid now (although we’ve struggled with not having enough to fill a ten man for various time periods ourselves), and some time ago we found a guild that was also small to partner with in order to run 25-man raids. We’ve seen the issues with not being able to fill out a raid and get into content firsthand, and we found ways to overcome that hurdle.

With that in mind, simply being able to obtain better gear due to problems associated with getting into raids I disagree with. I do recognize it is a problem, but it is a problem that can be worked through. Gearing alts is something I can definitely understand the changes for, especially from the perspective of those with limited time to play, and something I will certainly take advantage of myself. It still feels, however, like a change that is going just a little too far toward trivializing current content (and I want to make the distinction here, I specifically mean the difficulty of the encounters as designed for the average player, and subsequently the challenge of an instance/raid as intended. I do not mean any type of trivialization of a raider’s achievements.).

Raiding Progression

This is starting to look quite interesting. <devnull> is certainly not ready for the new content (to give an idea of our raiding progress you can view the pugchecker data for Byaghro assuming the armory is actually up), which is a very good thing. I prefer to have content I haven’t seen yet waiting for me than to be finished with what is available and waiting on something new to come along. Having this much coming relatively shortly after the release of Ulduar, though, makes me really curious about how close we might actually be to the next expansion after all, or if this is just a new trend Blizzard is trying to adhere to.

Raiding Lockout Periods

This change I absolutely love. For a guild our size the ability to continue in an instance more than the two nights we currently have is great, and it is not at the expense of anyone else. We currently raid two nights a week for roughly three hours, and as of this past week the plan is to spend both nights in Ulduar to work on progression. The ability to extend the lockout by one more week means we might actually make progress through the instance even with our inability to commit more days to raiding in a week. While some may balk at the thought of being able to do such a thing, I challenge anyone to give me a reason why this ability could be perceived as bad in any way.

Tier Nine (9)

This pretty much goes hand-in-hand with my thoughts on progression. Byaghro only has one piece of Tier 8 thus far, and if I remember correctly only two other guildmates have any T8 yet. This does make me feel like T9 is coming too quickly, but it also means I look at the emblem changes from a different perspective now as well.

The one thing I do like, though, is that it appears the T9 tokens are no longer slot specific. This is something that I truly wish all tokens were changed to embrace. With group compositions being so varied anymore (our typical group for 10-mans is actually quite… odd) we could go for weeks without having a usable token drop (defining usable as one that someone could use that didn’t already have three of the same token due to our luck with loot… we literally have a Paladin that has three sets of T7 because no one else that was on the token was present, and no other tokens dropped for a period of time).

Needless to say, this change is extremely welcome.

Future Changes

I’m not going to go into each one individually quite yet. I want to hear what people think of these upcoming changes:

• Faction-Switching Availability
• Ramifications of 3.2 Changes
• Do you think this signals an expansion soon?