To the dungeons with you!

Over a year ago, during the era of Wrath of the Lich King, I wrote a post about how to get exalted with every faction in the expansion (minus the Ashen Verdict, of course) without championing. In other words, this was a post about how to hit exalted on every faction by yourself, without needing to enter an instance. I was pretty proud of it, if only for the idea, and was looking forward to writing a similar post for Cataclysm's factions. Then Cataclysm came out, and as I plodded my way through the new zones' quests, I was hit by a sad realization: there would be no Cataclysm version of that post, because some factions are impossible to reach exalted with without donning their tabard and entering a 5-man instance. As such, if I should desire to obtain the Wrap of the Great Turtle to tank 5-mans, or if I want the Signet of the Elder Council to boost my stats while I'm out solo-ing, I can't get them by solely by solo-ing. And this doesn't sit right with me. Why, after letting us get exalted with every faction in Wrath of the Lich King by solo-ing, would Blizzard regress in its accommodation of us solo players?

Now, this is nothing new. Many of the factions in Burning Crusade required players to enter dungeons in order to earn reputation with them beyond a certain point (Honor Hold/Thrallmar come to mind), as did many of the factions in vanilla WoW. Wrath of the Lich King, however, moved away from this model by giving every one of its factions (minus one that was clearly designed around a specific raid) a way for players to earn reputation with that faction on their own. This was a good move on their part, in my opinion, for though those ways of earning reputation on one's own were often slower than championing, they gave solo players something to work for, as well as something to do, and they gave players a way to earn faction reputation that wasn't dependent on the competence of other players.

But there is one other major difference between the two expansion packs, one which may explain Blizzard's shift in design philosophy. In Wrath of the Lich King, the gear earned through reputation was the same ilevel as the gear earned through heroics, the primary source of reputation. The gear dropped by the last boss in all of the pre-3.2 heroics and the gear awarded at exalted status with Wrath-era factions were both ilevel-200 epics, and the gear dropped by all other heroic bosses and awarded at revered with the factions were ilevel-200 rare gear. In other words, factions awarded gear that was on par with what was awarded by heroics at the time, so by running heroics to earn reputation with various factions, players would be getting gear that was just as good as the gear they were trying to earn. What this meant was that it was quite possible for players, in the process of trying to earn one specific piece of gear, to earn another piece of gear that would render the reputation-awarded piece unneeded.

This has changed between Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, and in my mind, that change justifies some factions requiring dungeon runs if we wish to reach exalted with them. It is this one change that prevents this post from being one in which I merely complain about how this change to the faction design philosophy is unfair to those who don't wish to run dungeons. You see, heroics no longer drop epics. Heroics in Cataclysm drop ilevel 346 rare gear, while reaching exalted with a Cataclysm faction gives you access to ilevel 359 epics. This means that running heroics doesn't give you better gear than the gear you are trying to earn by hitting exalted with whatever faction you are trying to get exalted with. In fact, outside of crafted epics, the epics awarded by reaching exalted with a faction are currently the best gear one can get outside of raids. (With the exception of the epics that you can get if you save up enough valor points doing your daily random heroic, but it takes a couple of weeks of running a random heroic each day in order to earn enough points for just one piece of gear, so that's by no means a practical way to deck yourself out in epics.)

What this all means is that in order to obtain the best gear you can obtain outside of a raid, you will have to do the hardest thing you can do outside of a raid, i.e. running dungeons. This wasn't the case in Wrath of the Lich King, where gear awarded by factions wasn't the best gear available outside of a raid: you had the drops from the last bosses of each heroic, the emblem of heroism gear, and the crafted gear. But those first two sources of epics outside of a raid no longer award epics, so we players are left with factions and professions as avenues to earn epics without raiding. And since ilevel 359 epics are the best gear one can earn outside of a raid, it makes sense that to earn them, you should need to do the hardest thing you can do outside of a raid: running dungeons. (And the fact that crafted epics require Chaos Orbs, which are bind-on-pick-up and are dropped by the last bosses in heroics, further fits this trend.) To me, that seems like a fair trade.

The questionable legitimacy of objective rewards

So I'm back with more tales from the warrior front. As I mentioned in my last post before my laptop went down, patch 4.0.1 revitalized my interest in the game by turning my warrior alt from a joke to a force to be reckoned with, one who can take down red-colored-level monsters and complete red-colored quests with ease. What was once something of a burden has become fun; so fun, in fact, that I didn't want to stop playing my warrior. Killing things became so fun that I started to resent any break in the process, including needing to go to a capital city to learn my new moves. It was when I realized that this was the case that I was a bit shocked; after all, isn't leveling up the whole point of the leveling process? Why was I suddenly not looking forward to hitting those levels?

I remember that back before patch 4.0.1 made leveling a warrior fun, I looked forward to each time I leveled up. I would count the little bars in my experience bar and watch them fill, waiting anxiously for that time when I would see that golden light. Though all levels gave me a bit of a rush, the even ones especially were the ones I looked forward to, for that was when I would get my new abilities. But more than that, each of those levels represented something I had accomplished, something I had worked for. Leveling at the lower levels was usually not that fun, and each time I leveled up, it was like the game was telling me, "You should feel satisfied with what you have accomplished." And I did, and thus, though the leveling process was a pain, it was worth it for the sense of satisfaction I felt upon ascending to each new level.

Now, however, things are different (for me, at least). As I play my warrior, I don't watch the experience bar at all; I've been taken by surprise by that golden light quite a few times, in fact. And while the odd levels are met with joy (I do get to spend a talent point, after all), the even levels are met with less enthusiasm, since I have to go out of my way to learn whatever new ability I get at those levels. In other words, as I play my warrior now, leveling up is merely incidental to the leveling process; it's just another event that happens along the way. And it has become that way because the leveling process is now exciting in its own right, because this class is finally fun to play.

But now I'm a bit jaded, because I have experienced the contrast between playing for the objective statistical rewards and playing in spite of them. I have experienced the contrast between playing the game for the end result and playing the game for the sake of playing the game, and I'm not sure I could go back to the former. To put this in terms that might be more familiar to people who don't level alts frequently, the difference I have experienced is like the different between running a raid because you want to say you killed that boss or because you want the loot upgrades they drop, and running a raid because you enjoy raiding. One mode of play is motivated by the end-result, the other is motivated by the playing itself, and that's what I'm experiencing on my warrior now.

After experiencing this shift in mode of play, I realized that much of the time I have spent playing WoW has been spent in results-oriented mode. Most of the heroics I ran were motivated by the emblems that dropped and the gear that could be obtained with them. Most of the alts I leveled were leveled so that I could experience playing them once they got their better abilities and became fun, but I ended up leveling even the few that I managed to get that far for the sake of that flash of golden light. Maybe that's why I was never able to get into raiding; I was there for the experience, not the loot, the achievements, or the bragging rights, so I had nothing to motivate me to gloss over the things I found tedious or frustrating about the whole process.

So what does that mean in the larger scheme of things? Well, for me, it means I have become skeptical of many of the rewards we get for playing and their purpose in the game. By a metaphorical show of hands, how many of you would play WoW if there were no gear, no leveling up, no achievements, etc.; just the gameplay? Some of you would, I'm sure, so the other question is, how long would you play a game like this? Would you have raided ICC for ten months (going on eleven) if the gear weren't there to motivate you or to pace your progress? Maybe you would have; I won't make any assumptions, I'm just presenting these questions as food for thought.

But where am I going with this? Truth be told, I'm not sure myself; this mode of playing WoW is so new to me that I'm still getting a feel for it, for its nuances and consequences. I suppose the only thing I can say for now is that, though levels, gear currency, achievements, and gear itself might serve larger purposes within the game, they should be incidental to the gameplay itself. They should be there as conveniences and game mechanics, not as motivators to play. When they do become players' reasons to play, that's a sign that the gameplay itself isn't enough to keep people playing, and that says to me that the game just isn't fun.

Gear demotion and justice points

I'm going to write this post at the risk of putting my foot in my mouth due to lack of information, but I will give my reasons for believing what I believe so that if I look like a fool, I can at least look like a reasonable fool.

We already know that, come Cataclysm, the current emblem system will be replaced by a point system to simplify and streamline the process of getting gear from heroics and raids without depending on raid drops. (Which, incidentally, has motivated me to retire the "badges/emblems" tag for my posts and replace it with "gear currency", which reads better than "badges/emblems/points".) In order to finally retire the current badges and emblems, Blizzard is converting most of them to gold when they release patch 4.0.1, but emblems of triumph and emblems of frost are going to be converted into justice points. Not only does this mean our current emblems will give us a head start on gearing up in Cataclysm (though probably not a big one), but more intriguingly, emblems of triumph and emblems of frost are being converted to justice points at the same rate. (2.75 points per emblem)

Now, I am going to make a few assumptions at this point before I go on, assumptions which could easily be proven wrong by the PTR, but I'm going to take that risk. First of all, I'm going to assume that gear that can be bought with emblems now will be purchasable with justice points after patch 4.0.1 is released. While it might make sense from the players' perspective to save those points for Cataclysm gear that we'll use for a while, rather than spending now it on gear we'll likely replace while leveling, it wouldn't make sense from a business perspective to keep players from having that option. After all, I'm sure there are many players play just to see their numbers go up, and denied the option to do so with gear that was once available to them, how would they respond? Not well, I'd imagine.

The second assumption I am going to make is that both emblem of triumph and emblem of frost gear will cost justice points equal to 2.75 times their current emblem cost. Yes, this means I am assuming that a piece of armor that costs 50 emblems of frost and a piece of armor that costs 50 emblems of triumph will cost the same amount of justice points. Were it not for the fact that the two emblems will be worth the same number of points, I would not make this assumption. However, if emblems of triumph and emblems of frost are going to be converted to the same number of justice points each, it's only reasonable that cost of gear would be converted similarly. Suppose someone is limited to heroics and has been saving up emblems of frost for one special item by running the daily heroic each day. Just before he has enough emblems saved for that one special item, patch 4.0.1 hits. Now, if the point costs of emblem of frost gear was calculated at a higher emblem-to-point ratio than emblem of triumph gear (that is, unless the cost of emblem of frost gear were 2.75 points per emblem, while the cost of emblem of triumph gear was less than 2.75 points per emblem, a possibility I'll go over later), then that patch has diminished the fruits of his labor. That patch has now made it so he needs to work harder for gear that will soon be obsolete, and why would Blizzard do such a thing?

Of course, we must also ask the opposite question: why would Blizzard make emblem of frost gear so easy to get this late in the expansion? Elementary, my dear Watson; it's a final gear demotion before the expansion. Gear demotion (a term I made up for this post) has happened before, in the form of heroics and their daily quests rewarding better emblems with each patch after and including 3.2. When patch 3.2 made emblems of conquest the base-line emblems for heroics, gear that had once been exclusive to raiders who could enter Ulduar-25 or ToC-10 became available to anyone who could run heroics. Thus, the gear became less exclusive, which is why I say it was "demoted". The same thing happened in patch 3.3, which made emblems of triumph the baseline emblems in heroics. Why did Blizzard do this? To make it easier to get right into the most current tier of raiding content.

It's my theory that, by converting emblems of triumph and frost to justice points at the same rate, Blizzard is doing one more gear demotion as the expansion comes to a close. At this point, anyone who wants to defeat the Lich King while he's still relevant doesn't have long to do so, so being able to farm heroics for emblem of frost gear will certainly give players a leg up in getting the gear they need to do so. That combined with the more powerful talent trees and the stat conversions should make the process easier, allowing more people to see the content Blizzard put so much effort into designing, and in the end, that's a worthy goal.

Is WoW a Caillois-complete game?

If that name looks unfamiliar to you, don't worry; I didn't know who the man was myself until a week or two ago. Roger Caillois was a French philosopher who wrote a book called Les Jeux et Les Hommes, which traslates to English as Men, Play and Games. In this book, Caillois discussed games and what truly constitutes a game, and he came up with six points about what makes a game a game. For a game to be a "Caillois-complete" game, it must fit all six of these points, or else it is just not a game. It might be an interesting tool or an entertaining diversion, nonetheless, but it is not a game. For a game to be Caillois-complete, it must be:

-Free: “in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion.”
-Separate: “circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance.”
-Uncertain: “the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand; and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative.”
-Unproductive: “creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game.”
-Governed by Rules: “under conventions that suspend ordinary laws and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts.”
-Make-Believe: “accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality, or of a free unreality, as against real life.”
(transcribed from a post on the blog "Cope")

What I would like to look at today is whether World of Warcraft is a Caillois-complete game, i.e. whether WoW counts as a game. Now, astute readers will remember my post, Is WoW "just a game"?, in which I concluded that, in some instances, WoW was more than a game. However, I did end the post by saying, "WoW is not just a game, but it is still a game," so I can still examine whether it is a Caillois-complete game. Besides, even if I had concluded that WoW was not "just a game", it would not prevent me from examining whether WoW is a Caillois-complete game, for one could not conclude that WoW not being a game means it isn't a Caillois-complete game. That would be a "converse error", a logical fallacy in which you assume that if one fact implies another, and that if the second fact is true, then the first one must also be true. In this case, the implication is that if WoW is not a Caillois-complete game, then it isn't a game. If I had concluded that WoW isn't a game, it would be a converse error to assume that that means it isn't a Caillois-complete game.

Right, so now that your lesson in logic is over, let's get to the examination.

Free: “in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion.”

Interestingly, WoW is one of the few games that actually has a mechanism in place to encourage players to play less and rewards players who do not play as if they are required to play; that mechanism is rested state, which you gain when you log out and which doubles the experience you gain from killing enemies. Of course, once you hit the level cap, rested state is no longer useful to you, so this point no longer necessarily applies. Thus we must ask; at level-cap content, it playing obligatory? Are players at a disadvantage if they take a break from playing?

I would say that in the days of Burning Crusade, that answer to this question was a definite "yes". I tried to get into raiding back then, but I was behind in gearing up, and the guild I was in didn't have the time to run me through older content to help me catch up. Now, granted, this lack of gear was a result of trying to start raiding too late, rather than a result of me taking a break, but the end product would have been the same either way. Fortunately, in today's WoW, we have the emblem system, which allows people to get gear in heroics that is good enough for them to go right into the current tier of raiding. Thus players are able to take a break from raiding, and if their gear falls behind, it's easier for them to catch up without their guild needing to drag them through old content. This was a big step for making WoW a more Caillois-complete game, in addition to a more casual-friendly game.

For progression guilds filled with hard-core players, however, the situation is likely not the same. After all, if you are doing cutting-edge content, you need to get as much gear as you can get your hands on so you can gain that much of an edge, and if you take a break and fall behind your guild, even if the difference is small, it could be enough of a disadvantage that your guild will leave you out in favor of someone who is more geared than you. And all that practice you missed? Not to mention needing to make it to raids on time or else being replaced and being less likely to be picked for a future raid. Of course, that content isn't going anywhere, so if you do take a break, you can always find a group of people who are at your current skill and gear level and run with them, instead. Suffice it to say that the design of WoW is Caillois-complete in the sense of being "free", but the social structures and obligations created by the players sometimes make it otherwise.

Separate: “circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance.”

Well, it's certainly safe to say that WoW and the real world are separate entities... objectively, at least. But as I said above, when you look at the ways hard-core players approach WoW, the line between WoW and the real world gets blurry quite fast. When I was in a raiding guild, it wasn't uncommon for one guild member to call another guild member when we were trying to form a raid and were short one person. If that isn't WoW bleeding into the real world, I don't know what is. So, again, WoW is only as separate as its players want it to be.

Uncertain: “the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand; and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative.”

On the surface, this one seems much harder to defend than the others. After all, think of all of the raiders who do dailies for the money to enchant and gem their new gear, as well as pay the repair bills that endless wipes will lead to. Why do they run these dailies? Because they know exactly how much money they will get from those dailies, and they know it's enough to pay the bills. Think, also, of the raiders who run a heroic each day for the extra Emblems of Frost to get their tier gear that much faster. They know exactly what is going to happens in those heroics, and because of their gear, they know that failure just isn't a possibility. In other words, the outcome of dailies and heroics is certain, and thus they are not a Caillois-complete part of the game.

Of course, players only do these chores (let's call them what they really are) because they feel they have to, but the game doesn't require them to enchant and gem all their gear, and the money from the raid enemies themselves is usually enough to pay the repair bills if you don't wipe. And there are even ways to earn the money for gems and enchantments that are uncertain, and thus are a Caillois-complete part of the game. After all, one of my favorite parts of the game is fishing, and fishing is a great way to make money. The out-come is still uncertain, though; you don't know how much of the profitable fish you are going to get, and you don't know whether people will actually buy your fish. Still, it is a great way to make money, and the same facts apply to all gathering professions (except perhaps skinning). Thus, once again, dailies and heroics are only a Caillois-incomplete part of the game because players chose to continue to do them when they become chores.

Unproductive: “creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game.”

Two words come to mind when I see this rule: gold sellers. Where it not for the trade of in-game currency for real-world currency and the hacking that takes place as a result, this point would apply to WoW without exception. But gold sellers exist, and their presence means that WoW can be a productive activity, and thus not a game. Of course, their presence is only made possible by players who buy the gold those gold sellers sell steal, so yet again, the only reason this point doesn't apply to WoW is because the players don't let it.

Governed by Rules: “under conventions that suspend ordinary laws and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts.”

WoW certainly suspends ordinary laws and establishes new legislation. The fact that a human being can drop down in Goldshire and throw fire at a wolf, or the fact that the Undead Forsaken exist is enough proof that the game makes its own rules of what is possible. The game also makes new rules that are less fantastic and are still feasible by real world sensibilities, like the fact that we are literally unable to directly kill anyone on our side. The key to this point, however, is that the game establishes new rules to replace the old rules, and only those new rules matter. This means that none of our real-world rules bleed into the game unless we want to them to. Well, as a social game, it's likely that the rules we have for social interactions in the real world are going to become a part of WoW, but its safe to say that we want that to happen. WoW is just more fun when people act civilly around one another.

But what about when a player doesn't want that to happen? I'm talking about trolls, griefers, and people who generally make other players' experiences miserable. Where do we get the idea that their activities are to be frowned upon? Why, from the real world of course. If WoW somehow punished griefing and trolling in some way other than players reporting trolls and griefers to GMs, this wouldn't be the case. However, there currently exist no in-game mechanics (and thus no "new legislation") to discourage this kind of behavior, so because the players bring with them their sensibilities of what is and isn't allowed in social interaction, WoW doesn't fit this point.

Make-Believe: “accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality, or of a free unreality, as against real life.”

I think you can see the pattern developing. While WoW certainly can invoke a second reality for us players, that reality is tainted by all of the exceptions brought up in the previous points. It's difficult to acknowledge WoW as a second reality when there are consequences for not entering that reality regularly, when players contact each other outside the game to ask each other to enter that new reality, when we know how exactly how some of our interactions with that reality will end, when financial transactions take place in which currency within that reality is exchanged for currency in real life, and when our rules for social interaction in our reality bleed into our second reality. Suffice it to say that because of the players themselves, WoW doesn't create a second reality, or an unreality against real life.

So it seems that the general trend is that WoW is an objectively Caillois-complete game, but not a subjectively complete one. In other words, once players actually start playing, the Caillois-completeness of the game breaks down. I wouldn't say that this is WoW's fault, though. Perhaps with a smaller, more intimate playerbase, these issues wouldn't arise the way they do now. Because there would be fewer raiders to pick from, the raiding guilds would be happy to help guildies who took a break gear up again. With fewer potential customers, the gold-selling business wouldn't be as lucrative. With a more intimate playerbase, it's less likely that trolls would necessitate the infusion of real-world social rules into the game. Maybe WoW isn't a Caillois-complete game because it's playerbase is just too big.

Or perhaps we don't want WoW to be just a game, so we try to make it more than just a game, subconsciously or otherwise, and thus is loses some of what makes it a game in the process. That's an issue too big for me to consider in this post, though. Maybe next time.

Comparing the three WoW's, Part 1: Raiding and PvP

One could say that there are three worlds (of warcraft?) in this amazing game we play: solo-ing, group PvE, and PvP. These three areas have an interesting parallel between them: they each have two categories of content, one of which is a gateway of sorts for the other, the other of which provides better loot. For group PvE, those two categories are heroics and raiding. For PvP, they're battlegrounds and arenas (though battlegrounds will provide gear as good as that provided in arenas once Cataclysm hits). For solo-ing, they're, quite simply, content done before the level cap and content done at the level cap. Considering the parallel structure between these three areas of the game, I think it's worth it to look at each area, examine their similarities and differences, and see what that says about the game itself.

It seems that my readership is comprised more of solo-ers than of raiders or PvP-ers, but I'll look at the group PvE scene first--I want to save soloing for last, for I suspect that is where the most interesting conclusions will come from. From the beginning of Burning Crusade, when heroics were first implemented, they were designed to be an entryway into the raiding scene: they gave loot that allowed one to enter the first tier of raiding, and they provided a challenge to those who had just reached the level cap, while still being less of a challenge than raids (and thus rewarding comparably worse loot).

It seems, however, that Blizzard has acknowledged the popularity of heroics (a full 14% of my readership seems to spend most of their time in heroics), for they have added four since Wrath was released, all of which were designed to be harder than regular heroics and to be comparable to raids in terms of their difficulty, and thus reward better gear. All heroics received another upgrade when Blizzard changed the emblem system so that the daily heroic would reward the best emblem in the game, while the bosses themselves would drop the second best emblems. While this meant that heroics did allow players to get better gear, they were still firmly in the position of a stepping stone into raids; if anything, the new heroics themselves were just added to give people who can't raid but can run heroics a place to use that new gear, and to give those looking to get into the newest tier of content another avenue to get raid-worthy gear. Thus heroics still seem to exist as little more than the step before raids; the change in the emblem system only improved that functionality, since people likely don't want to run old raids to help alts and new players gear up, so the emblem system makes it so they don't have to.

And as for battlegrounds and arena? Well, they share a similar structure; battlegrounds are available to players before arenas are, and they allow players to gear up in second-rate (compared to arenas) gear, gear which can allow them to move into arenas, where they will get the best gear. Thus the best gear is only available to those who participate in arena, while gear that was once exclusive to arena players becomes easier to get for players who only participate in battlegroung PvP.

The way gear is obtained in battlegrounds and arenas shows an interesting parallel to the way gear is obtained in heroics and raids: the latter provides better gear than the former, but gear that was once exclusive to players who participate in the latter becomes available to those who participate in the former as the expansion wears on. This can allow us to conclude that Blizzard wants players who decided to enter the arena scene a bit later than others to have a chance at getting geared up for it with relative ease. It certainly takes longer than it may have at the beginning of the expansion, but it is still easier for them to do so than if they had to use the same starter gear as people had to use during the first season of the expansion.

More disturbing, though, is the implication of this parallel that Blizzard sees arena as the PvP counterpart to raiding, and thus they see battlegrounds as the PvP counterpart to heroics, i.e., inferior content. Now, Blizzard has said that they want as many people who PvE to raid as possible, and they have certainly designed the game to make that happen. Can we thus conclude that Blizzard sees arena as the end-goal of all PvP, just as raiding is the end-goal of all PvE? It's an interesting prospect, but it might not be the case. After all, Rob Pardo, Blizzard's VP of game design, has gone on record as saying that arenas were the biggest mistake in WoW's history, and I doubt Blizzard would want to encourage players to participate in something they saw as a mistake. One could see rated battlegrounds as Blizzard's way of admitting that arena should not be the end-goal of PvP, since rated battlegrounds will allow people who play only in battlegrounds to get the same gear as people who play only in arenas. This means that battlegrounds and arenas will no longer relate to each other the way they do now, with the latter being awarding superior gear and thus being implied as being superior to the former.

Still, if Blizzard was so unhappy with the way arenas were implemented, why did they try so hard to promote them over battlegrounds? And why did they still try to do this when arena participation dropped dramatically after rating requirements were added to gear, showing that many players simply weren't interesting in arena for the experience of it? And most importantly, why did they stick with this dying part of the game in spite of the balancing nightmare it created for them? The best guess I have is that they simply didn't know what a nightmare arenas would create; Pardo himself said that if they did know what a nightmare it would be to balance the classes in arenas and PvE, they probably wouldn't have implemented the arena system. I guess their best excuse is the classic excuse: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I wanted to make sure I had enough time to explore this topic as much as needed, so I will have to postpone looking at the parallels between leveling and cooperative PvE for my next philosophy post, which may or may not be posted next Wednesday (considering the sporadic nature with which the ideas for these blog posts come to me, I can't make any promises). Stay tuned!

Edit: As I suspected might happen, the follow-up to this post will be posted on Friday.

What improvements might Blizzard make to the badge/emblem system?

Edit: Blizzard recently announced exactly what changes they will be making to the badge system, so we no longer need to wonder what they will do. Though I didn't anticipate them changing it to a point-based system, they will be implementing a system where there are two types of gear currency, and when a new tier of gear is released, the better type is converted to the lesser type. All I can say is, called it!

The addition of the Emblematic feat of strength in the last patch, sent people into a flurry of speculation about the fate of the emblem system in Cataclysm, but there's one thing we know: it's not likely that Blizzard will simply do away with the emblem system. Instead, they are probably going to change it; after all, we know they didn't like certain aspects of the Badge of Justice system, and we know they don't like certain aspects of the emblem system, so the question is, how can they change gear currency in the next expansion to address the issues that badges and emblems had?

One of the things Blizzard didn't like about the Badge of Justice system was that people could stock-pile badges and buy gear the day it was released. This was not their intention, so they put in emblems with the tiered system we know today. That way, people couldn't run heroics before a patch to stock up on emblems and buy gear the next day; they would have to run heroics after the patch, which was much closer to Blizzard's intentions. Problem is, with five tiers of emblems, things get confusing. Needing to trade down your emblems three or four times to buy heirloom gear is tedious, and it can be annoying to need to talk to multiple vendors just to see what gear you can buy with your emblems. Whatever changes Blizzards makes to the emblems system will need to address these issues.

I have seen suggestions before as to ways to improve the emblem system, but many of these have issues of their own. Some have suggested automatically upgrading emblems to the next tier when a patch hits, but this creates the same issue that Badges of Justice had in that you can stockpile emblems for the next patch. Some have also suggested making old gear be exchanged for the new emblems when a patch drops, but this would prevent your from using the emblems you had stockpiled to buy it. One simple solution is to allow higher-tier emblems to automatically downgrade when you buy something, but this would create issues of its own. People would probably accidentally spend emblems they didn't mean to spend, and imagine the horror of trying to refund them automatically.

Whatever new system is put in place, it would need to motivate people to run heroics all the way through Cataclysm's duration (like Wrath's system), rather than encouraging people to run heroics in bulk to save up emblems to buy gear immediately after the patch drops. One option is to use a system similar to Badges of Justice, but to inflate the cost of gear much more dramatically as the expansion goes on while also increasing the amount of emblems that drop from bosses. This would discourage people from running heroics in advance while still keeping things simple, but the cost of gear would probably reach absurd levels, and people would still farm heroics to get gear the minute it is released. It would also mean emblem achievements be worth less as the expansion wears on.

Perhaps emblems could be demoted as patches went on and be given better gear they can buy. Let me explain what I mean. Suppose that emblems are replaced with a currency we'll call seals. When Cataclysm launches, there would be two kinds of seals: Gleaming Seals of Justice, and Seals of Justice. Heroics (and ten-mans, if Blizzard wants 25-man raids to drop better gear currency) would drop Seals of Justice, while 25-mans and your first daily heroic would drop Gleaming Seals of Justice. GSoJs would be used to buy gear equivalent to 25-man drops, while SoJs would be used to buy gear equivalent to 10-man drops. Now, when a new patch with a new round of gear is released, all of your GSoJs would be demoted to regular SoJs (the idea being that time has made them lose their sheen), but all of the gear that had previously been bought with GSoJs will instead be bought with regular SoJs. Only the latest round of gear would be bought with GSoJs. And, of course, GSoJs could be traded down for regular SoJs.

This kind of system is not without its flaws. One could easily chain-run heroics early in the expansion to save up regular SoJs, then use those SoJs to buy the second best gear later in the expansion. However, the best gear would still only be available to those who continue to run heroics, and someone who is the kind of person to run heroics to save up seals for new gear is probably the kind of person who would want the best gear and would keep running heroics to get it. Players may also feel indignant about their "good" seals being transformed into "bad" seals, even though the "bad" seals would be capable of everything the "good" seals had been capable of before the patch was released. Players may also feel that it isn't worth it to spend their regular seals now when they can get better gear with them later, but if today's system didn't evoke feelings of, "Why run heroics now when running them later will give me better badges?" then I doubt seals will evoke a similar feeling.

Sadly, I cannot come up with some magic system that can solve all of the issues emblems have (if I could, I'd be writing up my resumé to submit to Blizzard, not writing up this blog post.). Considering that the Cataclysm press beta-invites have already gone out, perhaps we'll soon have some idea of just what Cataclysm has in store for us and our emblems. I am quite eager to see what Blizzard decides to do.

Advice for emblem-gear-fueled dungeon speed runs

I don't think it's a controversial statement to say that the new emblem system has changed the face of the five-man dungeon scene, making it near unrecognizable compared to what it once was. Heroics these days are more comparable to running Scarlet Monastery at level 60 than Blackrock Depths. It's safe to say that much of we thought we knew about five-man dungeons has changed, and new assumptions need to replace old ones if we are to evolve to face the new challenges (or lack thereof) that await us on the other side of those instance portals (now replaced by an interface). Many have made these changes subconsciously already, but some may have avoided heroics during this time of great change, and this guide is for them. Note: This guide only applies to heroics, and only to the original Wrath heroics. The advice bellow doesn't apply to raiding or The Frozen Halls.

Tanks:
-Focus on whatever the DPS is attacking.
When it comes to trash, kill order is mostly meaningless these days. As much as you may want your DPS to attack the healer first, you will encounter DPS that just won't want to do it. Rather than getting worked up over them, it's better to just go along with it and focus on causing threat to the enemies they are attacking. Why? Let's say you focus on causing threat to the target you think should die first. This makes it easier for the DPS to over-aggro, so you will lose control of the mobs, making the battle slower. If, however, you focus on what the DPS is focusing on, you stay in control on the situation and the mobs will die faster, making the run faster, and because the mobs won't be running around doing damage to everyone, the run will be more enjoyable in general.

-Focus on AoE threat while fighting trash.
Back when kill order mattered, you would try to cause the most threat to the enemy highest on the kill order while not causing too much AoE threat because your DPS would be focusing on the target of highest priority and not trying to cause massive AoE damage. These days, DPS just want to AoE everything down, meaning if you try to focus on causing most of your threat to one target, you'll end up only holding on to that one target. Though you should use your auto-attacks to cause extra threat to whatever your DPS is attacking (as per the previous piece of advice), you should focus on using your AoE abilities rather than your single-target abilities.

DPS:
-Try to attack what the tank is attacking.
The tank losing control of trash is bad. Sure, with the kind of gear you're wearing, you can probably afford to take a few hits, but if the tank can't keep control of enemies, he can't cause as much damage to them as he could otherwise. As such, the run will be slower. The tank will be causing the most damage to his target, so it helps to focus your attacks on whoever your tank is targeting. You can turn on target-of-target in the options menu to make this easier.

Healers:
-Do some damage if you don't need to focus all of your time on healing.
If you and the tank are in great gear, you probably don't need to spend all of your time healing him and the group. In the olden days, it was considered unthinkable for healers to do any damage to enemy targets. After all, they need to heal when people take damage, and healing causes threat. The DPS can stop doing damage if they cause too much threat, but healers don't have that luxury. Extra threat was just something healers didn't need; it was something they couldn't afford. These days, however, you'd be lucky to break 1% of the tank's threat in an average heroic run. As such, consider dropping some damage on your enemies to make the fights go faster. This will be easier for Priests and Shamans than for Druids and Paladins, of course, since Druids need to leave Tree of Life to do damage, loosing a healing boost in the process, and Paladins can't do much damage without entering melee range, but Priests and Shamans should definitely consider dropping the odd offensive spell when they have nothing better to do. If anything, it will make the run more fun for you while you wait for your tank to drop bellow 95% health.

-Forgo mana efficiency for spell potency.
If you out-gear heroics and are rocking tier-nine or ten gear, you don't need to worry about mana. You do, however, need to worry about wiping. Heroics have become so easy these days that players simply have no patience for wiping. Now, granted, wipes are a near impossibility these days, but you still don't want them to happen. An unexpected development (adds, runners, etc.) can cause a sudden influx of damage, even in these heroics that we have all run before, so you need to stay on top of your game. In fact, being so comfortable with heroics likely leads us to make mistakes we would not have made in the days when they were difficult, if only because of sloppiness. Anyways, your main goal is to avoid a wipe, and knowing that running out of mana is a near impossibility unless you are blatantly overhealing everyone, you should feel free to use your larger, more expensive heals to reduce the chance of a wipe to near zero. It may feel wasteful, but it's only wastefulness if you can run out of whatever you are using.

Why I won't run heroics in blues

In my last philosophy post, I went over how I find heroics boring now that I am in high-level epics thanks to the new emblem system. Someone in the comment suggested that I try running heroics in blues (or in low-level gear, generally) so that I can get the challenge I want and no one would need to suffer through the admittedly inadequate solution I proposed at the end of that post. There are several reasons I won't do this, and though I went over one briefly in a comment on that post, I feel the subject warrants more discussion. (After all, that was the post that seems to have increased my readership exponentially thanks to it being linked on WoW.com.)

My first reason is a rather simple one. I usually tank; sometimes I heal when I need a break from tanking or a change of pace, but 90-95% of the time I spend in heroics, I tank. (What can I say? Instant groups are addictive.) This alone makes running heroics in "sub-par" gear problematic. If I tank in blues, I won't be able to cause as much threat as I can in epics, so either the DPS will need to hold back and not cause nearly as much damage as they would be able to otherwise, or they will grab aggro and die. In the former case, the dungeon run will go more slowly than most people like because the DPS won't be able to cause as much damage, meaning I will be imposing my views on how heroics should be onto them, something a commenter said this method would avoid. Considering the mentality most DPS seem to have these days, however, the more likely scenario is that they would ignore my low threat and go all out, pulling aggro on every enemy and likely making the healer's life hell. Even if the healer can heal them through the damage, letting that happen would mean I would not be doing my job as a tank, and it would all be because of my gear.

But what if I could get past that problem by finding a group of like-minded people who also long for the days when heroics were challenging and satisfying? Even in that case, I still wouldn't run heroics in blues, because then there would be no sense of progress. The reason I ran heroics in the first place was because getting those epics through the new emblem system was satisfying. It was like progression, even though I wasn't seeing any new content; I still got the satisfaction of making my character progressively better. That's why I got caught up in the gear race to such an extent that I don't find heroics fun anymore.

Now, some people equate running heroics in blues to freezing one's experience bar at 60 or 70 and running old raids. Unfortunately, that metaphor doesn't work, because retro raiders still get to experience content in a progression-based way and get that kind of satisfaction. They can get better gear that allows them to go to new raids. Unfortunately, an artificial gear freeze like the one described above takes that element of satisfaction out of heroics, so I would only be running heroics for their own sake. There would be no progress, only repetition. That may have been enough for me back when heroics were still new, but like most people, I am tired of them by now, and I simply can't run them for their own sake. In fact, putting on blues and running heroics would be the exact opposite of progression. Doing so means making content artificially harder by undoing the progress I have made.

So that is why I won't run heroics in blues, despite the fact that it would make them challenging again. Now, I know someone is going to ask, "If you don't like heroics as they are, and won't make them harder for yourself, why run them?" Short answer: I'm not. The reason my priest alt is doing so well probably has something to do with the fact that I'm not running heroics anymore.

How the new emblem system ruined heroics (and what could be done to save them)

I am a busy player. I don't have the time to raid or the reflexes to PvP, so I run heroics instead. I still get to play in groups, but I don't have to dedicate a large portion of my time to the game; I can simply plop down for a half-hour or hour when I have one to spare. With the death of solo content in Wrath, heroics were really all I had left, and now my last little sanctuary has been perverted by the very thing that were supposed to save it: the new emblem system.

I'm talking about the system by which heroics offer the second best emblem in the game, while the first random heroic you do each day (previously, it was the daily heroic-quest) gives you two of the best emblems in the game. There was a time when heroics only gave you emblems of heroism, the worst emblem in the game. These emblems were used to obtain gear that was good for heroics, but would never let you out-gear them. With the new emblem system, amazing gear is obtainable by people who have never stepped foot in a raid. Now, certainly, this system has benefits. People can gear up their alts rather quickly and get them into the highest tier of raiding without forcing their guild to drag them through the previous raids. Through heroics alone, I have decked out my druid in tank gear good enough that I could run Icecrown Citadel 10-man if I wanted to. The issue is, I can't, so for me, and players like me, heroics allow us to obtain amazing gear that we will never put to use. You could say that the new ICC 5-mans, the Frozen Halls, are the place to go to use that gear, but in the gear I'm in, only Halls of Reflection is a challenge, and I'm not going to run that one over and over again just because it's the only place that is difficult.

And so we see the issue. For people who only run heroics, the new emblem system allows us to get gear that only serves to make the content we are running easier. These same heroics that once provided some level of satisfaction are now hollow shells of what they once were. They are not challenging, they are not interesting, and they are not enjoyable. To pour salt in the wound, the ridiculously inflated cost of emblem of frost gear forces raiders, most of which ran heroics nauseam in order to gear up for Naxx, to run heroics each day so that they can get their gear in a timely manor. Many of them hate the heroics with a passion, and their animosity makes heroics less enjoyable to run when it rubs off on those of us who still enjoy them to some degree.

The dungeon finder only exacerbates this situation. It allows people to chain run heroics, bringing them to the point where heroics provide no challenge even faster than players would get there on their own, and it makes the groups inconsequential, promoting the kind of dickish behavior we see in heroics today. After all, when the only repercussions for your actions are being put on someone's ignore list (a punishment that is completely intangible), what motivation is there for the common man to not be a jerk? He wants his emblems, he wants them quickly, and he doesn't want to bother with the niceties that were once required to successfully complete a heroic.

Where does the solution lie? The benefits of the new emblem system are that it allows raiders to gear up their alts quickly and allows people who are only now reaching the level cap to quickly gear up for the most recent raid content. If Blizzard were to scrap the emblem system, the new solution would need to address these two problems.

The first one could be addressed by making emblems bind-to-account, thus allowing raiders to send their excess emblems to their alts. Some may object to that idea, since heroics are supposed to give people practice with their characters, practice they need to perform well in a raid. However, the kind of heroic runs that have become prominent since patch 3.3 (the "silent but deadly" speed runs) are hardly good places to train oneself for raiding. Overgeared healers can heal the tank and DPS through their mistakes, and overgeared tanks make threat a non-issue for DPS, while overgeared DPS make the bosses die so quickly that the encounters are nothing more than tank-and-spanks. This particular issue could be solved if the dungeon finder only put people with similar gear together in groups. That would mean the people who need to do the heroics slowly and need the practice would be put with people like themselves, while the impatient people who outgear the heroics would be put with people like themselves and could burst through the content. While this might be a good short-term solution, it doesn't address the larger issues of the emblem system.

However, if all Blizzard does is scrap the emblem system while making emblems BoA, that wouldn't address the fact that the new emblem system helps people who have only recently hit 80 get into the current tier of raiding, saving them the trouble of finding people who will run them through the previous tiers. If heroics only dropped the worst emblems, there would need to be a way for people to still get good gear without going through the old raids. I propose that, when Cataclysm hits, with each patch that Blizzard releases a raid, they also release a 5-man dungeon or two, like how with the release of Icecrown Citadel, they added The Frozen Halls. These new dungeons would be harder than other heroics, obviously, but to compensate, they would drop the emblems and gear that are better than the last tier of heroics. To use the current heroics as an example, some Ulduar-based 5-man would have been released with patch 3.1, and it would have dropped emblems of valor. Trial of the Champion would have dropped emblems of conquest, and the Frozen Halls would have dropped emblems of triumph (perhaps the Halls of Reflection could have dropped emblems of frost, considering how hard it is).

Yes, this would mean that heroics would become a new kind of progression, but is that such a bad thing? They are very popular now, so it wouldn't be a bad idea for Blizzard to cater to the part of their fanbase that likes heroics more than raids. This system would also mean that people could gear up for the current tier of content through heroics, which are quick and don't require a lot of preparation, rather than by running old raids, which takes a long time and requires more preparation and people.

So, to summarize the changes I propose:
1. When Cataclysm is released, the heroics that are available upon the launch date with drop the same emblem as the starter 10-man raids, while the 25-man versions will drop the next tier of emblems. As patches are released, the new raids will give better emblems, but the base emblems in old heroics will not change.
2. Emblems will become bind-on-account so that raiders can use their extra emblems to gear up their alts.
3. With each raid that is released, one, two, or three new 5-mans will be released, the heroic versions of which will drop the same emblem as the 10-man version of their corresponding raid. This will allow people to gear themselves up for the current raid content without running old content.

Edit: I would just like to add that these are preliminary ideas to inspire others to come up with truly great solutions; they are not meant to be end-all-be-all fixes.

Should tier 9 gear be the standard in heroics?

This edition of WoW.com's The Queue stated that tier nine has become the new standard of gear in heroics, meaning that if you gear is better, then your are considered over-qualified for heroics, and if it is worse, you are under-qualified. From a purely objective perspective, this is a ludicrous idea. Heroics were designed to be easy enough that a group of people in ilevel 200 blue-quality gear could do them; after all, heroics are the next logical step after normals. Tier nine gear is a large step above blues, so where does this standard come from?

Put simply, we are spoiled. The new emblem system that Blizzard has added (where the second-best emblem is the base emblem that drops from any heroic or raid bosses that don't drop the best emblem, and the best emblem is awarded by your first daily heroic and the weekly raid quests) has made getting raid quality gear possible without stepping into a raid, and as such, even the average Joe can get amazing gear. In the time between patch 3.2 (when the new emblem system was first implemented) and patch 3.3 (when the dungeon finder was released), many people took advantage of that system, which made emblems of conquest the new base emblem, in place of emblems of heroism. Those who took the time to run heroics could get very powerful gear with these new emblems, and Casual Carl (yes, I just made that name up) could get raid-quality gear without dedicating the time to raiding, since heroics were short, and thus he could do them on his own time. As such, everyone and their mother was running around in gear that was much better than what they could get in heroics. In other words, those who ran heroics the most soon out-geared them.

Once patch-3.3 was released, many people started chain running heroics, and if it wasn't clear before, it became obvious that very few people were running heroics for gear these days. After all, emblems of conquest allow access to ilevel 232 gear, the kind available in 10-man Trial of the Crusader. It was as if these people had skipped two tiers of raiding. The ridiculous extent to which people out-geared heroics became obvious, and because so many people fit that standard, it became the norm. The consequence of such a mass over-gearing was that heroics became easy. Very easy. Previously difficult fights became trivial and people stopped using the strategies that were once necessary for success, or at least only used them to make the fights interesting. I've seen fights end so quickly that the bosses weren't even able to use the abilities that made the fight difficult. Everything has become a tank-and-spank. (Except Oculus; thank goodness I have only had to run it once.)

That is, unless, there is someone in your group who doesn't out-gear the heroic, or at least doesn't out-gear it to a ludicrous degree. Then the run goes from ridiculously easy to pretty easy. After all, you are only likely to see one such person in a heroic, and you probably won't notice their presence unless you are used to running heroics with fellow guild-members who are decked out in gear from 25-man TotGC. That's if the under-geared "offender" is a DPS, though. If he is a healer, then all that means is that the tank can't chain pull enemies in the instance like he may be used to doing. If he is a tank, then that means that healer needs to stay on his/her toes and the DPS needs to watch their threat. These are more significant inconveniences than the boss not dying fast enough to not use his main ability.

Back to the main question: should the standard for gear in heroics be tier nine? Since the standard can be defined what most people qualify for, tier nine already is the de jure standard. However, the implication of such a standard is that anyone who queues for a heroic with gear worse than tier nine is a burden to the group and should potentially be kicked. If tier nine were the de facto standard, this would be true. So, should tier nine be the de facto standard for heroics?

God no! Here's why: in case you haven't run heroics recently, they are incredibly boring. Granted, as a tank, it's more fun for me than in is for other people, but I recently tried healing a run with a competent tank, and it was a very uneventful time. I kept Rejuvenation on him and that healed 95% of all the damage he took. Sometimes I threw out a Regrowth of Wild Growth just for the hell of it. Overall, the experience was one I would not care to repeat. Now, if the tank had not been over-geared, the run would have been much more fun. I would have been throwing out Nourishes and it would have been a more interesting experience. Point is, "under-geared" people make heroics interesting because they bring us back to a time when strategy was required and we couldn't blast our way through heroics half-asleep. They make heroics fun again. (If you are still complaining that they make the run slower, you may wish to read my last philosophy post.)

Happy New Years everyone! As a special treat for the new decade, I am posting this post right before I go to bed after staying up until midnight.

My issue with speed runners in random heroics

As anyone who has run a few random heroics recently knows, the new Dungeon Finder tool is a fantastic thing, but one issue that seems to have that comes up repeatedly is people who want to run the instance as fast as possible, to the point where the DPS (and occasionally the healers) pull enemies before the tank is ready to do so, just because they think the tank is going too slowly. When this happens to me, I usually let the DPS tank the mobs for a while, but I digress. Such occurrences are symptomatic of a larger problem I see appearing in the 5-man scene: the idea that 5-mans are only meant to be run for emblems. Forget the lore, forget the encounters, forget the money, the enchanting materials, the satisfaction of taking down an enemy you could not take on your own, the social element of the experience; it's all about getting through there as quickly as possible so that you can get your emblems and leave. I see this as a problem.

Let me begin by explaining how I view fun. My definition of fun is when you enjoy something for the process, not just the results. Let's look at something simple, like biking. Biking is exercise, so it's easy to enjoy biking for the benefits it gives you in that respect. However, if you don't enjoying riding a bike, you probably won't enjoy biking, in spite of the benefits it brings you. Biking is the process; the benefits are the results. In other words, biking is a means to an end, whereas the benefits are the end itself. Thus, in order to enjoy something, you need to enjoy the means to the end, not just the end itself. Otherwise, your fun activity becomes a chore--something you don't enjoy doing, but derive satisfaction from finishing.

I'd like to state one more assumption that I don't think anyone will disagree with: the purpose of emblems is getting gear. As I have said before in this blog, the only practical purpose of gear is allowing you to complete more difficult content, so it follows that that is the purpose of emblems as well: allowing you to see more content. Thus emblem are themselves a means to an end, so it is feasible that someone could enjoy their collection. However, it isn't that simple. Emblems are themselves an end as well, and random heroics are the means to that end. As such, in a transitive sort of way, random heroics are a means to the end of seeing more content. In other words, you are running content so that you can see more content.

What does this all mean? It means that I think that anyone who has ever uttered "I am only here for the emblems" in a random heroic needs to reexamine their priorities. Emblems are just an end that comes from the heroic run, and thus, if you only run heroics to gain emblems, then heroics are just a chore, not something that is actually fun. Now, I'm not saying that you need to find heroics fun. If you have run each of Wrath's heroics ad nauseam, no one can blame you for not enjoying them. All I am saying is, why are you doing something that you see as a chore, rather than something you see as fun? Sure, some of you may say that you need the gear so that you can go into raids, but what are raids other than suped-up 5-mans that require more people, time, and skill to take down? If you can't enjoy heroics, how much can you really enjoy raids?

Maybe I'm just prejudiced because I don't raid, but I say that if you don't enjoy heroics but feel the need to run them anyways, it's your responsibility to make them interesting. Just because you view them as a chore doesn't give you the right to force that view upon others, some of whom may actually enjoy heroics. Now, when I say "make it interesting," I don't mean pulling for the tank or trying to go so fast that your tank's health bar frequently dips bellow 10% on trash. That's just dumb. Instead, go for some achievements or help other people with theirs. Strike up a conversation during your run. Go overkill and pretend the run is more difficult than it actually is. Healers, you could overheal. Tanks, you could use your defensive cooldowns when you go from taking negligible damage to noticeable damage and pretend they are necessary. DPS, you could (gasp!) follow the strategies you used to use for the boss before you outgeared the dungeon. I assure you that all of these things will make a heroic run more interesting, for I have done them all myself.

Finally, to my readers: merry Christmas, happy belated Hanukkah, joyous early Kwanzaa, and happy belated Festivus.

How to gear up for two roles at once

As a druid who is both a tank and a healer (I gave up on being competitive at DPS a long time ago), I know how difficult it is to keep an adequate set of gear for two roles. By trying to stay competitive at two roles at once, you need to dedicate more time to gearing up just because you are keeping two sets of gear updated at once, whereas people who focus on one role don't need to do that. When your resources are spread that thin, you need to make ends meet however you can. That is what this post is about: tips to help you keep two sets of gear updated at once.

1. Take advantage of unneeded epics
This piece of advice applies more to people who are trying to start a second set of gear, but rolling on gear that drops in raids that other people don't need is a great way to keep two sets of gear up-to-date. This may be difficult if you guild uses a loot system that doesn't allow for people to role on gear for offsets without serious detriments to themselves, but if you take advantage of both sets of gear in raids, they'll probably understand and make some sort of accommodation.

2. Use your emblems intelligently
The various emblems that drop from instances are a great way to upgrade your gear when you may not be able to otherwise, but don't spend you emblems on something you may be able to get an upgrade for in an instance. If you are running 10-man Trial of the Crusader and you need a healing offhand item, you should spend your emblems on that since none drop in there, but if you need a DPS offhand, you may want to wait for the one that drops in there. Likewise, if you are a Death Knight, Druid, Shaman, or Paladin, you should focus on upgrading the item in your relic slot first, since no relics drop from TotC. More generally, you should look on wowhead to see what gear the raid your are running drops so that you know which items you won't be able to get. Those are the slots you should get gear for first using emblems. Aside from that, if you are interested in keeping both sets up-to-date, just update whichever item is in most dire need of an update, no matter which set it is from.

3. BoE/crafted items are your friend
No one said keeping two sets updated was easy, or cheap. Because you will need to split your drops/emblems between your two sets, anything you can do outside of an instance to make gearing up easier is a good thing. If you are starting a new set from scratch, use a combination of reputation rewards, BoE drops, items from the Argent Tournament, and crafted items to get yourself started. That should get you geared enough to do the daily heroic quests, which will be a good source of emblems.

4. Consider taking up enchanting
As an enchanter, I can't lie to you; if you aren't leveling it up as you yourself level up, enchanting is a pain and a half to level, and incredibly expensive too. It's not as lucrative as it used to be ever since rare enchants like crusader went the way of the shaman tank, so what's the main draw of it? Mainly, you can enchant your own gear the minute you get it. If you win an item in an instance, just put an enchant on it right there. It takes the hassle out of getting new gear enchanted (which you will need to do a lot if you don't have it, considering you will be going after twice as much gear) and gives you that much of an edge if you have difficulty staying ahead when it comes to gear.

Keeping two sets of gear is difficult, but the reward is that you will be able to fill two roles in any groups you join and any raids you do with your guild, making you a more flexible player and increasing the chance that you will get an instance group. I can tell you from personal experience that it is incredibly rewarding, so go to it!

Should raiders be angry about the Emblem of Conquest change?

Disclaimer: Everything I say in this post in my own opinion, and though I make sweeping generalizations about raiders in this post, I am not making an assault on your own character with this post. In other words, don't take what I say personally.

The last major patch brought a pretty big change to the game: emblems of conquest now drop from heroic instances. Many raiders who got these emblems the hard way through Ulduar were not happy about this change, as they saw it as trivializing the gear they had worked so hard to obtain. Were they justified? It's a difficult question, but it begs an even bigger one, in my opinion: what is the purpose of gear? After all, the purpose that gear serves is fundamental to how valuable it is.

The way I see it, the only practical application of gear is to make encounters easier and thus allow the player to see more of the game. However, if that were the gear's only purpose, then the Uduar raiders wouldn't feel as indignant about non-raiders sharing their gear. They may feel that Blizzard's making good gear easier to get makes the encounters easier and thus trivialized their achievements, but as Windwalkêrs's recent downing of Yogg-Saron in only blues shows, gear only plays a small role in raid success, and thus making good gear available to more players does little to make the encounters themselves easier. Thus, this could not be the reason that raiders are so indignant about the emblem change.

So, what's the purpose of the gear? Since skill is really more important than gear in determining a player's usefulness to a raid than gear, the only reason left is one that's pretty obvious: the gear is the best way for raiders to show off that they raid and that they raid successfully. Achievements do serve the same function, but they are inferior to gear as a way to show off successful raiding. It's easier for a player to admire his gear than his achievements, and gear is much easier to show off to other players than achievements.

Of course, the idea that gear can be used to show off raiding achievements begs the question of why raiders should want to brag about their conquests at all. This is an easy one to answer; anything that a person puts a lot of work into, that person is going to feel proud of, and pride generally leads to a person wanting to some how show off what they have achieved. Still, many a wise man will tell you that genuine pride results in humility, and only hubristic pride leads to bragging. In fact, those who brag often do so because they have doubt in themselves and need to reaffirm their baseless self-esteem. Whether this theory applies to WoW, I'm not qualified to say, but my suspicion is that it does.

Bringing that all together, are the raiders who want to keep raid gear to themselves selfish? No, they're probably just insecure about their achievements and fear that their gear (which symbolizes their success in raids) becoming more common will somehow trivialize what they have accomplished. Will it? Not really, because gear has nothing to do with what you have achieved. It may symbolize it to you, but that's your own thinking, not that of the player-base as a whole.