Thursday, June 18, 2015

Legendaries Are The New Attunements

I just realized the other day that Blizzard brought back attunements in Mists of Pandaria. Only, in classic Blizzard fashion, they flipped them and made them driven by rewards, rather than by punishments.

The purpose of attunements is to provide a guide through content. Something that tells the player if she is ready for new content. In The Burning Crusade, that role was played by attunements. You couldn't go to Kara until you had done the quest chain, same with T5, and T6 required defeating the bosses in T5.

Now, you can jump ahead if you want, but if you follow the Legendary questline, it paces you through the content. First you do some 5-man dungeons, then you do Highmaul. You repeat Highmaul for a few weeks, and gear up as a side-effect. By the time you've done the Legendary stages of Highmaul, you're ready for Blackrock Foundry, and the process repeats.

The reward, a Legendary item, is a very strong motivator. Pretty much every guide says to start the Legendary quest line as soon as you can. That encourages you to stick to the quest line, which matches you to content that you should be geared for.

The modern Legendaries occupy the same design space as attunements. But rather than restrictions on players, they are seen as rewards. The carrot, not the stick. Players also have the freedom to skip ahead if they know what they are doing, and there are no issues with raid composition that previous attunements used to have.

I'm kind of bemused that I didn't see this before. It's excellent design work from Blizzard. And what's most amusing and impressive is that it's the same trick Blizzard always pulls.

7 comments:

  1. Good observation! I actually just re-subscribed after not playing WoW since round about New Year. Did the heroic steps of the Legendary quest line on an alt (and, as I did so, noticed that several of my groupmates were always also looting the quest items). And am now looking at running Highmaul on that character - despite the fact that I could probably skip over it.

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    1. Yup, it also pushes people who are at the same stage of content to group together. I think the lack of Valor or similar endgame currency has also played a role here.

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  2. Well, the Mists Legendary questline also forced people into Silvershard Mines, which was a neverending problem for Alliance pick up groups in PvP.

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    1. Heh, part of the issue with guiding people through content is that you might be guided to content you don't like. I thought it was a interesting experiment. Notice that the WoD quest line is more focused, and doesn't send you to Ashran.

      However, personally I feel that PvE and PvP have gotten too far apart. The game was better when the average player indulged in a bit of both instead of exclusively focusing on one or the other.

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    2. The problem is that the arena teams and the rated teams can simply carve a swath of destruction over pick up groups. Even an arena group of five that stay together in Eye of the Storm can dominate that BG fairly easily.

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  3. I found that the legendaries also serve the purpose of keeping the lower tier LFR raids stocked with players. It helps bring in well geared players who are looking to complete their legendary to help even out the relatively poor gear quality of players just starting.

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    1. That's a good point. In some ways, the Legendary questline has re-introduced the idea of "progression" back into the raiding scene. Except now, progression is somewhat optional and on the personal level, rather than the guild level.

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