Gear Progression

Cameron over at Random Battle pointed out yesterday a nice little posting by blues stating that gear progression in WotLK will be much smoother than the debacle that was BC.

Quoth Bornakk: Players and items will have an increase in their stats/items that goes along with leveling to 80, it will just be a little more consistent when compared to The Burning Crusade. What I mean by this is the way items are working right now will be closer to the new items you get in Wrath of the Lich King and it isn't like you will see an item with double the usual amount of stamina from your first quest.

Now - this got me thinking. Remember how fun it is to get a nice shiny new piece of armor? Well I do, because it happened last night. My Druid is 60 now, and leveling in Outlands. I took a long hiatus from wow and returned to a new server with new toons and this is the first time I have been in Outlands since about September of last year. I was in Ramparts and our group basically had a healing set drop - I was healing, so I got four blue pieces - not purples, just blues, but they were there first true to life dungeon upgrades I had gotten in a while and it felt good.

Now - this is why I didn't do Strat, Scholo, UBRS, LBRS, or ZG, AQ BWL or Ony on my new character - because the minute I hit 60 and went to outlands instances, the gear far outpaced what I could have go there. Hell,. At 60 I now have 4k life, 6k mana and 275 spelldamage with 400 healing. That is great by old world standards and I am not even through half of the quests in HP.

The fact that gear progression will not be so dramatic and staggered will keep some of the "old" content useful - there is a reason people will want to keep going back to the raid level stuff from BC, say you can 5 man Kara at 75 and probably still get a few upgrades.Or 10 man SSC, - you get the picture - the content will still be seen.

I for one love the idea of it. Cool content should not be abandoned. I ran BRD all the way through before I moved on to Outlands and remembered what a freaking cool, huge, and fun instance that was.

In all the time I have played this game here is what I have not yet seen - Any and all heroics. Any and all raid instances. DM, UBRS, Scholo, BWL, ZG, AQ20, AQ40, SV, SH, hell, I have never even been beyond Terrokar forest on my old server - so you get the idea. Even though I have been playing since launch, I am a newb at endgame. I don't want to have to bypass the stuff that was endgame in BC just because the crap drops in Northrend will be as good as SSC gear. And now I won;'t have to. :)

Cameron at Random Battle had another great idea to keep older content fresh that I thought was excellent- go back and create Heroic instances for each 5 man in the old world. It would not be that hard, update some gear and increase the level of the trash mobs, then you would only need some minor tweaking on the boss fights to bring them up to par with the current difficulty levels. You may not even need to update the loot - people would have fun running them for badges alone.