Heroics, raids, and attunements: past and future

Yesterday someone spotted on the Spanish WoW forums this revealing quote from a Blue:

Looking to Cataclysm, maybe you want to know that, for normal dungeons, players must discover the dungeon in the world prior to access it from LFD tool. It is possible that you could see attunements for heroics and raids (which would be similar to the one of Karazhan). Developers aren’t sure yet of whether they use attunements or not. However, heroic dungeons at level 85 would probably have more gear requirement (in comparison) than heroic dungeons at level 80.

From this there are two points I’d like to address. The first is the idea of raid attunements.

I think they’re a great idea.

But, not the way they were done in the past. The old BC system was broken, it punished guilds when they had to recruit, and made it really hard for players who joined the raiding scene late to jump into the end game, without forcing a guild to go back and do old content so the new recruits could join the rest of the raid in the current tier. Imagine if that old system was still in place and you had to drag someone through Ulduar again before you could take them to ToC. That would be excruciating.

I tweeted about this yesterday, but I think a great “tweak” to the attunement system would be to do something like the old BC system but couple it with the new guild achievement system to create a third way that doesn’t punish guild suffering from turnover. Set it up so there’s an achievement to unlock each raiding tier. To score the T12 achievement and open up Uldum (or whatever it will be), you need to have 25 guild members complete the quest chain through the T11 content that eventually attunes them to T12. Once you get 25/25 on that achievement, your guild dings, and future members (and anyone on the bench) are automatically attuned provided they are still in the guild.

I think raiding would be well-served by some sort of limited attunement system, especially the one I just outlined. Raiding needs that mystical je ne sais quois it had in the previous two x-pacs where progressing from tier to the other was marked by a lot more fanfare than a new patch. It doesn’t need to be some ridiculously onerous series of hoops, just a simple questline that would be fun and rewarding and easily accomplished by anyone seriously attempting the current raiding tier.

As for heroics, I hope that they do up the gear requirement to run them. Heroics should once again be heroic. I want a situation like we had in BC, where you had to grind a set of gear just to get ready for heroics. The day I dinged 80, I was herded directly into heroics, despite barely getting to the 535 defense minimum for them. Once I was in there, I girded my loins to be struck down immediately by some vengeful and vicious trash mob, but it never happened.

Likewise, I never got the point of having normal 80 dungeons and heroic 80 dungeons if people could just jump into heroics on day one. But, I guess that’s neither here nor there.

A great suggestion I saw on Blessing of Kings was for the first raiding tier to not open up until a bit of time after the expansion pack launched. That way people wouldn’t feel like they had to gogogo rush to max level, and then dive immediately into progression. If we were stuck in heroics for the first month or two of Cataclysm, it would make that “tier” of content more meaningful and feel less grindy right off the bat.

Ultimately, there are two sides to every coin. On one side, there’s how BC ran heroics and raids–forcing people to do lengthy questlines and kill certain bosses to move on to the next tier, and demanding rep grinds for unlocking heroics. On the flip side is the Wrath method–an “anything goes” model where someone can set foot in ICC without ever seeing an earlier tier raid, and likewise being able to jump into a heroic as soon as they hit 80.

Both were extremes, the wrong way to go about it. But, they both had One Big Thing right. The trick is finding the middle ground between the two in Cataclysm and hitting that sweet spot between exclusivity and accessibility.