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Where to start… Who cares, well Intin cares seeing as how he saw it as a slap in the face to guilds who had completed Naxxramas as well as yourself since you agreed with him. But what’s really ironic is that you’re also stating that it took a mere couple weeks to replace their Tier three with Kara gear; if that was in fact the case, wouldn’t the corollary be that it also only took a couple weeks to exhaust the gear in Naxx?
Well of course we care about the fact that it didn't last - the point in the context of "OMG IT LASTS UNTIL 70!!" is, who cares if it does last that small amount of time when compared to lasting so much longer?
I think in the case of Naxx gear some guilds held on to it a bit longer as compared to Tier 2.5 stuff from AQ40 which was eliminated after Kara pretty much. So yea, a few weeks for the more hardcore guilds. The point was that it was replaced relatively quickly when it could have remained around a while.
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You also state that most dedicated players took a week or less to level to 70, perhaps true if your definition of dedicated only includes the likes of Death and Taxes and similar guilds, otherwise you’re out to lunch. As for these blues with new stat allocations that people were rushing to, does your sample include only those in ‘of the Bear’ and ‘of the Eagle’ gear? By and large, for people in Tier 2+, new items were more of the same, just better.
I think with my Pally I did it in around 5 days /played, and I didn't really even try nor AOE level. I could easily see someone doing it in a week, especially a DPS class with some previous gear from AQ/Naxx. And I did see a few people on Doomhammer do it in less, so I don't think it was completely rare. 2 weeks and you have many of the active players.
As an example of the new stat allocations/emphasis, you had warriors rushing to hit the defense caps for crit. It wouldn't be easy to attain that and actually be able to tank bosses reliably with mostly tier 2 or 2.5. AP also always had some emphasis, but with the leniency in stat allocation you saw more people gravitating toward it. Some of the changes in definition to things like crit rating at level 70 made people re-think the gear and change out.
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So let us imagine a world where Tier 2 lasted until Kara and Tier 3 lasted until SSC, who wins in that scenario? It sure isn’t those on the cutting edge who have zero incentive to experience the first portion of the new content on top of the fact they’re forced to sit around in their gear that is already how many months old now? And why does Tier 2 last until Kara, BWL was how old when TBC was released? You later argue that you want power increases to come in chunks but here you’re arguing for gear to stay relevant for well over a year.
The same could be said for those same people on the cutting edge who wander into a 5-man for the first time only to find no gear for them until Kara. The question is where the line is drawn. I don't think it should be drawn to the point where nearly EVERYTHING in Kara is an upgrade right when you step in. An upgrade here and there, a sidegrade there. It's a 10-man instance, not hardcore raiding content. When you get to the raiding content, then you should start to see some upgrades to your previous (gasp) raiding content.
With Tier 2, like you said, it's been around, so a 10-man Kara wouldn't be a bad idea IMO. I fail to see how that's contradictory to my want for small chunks of power increase. Well over a year? /boggle. Most moderate and average guilds have been done with SSC for some time now, and quite a few in Hyjal/BT now. More like 6 months to start seeing some drops if we assume that you have to clear all of SSC to see them all replaced. And that's only for stuff from Naxx. I don't think that's extremely unreasonable, but I think 2-3 months would be a decent amount of time - perhaps it would start dropping at Prince or optional bosses, and the rest at the first SSC bosses? Either way, that's a reasonable timeframe IMO. Kara loot still finishing off Tier 2/2.5 stuff, and we'll be generous and say 1-1.5 months for clearing Kara.
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So with this said, the obvious question is, how long has your guild had Illidan on farm for? As for the latter part of your statement, how do you propose they raise the limit power on a more frequent basis? Is this not already accomplished each and every time they release a new tier of dungeons, first SSC/TK than BT/MH and soon to be The Sunwell? That’s four notable increases in power in what will be just over a year, seems reasonable on this end.
Currently we're working on the borefest that is the Kael'thas fight(getting phase 4 down atm). I don't see what that has to do with my claims.
Raising it for only those on the cutting edge is not the way to do it. I would propose something akin to an Alternate Advancement system - in other words, EVERYONE gets an increase in power, not only those who have direct access to X and Y. Something that would, you know, make doing 5-man dungeon crawls feel somewhat worthwhile on a rainy day as opposed to your 20g in disenchant monies.
Giving everyone a power increase on top of adding new zones like Sunwell would go a ways toward getting anywhere even close to the amount that was increased with the new expansion. The problem is that even Hyjal/BT loots show plenty of signs from Blizzard on their massive holding back of any large stat increases.
Nearly the exact same issue in ZA... how pathetic is it that they actually put in a timer there specifically for the higher end guilds just so that they could disenchant more items and come out "ahead"? I will grant that Zul'jin drops a couple items that might come close to outdoing a few items in BT, but they really could have done quite a bit better instead of making most of the items next to useless unless you were in absolutely nothing but Kara gear.
The point being that Blizzard holds back on nearly every piece of gear, and then completely blows a load during an expansion. Now that might not be bad market sense at first... but it kinda sucks for the longevity of the game in the meantime while we wait in between expansions.
There is no limit to the numbers they can place on an item. If, every once in a while we could say "HOLY CRAP!" when we look at an item that came with one of the "big patches", then we could say this amounts to the "power chunk" I'm talking about. And maybe not even holy crap, but "Hey, I could actually fucking wear that item over what I have from a boss I killed 6 months ago!".