Why do people get better gear in WoW? It's exciting to get new stuff
that makes you more powerful. But I've long since passed the point in
endgame raiding where the reward of new epics outweighs the effort of
attaining them. For me these days the primary pleasure in playing WoW
is seeing and beating new content, the raid progression. The fact that
loot drops is nice, I certainly enjoy getting new stuff, but it's the
thrill of new boss fights that keeps me interested.
But gear is
a necessary pre-requisite to raid progression. You can't succeed in The
Eye and SSC until you've gotten most of the gear you can out of
Karazhan. So gear progression and raid progression are hand-in-hand.
But for me, the gear is in service to the raiding, not the other way
around.
Actually, I lied a bit. You can
do just fine in TK/SSC without Karazhan gear. Because you can gear up
via arenas and Badges of Justice, too. One of the biggest changes since
The Burning Crusade was introduced is the multiple gear progression
paths. Pre-BC, the only way to get better gear at level 60 was to do 40
man raids. If you'd logged 30+ days /played and were still trying to
improve your character, raiding was the only way. But now post-BC we
have lots of ways to progress. There's raid gear still, but also PvP
gear, arena gear, and in 2.4 some post-T5 Badge of Justice gear. The
end result is you can have gear progression without raid progression.
Some
people who play the old raiding game are annoyed by the other
progression paths. %26quot;It's not fair they can get welfare epics just for
losing arena matches while I had to wrest this pretty frock out of
Kael'thas' hands myself!%26quot;. I have some sympathy for that view; I think
the PvP gear progression is a little too mechanical. But it doesn't
cost me anything for others to have good gear too, so I don't much care
about it.
Karthis stirred up some of this resentment on a blog post about 2.4 BoJ gear.
I agree with a comment he made later, %26quot;I look at WoW as a game to be
beaten%26quot;. Me too. But it's clear Blizzard now sees WoW as more than a
PvE game to be beaten. They've put a huge effort into making the PvP
game viable, too. And PvP is never beaten; you're always competing
against people who are as good as you. It's evergreen content, and a
way Blizzard can keep WoW living for a long time without having to have
hundreds of developers making new raid content.