Today I'm going to talk about Raid Size - not the debate of 10, 20, 25, and 40-man raids (frankly, I've always enjoyed 10-mans the best, though admittedly I do like seeing the huge swarms of fireballs, arrows, lighting bolts and wraths flying through the air at a big raid boss.) No, what I'm talking about is boss count.
I'm also going to talk about Loot Distribution - though I am not talking about how a party or raid decides who gets what, I'm talking about what drops off of bosses.
Raids have been getting smaller in the past few years - especially in Cataclysm. The largest raid, in terms of bosses, is Dragon Soul, with eight. Arguably, tier 11 can be grouped together, leaving us with Blackwing Descent and Bastion of Twilight adding up to 10 (+1 for the hardcore.) Yes, I realize Throne of the Four Winds adds two to that number, but much like Malygos, Onyxia, and other one-or-two boss raids, I sort of think of those as on the side. I mean, all the gear from Tot4W had random enchantments.
Actually, if we do include Tot4W, we should include its predecessors in the final count, so, starting with Burning Crusade because I don't really want to get into all the re-vamped instances and where they should belong:
BC: 44 raid bosses (50 if you count Zul'Aman)
Tier 4: 14
Karazhan: 11, not counting the Servant Quarter bosses
Gruul's Lair: 2
Magtheridon's Lair: 1
Tier 5: 10
Serpentshrine Cavern: 6
The Eye: 4
(Zul'Aman: 6)
Tier 6: 14
Hyjal: 5
Black Temple: 9
Tier 6.5: 6
Sunwell Plateau: 6
Wrath: 50 raid bosses
Tier 7: 17 (holy crap)
Naxxramas: 15
Eye of Eternity: 1
Obsidian Sanctum: 1
Tier 8/Ulduar: 14 (counting Algalon)
Tier 9: 6
Trial of the Crusader: 5
Onyxia's Lair: 1
Tier 10/Icecrown Citadel: 12
Ruby Sanctum: 1
Cataclysm: 28
Tier 11: 13
Blackwing Descent: 6
Bastion of Twilight: 5 (counting Sinestra)
Throne of the Four Winds: 2
Tier 12/Firelands: 7
Tier 13/Dragon Soul: 8
Ok, so why am I bringing up these numbers? No, I'm not trying to be another whining complainer about how underwhelming the endgame content was for Cataclysm (well, maybe just a little bit.) No, the problem I'm interested in talking about is the way that boss loot is assigned to drop from various bosses, and the role of Valor Point gear and how it relates to gear drops.
In the past, even within Cataclysm, the gear that dropped off of bosses in a raid was enough to put together a full set. You could, for example, take your Death Knight tank into Icecrown Citadel week after week and, avoiding any Emblem of Frost gear (for those of you who are newbies, Emblems of Frost were the Tier 10 equivalent of Valor Points,) you could still put together an entire set of tanking gear from boss drops alone (you'd wind up looking like an Arms Warrior, but it was worth it.) In fact, if you were coming in as a DPS Death Knight, you'd even be able to choose between various drops - one pair of plate dps shoulder might provide crit and hit, while the other might give haste and expertise, and you could choose the one that best helped you out. There were even three different two-handed strength weapons, an axe, a mace and a sword, that you could choose from - and this was before you even considered buying pieces with your emblems.
Blizzard has stated that they want Justice/Valor Points to return to their original intention. The idea was, originally, that you would run the raids and dungeons to get pieces of gear off the bosses. However, as any player (unless you're criminally lucky) knows, sometimes you get in a rut. You've run that raid approximately three billion times, and that stupid freaking pair of boots just refuses to drop for you. So, in Burning Crusade, they adapted Badges of Justice (for the probably larger number of slightly less newbie, but still a bit newbie folks, Badges of Justice were the original incarnation of Justice/Valor Points) - originally created to give non-raiders a way to upgrade their gear beyond drops in heroic dungeons - to drop from Raid Bosses, and help smooth over the unpredictability of gear drops.
So eventually tier 9 happened, which was the first time a raiding tier set was entirely purchasable (and in fact, only purchasable) via Emblems of Triumph (Wrath's system was a bit weird, with different Emblems for each tier, though in practice it basically worked like today's system.) Badge/Emblem/Point gear was always a nice kind of gap-filler, but now you were fully expected to spend those points on not just a stand-in for the piece you really wanted, but the tier set - kind of the pinnacle of desirable gear.
This is something they've been struggling with in Cataclysm, first limiting the shoulder and helmets to only drop for actual raiders, and then in tier 13 making every piece of tier gear require a token, but then providing several other pieces of Valor gear (notably not shoulders) available for purchase.
Dragon Soul not only doesn't provide alternatives for some slots, they flat-out don't even provide drops for some slots. There isn't a single helmet that drops out of Dragon Soul, nor a single cloak. Your only options are the tier piece or the Valor point piece. Usually that's fine, but sometimes you want another option, whether because of stat priorities or what-have-you. Before Deathwing himself, there is a single viable melee weapon for Enhancement Shamans or Combat rogues. There is, in fact, not a single tanking weapon other than the one-handed sword off Deathwing. There are missing pieces here, and one is forced to fill the gaps with the solitary option available from Valor Points (or, if you're a tank, you can take the useless crit on the axe from Morchok.)
Ok, so where am I going with all this? (You'll find I'm a bit of a rambler.) I think a big part of the problem here is the size of raids. When there are only 8 bosses in an entire raid tier, you are left with the choice of putting either a ton of pieces on each boss (making it less likely the individual player is going to get the piece they want) or you do what they've been doing - leaving gaps. Many a plate dps has had to deal with not having a single option for shoulders in Firelands other than their tier piece (which, one must remember, they are essentially competing with the whole raid for.)
Perhaps this isn't the most crucial problem facing World of Warcraft's raiding scene today. Frankly, I'd prefer more raid bosses simply because it means that we can have more space for easier, gate-keeper-like bosses such as Marrowgar, XT, and Morchok, giving us casual guilds a foothold to work our way up from while the hardcore kill the late-raid bosses. But for whatever reason you pick, I for one would like to see a return of the immense, epic raids of the past.
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