The Thunder King Comes, The Thunder King Comes - Is the Hibernation of the Alts Over Yet?

With MMO-Champion calling it, and WoW Insider agreeing, and given the deluge of previews we've been getting from Blizzard, it's a pretty safe bet that tomorrow is when 5.2 drops.

I've already gone over a lot of the new content in previous articles, though I will point you to this official preview of the Isle of Thunder itself. It seems to me that Blizzard is trying very hard to create new world content that's different from what we've seen before.

I'm excited about the summonable bosses and such, though I hope there will be rewards compelling enough to do them.

The other thing I am excited for is the prospect of better drop rates in LFR for the 5.0 raids and the VP cost reduction for 5.0 and 5.1 gear (50% and 25%, respectively). While Oterro and Jarsus are at 484 and 481, respectively (and as soon as I get a new Valor piece on Jarsus, I'm sure he'll jump considerably, especially since I believe there are some VP pieces to get from the Shado-Pan Assault that are available at neutral,) everyone else is considerably lower. Only Ardten is geared to queue for MSV, and he's cheating a point with a piece of tanking gear in his inventory.

Mists is not as alt-friendly an expansion as previous ones have been, but I think a big part of that is simply the huge amount of work you need to put in just to qualify to spend your VP on something. Blizzard slowed down gains on VP (remember that by the end of Cataclysm, we were getting 140 VP every time we ran a random dungeon.) The weekly cap is the same, but the amount of content you need to run to hit that cap is pretty heavy, meaning alts get left by the wayside. Even when focusing on a single character, it's pretty hard to cap. Then again, it's called a cap because it's the maximum, not the minimum.

Still, the reduction of price for VP gear will make things a great deal easier, and the Grand Commendations introduced in 5.1 make getting up to revered with the various factions a somewhat less painful experience (especially as the one-off quests for those factions usually provide a pretty nice chunk of XP, which means fewer days doing dailies - this is why in some ways I REALLY wish I had waited on all my alts until 5.1, or at least held off on taking them through Townlong and Dread Wastes, which are awash in Shado-Pan and Klaxxi rep.)

The thing one can often forget is that the life of an altoholic (remember, that's the name of the blog!) gets easier the longer the expansion goes on. We can likely expect that with the drop rate changes and VP price reductions, getting a toon outfitted in such a way to not embarrass him or herself will be a far quicker process. If the usual pattern holds (and I know Blizzard would prefer that it did not) we will probably hit the final raid patch some time in the late fall or winter, and then we will likely have roughly a year before the next expansion comes out. During this latter-day part of the Mists life-cycle, I expect that the VP will be flowing freely, and the drop rates in Throne of Thunder will likely also have been enhanced.

It will still probably be unlikely that you'll have an easy time getting all of your toons geared up in tier 16 stuff, but I am cautiously optimistic that before too long, we're going to see a lot more people decked out in tier 14 sets with Sha-Touched weapons, ready to charge into Lei Shen's house.