Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Currencies in Warlords of Draenor

At the moment, we have a number of currencies that play a part in gearing our characters. If I recall correctly, the first true gear currency was Honor, earned by participating in PvP and used to purchase PvP gear. The system was weird and complicated at first (I believe that your honor slowly drained away if you didn't keep up, and there was also something that tracked "honorable kills…" anyway.)

In Burning Crusade, they added Badges of Justice, which would evolve into Wrath's many different Emblems and then Cataclysm's familiar two-tier system of Justice and Valor points. Mirroring this, the PvP currency system also got two tiers, namely Honor and Conquest points.

Mists of Pandaria added a new wrinkle into the mix: Lesser Charms of Good Fortune. The idea behind lesser charms was to encourage people to do "outdoor content" instead of simply sitting in cities and queueing for instances. Much as Wrath of the Lich King had a tier of Emblem for each raid tier (two for Naxxramas… it was complicated,) there has been a new tier of Bonus Roll Coin, each purchasable with Lesser Charms when the content is current, but then transferred over to an alternate method (in the case of Elder Charms, a frustratingly RNG-oriented one.)

Justice and Valor:

In Mists, we did see some funny changes to how currencies are used. In Cataclysm, and effectively in Wrath of the Lich King's later patches (though in a convoluted manner due to the many types of Emblems,) Valor Points and Justice Points worked on a system of "Current Tier" and "Older Tiers." It was a fantastic catch-up mechanic, because you could always get pieces from the previous tier simply by running a bunch of dungeons.

Mists kind of screwed with that a bit. I think Blizzard was trying to experiment with the system, though if you ask me, they took a functional system and just broke it (I will acknowledge the flaws they were attempting to remedy, namely that it made it easy to skip content, but I think there were more elegant solutions, and in the era of the Raid Finder, there's no need to worry about that.)

First off, Justice Point gear at the start was inferior to heroic dungeon items. Not the end of the world, but it certainly made the purchase feel bad. It also meant that very, very quickly, Justice Rewards were nearly worthless. By the time you had enough to purchase a piece, you would likely have just gotten something better already.

The other thing is, at least for the second raid tier, they did not upgrade rewards. In Cataclysm, once tier 12 came out, the tier 11 Valor Gear became purchasable for JP. In Mists, this did not happen until the third tier. In fact, once the 489/496 gear was downgraded to JP, most of us had better stuff anyway.

Valor Points were also messed with a bit. Locked behind reputation grinds that would take several weeks, Valor gear became less of a bad-luck-aversion and more of a two-part grind. While tier 15 handled it, I think, the best, by having the reputation that unlocked the gear tied to the most current raid tier, with tier 16 they abandoned Valor gear entirely in favor of item upgrades - perhaps the game mechanic I would most like to see removed.

Given how they struggled to make Justice Points relevant, and that they really prefer us to run the old content to gear up, I could imagine them eliminating Justice Points entirely. Still, if they do that, I would hope that they also provide discounts for older gear, to allow players to speed through old content without necessarily skipping it entirely.

My hope is that we will see item upgrades removed and replaced with more conventional valor gear. I think that valor serves an important role as the best way to prevent bad-luck streaks, and in 5.4, it does not serve that function in any way, shape, or form.

Regarding reputations, I'd rather see Reputation Gear as a separate entity from Valor gear. If you do that, I'm fine with keeping reputations more of an outdoor thing that requires dailies and the like. More avenues to gear is always a good thing, if you ask me, so I don't think these two should be collapsed into one as they were in Mists.

Lesser Charms and Bonus Roll Coins:

First off, we're going to have an Emblems of Heroism/Valor/Conquest/Triumph/Frost situation here if they don't figure out more generic names for these coins. Depending on whether they keep Justice Points around, they could either make an old/new pair of tiers for the coins, or they could just turn it into a single type of coin that works for every raid.

Regarding the acquisition of Lesser Charms, I think once again this is one of those things that heavily favors DPS roles. Really, any questing content that isn't specifically designed for five-man groups (and we haven't really had that since the Crucible of Carnage in Twilight Highlands,) is going to favor DPS over tanks and healers. I have over a thousand Lesser Charms on my Death Knight (good for twenty weeks!) but I have to force my Paladin to go farm them.

Alternate methods to acquire Lesser Charms would be good, but it's tough, because I know that what they want is more people going out into the world. Is it possible to design outdoor challenges that favor tanks and healers? I'm not sure.

This would probably sink the whole "getting them out in the world" ship, but I could actually see Justice Points and Lesser Charms merged together.

Honor and Conquest:

As someone who doesn't really PvP, I can't talk all that intelligently about this, but I wonder, should they eliminate Justice Points, if they will do the same for Honor (maybe keep Honor and get rid of Conquest, given how integral the term "honor" is to WoW's PvP.)

I don't know what effect this would have, but given that I think they're trying to make gear less of an issue in PvP (the whole Trial of the Gladiator thing, for example,) I could imagine the currency and purchasing system changing.

No comments:

Post a Comment