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World of Warcraft News - Correspondent - A Look at Gear in WoW
Posted by Jon Wood on Sep 07, 2008 | 16 comments in our forums
MMORPG.com World of Warcraft Correspondent Ricky Turner writes this article about the importance of gear in Activision / Blizzard's record shattering MMORPG, World of Warcraft.
In Activision-Blizzard’s MMO World of Warcraft, gear is the single most important component of your character. Contrary to what some players say, WoW is a gear based game. Of course, skill does come into play, but even the worst player can beat one of the best if he out-gears him. This is quite an unfortunate pitfall in the game’s grand design, but is made up for once someone gets decent gear. From this point on, the article has been written for people who do not know much about the game, it’s an informative guide aimed at helping people. If you know everything, stop wasting your time reading now, thank you.
From the moment you step into Azeroth, gear becomes an important part of your gaming experience. Whether it be the grey starter items, or the +1 stamina leather belt that dropped in a cave filled with the Burning Blade cult. As you level, you will interchange gear so often that it’s a pain to try and keep gear that is exactly your level. The best strategy for this is to just run instances every few levels and get your updates from the many instances spread throughou the game. If you buy items off the auction house, you are most likely wasting your money unless the item is really cheap. The reason I state this is because you will “out-level” the gear pieces by the time you make the money spent back. Another popular money-sink are the blue bind on equip items that are placed on the Auction House for twinks. Most of the blue BoE items are so over priced that it isn’t economically efficient for a leveling character to purchase them. Yes, they are flashy and wonderful at the time you buy them, but when you’re 75 gold short of buying your mount, it wasn’t worth the money spent. Blizzard fixed these small issues in the Burning Crusade expansion by having quests give out the best items for your level. Once you begin to do BC’s quest lines, you’ll never have to purchase another piece of armor or new weapons at all. Gear while leveling is important, but you can often quest and level with equipment under your level without having any problems.
Read the whole thing here.
First, I want to apologize that I didn't really read the article but am more responding to the Topic Line.
Every MMO that has a main focus on "Raiding" will be gear dependent. its a Known fact imho.
Not to mention designed so the best content in the game only about 5-8% of the population on the game gets to enjoy, which I find funny because that's also the usual unemployment rate.
So basically endgame raiding = grinding for items. I admit getting awesome gear is satisfying, but not when you have to spend 3 hours in a raid just to have an item drop that you can't use - or to have the item go to someone else. Nevermind that you might end up wiping and not completing the instance at all.
Even as a fan of this game, I really dislike how everything revolves around getting the best loot. And you can't even customize the look of it.
Perhaps if people approached the game differently they wouldn't find it so tiresome to get gear.
For example, of the people I know who play online games, they only play WoW.
They very much enjoy it and play it with friends, coworkers and family. To that end none of them really fret about gear. They just log in, have some fun and log off.
Never once have I heard them complain about gear and raid grinding. They take the game for what it is and just enjoy themselves.
I'm afraid too many WoW players (or at least those that are vocal on these boards) have put themselves in the position of Sisyphus.
I fully agree with this article. WoW is very item focused. But this has not to be a bad thing ^^
Still glad I stopped 3 years ago :p
I can emphasise with pretty much everyone in this thread tbh.
Before The Burning Crusade came out I was in one of the Top raiding guilds on my server - Source of Strength, on Turalyon. That guild collapsed due to the effort and time required by its members to maintain 'pve progress' in AQ 40 and then Naxramass.
The same fate awaited my next guild DrAmA, the GM took some time off for Medical reasons, the then Main Tank left to join another guild that would keep him in epics and some others followed suit, breaking the back of our raid team while we were trying to crack SSC and tempest Keep.
Since then most of us that enjoyed playing together have banded together and stick to heroics, 10 man raids, leveling alts and messing about in the Battlegrounds to keep entertained until the new expansion.
(we tried to migrate our guild to Age of Conan... dont think I need to elaborate on how that turned out).
None of us want to get back into the sort of time and life commitment to a computer game that we sacrificed in the past, really whats the payback of that kind of effort? epeen? prettier pixels? bigger stats?
Hence none of us will ever see the inside of Black temple, Mount Hyjal, Sunwell Plateau etc...
The new 10 man / 25 man versions of the wotlk dungeons etc is a really big factor in the appaeal of continuing with Warcraft for me and many of my friends. we can experiance the content and have fun while the epeen-brigade still get to feel like they are superior, strutting around Ironforge in off peak hours in their 'Purples'...
everyone's a winner hehe.
Holy crap, circulate this to CNN fast. WoW is gear based!!!
OMG,WoW is gear based ?! WTF ive being playing for 10 years now and I thought it was player skill based and had nothing to do with lag circle warping.
I've got to agree about the Auction House having way too much stupid prices.
Or should I say StOOOpid prices. (Yes, that was stupid with 3 Os. It's just that stupid.)
Always use a tool like Auctioneer. (Make sure it has a wide enough sample base to give decent results.)
Haven't played WoW for almost 6 months now.
I have to say, out of most of the MMO's I have played, I've seen the most drama stem from gear in WoW. Have seen many friendships end over gear, backs being stabbed, and whatnot. Not so much the game's fault, as it is the people that play it.
Did the whole hardcore raiding thing early on, before TBC, while at first it was fun and exciting, it very soon became repititous and tedious. Just my thoughts on the matter anyway.
was anybody else disappointed by the writing in this article.
seemed very child like.
It was a decently-written article, but nothing too new. Almost 90% of MMOs are gear-centric, as they have some sort of raiding aspect, or end-game instance that people run over and over for gear. Most games keep their players hooked by giving them a meaningless grind, or repetitive ritual. For example, if you were somehow able to eliminate or reduce gear significance in WoW, gold would still be important. With the addition of dailies, the currency value in the game is almost trivial now, but the process of obtaining it has turned into a grind on itself. I've known people that would do all 25 dailies on 2 or 3 characters, then when they reset, they would start all over again. They were doing the exact same thing every day, and didn't seem to mind.
It should be clear at this point, that better gear is what the WoW fanbase wants. Obtaining better gear is always an exhilirating experience in almost any game. Going back to Diablo II, when we would sit there doing cow runs all day so that we could get some better equipment for our alts, or XP for our mains. Like it or not, WoW's gear-based system is here to stay. Although a lot of other games do things differently by not placing as much emphasis on gear, it's WoW's gear system that has earned it so many subscriptions. We know the gameplay's repetitive and the graphics out-dated, but something as simple as adding a new instance and a few "purples" will keep the player base going. When Magister's Terrace came out, I spent a month helping a guild member obtain a Shard of Contempt, then another, and another. I didn't want one, but it sure as hell ensured that my subscription was still active.
Once developers give up on the bind on pickup and forced raiding concepts, we'll find ourselves having a lot more fun in mmos.
some games are already there. just not wow.
lmao, I find this very true, my roommate a deadbeat who's leeched off everyone he's ever known in his life and also happens to be in a very prestigeous raiding guild and known for being the best geared shaman on his server. His title is only possible from his lifestyle which consists of massive amounts of free time a normal person just cannot make EVERY raid on a full raiding guild, just not gunna happen.
I'll say that skill can make up for a lot of gear however, but not all of it. Freetime equals power in mmo's something that needs to be changed, those of us who play for fun tho, shouldn't be bothered with that cycle, it's made to hook and reward compulsive and obsessive behavior... just don't play into it and find what you love about your game and do your own thing.
While the gear in WoW has some big stats across the board, all their items are cookie cutter designed for a class in mind, the majority of items are there to accent the abilities of said class, which is fine but leads to just increasing power on the same abilites over and over again. In previous MMO's they did break this let me explain...
In EQ1 I had a cleric with the eyepatch of plunder (self hatse buff) + a very fast hatse belt, now you might ask, is he crazy or smoking somthing, but i could buff myself for melee speed and i also had a staff which would proc an AE heal, so melee was viable in the end it would heal minor damage inculding some from mob's AE's, the majority of clerics sat there and flash/ "complete heal" without ever swinging a weapon since passing level 50. I awas also a follower of Innoruuk(sp) and a very easy minor old world quest resulted in a necklace that cast snare, i used to use the hell out of it to stop runners it was great.
Break the mold, why not give a warrior a sword which every 5 mins can cast a long range flamestrike, or give armour that gives you a self buff to resistances that lasts 4 hours as long as you wear it, instead of the lets give mortal strike 5 more damage points they'll like that! Thats where character customiztion fails in WoW, althought the majority of my WoW BC knowledge is before they started to raid much. Feel free to point out anything that shows that WoW can break the item molds, but at this point I;m not hoping for a miracle from WotLK.