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Roundtable Discussion: Grading World of Warcraft’s 5.3 Patch

by - 11 years ago

escalation

It’s been more than a week since World of Warcraft’s 5.3 patch went live. Escalation brought with it changes and improvements in a number of areas, the list including scenarios, PvP, pet battles, class balance and more. The time has come to pass judgment on the patch. Did Escalation accomplish what it set out to do? Did the updated narrative set a solid stage for 5.4? Is it worth grinding up yet another alt? BlizzPro, along with other members of the community sat down to discuss those and other questions in an effort to grade 5.3.

With 5.3, Blizzard seemed to divide their attention between a number of areas, including pet battles, the designing of new scenarios and class balance changes, just to name a few. Would you rather see this again in the future or patches that focus on sweeping changes to one specific area, such as professions, or addressing how reputation gates work?

Tim Bales, All That’s Epic: Given the nature of Mists of Pandaria, the large-scale patches are probably the best way to go. Previous expansions seemed to focus on specific areas: Burning Crusade was heavy on raiding, Wrath was more focused on lore, and Cataclysm shined in terms of leveling content. With Mists we have a bit of a mixed bag; it does everything well but nothing exceptionally so. Sure there have been some cool additions like pet battles and the expansion of LFR, but to devote a patch to just one aspect of what Mists has to offer would be mistake unless the patches are incredibly frequent. Everyone has something to look forward to with the larger patches.

Robert Wing, BlizzPro: The issue with trying to do patches that focus on specific areas is that, invariably, someone always feels left out. Blizzard could’ve reinvented the wheel in terms of professions, making them more worthwhile at all points in the lifespan of an expansion, but others would’ve lamented the lack of attention paid to pet battles, which admittedly needed tweaking, the narrative, or their specific cup of tea. It’s my opinion that this sort of balanced approach is the way to go, now and in the future.

Rich Fisher,  the Horde For Life Podcast: Patch 5.3 along with many before it, is a product of the decisions made starting with the Cataclysm expansion. The World of Warcraft has tried – successfully in my opinion – to cast a wider net of potential subscribers by appealing to a broad set of play styles and gamers. From pet battles and transmogrification to end game raid and rated player versus player content, each patch generally tries to offer something for the many facets and types of gaming.

While this horizontal and iterative scope of content delivery certainly nets a more shallow experience for the more focused gamers (i.e. those players that primarily concentrate on a single facet of the game), it is necessary to maintain harmony among the largest base of the games subscribers. Additionally but no less important, we must remember that as this game grows in terms of not only content but new mechanics, the resources allocated for general maintenance, content tuning and bug fixes also increases.

William “Hota” Foss, Twizzcast: I am truly impressed with Blizzard’s patches thus far in Mists.  The even patches have huge content involving quest hubs, dallies and raids. They focus more on the end game progression with a new tier of gear, while the odd patches are filled with quality of life features and story content etc. If there was a sweeping change to a part of the game I think it would be in one of these odd patches. Players are used to getting new raid content every 2-3 months and I don’t think Blizzard wants to mess with that. I feel professions do need to be completely redone. I would gladly give up some of the additions to brawlers guild and pet battles for a patch to get it.

Garroshandfriend

The Horde’s rebellion against Warchief Garrosh Hellscream continued on in 5.3 for about all of an hour before questing ran dry. Were you satisfied with the amount of progression in the narrative or would you have rather seen more content put in prior to 5.4?

Tim Bales: The narrative could have used some more fleshing out. As much as I like having an alternative to the daily grind, Vol’jin’s rebellion would have benefited from slower pacing. The format used for the Ahn’Qiraj event back in vanilla WoW would have worked great here; the rebellion could have started on the troll starting island for the horde and southern barrens for the alliance, and upon each faction reaching a certain tier of collected resources, the respective army would move up to the next hub and unlock more caravans to protect and commanders to fight. As things stand, I guess we’re just going to sit tight in Razor Hill for a few weeks.

Robert Wing: 5.3 was a mixed bag for me, when it came to the progression of the narrative. The content that Blizzard did produce was absolutely amazing. I loved walking around with Vol’jin, Thrall and the gang. I even enjoyed how hesitant Bane was to get involved, given the situation his people were in. It felt like Blizzard really thought things out, rather than just do them. That said, the lack of available quests really grated on me. It was three short quest chains and then we’re off to farming 600 mats to use on gear progression. It’d be nice if Blizzard tossed in more plot line prior to the release of 5.4.

Rich Fisher: There is no debating that the story arc content driving this expansion was a little light for patch 5.3. That being said and being mindful of my earlier comments, I personally am not discouraged with what has been delivered thus far. Blizzard understands how best to advance the story and truth be told, whether the direct storyline content was a single hour or 2 or 3, what we received would have resulted in the same comments from the voracious (and vocal) gamers that this game serves.

The entirety of the Horde rebellion is not only pretty epic in its scale and impact upon the game world, in my opinion it is also going to be played out over a long period of time, potentially extended into the next expansion. I fully expect to see the story played out in each and every patch up until the Horde have a new Warchief, which in the end will result in many hours of content.

William “Hota” Foss: Being a lore enthusiast I could not wait until 5.3 and see the Darkspear rebellion begin. I started the quest chain and met up with Vol’jin, Thrall and Chen. I could not be more excited to team up with these Hero’s and take down those nasty Kor’kron.  Then as quickly as I got excited, the quest line was over!

I was expecting a quest chain similar to that of the Dominance Offensive or Operation Shield Wall we saw in patch 5.1.  So no, I was not satisfied with the amount of narrative in 5.3. While it was very well done there wasn’t enough of it to make it memorable.

Alts

5.3 brings with it a 33% reduction in the amount of experience required to level, along with lower heirloom costs. These changes undoubtedly make Mists of Pandaria more alt friendly. However, given the need to still grind reputation to unlock some gear at 90 and the fact the most heirloom gear stops being useful at 80 or 85, is the prospect of leveling alts much more appealing?

Tim Bales: The reputation wall is probably my least favorite thing about Mists as a whole. I don’t mind grinding reputation for cool cosmetic items, mounts, and other smaller upgrades, but locking valor gear behind reputation vendors seemed like a strange call to me. Perhaps if there were more alternatives to grinding said reputation other than dailies and the miniscule bonus from dungeons it wouldn’t be as bad, but I have very little interest in performing the same grind over and over again. I recently made an alliance character so that I can see all of the Cataclysm content on their side plus the 85-90 quest lines, but that’s really the only draw at the moment to starting a new character. Thankfully LFR takes away some of the necessity of the valor/justice grind, but knowing that the reputation wall is waiting for my alts is a hindrance on my desire to level them. Perhaps Blizzard should consider a universal unlock for reputations the same way achievements are across accounts!

Robert Wing: I’m not an alt guy personally, but I can see where these changes definitely make the prospect more appealing. That said, I know one common complaint is that a lot of people already have a plethora of 85’s sitting around, meaning that the idea of rolling a brand new character isn’t all that awesome. Again, I see why Blizzard did this, despite it being the first time ever that they’ve reduced the experience required to get through an expansion DURING the expansion, but I feel like more needs to be done, possibly in the arena of removing reputation gates for those that have already unlocked them on a main. Reputation gates remain a huge turnoff for people looking to gear 90s and realistically, that’s too large of a demographic to ignore.

Rich Fisher: Without question, the reduction in experience required from 80-85 was a sorely needed change. However that only just begins to address the problem of alternate character advancement in this expansion. The fact remains that the most impacting negative by-product of all the great new mechanics and new game play “paths” that are available with this expansion, is the sheer amount of time that is required to “remain competitive” with a single character. This level of dedication to your “main” really leaves all but the most dedicated players (in terms of availability) very little time for additional character advancement.

While Blizzard has done much to mitigate this problem with the implementation of account wide mounts and achievements, heirlooms and experience adjustments, much of that goodwill was offset by the ill timed removal of the daily quest cap combined with the flood of dailies that now consume a lion’s share of many players online time. Blizzard miscalculated its consumer base by stating the “letter of the law” that these dailies are not mandatory. However Blizzard has backed off that stance and now acknowledges this as a problem to alt viability.

There are several ways to continue improvement in this area, including but certainly not limited to account wide reputation gains and the reintroduction of a daily (or how about weekly) quest cap. However the latter might be a hard sell since the proverbial Genie is out of the bottle.

William “Hota” Foss: I like many others have an army of 85 plus alts collecting dust on my log in screen.  So for me, yes it is very appealing to work on those characters to get them to max level.  Although, as you have stated when they reach 90 will I have the ambition to spend time grinding rep or quest dailies? Probably not.

Blizzard has made some changes to help alts but still for me it is way too much of a time commitment  to properly gear an alt. First you have to dungeon/scenario, then collect elder charms to go into the LFR. After that wait in queue, run the raid and hope you get the drops or get lucky on your bonus rolls. If you succeed in gear up you have to move onto the next LFR and do it all over again just to get to the current tier.  I feel the jumps in item levels each tier is what really holds people back from spending the time on other characters.

Voljin

After digesting the 5.3 content, what’s the biggest thing you hope to see in 5.4?

Tim Bales: I’m looking forward to kicking Garrosh’s teeth in and welcoming our new troll overlords. In all seriousness, I still have a lot to do before I start looking into the new raid(s) as I haven’t even gotten my DK geared for Throne of Thunder yet, but I’m interested to see how they’ll handle the battle for Orgimmar. It’s already kind of weird flying around the barrens, beating up Garrosh’s buddies, then heading back and chilling in his city. Will Orgimmar become a constant warzone? It would be kind of neat if Horde players had to use other cities as their main hub during the patch, but we’ll have to wait and see what Blizzard has up their sleeves. I’m also looking forward to the Alliance getting some more love from the writers. Even though I’m a primary Horde player, I’ve felt bad for the other team since it seems like they’re just along for the ride as we handle this whole Garrosh thing.

Robert Wing: My personal hope going into 5.4 is more scenarios and a meaningful resolution when it comes to Garrosh Hellscream. Blizzard has invested a lot of time and effort into building him up to be a satisfying antagonist, and I personally want to see it end correctly. Without going into spoiler territory, the writers have done a good job showing the Garrosh is not just some mindless killing machine, but a character that often feels the weight of his father’s legacy and that, at times, it appears to crush him. Whatever happens, I just want it to be well done in 5.4. I’ve a lot of faith though, given how great Blizzard has been about the narrative thus far. Beyond that, it’d be nice to see Sylvanas somewhere in all this. I still have hope that the powers that be will have her roll up and dump plague and all kinds of nonsense on Garrosh and the other loyalists. That would be a hilarious time.

Rich Fisher: Additional story arc content is a given so we always have that to look forward to but my biggest hope for 5.4 is the Blizzard labeled “unannounced feature” that has been confirmed for the next patch. All we have been told to this point is that player has asked for a better way to revisit old content and this feature will do just that. Tantalizing words to say the least and my hope and prediction is that this leads us to a classic version of the raid finder.

Any tuning of this classic content (Deadmines style not Zul’Gurub) would just be icing on the cake. Give me a tool to improve access to older content like Ulduar, ICC, Firelands and Dragon Soul and I will not be alone in calling patch 5.4 one of the best since Transmogrification was implemented.

William “Hota” Foss:  5.3 is obviously the tip of the sword concerning both factions taking down Garrosh and “his” horde. What I would love to see is the continuation of the Darkspear rebellion but on a much grander scale. What I mean by that is in Mist of Pandaria the factions are back in all out war but haven’t seen much of that since the cut scene in Jade Forest.I want a great quest chain leading up to the raid in Ogrimmar with all the heroes/faction leaders there actually doing something! Both factions want their shot at Garrosh and I hope there is some real conflict between the sides in 5.4 and not just teaming up to take down the greater threat. We have been there done that. I want some serious surprises in the next patch, that may change the story forever.

MistsScreen

If you had the chance to give 5.3 an overall grade, what would it be?

Tim Bales: I would give Escalation a B-. It’s an interesting patch that makes a lot of good changes to the game, but there’s little there to bring old players back due to the new content being so minimal. Thankfully I still have a lot of old content to work through while we wait for 5.4, but I feel sorry for those that were waiting for a large addition of new activities.

Robert Wing: I’d give it a B. It’s not a perfect patch, but it brought a lot with it, and different demographics of people should enjoy it. That’s a big thing going forward for Blizzard. If World of Warcraft is not going to make what should feel like a somewhat necessary swap to free-to-play soon, it has to continue to churn out a lot of content for a lot of people at different levels. Casual, hardcore, the guys in between – all have to feel like they’re getting their fiften dollars worth. Escalation accomplishes this without seeming watered down.

Rich Fisher: We recently ran a poll at hordeforlife.com asking this very question and what struck me immediately was that the spread between “Not Impressed”, “Good” and “Love It” was less than 4 percentage points. Additionally, very few people “Hated It”. What this says is that the patch is solid, not spectacular and really walks the demarcation line between a true content patch and an iterative maintenance patch.

5.3 will not hit you with any “WOW Factor” but in addition to some sorely needed changes and adjustments, the patch beckons to take us down the path of continued conflict, strife and war, the dethroning of Garrosh and the eventual crowning of a new era for the Horde!

William “Hota” Foss:  I give 5.3 a solid B+.  More quality of life changes are always welcome. Also, not having to run back and forth from my bank to transmog my gear is flipping amazing!


JR Cook

JR has been writing for fan sites since 2000 and has been involved with Blizzard Exclusive fansites since 2003. JR was also a co-host for 6 years on the Hearthstone podcast Well Met! He helped co-found BlizzPro in 2013.


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