Outside of the new game, Blizzard announced that the Voidbinders/Item Upgrade venders will make a comeback in patch 5.3. The chief difference will be the massive reduction in cost for both valor points and justice points upgrades. Valor upgrades will cost 250 per 4 item levels for a total of an 8 item level upgrade while Justice upgrades will cost 750 for 8 item levels.
While the general cost is still higher than I would like, this isn’t as unreasonable as the 750 valor points when this feature was originally released. I still think that 150 per 4 ilvls is better, but I don’t think 250 will kill the bank book as badly. If/when I re-join the game, I foresee this as being useful for weapon upgrades. If anything, usually what ends up hurting me the most in the game are finding better weapons. So the VP upgrade option is good for that purpose.
Which brings me up to my next point: cutting edge gaming. You can also call it “competitive gaming”. Another name is “progressive raiding.” The fact that the venders made such a quick comeback with an expected lower price for valor points emphasizes my issue that trying to be on the cutting edge, at least with World of Warcraft, is a complete waste of time.
This is evident with every expansion where your raiding gear essentially becomes meaningless since the greens offered by the newer zones tend to be better than your epic gear. Now, they have managed to improve this issue over time by having epic gear slowly being deprecated around the mid level in expansions. So there is an interesting issue coming up where LFRs, gearing and the possibilities of new expansions can present a controversial decision making process for casual players who see gearing and experiencing content as being a waste of time vs being able to participate at all in content (i.e. raids).
For myself as a casual player with tons of alts, my biggest concern is using my time effectively. This is the primary reason why I’m not into progressive raiding. At the same time, I don’t want to fall too far behind. So my theory is that the way the game is being set up, it’s best to do what I call raiding tier -1 self-progression. The idea is to not do current raids (at least with LFR) and focus on other aspects of the game using alts. In short, focus on leveling, improving reputations and older LFRs to play catch up on. The game seems far more mercify at this point in terms of catch up than it is on cutting edge.
Some benefits of doing (LFR) raiding tier -1 self-progression are:
- Better drop rates
- Not encountering all the frustrating bugs
- Strategies being available on the web
- More competent players or at least people who have better understanding of the mechanics than when it first started
- Nerfs
- Allowing better geared players to carry others
The one problem occurs when the game is near the next expansion. Since no new raiding tiers will be presented, you will end up being stuck with that tier. So obviously, you either have to accept being in that tier or move up. Honestly, this ends boiling down to the design of the expansion. If expansions only end up having 3 tiers of raiding, then it might just be better to do this for the first last two tiers then play the catch up game once you’ve geared up. But I wouldn’t want to do all the cutting edge stuff early on.
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