MongoJerry,Apr 18 2006, 02:39 PM Wrote:Aha, you're taking one extreme and going to the other. Blizzard never said that WoW was exclusively for the casual gamer. They said that there would be plenty of content in the game for the casual gamer. That does not mean that a casual gamer would get to experience every single thing in the game.
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It's not that casual gamers should get to experience everything, it's that beyond Tier 0 (which I'm admittedly still unfamiliar with), there isn't currently an upgrade path for casual gamers. As Warlock pointed out, there is hardly* a part of the game where the 'best' isn't exclusively available through raiding.
I've often wondered, as with the Dungeon sets, why the epic sets didn't drop in a couple of different sized instances. For example, why didn't Blizzard make T1 bracers and belts as BoP drops off quest boss in UBRS? Or a hard-to-unlock BRD quest boss? Sure, then everyone and their kid sister would have easier access to those epics and it would be slightly less epic to have the whole set. Is that a really bad thing, though? Wouldn't flattening out the gear curve help other places a bit?
Heck, give these hard-to-reach bosses cooldown timers and a small chance to drop one lava core/firey core/core leather. Suddenly the 5-man/casual gamer has a slower-than-a-raider upgrade path with drops and crafted epics.
However, my feeling as we discuss these issues is that Blizzard's current plan is "We'll fix it in the expansion" which is frustrating to those of us playing the game now but probably fast enough in Blizzard's opinion.
*If I recall correctly, the exception to this rule is Alchemy.