Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Panem et circenses

In the first century AD the Roman author Juvenal wrote about the Roman plebs that they wanted only two things: Panem et circenses, that is bread and games. Nearly two millenia that discovery finally reached the Blizzard developers, and they realized that just adding content ("games") wasn't enough for their 2.1 patch, they also needed to add phat loot ("bread"). With stories of raiding guilds after several wipes killing a boss for the first time, and then promptly disenchanting his loot, there was definitely something wrong with the item balancing in Burning Crusade. So in the 2.1 patch the level 70 epics will be increased in power, by increasing their "item level" by around 10 percent. World of Raids has a list of the new stats of epics.

Of course that opens up other cans of worms, with raid items now being much better again than PvP or crafted items. And the next expansion again having to introduce more powerful level 71+ green items to get everyone on the same equipment level. But it appears that the WoW system is more or less infinitely scaleable. And you simply can't expect people to jump through all sorts of hoops to go raiding and then only reward them with crappy loot.

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