One

"Is it getting better
Or do you feel the same
Will it make it easier on you now
You got someone to blame"

 

U2 - One

Kudo goes to Alt:ernative Chat who is now my unofficial source for news. The champion who can wade through the crap and beat WoW Insider who are still snoring in bed. The article I refer to is 5.4.8 News and prior to that was Spirits in the Material World. Both of these stories have huge impact on the declining player base  and in particular those with multiple characters. I was so taken aback that I have had to check the official sources for both pieces of information.

Everybody is familiar with the current scenario, that Blizzard is going to starve the player base of any new content for 12 - 14 Months, and that the content is already feeling old and tired with 6 months still to go. Taking the items from both stories, how much extra game time will these gimmicks afford the average player.

"All upgradable epic items introduced to the game in Patch 5.4 will be given the option to upgrade 2 more times for a grand total of 16 item levels."

These will give the player something to spend those worthless valor tokens on and in the process make us all feel marginally stronger. The hope is to stimulate the requirement to acquire valor and give raiding teams an automatic boost in their quests to complete either normal or Heroic Siege of Orgrimmar.

"Adding a new token called Deeds of Valor which will cost 3000 Timeless Coins, and can be used to grant your character 100 Valor Points."

This operates in the opposite direction and negates the need to collect Valor points, when we can simply convert 3000 Timeless Coins for 100 Valor. Currently scattered across my characters I have thousands of Timeless Coins. The Grumpy Elf wrote back in October "What to do With All Those Timeless Coins?", I have also been thinking up imaginative was to convert them into another more useful currency.

Combined together these two bits of information are about prolonging our time in Raids, and will have the affect of Buffing the players without having to artificially buff the raid or nerf the content as previously done for Lich King and Dragon Soul.

One other aspect not discussed by Crithto was how this will affect Valor of the Ancients. If there is no impact simply convert 30,000 Timeless Coins to get valor capped and then use the 50% buff for the rest of the week and just before reset day top off your valor totals with Timeless Coins. I can tell you now that Tuesday and Wednesdays are going to be busy in my house.

"Gaze of the Black Prince - Increases reputation gained with the Black Prince by 100%. Increases the chances his most hated foes will relinquish their Secrets of the Empire, Sigil of Wisdom, Sigil of Power, or Titan Runestones."

This is all about making the welfare Legendary, truly available to all. With all the changes together there is simply no reason not to get Legendary Cloak on all characters. The bottlenecks are going to be the PvP quest and a 3 week wait to obtain the 3000 valor. Capping is not going to be a problem, but the weekly 1000 valor cap is still in place. I am guessing the whole process for the Legendary questline will take about 4-5 weeks with the new express system in place.

"Heart of the Valorous - you earn 100% additional valor."

It is slightly intriguing that this spell no longer exists on WoWHead but can be found on WoWDB, read what you want into that, but I am guessing that Timeless Coins is the new preferred method for obtaining Valor.

Summary

Blizzard want you to go and Raid until the new expansion is released. They know we are bored and they are trying to remove all the obstacles in our way. If nothing else simply upgrade your gear and feel 8 iLevels stronger than you did before.

"Did I ask too much
More than a lot
You gave me nothing
Now it's all I got
We're one
But we're not the same
Well we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again"

If I didn't know better I would say that U2 wrote this song about WoW and the Player base.