Just Can't Get Enough

PTR to live in an instant, I thought it was going to be quick but this was less than a week since the story broke. Just in case you missed the news, I will be mostly talking about:

"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." and "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."

1 week is not a lot of time to hoard away 3000 valor points especially when the cap is 1000 for any given week. I was meaning to write a post on the best way to valor cap but was beaten to it by Alternative Chat, mostly because that kind of post takes an age to research, and I really couldn't be arsed. A big round of applause for the Godmother for creating possibly the shortest lived, current content article.

WoW Insider in the form of Matthew Rossi wrote about patch 5.4.8 and this is what I intend to elaborate on. Rossi wrote:

"Consider - easier valor, and valor made more useful, but still capped both weekly (1000 points a week) and overall (3000 total) - this means that you'll get valor faster, and spend it faster. Fully upgrading an item will take your entire week's worth of valor points (250 per upgrade, 4 upgrades) but this assumes you're not going into the patch with a full set of 2/2 upgraded items. It creates pressure to be capping valor every week, makes valor relevant again for a time."

If you already at 3000 valor points and all your gear is 2/2 upgraded, when the patch dropped then are still not going to upgrade all your gear to 4/4 this week. 4000 valor will purchase 8 gear upgrades @ 500 valor per item for conversion from 2/2 to 4/4. By my reckoning there are 15/16 gear slots depending on 2 handers/2 x 1 handers and off hand items. Half the gear is upgraded in week 1 but the rest of the gear will still take an extra 4 weeks and as Rossi pointed out a new piece of gear will wipe out an entire weeks valor cap.

This will create a meta game for the next few weeks as we all find the best ways to upgrade and valor cap. For some people like myself who chose the Timeless Isle as a method for gearing alts instead of running endless LFR and Flex, we are laughing about the amount of Timeless coins that we have stashed, and wish that we had not been so inventive with our methods of trying to get rid of a currency that we thought was past its sell by date.

I am rich

Not all my coins are spread equally and I will need to be inventive to maximise valor and coin usage. My plan will incorporate a wise implementation of Valor of the Ancients. After logging on with a character with a spare 30,000 timeless coins, I can immediately invoke the 50% buff. All other characters will then have 6 days to valor cap and any character not achieving this goal can be topped up the day before reset day using timeless coins. Half a million timeless coins will not last long with this kind of spending but it should help clear the hurdle of the first 8 weeks.

It is quite sad, but I thrive on this kind of shuffling resources around to maximise results. The only problem is that 5-8 weeks will test the patience of a saint. It is for this reason that people are asking for the valor cap to be removed. Blizzard will argue that in terms of Raiding the gear upgrades will allow for a 4-8% increase in relative power to trickle over a 8 week period instead of a sudden avalanche of power.

Wednesday will be Celestials and Ordos day, and Tuesday will be Deeds of Valor day. The rest of the week is mine to do as I please.

Stuck In The Middle With You

Once upon a time, Blizzard used to treat every character as individuals, not alts belonging to the same account. This was typified by the loot system, Bind on Pickup (BoP) and Bind on Equip (BoE). BoP items become soulbound as soon as they hit the bagspace making them vendor trash, disenchantment goods, or usable by that character. When in a group or raid, careful consideration had to be made before assigning any loot. BoE on the other hand was Guildbank, Auction House or Alt territory.

As far back as patch 3.0.2 Blizzard introduced a new option Bind to Account (BtA or BoA) which is far snappier than the Binds to Battle.net.account (BtBNA - which incidentally nobody uses and I just made it up). The original plan was the distribution of an account wide pets the [Baby Blizzard Bear], and the [Onyxian Whelpling] as a reward for logging in on the WoW anniversary.

The technology was there but it was seldom utilised, but there was a seismic shift in playstyle with the introduction of Mists of Pandaria and the Account Wide Pets and Mounts (achievements). It looked like Blizzard had finally recognised the existence of alts, before giving so much content and significant gating mechanisms as to make playing alts difficult and in some respects painful. Blizzard would eventually concede ground in this area and make rewards for alts and gearing significantly easier, the zenith of this policy is the Timeless Isle with the gear reset to top all gear reset.

The question is, have Blizzard gone far enough? Yesterday the Grumpy Elf discussed Timeless Coins but touched on the subject of Burdens of Eternity. Any main character doing the Shaohao rep grind will be rewarded with a plethora of Timeless Coins and Burdens of Eternity and of course armour drops. Only the armour drops can be posted to alts, leaving the main character with largely useless items that would be useful to another character. Earlier on in the expansion Blizzard had made the same mistake with Spirits of Harmony. How difficult would it have been to let gatherers send their stash of Spirits to the Crafters  that needed them? The reason was clear, Blizzard wanted to stop a flood of iLevel 476 crafted items reaching the Auction House. This policy was so successful that I never saw any of these items until they were already superseded by the Kor'kron gear from the Barrens.

I have decided to write an open letter to Blizzard, seeing as Miley Cyrus and Sinead O'Connor can do it.:

"Blizzard, our allocated time slots are limited, does it really matter which of our characters does the hard work? We still have to spent the hours grinding one way or another. Just a few Burdens of Eternity on top of the Timeless Armour would make all the difference. I have thousands of timeless coins, unfortunately they are separated over 11 characters, please let me trade coins and Burdens of Eternity and let me do something useful with my alts. I promise I will stop going on about the pitiful excuse for weapons that you let us have outside of Raids."

Yours faithfully
Bob (and alts)(we really are the same the person on the same account)