So Long Trials of the Naaru
June 20, 2007
After a lot of thought and deliberation, we’ve decided to remove the attunement requirements to enter Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep: The Eye. While many of our attunements in the Burning Crusade have been good progression checks, a few of the attunements have turned out to cause unnecessary stress on guilds either doing the content or attempting to do the content. With Black Temple and Battle for Mount Hyjal thriving, we want to encourage (rather than prevent) new guilds and raid groups to attempt Serpentshrine and TK. We are going to leave the current attunement quests in the game so that players can still engage in the challenge and the lore of those quests should they choose to. At a later point, we are considering adding a final reward step to those quests as well (that way those who have already completed them would not miss out on a *new* reward).We’re listening to feedback from you guys constantly and your opinions are important to us. We want this game to be the best possible MMO experience for our players.Enjoy Serpentshrine and Tempest Keep =)(Please note: This change will go live later today — it’s not yet active)
I’m going to take my own personal view on this decision, which is quite biased due to the fact I myself had to endure the TK and SSC attunements.
Blizzard stated quite awhile ago — around the release of patch 2.1 — that they had intended faster progression, and were unhappy with guilds still stuck in Karazhan. They came up with a small figure of guilds that would actually reach Black Temple and Hyjal before the next expansion, and thus in 2.1 with Karazhan bosses nerfed and countless items buffed, so that more guilds — particularly on the Black Dragonflight server — were now able to clear out of Karazhan with ease.
But this annoyed me to an extent. At this point in time my guild had Kara on farm, and we endured countless hours of boss fights that many guilds now to come would not. While I had to struggle getting epics slightly better than my blues, other guilds that need not work half as hard could now easily obtain epics far better.
Now, in 2.1.1, the Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep attunements have been abolished; sure, it wasn’t enough to nerf the heroics themselves, so the good hearty people at Blizzard decided to kill the attunements altogether, but consequently in the process a countless number of guilds’ hard time, work, and effort was now at a waste.
Understand the fact that I for one have never been for rep grinds. When I first caught glimpse of the attunement list laid before me, I was a bit discouraged and mad that the game devs enforced such things to progress. But the mere fact that Blizzard just laughs off something I spent too many nights stressing over aggravates the hell out of me. They knew that they were going to be releasing a new expansion every year, but still released content (BC) that clearly would take much longer, especially for casual gamers, leaving the more hardcore players fucked over Blizzard’s miscalculation.
With TK now attunement-less, Magtheridon now becomes a completely optional raiding boss, nub guilds now have t5 begging them to come steal them off of Void Reaver, and scrubs ont he raid forums are going to now bitch about how hard VR and Hydross are. Good job, Bliz.
