Ooh drama!

What with the recent developments in the World of Warcraft attunements, I thought I'd throw in my two copper.

For those burried under a rock, attunements are a way of artificially limiting who can enter a raid zone. I believe the theory goes thussly: if you're powerful enough to kill Jim McEvil, then you can probably kill Jim McEvil's boss. Therefore, we will insert a quest to kill Jim before you are allowed to kill his boss, because otherwise the progression is screwy (unless his boss turns out to be a lich and can give Jim orders to throw you (and your 9/24/39 friends) down even when dead). WoW has just changed its two midlevel raid zones to not need attunement, when previously they did.

I think its a stupid change.

To clarify, the old system was also partly stupid.

Although the point of the exercise is to make it more accessible to more people, I think its going to disillusion them more. Now the change is live, I expect lots of guilds are having mass wipe-a-thons in SSC or The Eye, purely because they can, instead of sensibly gearing up so they don't get their asses kicked.

Because I've put far too much thought into this, here's what I think the attunements should be like:

Karazhan: Stay as it is. Need to run four instances (oh noes!), with the main quest giver being in Shattrath, where everybody 'lives' in TBC anyway.

SSC: Move the quest giver to somewhere more accessible (more on this later). Otherwise can stay the same. You can't kill Gruul without the same number of people as you need to go to SSC, and you can't do much in SSC without having got some gear from Gruul or Karazhan (not that 10 man to 25 is a good progresion system, but thats not the point of the exercise)

The Eye: Change it. Shred it. Dismantle it. Make it need a Mag kill and a Prince or Netherspite kill. Or something. The pre-quest line can stay I guess, but needing to go to heroics is just a dick move.

Heroics are silly. You need the key (making the attunement 'run this instance lots of times, then do the following:') that not everyone will have. You need 5 people with vastly different class propotions to a 25 man raid. And people don't want to do them like they do raids. There have been several times that my guild has had 5 people go to Slave Pens, where the quest giver for SSC attunement is, get as far as the dude, then have anyone who needs to get or hand in the quest join that instance, so they don't have to bother doing it themselves.

In my mind, heroics should be disconnected from raiding, and a second, distinct progresion route, complementing the raiding and pvp routes: raid to get maximal primary role abilty (dps, tanking, healing, whatever); pvp to get survivability and, well, pvp gear; heroics to get 'utility' gear, for example, shorter frost nova cooldown, more chill duration and a big mana pool for crazy kiting ability.

I fully expect people would still complain that people shouldn't get free epixxxx from heroics, because then nobody would raid, but in theory they shouldn't, as each progression is for a different job, and there's a completely viable progression route for small guilds that isn't merge with a big guild and raid all night.

I also expect its never going to happen with the current thinking behind MMOs, but its nice to dream