Epic isnt epic

I don’t think this will change any time soon but I must say that I sympathize with what you’re saying, This isn’t a “special snowflake syndrome”. Sure, there might be a little bit of that involved, but it’s mostly a matter of perception, and perception is a very important factor in driving motivation.
If a colour is associated with rarity, that colour becomes important by itself, and that’s something that only the most old school players probably understand, still feel, or miss.

What I’m saying is, there was a time when having 1 single purple item was something absolutely amazing, they were not only the very best items but they were also incredibly rare.
That rarity was a consequence of a combination of many things:
- Raids were hard to get into.
- Only a very small minority was actually able to raid.
- Players were much less skilled than they are nowadays, so killing raid bosses was done at a much slower pace. Content was also updated much less frequently.
- Apart from the very first 40man raids (Molten Core, Ony), the chance of getting any epic items at all was incredibly small (world drop BoEs)

So the colour purple meant two things, extreme power and rarity.
But the game soon evolved, more raids were introduced, and all these new items that came with it were epic.

Nowadays purple means power, rarity hmm… not so much, maybe at the very beginning of an expansion.
But you see, that’s exactly the same that happened in vanilla, the only difference was that raids were a lot less accessible and less diverse (so, less overall chance of getting raid drops), and the patch turnaround with new raid content was much slower, which means, less availability of epic items. There were also no catch up mechanics set in place, so players had to go through all the clearly defined gearing paths of green-blue-purple (quests, 5man, 10man, 40man), and also follow a progression path with raids ZG/MC, Ony, BwL, Naxx.

We don’t want to restrict raiding again to <1% of the player base, and that’s the only way to go back to purple being rare again. Reducing LFR gear to blue wouldn’t make a big difference, there’s plenty of other sources of high ilvl gear that would need to be changed to blue, and even if we did that and only normal + heroic would drop epics, we would never have the same level of rarity as in the old days, content is just so much more diverse, more regularly updated and players are way more skilled.

01/08/2013 09:24Posted by Yme

That little green tag which says "Heroic" is the new epic. Purple is just the new blue.

I kind of agree. I’m wondering… do you guys feel that if the green “heroic” or maybe even the thunderforged tag could be transformed into something else instead? Let’s say for example… something more like Hearthstone’s golden border around the cards. Would that make those items feel more appealing and rewarding to you?
Personally I imagine it would, since that gear would be much more noticeable whenever you would inspect someone.

I suppose it should really work like this, the top 5-10% of iLevel gear of any single expansion should be Epic. This should be dynamic and change gear from Epic to Rare when the next tier comes out.

Same goal, but a different and very interesting approach. I wonder what most would prefer…

Let us hear about all your crazy ideas. Nothing is too crazy!
I’m all for brainstorming on the forums, sometimes really good ideas can come up from these discussions, and devs do pay quite a lot of attention to feedback and suggestions, so you never know…

01/08/2013 11:04Posted by Dottie

You did see the items I linked, right? Same level Blue is much more powerful? When I mentioned them in the last thread about this I got shot down with people saying I was an idiot as they aren't the same as they drop in different areas.

I did and you have a good point, but I think that's the exception to the rule.
You could say the same thing about comparing last expansion’s epic items to MoP’s greens and blues.

In general, dungeon/raid items from the same expansion have a linear association between ilvl and colour.
The issue is that above a certain ilvl, everything will be purple, which ends up making purple more “common” than blues later into an expansion since it will be much harder to find someone wearing blues than purples at that stage.

*Keep in mind that there are currently no plans that I know of to change the way these tags are displayed, this is intended as merely a gathering of suggestions and feedback.