Interesting Blue Post on Cataclysm Progression
This may be information that has been previously released, but there are a couple points that I haven’t heard before from a Blizzard source.
Below is the basic progression map. Obviously your mileage may vary, i.e. If you’re Paragon or Premonition you will be able to skip some of the below and/or mix and match at your discretion.
*Normal Dungeons/Crafting/Questing to get full set of 85 blues (non-heroic) to do Heroic dungeons.
*Heroic dungeons to get full set of 85 Heroic blues to do Normal mode raids.
*Normal raids to get full set of 85 epics (non-heroic) to do Heroic mode raids.
*Heroic Raids to get full set of 85 Heroic epics, which will presumably help a bit on Sinestra and the next tier (when released with patch 4.1.0)*Badge vendors to help fill in gaps at all tier levels.
*No real gating to speak of for ship.
*Sinestra opens after Cho’gall is defeated on HEROIC mode. No timers or attempt limits, but she will pound you relentlessly. She has better than Heroic epic level gear (half a tier better).
I bolded the most interesting points. This is the first time I’ve actually heard a Blizzard representative say that there is no real gating at launch. I’m not a huge fan of the whole concept of gating, so this makes me happy.
The second point kind of sounds like the EQ progression server. Basically, an area opens up after the boss of the previous raid instance has been killed. This is still gating, but at least the players have an impact on the length of time the content will be unavailable. This is probably better than requiring keying or some type of attunement out of a previous instance.
Thoughts?
I like this, it’s like every time you do something new you take an extra step on the ladder. just like ICC I think that all raids should require you to down one level of difficulty in order to gain access to the next
I think it is definitely an improvement on the completely artificial gating they used with ICC when it was first released.