Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Getting The Token Shaft

I just realized something. To my knowledge, normal Ulduar (10-man) will reward raiders with Emblems of Valor for boss kills. Emblems of Valor can be exchanged for ilvl 213 items at vendors.

However, the loot in normal Ulduar will be ilvl 219, and the end boss (or bosses) will yield ilvl 232 loot.

The token-exchange loot they will have access to will not be equal to the boss-drop loot they will obtain.

On the 25-man side of things, a new token will be found on heroic boss corpses: Emblems of Conquest. The bosses will drop ilvl 232/239 loot, and these tokens, which will be exchangeable for ilvl 226 loot.

Can't wrap your head around it? Here, let's tabulate the data:

Normal Ulduar
Token rewards = ilvl 213
Boss drops = ilvl 219
End boss drops = ilvl 232

Heroic Ulduar
Token rewards = ilvl 226
Boss drops = ilvl 232
End boss drops = ilvl 239

So, all loot from tokens will be lower quality than the loot obtainable in the associated Ulduar raid instance. This is in contrast to the current rewards in Naxxramas, where you can get items from Emblems of Heroism/Valor that are equal in ilvl to the drops in the associated instance(s). The loot that Patchwerk in normal Naxxramas drops is equal quality to the loot you can buy from the Emblem of Heroism vendor, for example.

They done nerfed our epics. Sorta.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I half-agree with what they've done... now you can't mindlessly farm badges in terrible PuG's and get gear equal to skilled raiders. On the other hand... I like that they were the same level, it made it fun for casuals too.

Is conundrum says I!

Siha said...

But, if you have a look at the loot listed in this post: http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=43158.0 -- you can see that a bunch of the loot drops are only iLevel 226, not 232. So it looks like it varies within the instance.

Anonymous said...

The 232ilvl is from doing heroic uldur bosses on hard mode

drakatar

Dreaming said...

I agree with Siha, I think that first the loot isn't final and second your values are a little off.

Ulduar10 :ilevel 213
Ulduar25: ilevel 226

That's the basis. Now, it seems Ulduar weapons will have 6 ilevel more than other items (not sure if it'll stay).

so Ulduar10 weapons : 219
Ulduar25 weapons : 232

And then the ned boss, as for Nax, will be one half tier higher so

Ulduar10 end boss : 226
Ulduar25 end boss : 239

If they keep the 6 pts difference for the end boss too, that gives you 232 and 245.

Then we have to add the hard modes, that can gives higher ilevel items ... I think it's a bit early to be sure of all that, but it seems relatively ok to me up to now.

Heywood Djiblomi said...

Emblems = consolation prize, particularly if you didn't get the boss loot. Consolation prize loots as nice as the boss loots? I think this pseudo-nerf is reasonable.

Shwitz44 said...

Ah, I didn't see that the loot ilvl varied even within the same boss's loot table. I guess they're using the Sartharion model for loot rewards throughout Ulduar. Good catch!