Tuesday, February 23, 2010

New Holiday Boss Mechanics, or "I Approve of This Message"

No one on the WoW Insider comments I saw, or even me on this blog, could decide how the holiday bosses could be turned to our favor while still maintaining the rarity of mount drops.

But Blizzard knew.

Zarhym gives us the extra information I needed in order to decide if I liked the "Get your holiday bosses through LFG!" change. And I do. I like it, because I don't have to roll against crappy people anymore or nag friends into bringing 100 alts.

You now get mounts from loot "troves" that are available per player per day when you kill the boss. You can queue as many times as you like, but you only get the trove for the first kill per day.

You still get normal loot from the boss itself, but the mounts will now drop per player "trove."

This solution is identical to getting Occulus in random LFG and having it drop a bag that can hold a mount, except you can get random Occulus more than once a day and you can't do the same with the holiday boss.

Since my issues were that I didn't have friends to take me to the boss, nor the will to force them to bring their alts to summon for me, and I didn't see the point of rolling against 4 other greedy people if a mount did drop, and I didn't want to spend all day every day for a week or more killing myself on the grind even if I did have the necessary resources, this solution fixes every single issue I had without upping the mount drop rate.

Normal people are back in the running!

Sure, those of us who want to help our friends can't bring tons of alts to give them extra chances anymore, but Zarhym said that "grandfathering alts" was never intended in the first place. He also points out that this removes any chance of people scamming others by not having a summon.

For me, being slightly (or even massively) inconvenienced alt-wise is worth kicking the legs out from under crappy people. You may not agree, if you've been alt-grinding the bosses every chance you get, but I remain firm on this. Any policy that stops jerks dead in their tracks makes me grin.

5 comments:

  1. I am excited by this! I hated the holiday boss grind and killing them over and over. The Headless Horseman made me want to scream and after that I just gave up. My guild only made one attempt on the Love is in the Air bosses, none of us were all that excited about yet another holiday boss grind.

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  2. I hope there will be a solution for Sinister Calling. It's one of the last luck achievements of the meta which "had to be forced".

    Possible solutions would be the Brewfest one where you could also get the achievement for obtaining a "temporary pet" or to make it buyable with something.

    The only thing is that people will probably be able to kick you after the boss is dead and your daily chance is therefore burned but before you were able to loot your bag. Yeah, happens rarely but it would still be nice if the bag would appear in your mail/spawn in your bag.

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  3. Sinister Calling can be completed through trick-or-treat bags, not just the boss. (You probably knew this, but I thought it bore repeating.)

    Both items are RNG in the bags, but if you're fairly diligent about trick-or-treating every hour, you should get them (took me until my second year for Dusty to get the squashling, but she got it right off). 1.3% drop in the bags, 7% on the boss.

    I wonder if the pets will drop from the Trove or the Boss from now on?

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  4. It will be in the bag, I'm quite sure.

    If you don't work from home you can probably not get more than 6 treats per day. That's already a lot. If you're in a raid/instance when the timer ends, you will not be able to do it as often. And RL might also reduce this time.

    So for 2 weeks, treating 6 times a day, you have a 76% chance.

    And a 64% chance to get it in one of your possible 14 bags from the boss.

    I think that's more than enough "to get a special pet".

    It's way to low to be a requirement for a meta-mount into which you've invested many RL days of work.

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