Sorry for the lull, guys – I have a handful of posts I want to put up, but I’ve been really sick for a few days. I’m still not entirely sure what I caught, but I figure when it’s summer in the tropics and you have to go to bed with a hot water bottle because you’re so chilly – maybe you picked up a little bug somewhere. Not very nice. Still feeling not-so-great, but I should be ok after a weekend of rest. Where’s Cure Disease when you need it?

Anyway – I was going to get back on track and post about some other things, but I was going through my RSS and got distracted.

Gnomeaggedon started this ball rolling, and Wow.com picked it up. The question posed is,

“Should we just make everything BOA?”


Wouldn’t it be easier if everything was shared between all of your characters?


I’m not sure that’s such a great idea..

The immediate problem that springs to mind for me is multiple alts + raid lockouts. Wouldn’t it mean that you could do as I have – level up 5 druids (heh) – and do this:

  • raid on 1st character, pass outfit to 2nd character

  • raid on 2nd character, pass outfit to 3rd character
  • raid on 3rd character, pass outfit to 4th character…


Obviously not everyone has a set of 5 characters that share the same armor class and role (leather/healing) like me, but you get the point, I’m sure. You would essentially only need one set of epic gear but you could potentially raid on up to 9 extra characters. It’s highly unlikely, of course, that anyone would have the time to do this, but if you consider that TOC takes <1hr to clear, that's not an excessive amount of raiding to a hardcore raider. I think they'd do it.

I imagine this would then lead to hardcore raiders doing "dry runs" of tribute-style raids with their "alts" (wearing their main's epics!) for practice, and then when the strat is solid, swap to their main characters (after reclaiming their gear from the alts), to kill the boss. I dunno, maybe that's an extreme example - but when you consider all the guilds that server-hopped for extra attempts in TOC, I don't think it's too much of a stretch.

But that stuff aside, it would basically mean that you could earn 9 more lots of emblems each week (time constraints permitting). You would be drowning in emblems, and be able to share them through your alts, too. You'd be able to deck yourself out in the top tier of badge gear very quickly - is that really the way we want to go?

I mean - don't get me wrong - I'm impatient and I wish I had more Emblems of Frost right now - but I don't want them to just land in my lap in the first week. There's no fun in that. This game is all about improving your character, and if you improve it instantly and have nothing left to earn, it's dull. Honestly, I still feel sad that I have nothing left to do with my triumph badges except trade for gems - and with the new random dungeons, the "useless" Triumphs keep piling up.

But, on the other hand - I'd love to be able to hand those badges over to another character to help it get a little more geared...


Other possible problems

Some other cons (mostly speculation):

  • Enchant mat prices go up as fewer items are disenchanted because they are snapped up for alts or "just in case I start playing my mage again"

  • A flood of over geared, under-experienced alts, levelled in a week with the RAF system, dressed in top tier epics, but with virtually no knowledge of how the heck that class is played..
  • "I'm rolling on this for my alt"



Alternative BOA system

Commenter Mr Crow on Wow.com had an interesting idea - don't make everything BOA, just make the lower level emblems BOA, for example just the Heroism badges. That way, you can gear up your alts with Heroism gear easily, but it's not as ridiculous as being able to throw the top level gear at your alts.

I would probably suggest allowing the tier below current (or perhaps two tiers - T8/Conquest gear), and have this follow along with patches in a similar way to how Blizzard changed instances to drop Valor, then Conquest, and now Triumph, so that alts and rerolls have quick access to the previous tier of gear.

So, if BOA tier gear was 2 tiers behind current, you could get your newly minted alt into Tier 8 to get started running your random heroics for triumph and frost emblems. I think this would be perfectly adequate; you'd have a solid set of gear to get you started in heroics and lower level raids, but it wouldn't be over the top.

Allowing alts to piggyback around on mains for Tier 10/current tier gear is a bit much, I think.


What I'd love to see go BOA

  • Bags

  • BOA profession patterns - eg a scaling tailored item that I could give to my alts to wear - like the current BOA items, but something I can make myself. Ditto for the leatherworkers, blacksmiths, etc. It would be an additional "perk" for being a crafter - something that you can send to your lowbies to help them.
  • Keys, particularly for dungeons.
  • Special items like TCG loot.
  • Mounts.. I'm not sure. I suppose it would be nice to have my TCG mounts on my other characters, and my rare drops available to them - especially the fast ones. It would also make me more inclined to want to raid on my alts for a chance at say, Onyxia's mount - I would hate to see that drop while I was playing Kiiva and not Keeva! And I would definitely love to have my mammoth (with vendors) on my alts.



Let us share achievements!

Ok, this isn't really related, but I do wish Blizzard would implement a way to share your achievements across all characters, but still show the individual character's achievements as well.

So say for example if I have 100 pets on Keeva but 5 different ones on Kiiva (say, the TCG pets), my "Overall" achievements would say 105 pets, but next to it, it might say "(Keeva: 100)". That way, we could have the sum total of our achievements across all characters - but still show the "real" value of our current character, so it's not like we're "cheating" by claiming them all as our own. I'd love to be able to add in my vanilla stuff from Caoimhe - the reps, the raids, old feats of strength - things that stung when I left them behind.

And hey - it would help as your personal raiding resume - because you could show your entire raiding history/experience across all characters. How many times have I told people that "this is just my alt, I've done XYZ raid on my main"? Just thinking aloud, really..



I'm really not sure about making everything BOA. Obviously it has its merits, it would make playing alts easier, fielding raids much easier (down a healer? Just have someone throw a bunch of emblems at an alt to gear it up in a few days!), and generally reduce "the grind".

But isn't that grind part of the sense of achievement? If you suddenly have 5 epic characters and the ability to produce 300 emblems a week - if all you ever had to do was level a character to 80 and it was instantly able to put on your epic gear - and if your characters were all geared within a few weeks of each patch - wouldn't that make things pretty boring?

Or am I weird for thinking that way? Masochistic?



It's not that I want to grind out 5 different characters to epic gearsets and enough badges to go around - like many other people I wish I had more time to play my alts, and I lament the fact that I don't have enough time on my hands to gear them up better, faster.

But really - if you take away the process, if you make it super quick or virtually nonexistent..

..then what's left in the game to do?



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