My 3 Wishes for Warcraft

It has been too long since I did a non themed blog post. Today I am going to break that pattern. I have moaned and whined about the game for too long and think I can do a better job than Blizzard and that Greg Street dude. So today I'm going to imagine that I have been given the role of Blizzard's Lead Systems Designer and have the power to fix three things that are wrong with Warcraft.

The three things that I would fix are heirlooms, instance loot and reputation grinds. My fixes are my own personal opinion, I don't expect everyone to agree. In fact I don't expect anyone to agree but it would be great if you did. Either way I'd like your thoughts on my "solutions".

First on my agenda is my number one pet peeve cross realm mail. I have 11 characters on my home server at level 85 I also have ALL heirloom items that are simply clogging up my bank space. I have low level characters on other servers that I would love to have use these heirlooms. Blizzard have spent a few years trying to fix the problem but cannot find an elegant solution. I have not one not two but three elegant solutions:

• Normal mail, should be simple right? But wait my character name is only unique on my realm and a realm is only unique in a region so mail could get delivered wrong. Well yes it could but how about copying an existing system that guarantees to get mail from one unique point to another? Blizzard are not usually afraid to  borrow ideas after all. The system the need to borrow here is email. I can send mail from evlyxx@shadowsong.eu to evlyxx@defias-brotherhood.eu and it would arrive. If they enabled cross region mail I could even send mail to evlyxx@shadowsong.us.
• Allow me to have an 18 slot account bound storage that can only accept account bound items. An obvious location for this is the old void storage sure my enchants would vanish off the items but that would be a small price to pay.
• We have account wide pets and mounts we could just add a similar arrangement for our heirlooms so you don't actually have items just the ability to equip them from a selection screen. It is the least realistic and elegant.

Second on my hit list is instance loot. The current system is awful and to be fair I hadn't realised how truly awful it was until this expansion because I'd simply learned to accept that Boss X can drop items A, B, C and D back in 2005 years ago and simply accepted it. Cataclysm changed the way we thought about that with raid finder loot and the change to raid finder loot this expansion has really made it even worse on the RNG. What I would propose is that in 5 man and raid finder content when we kill a boss we get personal loot as we do in raid finder and scenarios now. But if you are deemed a winner of loot, rather than an item you get a token to buy a specific level of item for a slot. So if the system were in place now, you would win a iLevel 463 item. The slot would be dependent on the boss killed as it is today. You could then choose if this was for your main spec or your off-spec. If you wanted neither you could trade it for a DE material. This would remove the risk of people "ninjaing" your item and would also assist tanks and healers at getting off-spec items without having to play their off-spec to get them and so increasing the available tank/healer pool for LFD and raid finder queues.

Last but by no means least is the reputation grind. Over the years Blizzard have continually tweaked the reputation system in a hope of getting it right. Back in Vanilla it was bloody awful. Quests gave 10 rep for teh local faction. Then there was the cloth turn ins and for stuff like the Wintersabre Trainers that meant a lot of repeatable quests. Then there was teh Argent Crusade and the Scourgestones. Not a perfect system but killing mobs in instances and certain zones also gave rep but boy was that progress slow. Burning Crusade gave us better instance rep and better quest rep (250 per quest). It wasn't easy but it wasn't slow either. Wrath added Called HP and advised this looks like a false alarm and that they can close their case. to the BC system and that helped immensely and Cataclysm simply carried on the system from Wrath. It worked well to be fair but the immersion factor wasn't there with the tabard system but the BC method of rep from mob kills in instances had disappeared. Why? Mists saw the removal of the tabards for all new factions. Oddly the city rep could still be earned in any dungeon wearing the tabard and the Wrath factions also continue to give rep in BC dungeons if you equip their tabards.

Prior to 5.2 the rep in Mists content is limited to quests in some zones and the repeatable daily quests, there were even factions gated behind other faction. Thankfully Blizzard fixed it in 5.1 but the solution was not particularly elegant and rather than fixing it properly they actually made the ridiculously hard rep grind too easy by the introduction of a double rep bonus buff you can purchase when you reach revered on one character on your account. This buff is truly account wide as well. Klaxxi rep is now so easy you're revered by the time you complete Dread Wastes questing which unless you want the rep ring and/or the mount is as far as you need to go. Only Golden Lotus is what I consider a normal speed but that was always so very slow and that only made the fact that August Celestial and Shado Pan rep were gated behind it even more frustrating.

Since 5.2 we have had rep items dropping from the Zandalari Warscouts and Warbringers which reward 2000-2600 rep depending on your race, guild level and if you're using the Darkmoon Faire buff, this means that rep grinding is now ridiculously easy. So easy, that my mage got exalted with the August Celestials at level 88. So now you don't even need to rep up alts through any form of questing. 

What I would do is simply reintroduce rep gains from mob kills in the relevant zones and instances e.g killing bugs in Dread Wastes, Heart of Fear, Gate of the Setting Sun. No need for the stupid 300 rep from you invisible tabard Blizzard have put in pace and normalize rep gains to a fixed amount per quest.

There are of course many other niggles I would like to fix but these are the biggest ones on my list. If you had the power to make 3 changes to Warcraft, what would you choose to fix and how?