Honored rep required for heroics

As anyone who’s actually reading this probably knows, one of the upcoming changes in patch 2.3 is that heroic keys will require Honored reputation rather than Revered. This change has been on my mind a bit, mostly because I’ve heard friends and guildmates express varying opinions on it. Some people think it’s a great change, and some people are going, “OMG why do they have any rep requirement at all, then? Isn’t that just part of the ongoing leveling that’s occurring as Blizzard makes it easier for Joe Pubbie to get ‘teh phat lewtz’?”

I confess that, in the past, I have been pretty elitist about the aforesaid “ongoing leveling.” I scoffed when they removed the attunement requirements for SSC and TK, and my guildies and I gloated that we had been there before just any old ragtag bunch of 25 losers could waltz in there. And yeah, when 2.3 comes out I may actually use my “Champion of the Naaru” title.

Regarding this heroic rep change, though, I feel differently. Maybe it’s because I’m now in the process of leveling Alt #3 to 70, and the thought of grinding up a whole slew of reps just gives me a sinking feeling in my stomach. Honored is pretty easy to attain just through questing and a modicum of instancing, however. Yeah, having the rep requirement at Revered definitely separated the hardcore (or at least “the persistent”) from the rep-slackers, but now that many people have more than one 70, it makes sense to reduce the requirements.

To be honest, I’ve even moderated my views on instance attunement a bit. Slight digression: if anything, I think that the current 25-man raid scene is too difficult. On my realm, there are only four guilds that have even set foot in Hyjal or BT. Blizzard’s ongoing trend is to design encounters that require more and more coordination, leadership, and execution, and it’s gotten to the point where only the most “hardcore” groups have even the slightest chance of succeeding. Case in point: my guild, which raids 4 nights a week and considers its goal to be “progression raiding,” has only now begun to scratch the surface of Hyjal/BT. These are people who in some cases have hundreds of days of /played on their characters, who probably spend as much or more time in WoW as they do in their jobs, and the Kael’thas fight was so hard that it took us 2 months to master it.

In making the endgame content so challenging, in tuning the raid environment to a level that presents a challenge for world-renowned guilds like Nihilum and other “world first” groups, Blizzard is essentially making whole swathes of content “unavailable” for the vast majority of the WoW population. That’s why I think that the heroic rep change is a small step in the right direction.

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