Friday, January 18, 2008

Medallion of Nagging Dissatisfaction

Read any blog / forum post / guide / whatever on gearing up for PVP and the first item they will all tell you to obtain is the Medallion of the Alliance. There is no doubt that this trinket is invaluable to PVP; getting out of CC once every 2 minutes can be a game changing outcome. The 20 resilience doesn't hurt either.

So why did I have a nagging sense of dissatisfaction when I spent my 16,985 honor points on this?

I think it comes down to these factors:
1) There's no visceral impact. There's no emotional appeal. You don't see your heals ticking for any extra X amount. You don't see your hits hitting harder by Z amount. You don't see damage coming in to be Y less. You get to click a button on your actionbar about twice as frequently (maybe). The resilience effect is defined by what doesn't happen. You're not going to get crit as often by a small percentage (0.51%). But you don't see a message saying "Resilience just prevented a crit!", so the effect harder to notice. Intellectually, I know I need this trinket. Emotionally, this trinket fails to deliver.
2) The cost seems to be disproportionate to other items that can be purchased for about the same honor. The PVP epic boots and PVP epic belt cost less than 1,000 additional honor points, yet are 31 item levels above the medallion (146 vs. 115) and are epic quality vs. superior (blue) quality.

In game items in a MMO have an emotional appeal (or at least, they should have if you want to keep your customers). This item needs help.

My suggestions: throw on a small measurable, visible on equip effect. +healing for whomever wants it, +crit % for melee, +spell dmg, whatever. Make the trinket epic. I'm a sucker for purple items, and I know most others are too.

1 comment:

TKC said...

It is still on my list of things to get. I only have the 5 minute one.

The deal is, I'm a BM hunter, aka, Mr. Anti-crowd control. Beastial wrath is on a 2 min cooldown but my current trinket is 5min. I'd love for them both to be the same.

I love watching rogues hit the sprint button when me and the kitty turn red. And locks, they just die.