I have this bad habit of being nostalgic about the weirdest things: Today I was hit with the desire to see attunement re-enter the game. Attunement was a screening process implemented to limit dungeons to people who had the proper credentials–you either gained enough reputation, did a quest for a certain party, or killed a particularly nasty boss in X dungeon in order to gain entrance to Y dungeon.
Could it be complicated and annoying… you bet!
This is an actual listing of required dungeons and raids required to be completed to gain access to content. However, like Achievements today, attunements allowed a group to know that you had some experience with playing your character at max level. It didn’t exactly guarantee a great run, but chances were, a player you picked up for a heroic or raid would have the minimum gear requirements, and a certain amount of time played to actually make a contribution to your party.
How To Bring Attunement Back
I Can Raid!
Now, it might just be my experience with some people who are just really cool at video games, but generally, if people can play a character well, they can play alts just as well. Additionally, even if you learned a strat initially on your tank, just because you’re on your healer doesn’t mean you have to be re-groomed for the fight. Yes, you twitch differently, but overall, if you’ve beat an encounter on Class A, you’ll do just fine when playing as Class B too.
I’d like to see an attunement process that requires you to beat certain encounters, and basically progress through the raid process before allowing you to enjoy the next tier of content. However, once you have a single character with attunement priveleges, all your character on that server would have the same access! You could still gear up your alts and drag them into content when needed without having the “oh, everyone already has the key, too bad for that healer… even though we really need one this week.”
Something like a BoA key that you can hand off to another toon when they reached a minimum requirement (like a gearscore) would be perfect for this.
I’m max level, open the gates of Heroics… or not.
The best part about the attunement system was that it required you to play your character at max level IN DUNGEONS before you got access to really GOOD stuff. Faction reputation that is tied to a dungeon is a great way to make sure that new players know the fights and have some experience tanking, healing or dps’ing in a group before they got tossed to the wolves in heroics… and took their party down with them.
In the BC system, you were required to become Honored with a faction to gain access to heroics. If you could combine this with tokens or trinkets for turn-ins (that you got from the dungeon) Honored is an ok threshold even for alts. However, for a pure kill for kill rep grind, I wouldn’t mind having this bumped down to friendly.
Do NOT Allow Weekly Raids to Complete the Attunement
Now, this may sound like a meanie-headed thing to do for newer characters on an old server; however, I’ve seen some of the people who go on weekly raids, and I don’t think its sufficient raid expertise to bounce you to the next core of content. Since Blizzard seems to be into the whole “wing” mode of dungeoning, require a raid to complete the first wing in order to gain access for the next portion–that shouldn’t be a burden for a guild recruting new players, or even for people attempting to PUG. It might also see a slight resurgence in older raids getting some love. Most weekly raids only require a boss, max two, to be taken down, and I think asking someone to kill four or five bosses for experience is not too heavy a burden.
Don’t Bring It Back
I Have the Key! Bwahahahaha.
Dungeons and raids should not be accessible by a single member of the party who can then grant access to everyone else. This undermines the entire attunement process, and basically, makes you feel compelled to bring X because “they have a key.” Yuck!
Grind Away
Do not require me to spend 2 hours grinding an item from a solo-able quest mob in order to complete my attunement. Attunements are for group activities and should be obtainable in group. Keep it simple: Kill something, get reputation from this dungeon, or do a quest in said dungeon. (And on the quest in dungeon, don’t make it something that requires people not involved in the quest have to wait on my butt. I will never be able to complete my quest if it’s something “not required.”)
And Since I Had This Post In Draft
There has been a small leak in the Cataclysm news that attunement of some kind will be making a come-back… but no details as of yet (that I saw… you know I skim these things, I don’t want real information). While my post may be too late to affect the powers that be *snickers* I can still use it as a milepost of “How close was I?” Yay, post saved from the dumpster.
How would you change attunement if you were bringing it back?
Jaded Alt 
I like some of the simple attunement requirements. I liked that you had to complete Magister's Terrace on normal before getting in on Heroic. I liked that you needed Reverred (and then Honored) reputation to access BC heroic dungeon hubs, but I HATED that you had to go and buy the key from the Quartermaster too.
On our server the top end guilds are currently selling Kingslayer titles via their 25 man raids (20k I think?). At first I thought this was bizarre. Then someone pointed out to me that guilds struggling to go from 11/12 ICC to 12/12 ICC are paying for someone to unlock the hard modes – and thus farm the easier hard modes like Gunship. I think in that situation the attunement doesn't work.
Just as long as they don't bring magical resistance fights back… I'd take Attunement over Gating I think.
True enough. I hated dropping cash for a key after I spent 3 solid weeks grinding the same forsaken instances so I could run them again… only on hard mode ^^
Guilds have been amazingly flexible in how they run content now, especially GDKP. I think it's one of the side effects of making content "more accessible." To me, getting Kingslayer is kind of like having the one guy with the key–oh look, we've got just enough people to prove we did it.
I have mixed feelings about attunements. Getting the Karazhan key was a lot of work back as a new level 70 – but it was a special kind of experience. In vanilla getting the key to Onyxia was an insane amount of work – but again, you felt so good once it was done.
The problem I see with attunement is that if you're a solo player not yet in a guild getting them done is really difficult. It can be hard to find a group willing/wanting to do what you need to do. Especially if it's a quest of some kind rather than just something inside a dungeon they'd be doing anyway. As a new player I had trouble getting my first attunements because I hadn't yet made lots of friends that would help.
I do agree however that once you get the attunement – make it account wide. Doing the attunements on multiple characters gets incredibly tedious. Especially when having to find people willing to help/do it with you.
Attunement was also a little bit tricky back in TBC when you were progressing in your guild – you needed new people and people that applied weren't yet attuned. People that were attuned generally weren't looking for a guild – they were already in one. So you have to decide.. wait for someone with attunement though this person looks good.. or go through the hassle of getting them attuned?
Interesting post on the whole – and after writing this I still have mixed feelings. I can't quite tell if I want attunements back or not. And if back – definitely not in their current form.
It's really hard to compare vanilla and BC raiding / heroics with how the current system has turned out. With random dungeons and badge drops, it makes heroics much more accessible to new players instead of a wasteland of empty dungeons that require you to flog 4 other people to join you with in order to get what you need. As long as they keep a semi-similar heroics/dungeon experience in the next expansion, I think keys may work just fine.
I did hear that the first raid content would be immediately available upon level 85. Also, "wings" in raids make content easily accessible. If I'm a recruiter for my guild, you can bet that I'll have a key run every week when progressing from dungeon 1 to dungeon 2, and later from dungeon 2 to dungeon 3.
….that attunement chart brings back soooo many memories. Thank you for reposting it 🙂
I don't mind some amount of attunement: if a guild can take their new buddies through the content easily to get the parts needed to attune.
The attunement chain that was truly horrid was the Hyjal chain when it required fragments from Kaelthas and Vashj, which were both fights that are extremely complicated and not easily brute-forced, thus requiring perfect execution with a group of players who probably don't want to be there and will goof off. Kael, at least, had a mount-drop chance to keep raiders' attention when re-attuning new recruits.
Indeed. I was thinking a wing of Naxx or a wing of ICC. If you've got a new recruit or 2 (or 5 for those big guilds) a guild can easily steamroll a newer player through in order to get a key. It's also an excellent way to try out new apps–nothing better than raid experience to check out your new raider.
I think if they kept the keying in some region where pugs could easily reach (first wings if "zoned") than people who do raid even unguilded would be able to come to a guild prepared.
I loved attunements in BC. It made opening up new content that much more exciting, and made you feel like you had actually worked for it. I think the Kara attunement was perfect.
When I saw the attunement April Fool's day joke from Blizzard a couple years ago I thought it looked awesome. I am somewhat of a glutton for punishment.
I agree. Attunements is a fun mini-game in my opinion, like building an epic weapon, or gathering dungeon mats to craft a piece of gear.
I fully agree with the "BoA key" idea – http://needhealerplz.blogspot.com/2010/05/attunem…
I don't want to have to do quests and chains over and over again on all of my alts – there will be enough repetition through straight questing and doing the same raids. Anything to cut down on having to do "chores" like attunements on alts will be welcomed.
I also agree with the "don't let one person with a key let everyone else in" thing – if I have to slog through an attunement chain, so should everyone else! 🙂
Lawl. Great minds think alike, and definitely, if they make keys BoA per server/faction, they definitely can require 10 or 25 people to all get the key. I never understood the "Hey, who's got a key," philosophy.
I don't mind attunements as long as they make sense. I loved getting keyed for Onyxia. I even didn't mind MC and BWL. What I hated was the tiered progression attunements of early TBC. If I enter the raiding game late, I could have never gotten into Hyjal or Black Temple. No guilds ran that content. I could have (and never did, actually) see the end of TBC content because of the way the tiers worked.
I'm all for Achievements and attunements being there to help people feel as thought hey accomplish something to get into a raid. I just think that it should be more like Onyxia/MC/BWL/Karazhan where I have to quest my way and jump through hoops to get there instead of being forced to complete obsolete raiding content like was attempted in TBC.
MC attunement was a joke in my opinion. We hit 60, ran a small group with a warlock and keyed our entire raid team within the hour.
TBC was odd in many respects because if you were a 25 man guild, you didn't run the initial keyed dungeons, and if you were 10-man, you couldn't get enough people to progress into later dungeons because you never had enough people. It was hard to be recruited for 25-man content when you couldn't garner the key yourself.
However, now since 10 & 25 man dungeons will be accessible by both 10 and 25 man raiders, I don't think you'd have the same issues with getting a 10-man raid together to clear a wing for a key. I know I'm always up for a 10-man of Naxx or Ulduar, and I don't expect the quality of dungeons to go down, so I'd be happy to be the Monday night key-runner ^^
Noted. Windsoar will key all newbs for us. Yay! (Just kidding.) 😉
I like attunements. I hate people who think they can ding 80 and walk into ICC or who think nothing of asking others to carry them through gear runs (read TOC normal) so they can get pimped out quick. You should have to work up to content and the easiest way to force that is through attunements.
Does phasing out attunements make sense as newer and newer content is released? It seemed to in BC, even if the hardcore raiders complained. It didn’t seem to happen fast enough for a lot of guilds though. Some guilds solved the attunement problem by running attunement runs with alts for the win-win of useful gear for alts and keying new people. Others ran "community" runs for the easy bosses and then brought in their guilds to clear the end bosses (which is where the loot they wanted was anyway). Of course, that did lead to a few cases of Raid IDs being ninja’d. Unfortunately neither of these was an option for smaller guilds and/or guilds with limited raid schedules and thus created issues with recruitment and retention towards the end of BC. It would be a lot easier if you could get your key in a 10-man run though.
I'm excited about the changes and looking forward to seeing how it all works out.
P.S. Good luck tomorrow!! ❤
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