With season one of World of Warcraft: The War Within winding down, Blizzard has turned their attention towards the content update, Undermined. As with all large-scale content updates, Undermined will be coming with a host of fresh content, including the flashy new raid, The Liberation of Undermine, and the new bosses and loot included therein.
The standout loot of any season is always WoW's version of tier sets. Typically, tier sets have specialization specific bonuses that players can count on being their best gear option for the entirety of a new season. However, with Undermined, WoW has charted a new course for these armor sets, homogenizing the bonuses across roles with goblin-themed mechanics. Some of the luster of unique bonuses has dissipated with this announcement, and if turned into the standard tier set approach, it may harm WoW in the long run.
WoW Standardizing Tier Set Bonuses Could Be A Mistake
Homogenization Is A Slippery Slope
A community manager posted a list of the tier set bonuses on exciting Liberation of Undermine raid. For instance, melee DPS have a stacking buff called "winning streak." Each role mechanic is standardized in how it is activated or acquired, with the difference being the benefit of the received buff. The four piece bonus isn't quite as rigid as the two piece, but still relies on the introduced mechanics.
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Tier sets should be exciting, and more often than not are, with WoW's anniversary patch marquee reward even being HD tier set remakes that show their importance to players. From a design standpoint, there are potential issues with homogenizing bonuses across roles. Standardization can often bring with it more limited design space. As tier sets are a major and exciting component of a class's gameplay during a season, standardizing them feels like a poor choice of system.
FFXIV Proves The Problem With Homogenization
Standardization And Distinctness Are Difficult To Balance
Final Fantasy 14 has a notorious problem with homogenization, a perfect example of the ways in which over-standardizing can reduce the ability to have more dynamic gameplay. While there are some benefits to FFXIV's lack of diversity: theoretically better balance and tighter fight design, it has, in the past few expansions, turned into a more decidedly negative aspect of the game. For instance, tanks in FFXIV have access to largely the same exact defensive toolkit, leaving no room for something like a brewmaster monk from WoW, one of the most distinct tanks in any MMO.
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This also applies to the DPS role, wherein it seems that every single class functions on a similar timer in order to facilitate clean buff windows. This two-minute timer is the guiding star for nearly every class in FFXIV, which in turn makes it difficult to create more dynamic or asymmetric classes, a problem even pointed out in an interview with game director Naoki Yoshida. WoW tier sets are a part of that coveted asymmetry, and while the changes to them appear fine now, it's a slippery slope that, hopefully, will not extend further.
How Themed Tier Sets Could Still Help WoW's Future
Unique Themes Can Create Unique Bonuses
If there's one positive element to the tier sets, it's the strong thematic tie in they have to the rest of the content update. Thematic ties, when done properly, can function as a guide for more unique bonuses. Thinking about what a goblin themed Death Knight bonus could be is properly exciting, and could easily be a recurring source of fan discussions and excitement for future patch content. Sure, an argument can be made that this also limits creative freedom, but it feels like a system that can encourage creativity in its tighter design space.
Overall, there is a tight balance between homogenization and uniqueness. Of course, as more classes get added to WoW, certain elements may need to be more concise. Yet, ranking the appearance of tier sets, and looking through the bonuses coming for player mains is, at this point, a tradition in WoW's content cycles. It's a feature of the game that, while minor in the grand scheme of systems, goes a long way in ing class identity. Standardization cannot be the new status-quo in World of Warcraft, as it is antithetical to one of the core components of MMOs; design asymmetry.
Source: Blizzard Enertainment
