The Drama With Quel’Delar, and the Battered Hilt
After Patch 3.3 dropped there was no doubt that some players would be upset about the changes. I feel the Dev team listens to the players a bit to much at times, and I believe some players see this as a sign of weakness. Since 3.3 came out there has been a lot of uproar surrounding several topics, but the topic of the moment seems to be the requirements of obtaining the Battered Hilt, and ultimately Quel’Delar (Note: There are 7 optional versions of Quel’ Delar to suit every class, the one on the tooltip is an example of only one of them) a level 251 epic weapon which you will receive after completing a quest chain started after picking up the Battered Hilt.
The Battered Hilt drops from any of the 3 new heroic instances which make up “The Frozen Halls” with a very low drop rate. The kicker about the awesome item of Arthas face smashing goodness is its status not being Bind on Pickup. When the development teams judgement was questioned about this decision on the official forums a blue post appeared with this response:
As it stands right now you can achieve the item one of 3 ways, you may either farm the The Frozen Halls for it, trade, or buy it off of the auction house. Dont start thinking great I will just buy it from the auction house either. On most servers the price is over 15k, and the item rarely lasts more than a few minutes.The price of the item leads to a couple of other debates about its status encouraging players to purchase gold from the unscrupulous companies that seek to exploit WoW for profit, and ruin many facets of the World of Warcraft economy, as well as whats to stop players who have already acquired the hilt from needing on it a second time out of greed just to sell it on the auction house. Again Blizzard has also released a response to these two issues:
Q u o t e:
Then what is Blizzard’s stance on players joining groups and bailing before the bosses?
It is a negative side effect, that’s for sure. Whether or not we can implement future changes to help combat this, I cannot say at this point.
Q u o t e:
As you also said gold is the only other way to obtain this item. What is Blizzard’s stance on it encouraging players to buy gold or buy directly with real cash just to get the item because of how rare it currently is? Is there anything being done to discourage that with this item as the prices have kept going up after the latest “fix”?I don’t like it when people use this sort of language truthfully. There are a lot of great things to obtain in the game if you have the funds, but it’s unfair to use any of those features as an example of us encouraging gold buying. We never encourage gold buying and have gone to great lengths over the years to fight it.
Some people have fortunately taken the side of Blizzard along with myself. I feel that they have brought the game about to be more casual friendly. I am a member of a hardcore raiding guild ( I haven’t really been raiding due to my work location though), but I still think there are people out there who don’t have the hours of time I dedicate toachieveeverything they want in the game. This game is for the masses, and many guilds still wont clear all of the hard modes, which is really where you find your pride in being able to say your a top 500 guild from actually clearing all of the content available in the game.
So since all of these debates have came out there has been a few changes, and I suspect there may still be a few more to come. On the first 2 days of the patch we witnessed quite a few players obtaining the Hilt quickly until on Dec. 10th There was the initial hotfix which would lower the drop rate of the item to almost a complete stop. Then on the 16th we would see another hotfix which would increase the drop rate, however the drop would no longer come from the non-elite skeletons in the Pit of Saron. You can view all of the hot fix blue posts gathering up in this official thread.
Ill close with this, if you were playing way back when WoW first came out you would know at this level in the game no one would probably be even entering the highest level dungeons, but the most elite of guilds. Naxxramas in Vanilla WoW was a guild crusher, that only a handful of guilds ever seen the final encounters. Now grabbing an item like Quel’Delar is obtainable by pretty much anyone willing or who has the time to farm heroics. I am not saying this is a bad thing I am only pointing out how far we have come when talking about now vs. then. The game is created for the masses, and I appreciate that the casual gamer has a place in this world. I would still like to stand out somehow though. I put a lot of hard work and time to get to where I am at, only to see casual players able to obtain the same things I can in the game. I believe the original draw that brought me to World of Warcraft was the ability to rise up and truly be a hero walking around Azeroth simply by wearing my badge of honor, which was the unattainable gear I wear.
