Guild Advancement System in Cataclysm Expansion For World Of Warcraft
Posted on August 27th, 2009 by Thundernudle under Achievements, Alliance, Cataclysm, Expansion, General Tips, Horde, PVE, PVP, Raiding, Spec, Tips, Trade Skills, World of WarcraftIs the Buff to Guilds the End of Guild Alliances?
The news of all the upgrades to Guild systems in the expansion is really exciting; Blizzard has stated they’re trying to make being in a guild more viable and interesting. It seems like from whatever polls they’ve taken, they’ve gathered that the social aspect of World of Warcraft is something drawing in a large portion of their players, so they’re trying to improve and bank upon that.
So far, here’s a list of the things the Guild Advancement system is slated to have:
- Guild Experience
Your entire guild will have and experience bar. Gaining experience for your guild may be possible from things like leveling, gaining reputation, killing bosses, or winning Battlegrounds or Arenas, all on your guilded toons.
- Guild Talent Tree
As your guild levels, it naturally gains talent points as well. These talent points can give your guild members a range of very useful abilities, such as reduced durability taken during fights, removal of buff reagents for raid-wide buffs, and even mass resurrection (my inner-raider can’t stop drooling!).
Guild Talent Tree sample, with example talents "Everybody's Friend" which removes reagents for raid-wide buffs and "Penny Pincher" which reduces repair costs by 30%.
- Guild Currency
Gaining Guild Experience will convert into (somehow) a special kind of currency called Guild Currency. You’ll be able to use Guild Currency to purchase a vast array of items, from purely cosmetic and fun to very useful. There’s the possibility it will be able to be used for mounts, standards with your guild’s insignia on it, as well as being used for a guild talent respect.
- Profession Plans
Profession Plans can also be bought with Guild Currency. Once a plan is bought, any person of what profession will be able to purchase the plan from their profession’s trainer. It will also be possible to craft guild heirlooms, which will scale with level just as regular heirlooms do today. Additionally, an interface is being added so that anyone online can see other online players’ profession levels and patterns (no more spamming, now we can just ask!)
- Achievements
Just like normal achievements work now, except, naturally, guild-wide. Achievements for having Grand Masters of every profession and obtaining Legendary items were mentioned.
Guild Achievement examples, showing the "Working as a Team" achievement, where the guild has a Grand Master of each profession.
- News Feed
Keep everybody up to date on the latest happenings in the guild with the News Feed. What bosses were killed, what achievements people have earned, what the most recent loot was.
The Guild Professions interface on the left, and General Guild interface on the right, including the experience bar, News Feed, and MOTD.
- Improved Looking for Guild/Recruit Feature
A new Looking for Guild interface will be included. This interface will let you better specify who you are and what kind of guild you’re looking for. Some specifications for the Guild Recruit feature may include the guild’s play style (casual, moderate, or hardcore), common days of activity, class roles needed, and what levels of toons are being accepted.
Looking For Recruit Interface
- Other Guild Invitations to Calendar
Finally, something many people have been waiting for: the ability to invite another guild to an event on the Calendar.
As you can see from this Guild Advancement system, a lot has been done to make it beneficial to be in a guild. Plus, besides encouraging people to be in guilds, it also discourages people from guild hopping; the system is put together to actually encourage guild allegiance. These days it can be much easier for people to just jump around to whatever guild seems to be doing best, get some gear, and go. There tends to be fewer people willing to stick around and work (I.E. wipe, pay for consumables, practice) for the final goal, be it downing a boss or winning a Battleground. With this new system, as soon as you leave a guild, all the benefits you’ve received from being a member are wiped. The game will still be completely playable, but any professions, heirlooms, or other guild doo-dads you’ve collected during your time will be gone.
What does this mean for Guild Alliances?
Now, while I personally am stoked for these changes (as far as I can tell, they’ll bring nothing but fun in for those already in solidly performing guilds), I fear for those that use the Guild Alliance as their primary way to accomplish high-end content. These days it’s relatively common for 2 or 3 smaller guilds to band together into an alliance to attempt to accomplish higher end content; 2 or 3 guilds that run their own solitary 10 man can easily form a 25 man together.
Often these guilds stay separate because they simply like having their autonomy; often they’re a small group of friends who play together and have no interest in joining another guild with people they don’t know as well. While the ability to invite more than one guild to your Calendar is a plus for guild alliances, everything else they’re implementing is basically a detriment. To receive a guild achievement for a boss kill or Battleground, for example, it was stated that 75% of the guild will have to be present. This means that any guilds that happen to be accomplishing content as an alliance will likely not be able to receive any of these achievements. Allied guilds will have separate talent trees as well, separate obtained profession plans. While these issues don’t keep anyone from playing the game, it will certainly keep them from taking part in many of the game’s new features, at least to the extent that other bigger guilds do.
Cataclysm has a lot of wonderful new features coming that are going to make raiding and general game-play easier and more fun for most of us. It’s understandable that Blizz wants everyone to take advantage of the social aspect of the MMO (whether it’s to make them more money or to actually help us enjoy the game more), I just hope it doesn’t end up strangling smaller guilds and alliances. So enjoy the new Guild Advancement system, everyone…it has a lot of amazing new features to offer. But for anyone in a guild alliance, it may be time to start contemplating what to do when Cataclysm hits.
You say that to receive credit for a battleground or boss kill 75% of the guild will have to be present – is this true? Isn’t it that 75% of the team will have to be from your guild? Otherwise massive guilds would have no chance and solo guilds would get acheivements every time.
I dunno about anyone else, but I’m just stoked about the guild improvements. Guild-hopping is becoming problematic. Raids are gonna be a whole new ballgame with these additions, and I can see filled 10 and 25 man heroics and raids running on a more consistant basis.
This will, however, have a pretty big impact on the AH, if everything I’ve read comes to play. Most upper-level guilds are gonna be running instances a LOT more for gear, drops, and the like. This will increase the # of BoP items that players have. Seems like the AH is gonna be reserved for profession levelling, lower-level twink characters, and guild bankers. Level 80+ toons aren’t going to need the AH as much as they do now for items, consumables, etc, and mostly use it for gold building. Any thoughts Gav or Law?
low level twinks are dead. Not a battleground open for my 2xlvl29 since I turned on the ‘not leveling’ portion, I tried every second day.
it sucks. I can only play 45 minutes-1 hour a day, so I loved those quick battlegrounds, now I’ll have to return to my boring 80 healer.
This makes me wonder if hardcore raiding guilds will start purging their casual players to make the achievements easier to get…
dangit im gettin /gkicked now! lol
Okay, for the most part, I was extremely pleased to see some of the things that are being proposed for guilds in 4.0. however, when I got to the last section, everything seemed to fall apart due to one sentence:
“To receive a guild achievement for a boss kill or Battleground, for example, it was stated that 75% of the guild will have to be present.”
Think about that… for one thing, making the system have such a rule would kill off any guild of significant size, say, 55 or more. Why? Because, at that size, it would be impossible to have the raid include 75% of the guild, because raids don’t come that big any more, except for AQ40. Besides, we know that large part of many guilds are alts; Blizz would be REQUIRING them to dual-box.
Gavin, could you or one of the others PLEASE verify the wording on this? Did you mean the printed “75% of the guild will have to be present”, or did you actually mean “75% of the party would have to belong to the same guild for that guild to get the acheivement”? The second would seem to make a lot more sense.
This has to be a typo – a 100 person guild would never be able to accomplish anything. I’ll get a hold of Thundernudle and get her to reword that…
Wow, sorry guys, that’s my bad for really bad phrasing. What it should read is “75% of the raid must be from your guild to earn the achievement.” Apologies for going temporarily crazy.
what it means by “75%” is that 75% of the raid makeup must be 1 guild.. IE.. a 10 man raid can pug 2 people without losing out. not that 75% of a guild must be in there.
as foor the changes.. im in a hardcore raiding guild with casual players (dont ask.. i havent figured it out either) but it works… im REALLY looking forward to these changes.. and hopefully a lot of those smaller guilds will start to dissapear (the ones always spamming trade for members) and join bigger guilds or just make 1 big guild from 3-4 smaller ones… only time will tell
and there is still going to be a good AH.. people still wnat max money.. and as long as there is an excess of gold floating around.. theres gonna be an economy.. cos all those new epics are always gna need enchants.. and that means more money to me for my mats and for my skills
But then you’re talking about just what my concern is. You’ll be selling mats. Hence, gold making.
I guess it’s more of a profession concern than an AH concern. The current profession setup has most of the epic craftable items BoP. Now, I’ve also heard that professions are getting an overhaul, and several crafted items like gear, weaps, and jewelry are going to by slightly cusomizable by the crafter to increase one stat bonus over another, or to enter their own stats as offered by the gear. This would eleviate my concerns on that one.
I think the Guild achievements will really strengthen the good guilds. I know my guild and GM are very interested in the system. I would also believe the 75% of the raid must be the same guild to be the proper wording.
On the profressions Lythe brought up a interesting concept. We already know they are planning reforging to alter gear. maybe if they remove the BOP’s and make them BoE there will be some sort of “gear buff” for the profession?
EX: A LW makes a piece of BoE chain gear, Std value is +20agi, however if he uses it himself it is +23AGI? That would be a very interesting twist to it, and also keep the AH churning along.
I can see this as actually being beneficial in some ways for guild alliances. If 2 guilds band together for 25 man, they can each spec completely differently and as a result they’ll benefit from eachothers spec as well as their own. It’s the closest thing to having twice as many guild talent points imo.
So, by that, you mean that the guilds would basically take turns at taids? That is, one guild gets the points on one night while the other gets them on the next raid? That would be the only way that could happen.
I should point out that there is a danger of killing a lot of guilds. For example, there are a lot of guilds that seem to be focussed on role-playing; judging by what I have read, there would be no benefit whatsoever to being part of such a guild under this system.
But, while inefficient guilds are being knocked off, wouldn’t the system also work against guilds that are just starting out? How could new guilds compete? Aside from the old “getting together with friends” reason, why would anyone want to join a new guild, if so much more is gained by joining an established guild?
Heh yeah seems like it won’t be _that_ detrimental to smaller guilds. I imagine that guilds will reach a point in levels where they just do nothing but gain more points to use on heirlooms and such. So the smaller guilds will still cap their talents and things like that anyway. It will just take a bit longer than a larger guild…
The only thing I see being a problem would be the achievements thing, but since they do absolutely nothing and provide no benefit what-so-ever that isn’t really a problem
I personally think blizzard has ruined the game, and the expansion doesn’t seem to help it much either. I understand they want people to progress through the game but this whole wal-mart way to get gear is redic. Now people can just skip through content or get carried through by guild members who have been geared, doesn’t make the game much fun anymore. Also with how easy it is to level up from 20-60.
People could always skip through content and get runs from higher level friends. That was true from day 2. And leveling was always trivial, even when there were so few quests you had to grind mobs for xp.
I don’t fathom how people can seriously complain about the game having so much content that you can pick and choose how you play it. Oh dear, how awful.
The problem noted is that you won’t gain all the benefits of 2 guild talent trees in all situations.
For example, if Guild 1 has mat-less Raid Buffs, but Guild 2 doesn’t, then only Guild 1 players get free raid wides. If guild 2 has the reduced durability loss, but guild 1 doesn’t, then only guild 2 will benefit. If guild 1 has mass-resurrection, there’s the possibility it will only benefit guild members.
Sure, the game will still be playable, but it will be faster, easier and generally better to go with a guild. The smaller guilds will likely want to join together, but the problem arises in leadership, accepted rules, etc. It also means that pugs will occur less often (both for raids and for 5-mans), simply because of the bonuses available from guild-only runs. This could hurt servers like mine (Ysondre), where the population is low, and pugging occurs often thanks to larger-than-average guild to player ratios.
As I understand it, only the tope twenty “performers” in a guild will contribute to the guilds experience gain each day. So large guilds won’t permanently be able to outstrip small guilds in terms of guild level, and new guilds should be able to catch up fairly quickly with a minimal number of members.
Those top 20 are also visible (though maybe only to the GM/guild leadership?) so it’s a good way of measuring who’s contributing.
I think takeing all the achivements off a player for leaveing a guild is fine but and i am conserned on this what hapens if you are kicked do you still loose and more to the point does the guild loose all the points it gained from your imput like if you are the only maxed JC in that guild and you leave or they kick you dose that guild then loose the bonous it gets from haveing a guildy in every prof at max ??? i wounder
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