Before you go on, please read this first. The post below started as a comment on Dinaer’s thoughts on the matter and when I noticed that I had written three paragraphs on the subject, I decided to just make a post about it here.
I think the whole point of Trial of the Champion is to make Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader more accessible to players. The heroic version of Trial of the Champion drops ilvl 219 gear, sharing the item level that comes from Ulduar 10. This makes it possible for players to skip Naxx 25 and go straight to Ulduar 10.
Going back to the post title, I think we need to define what a typical player is first. Dinaer says:
Most players have a max-level character. The majority of those have been in either Naxxramas or Obsidian Sanctum to some extent. Somewhere between half to two-thirds of them have done Ulduar raids, and maybe a quarter have done any of ToC.
I know that it’s hard to define exactly what a typical player is, but if we take a look at the last part of the description, we’ll see that the closer we get to end-game content, the number of typical players goes down. Do we actually want all players to see the end-game content? I think Blizzard wants us to, given three things:
- the accessibility of ilvl 219 gear from heroic Trial of the Champion;
- the streamlining of emblems so that they’re all Conquest now;
- the rewarding of Triumph emblems via heroic dailies.
All this points to the conclusion that gearing up is easy, and that means if we put effort into it, we will see end-game content. The question here is if a typical player is willing to do all that legwork. Do we want all players to see end-game content? Of course. Should everyone see end-game content? Not if you don’t work for it first.
My two-cents. It’s something that I’ve always thought about since patch 3.2 came out and I’d like to thank Dinaer for asking that question. It helped organize my thoughts into this (somewhat) cohesive post.
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