So I haven’t played World of Warcraft in a few months now– my account expired sometime in February or March, and I hadn’t been playing for weeks before that– but I still follow a lot of active WoW players on Twitter by virtue of my background as a WoW blogger, so I hear a lot of game-related news simply through the grapevine. And one of the things that’s going to be happening soon, from what I hear, is the removal of the keyring and keys from the game.
Now if you’ve been following me for a long time, you can probably see where this is going. If not, I’m just going to leave this here:
Remember getting the Karazhan key? Remember ALL THOSE FREAKING DUNGEONS?
No? Lemme refresh your memory:
Remember Sethekk Halls, Shadow Labs, Steamvault, Botanica, Mechanar, Arcatraz, Old Hillsbrad Foothills, and The Black Morass? And how it took days to do all of these because you had to get groups together and stuff, because there was no Dungeon Finder? You’d wait and wait until your trusted guildies and friends were online before even thinking about making a group? Yeah.
It was such a pain but it felt so good to get that key at the end. These were some seriously hard dungeons, too. Remember freaking Shadow Labs? Remember when you would grind that thing for days just to get a blue?
Back then, you needed keys for everything, and the Master’s Key was one of the big ones. After you spent forever getting that key, it was time to grind rep in order to get keys to get into Heroics, so you could get epics. Remember Heroic Steamvaults? What a pain in the butt dungeon. Heroic Mech, anyone? That fire chick, anyone?
Keys were a tangible reward showing that you’d been through the maze and done your time and had access to all those mythical places that you heard about only in whispers in trade chat. Hearing that they’re going away is… well, it’s not the end of the world and I’m not crying about it or anything. But it made me think back to those days when they and their partner “attunement” were a pretty big aspect of endgame. And that made me nostalgic. Hence this post.
I may not play anymore, but I’m going to miss my Master’s Key, I think. Just a bit.
That’s the one of the few reasons I’m annoyed about the removal of the keyring. I worked really hard on some of those keys, dangit, and I want them as trophies (but I don’t have room for them outside the keyring, thus dilemma). And I really don’t want to have almost-useless keys taking up my valuable regular bagspace…
I probably treasure my Master’s Key more than anything else in the game. Enough so that I had STILL been going through that crap to get it on each character AT LEVEL.
This is me, sadfasing.
Up through the Heroic keys I kinda giggled at others. Granted being a Rogue meant I only had to do the Ony pendant quest and sleepwalk through the BWL attunement quest.. ;)
I can see how taking out the keys and attunements in general makings things way more accessible and convenient, but I can also see how putting things in the game that require a lot of effort make the game more satisfying. Blizz can’t seem to have it both ways; in Wrath everything was too easy, and half the playerbase complained. In Cata, everything is now too hard, and the other half of the playerbase complains. I tend to lean toward the side that wants content that takes more effort, but I can see both sides.
Not sure just how I feel about it. My DK on Silver Hand kinda skipped over most of the Outlands instances and I recently went back to do some gap-filling in my achievements list. Try as I may I can’t get the drop to start the Shattered Halls key quest so I won’t be too unhappy to just be able to walk in when the time comes.When it comes to Karazhan however I quite agree with you. That sucker was HARD to get and doing it really made you feel like you’d achieved something more then just a little gold pop-up on the screen… I don’t agree with all of the changes that Blizzard have made this time around but I hope they leave some stuff in that actually makes players stop and think.
Example thread from the Blizzard forums…
My main had the Keymaster achievement; regardless of whether or not the key objects are required to get into areas of the game, I remain disappointed that this achievement was never turned into a Feat of Strength.