Anti-attunements? You don't get it, that's all.

It's amazing how much the attunement topic has exploded recently. Arguments for and against have sprung up like wildfire, and most of it has been caused by blue commentary about why attunements are unlikely to see a return. I'm not going to quote any of Draztal's statements because they're mired in poor logic and a lack of imagination but, more than that, I've no idea who he/she is; just some CM talking about his own preferences, I suppose.

Of course, I've spoken about attunements before. I wrote this piece well over two years ago and, though it dealt with some specifics about WotLK, some of the messages ring true. I also had this debate over a TankSpot and it got quite heated near the end, implying that this is quite an emotive topic. If someone is against attunements, that's fine, I can clearly understand their reasoning. I think what upsets me is that those who like them are represented terribly, either caricatured as elitist idiots who want nobody in their special content, or simply dismissed as the bearers of rose-tinted glasses. Hell, the blue poster doesn't even bother to represent fans of attunements at all, and that's probably what annoys me most. He simply looks at those who hated them and says "I agree", rather than trying to foster a creative debate on both sides of the fence.

It's terrible community management, designed to close down discussion rather than encourage it, but that's not all. It also spawns garbage like Matt Rossi's "Attunements and why they must never return", where the author of a major WoW fansite decries attunements by making several straw-man arguments, totally misunderstanding the support for attunements, ignoring inconvenient facts completely and, frankly, spreading misinformation to too many people.

You want the truth?

There isn't a single, solitary reason why attunements can't be brought back.

Let me say that again:

There isn't a single, solitary reason why attunements can't be brought back.

Yes, I'm going to prove it.

First, the misdirection

Those against attunements have a vested interest in making sure nobody gets to the nub of the issue. This is because they don't actually want a sensible debate that they're 100% destined to lose. It's simpler to fill up the talk-box with as much circa-2007 scaremongering crap as possible, rather than looking at the game of 2012 and talking about it meaningfully. Here are some examples:

"Recruitment is enough of a pain, I don't need to run through old content with new people as well".

Attunements don't have to be about going through old content. Next.

"I have alts which also raid, so running attunements on all of them is pointless and not fun".

In Mists of Pandaria, account achievements are about to go live. Next.

"I shouldn't have to worry about attunements when I apply to a guild, I should be judged on skill".

Guild achievements are already live, so you could attune by joining one. Next.

"I'm not interested in having to get a group together just to get attuned to a raid".

The dungeon-queue makes this easier than ever, and is about to become WotLK-like. Next.

"Attunements are just time-sinks and content barriers - nothing to do with skill".

There are already content barriers in the form of 85 levels and an item level minimum. Next.

I could do this all day, literally. As you can see, in the game of 2012 (and looking ahead to the next expansion and 2013), there simply isn't a single valid argument against attunements. Those who are against them are drudging up half-decade old crap about Brood of Nozdormu reputation, Onyxia quest-lines and recruitment woes. Hell, we're now in a world with three raid difficulty settings and exclusively 10-man guilds since the requirement for 25 players died (and was placed on life support) with Cataclysm.

To round this section off, I should point out that there is one question doing the rounds that seems to have picked up momentum:

"If an attunement quest isn't hard, difficult or time-consuming then why have it?"

I'm glad you asked.

The case for the accused

Not only are attunements a solid way of introducing the context behind a tier of raiding content to help players understand why they're going and doing something (rather than just killing faceless skull mobs for gear), there are actually some extremely solid arguments as to why they're positive beyond that.

1) The difficulty curve in the game is smashed to all hell, resulting in the Cataclysm-launch fiasco. Attunements can help to deal with that.
2) Gated content lasts longer, and it's clear that Blizzard cannot push content out fast enough for the current rate of consumption.
3) Attunements can bring players into the raiding context without forcing them to raid if they don't want to. This adds a sense of "progression".

Finally for this part of the discussion, and most importantly:

4) If you use attunements to gate content, there is no need to continue using gear to do so. Alternatively, you can use both systems.

And as I did above, I'll repeat that to make sure it sinks in.

4) If you use attunements to gate content, there is no need to continue using gear to do so. Alternatively, you can use both systems.

The erudite know of what I speak. You hit 85 on your latest toon, you want to raid, but you don't have stockpiles of Justice Points, gold or other materials to give you the gearing-up helping hand. You're forced into the often painful heroic dungeon grind, where you find all manner of people using non-spec or PvP items to fudge the item level bouncers at the door, while you diligently hope for the right things to drop while the 4k death knight walks off with your tanking plate.

Attunements can avoid this happening and, thus, SAVE YOU MORE TIME THAN NOW.

Cataclysm actually did this in a very intelligent way. Lore spoke about the Elemental Bonds questline from patch 4.2 in one of his best Weekly Marmot episodes ever. For me personally, I think the entry into the Firelands was the far better chain (as it is now, not the token-capped launch version) because it set up the context for the raid itself (including an appearance by the much-maligned Lord Rhyolith), rewarded the player with decent gear, while also introducing boss-like mobs that required attention to what was going on, and an awareness of mechanics.

A skill check.

That's EXACTLY what those quests were as you moved from the molten spew or hid under the turtle's shell. Make those spells more dangerous and buff the health of the mobs, and you have a basic skill check albeit a relatively simple one. In 4.3, we came up with the instanced version of an attunement line in the Hour of Twilight five-mans. The quests provided the rewards you bought from vendors under the first Firelands tree, while they also set the context of the raiding tier by having your party bring the only weapon capable of defeating Deathwing to Wyrmrest. If you wish to put in a basic skill-check here, such as interrupting Twilight Bolt against Benedictus or interrupting the mind control from Azshara, then you could do. At the end of the three instances, congratulations, you're attuned to enter the Dragon Soul raid, you've picked up some free loot (which the current playerbase loves) and, perhaps most importantly, you know why you're going in there.

Either an involved quest chain with challenging boss-mobs or a series of instances or scenarios with skill-checks along the way would be a great method of bringing back attunements in a patch-dependent fashion that doesn't adversely impact anyone, and actually adds to the fabric of endgame PvE. Because such a thing would be far quicker than simply grinding out gear in order to beat an arbitrary item level counter before queuing, it's actually encouraging FASTER ACCESS to content for players who have the ability to manage these quests.

Hell, leave the item level gate as another option for scrubs and baddies to get carried to purples.

Other considerations to note

There are a couple of other quick points I need to make here.

First of all, gating content is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing. It's not a "barrier to entry" (unless you're a self-entitled whinger), it's actually the game telling you that you're not quite ready to contribute properly in a given piece of content. If you're wholly incapable of queuing up and completing the Hour of Twilight dungeons, you really need to work on the basic principles of playing the game before inflicting yourself on others. The busted learning curve is a problem in the game as it is, and attunements are one part of a solution. If someone chooses to claim they don't have the time to do a quest chain or trio of dungeons, I find it impossible to accept that they'd somehow find the time to raid. Plus, let's not forget, we're almost exclusively talking about the LFR "raids" here, and attunements can be used to save them time if they're decent players at all.

Secondly, exclusivity of raiding content isn't a bad thing either, and the numbers would seem to suggest that. The game grew by far higher percentages the more exclusive level-cap raiding was (vanilla, TBC grew the most, WotLK grew at a slower rate and Cataclysm saw a decline), so it simply doesn't follow logically that "everyone has to see everything now". I think it would be churlish to say that attunements are the reason for this, but I'm extremely interested to see just how high a percentage of people raid in Mists of Pandaria when there are far more things for them to do than there was in Cataclysm. Personally, I think the numbers have been obscenely massaged to make LFR look like a bigger success than it actually was. Sure, more people got to raid; but was it the increased access that caused this, or was it the fact they had nothing else to do? PvP is utterly broken balance wise, dungeoneering is a complete waste of time, archaeology turned out to be a damp squib and all people were really left with to spend their time on was a bit of LFR. If raiding was designed for "raiders", rather than for everyone, the quality would go up and people who had no interest in raiding could still play some content related to it for the lore aspect, and then just get on with whatever they like doing more.

Note: I'm not saying this WAS the reason why LFR appears such a success, merely that I think it likely.

Wrapping it up... Finally

I've spent the last hour or so pointing out, very clearly, where this debate needs to take place and where those who are against attunements are doing the discussion a complete disservice by concentrating on the utterly irrelevant. Yes, this is exasperated by idiot blue posters or community paragons like Matt Rossi spreading misinformation, but you needn't be fooled and now see the chink of light these people are trying to obscure. Truthfully, the only group of people I'm sympathetic toward would be the cutting edge raiders who might see their progress held up (by two hours? Lulz) by attunements, but Blizzard can sort that out by removing the need to complete normal mode raids prior to heroic mode raids, or simply releasing small pre-patches that allow players to do the attunements before the content actually starts.

Hell, as a poster on TankSpot mentioned, I'd have no problems with those completing the previous tier being automatically attuned to the next one as a direct-reward for doing live content.

And although I'd tossed the anti-attunement arguments on the fire where they belong, we should all rest assured that attunements still won't be brought back. Not because they're barriers, difficult, needless time sinks or busy work.

It's because Blizzard are too fat-arse lazy to bother.