It failed, but like others said, I don't know that it was bad. Gearing up an alt 8 months or so after the expansion hits shouldn't be as hard or as long as gearing up a main, given a couple BoE items each tier, crafted items, Molten Front, and the conversion of VP down to JP each tier.

I think the combination of *long*, hard dungeons combined with difficulty early on obtaining gear may have been a mistake. A lot of people became discouraged, especially healers and tanks. I know people who still won't pug thanks to early Cata, and what others say now about people wanting to blow through them as they did in Wrath, and being irked about undergeared alts, is coming back as well.

I think the early idea of blues needing to be more prevalent to keep purple feeling "epic" could have been better handled, even up through Molten Front. A blue and a purple can be comparable; it's the ilvl and stats that matter more than the color. Given current player expectations of easily-obtained purples, that could have made it *feel* harder to gear even if it really wasn't. It sometimes gets to me, as a Classic player who couldn't raid, how prevalent purples are now that I don't even blink at them. I still worry more about my *ilvl* than what the text color of my items are, though.

Color is mainly an indicator of what it disenchants into, anyway. Could have avoided the heavenly shard crunch mid-expac, made maelstroms a bit harder to get, perhaps, but essences are already rarer than either shards or crystals; perhaps what enchanters need are more ways to make the mats they need out of the overstock they already have (like the maelstrom to heavenly ability). Or even just make it that tiny bit harder to get top-end enchants, too.

It just seemed to me that Blizzard had a good idea in place for weaning players away from the idea that they are entitled to epics (and therefore legendaries) right out of the gate without gimping their actual progression, and then abandoned it a lot earlier than they needed to.

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