Warforged, extra socket, tertiary stats and now Titanforged.

[PrairieChicken]

Titanforged seems like a fun mechanic for the vast majority of the playerbase, especially those players who do not care for raiding. However, for the small number of hardcore min/max players this sounds like a potential nightmare... but as a hardcore top level min/max player, you basically signed up for this - if it is too much for you, maybe it is time for you to scale back at bit.

Or it can go the other way, majority of the players give zero fucks about it and those who do are pissed

[Deleted]

I hope there's a high chance of getting titan or warforged, I don't want other players to have better stats just because they have better luck.

[MyndZero]

It's bullshit is what it is. It's a bloody RNG fest that you never get a FULL BEST IN SLOT SET OF GEAR. It's like.... anti-RPG in my eyes. I hate it so much.

[Deleted]

Isn't there an ilvl ceiling on all items in the game?
I thought that was the main premise of this waforged system, presented on Blizzcon 2015.

Suppose this:
Mythic Dungeon base ilevel is 840, it can be warforged up to 900 (max +60)
Heroic Raid base ilevel is 885, it can be warforged up to 900 (max +15)
Mythic Raid base ilevel is 900, it cannot be warforged - it's already at ilevel ceiling. So all items dropped off Mythic already have the highest possible ilevel in the game.

With that system, all items in the game can potentially be Mythic Raid quality. But to counterbalance that, doing harder content raises the item level floor. While a world quest item might become Mythic Raid quality, it will only do so 1-2% of the time. Rare and unrealible, a fluke more than something consistent. Mythic Raid will award Mythic Raid quality loot 100% of the time, not 1-2%. Thus in order to obtain those items realibly, doing hardest possible content is still the best (and desired) method.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not supporting such MASSIVE (75 ilvl, dafuq?) RNG on every item in the game. 975 mythic loot, wtf am I supposed to keep this item till the next expansion? That's nonsense.

I thought Blizzard didn't liked extreme power gaps between raiding and non-raiding players. My version of thinking bridges this gap, as non-raiders will eventually accumulate warforged loot off non-raid content, bringing their character power closer to a raider. Allowing this warforged system to EXCEED base mythic level (the highest normal items) makes this situation even worse - it makes this gap far bigger than it needs to be!

Maybe with warforged there was a ceiling... but titanforged looks like a +5 up to +75 on everything...

Yes your idea would work, it lacks the longevity of a currency upgrade system but considering the current system, your idea ist 4 times better.

Blizzard just slapp RNG onto everything. Garrison RNG for success next step Shipyard, RNG for success AND if you failed RNG to destruction of you ship.

Order Hall: RNG for success AND if failed RNG to kill Troops! Because RNG "prolongs" the game, because you can never be sure when what happens. So if your troops die you need to recruit new ones, which takes time. So a 4 hour mission that fails becomes a 4 1/2 hour mission because you need a new troop, because RNG.

Same with loot, you need to run every possible way of getting gear because of the chance you get an upgrade from LFR even as mythic raider!


If it wasn't so obvious I would say my eight ball told me Legion would loos 50% of it's playerbase after 2 months... but we already can see the systems in place to guarantee it

[Echocho]

Blizzard really need to dial down this loot race.
Make loot drops rare so aquiring an item will feel rewarding.
Make all the stats static so you can go after the items you want.
Reduce iLvls across the board or the power they give so we don't outgear content after a few weeks.

[Daedius]

RNG has allways been part of the game, ever since vanilla, sorry mate

but yes they are making it more and more... but you cant say "SHIT ALL THIS RNG, WE NEVER HAD RNG"

I never said there shouldn't be RNG...

[Pua]

I wish I lived in this fantasy land that you do, where the changes they've made to the game remotely resemble anything that raiders want. I might actually enjoy the game more and not be swimming in a sea of raiders tears because the game has done nothing but gone in the polar opposite direction of what raiders want.

Rubbish.

The game has consistently, and continually, gone down the route of removing or diluting rewards from activities other than raids for a long time; and it reached a peak in Warlords of Draenor. This "peak" essentially meant that raiders were expected to do nothing but raid to get all their rewards, and everyone else had no choice but to raid in order to join in the fun (assuming they wanted to gear up). They ended up going further by putting mounts and pets, obvious collector items, into raids where they'd be the least sought after items... But collectors would be strongly encouraged to raid, whether they want to or not.

This isn't fantasy land, it's a fact. Currency gearing removed, professions dumbed down, world content made irrelevant; all done because raiders didn't want to feel "forced" to do anything else. Look at the debates now around decent world drops, Mythic+ dungeons or (particularly) legendaries.

Now, if you want a debate as to whether this is what raiders actually want, rather than what Blizzard thinks they want, then that might be interesting.

But arguing against the dilution of rewards from everything other than raiding just isn't based in reality.

[clevin]

The silly thing about all of this is that they dropped a lot of the gem slots and reforging because they wanted it to be easier to get and upgrade and equip it. Now, it's getting so that you have to run simcraft to figure out if it IS an upgrade.

[Varitok]

If this is true, This game is so screwed. I saw this coming the second they started putting people from the Diablo team on the WoW team. I like to know my gear is gonna be a certain way when I get it, not a random stat that either makes it worthless or godly.

[satimy]

another layer added in the illusion of depth

[Baconeggcheese]

Rubbish.

I agree with the rubbish part, just not where you're directing it.

Different changes have been made to cater to different demographics. To blame any significant portion of what happened to the non-raid content on raids is just submerging oneself in blatant personal bias.

There's this community of people who don't seem to understand that the raiding demographic are typically the kind of people who enjoy and participate in most of the content the game has to offer and do not play the game in the manner that many non-raiders do where they choose specific bits of content they enjoy and mostly stick to those. I am not only a hardcore raider but a hardcore player of wow in general, when blizzard guts non-raid content it is not in any way shape or form done to cater to someone like myself.

I've never once actually had any of my raiding peers make the argument that they want content removed so they don't feel obligated to do it, because my raiding peers fully expect to do anything and everything to gain any advantage they can. That is the attitude we've always taken towards the game, and it doesn't benefit us if the content is gutted so that we have nothing to do or strive for. If there's any complaint there, its that they place rewards we want in content we should have long since stopped doing. For instance they put valor into LFR but not normal+, so now my fully mythic geared toon who has no business being in LFR and clears mythic every week is running LFR for this currency I want for my mythic items. That's just shitty game design, but that doesn't mean I don't want valor in LFR... it means I want valor in every other difficulty that way when I do the content intended for me I get the same reward instead of having to do the content I'm already completing a second time.

If they designed the game for players like myself, things would be a lot more challenging all around and you'd be rewarded with way less gear etc every step of the way through the game in general, which includes raids. It'd look a hell of a lot more like vanilla / bc and a hell of a lot less like the current situation where we walk up to a table that gives us free epics and gold and everything else.

[Mafic]

The silly thing about all of this is that they dropped a lot of the gem slots and reforging because they wanted it to be easier to get and upgrade and equip it. Now, it's getting so that you have to run simcraft to figure out if it IS an upgrade.

It has reached a point of absurdity that they had to make ilevel indicator on character pane so large so players could figure out if gear is an upgrade or not.

Despite Blizzard saying higher ilevel = "good" for Legion gearing...the truth is that stat weights will determine that not ilevel. Even with the change to secondary stat scaling...secondary stats are so important for some specs that higher ilevel isn't a slam dunk to be "better".

I would argue the Legion gearing is more confusing than WoD's because of how they have changed secondary stat scaling.

- - - Updated - - -

Let me add that Blizzard is trying to go back to pre Cata gearing with primary stat helping determine if gear is an upgrade or not. But as long as mastery exists in the game that can not be true as mastery changes how specs play far more than primary stat scaling.

[Pua]

Different changes have been made to cater to different demographics. To blame any significant portion of what happened to the non-raid content on raids is just submerging oneself in blatant personal bias.

But that's not what I've done, and this comment of yours would explain why you're arguing with something that's self-evident.

You're talking about content, and I'm not - I'm talking about the dilution of rewards from the rest of the game, in order to push raiding as a reward bribe (this is done because organised raiding is wholly unpopular). Ion Hazzikostas' post recently was a laugh, because he went as far as describing what happens when you largely cater for one group of people beyond the others; and he, almost exactly, described Warlords of Draenor. He may be a trained lawyer, but self-awareness clearly isn't a big thing for him.

There's this community of people who don't seem to understand that the raiding demographic are typically the kind of people who enjoy and participate in most of the content the game has to offer and do not play the game in the manner that many non-raiders do where they choose specific bits of content they enjoy and mostly stick to those. I am not only a hardcore raider but a hardcore player of wow in general, when blizzard guts non-raid content it is not in any way shape or form done to cater to someone like myself.

To suggest that the raiding demographic are "typically the kind of people who enjoy and participate in most of the content", and then claim that non-raiders "mostly stick to specific bits of content" is laughably backwards. You're conflating the raid community with your own personal preferences, and hoping that I won't notice you doing it.

Nice try.

For what it's worth, I think the majority of players enjoy a myriad of different types of content and I think it's a very small minority that largely stick to one thing. The reason raiders are substantially more likely to only raid is because it takes up dramatically more time and energy than anything else (besides competitive PvP), and leaves a lot less room to simply mess about with mount collection, high-level questing, some dungeoneering and a few battlegrounds. I spend a bit of time on Twitter and I read a lot of Warcraft blogs, and I can categorically tell you that that section of the community is much more interested in playing a lot more of the game than the dedicated raiders are.

Their commentary, such as it is, revolves exclusively around min-maxing your raid performance.

I've never once actually had any of my raiding peers make the argument that they want content removed so they don't feel obligated to do it, because my raiding peers fully expect to do anything and everything to gain any advantage they can.

This is where the argument comes from. You've described it almost exactly:

The raiding community doesn't want to feel forced into doing content that it doesn't want to, just to maintain an edge.

The fact that you use the very argument that's deployed as an excuse to gut rewards from other types of content, in order to argue against it happening, is astonishingly ironic. The evidence in-game is so obvious, it's incredible to me that someone could actually miss it; they knew that they'd made a complete mess of the reward paradigm in Warlords, to the extent that they put a horrible triple-roll mechanism into Mythic dungeons, along with crates of free loot by virtue of playing a Facebook game, because the rest of the game was wholly irrelevant.

Take a look around the forums, and around blue commentary. This argument is absolutely everywhere.

"We don't want to be forced into..."

You're not a stupid person, at all, and I often enjoy our interactions. But this approach is so willfully ignorant of what's actually happened, I'm wondering if your account has been hacked or you let your sister log into it.

If there's any complaint there, its that they place rewards we want in content we should have long since stopped doing. For instance they put valor into LFR but not normal+, so now my fully mythic geared toon who has no business being in LFR and clears mythic every week is running LFR for this currency I want for my mythic items.

This is part of the problem with the raiding community.

You're telling me you've cleared Mythic, you're doing it every week, so you're getting currency to spend on gear that doesn't need upgrading... Because you've already cleared the games hardest content, and have been doing so for ages.

To complain about a mechanism that's put in to nerf content over time, content that you're telling me you're long since done with, is incredibly self-serving. It is entirely appropriate for Blizzard to simply forget about you and your needs, because you've already met and defeated the biggest challenge they can offer you. Gear upgrades via currency are NOT aimed at you in any way, shape or form. Catering to you, in any way whatsoever, is absolutely mindless and those who are still progressing in Hellfire Citadel, a year after its release, are likely glad of the leg up.

If they designed the game for players like myself, things would be a lot more challenging all around and you'd be rewarded with way less gear etc every step of the way through the game in general, which includes raids. It'd look a hell of a lot more like vanilla / bc and a hell of a lot less like the current situation where we walk up to a table that gives us free epics and gold and everything else.

If it was designed for you (or me), fewer people would play it.

[BiggestNoob]

To complain about a mechanism that's put in to nerf content over time, content that you're telling me you're long since done with, is incredibly self-serving. It is entirely appropriate for Blizzard to simply forget about you and your needs, because you've already met and defeated the biggest challenge they can offer you. Gear upgrades via currency are NOT aimed at you in any way, shape or form. Catering to you, in any way whatsoever, is absolutely mindless and those who are still progressing in Hellfire Citadel, a year after its release, are likely glad of the leg up.

That's not the correct way to nerf content over time. Blizzard has yet to figure out a good way to do it, but we know for sure that every thing they've tried has been bad. Direct nerfs, ilvl buffs, class buffs, and unlock-over-time things (legendary ring) are highly unpopular among the raiding community because they're divisive and/or create large power disparities or are too exclusive. We want more people to enter the raiding scene, not for people to be excluded because of bad design, but we're often forced down this path because Blizzard is too focused on the outcome. Even if the content is eventually trivial, it's still not accessible, so the outcome of "content is easy" is not necessarily going to correlate with a higher participation. Look at wowprogress -- the rate of clears just after the ilvl bump of HFC skyrocketed, but they hit a plateau and are slowing. New guilds didn't form because the content was effectively nerfed, it was mostly guilds that had been working on it being pushed over the edge.

What this means is that these types of "solutions" tend to benefit people who play a lot far more than anyone else. Your casual player who runs 3-5 dungeons a week might see a titanforged item in their 4 months of playing, but your raider who does 30 dungeons a day probably has 5 before the first raid comes out. Even in the case of the legendary ring, the people who benefited most from that were people who were actively playing and doing content at least on normal difficulty every week. The benefit is mostly to people who play a lot, over a long period of time, etc, and this ultimately results in a massive power difference between those who have done this and those who haven't, especially when these things are better than or distinct from raid gear. You can carry a new guy through a raid and gear them up, but you can't give him a 795 ring, nor can you hand him titanforged gear and legendaries that are stronger than mythic raid gear. Fundamentally this is a problem long-term, but it's also a problem short term via things like split farming. Blizzard then necessarily balances the content around the assumption that these things have been done so that it remains a challenge for the most hardcore of players. This means the barrier to entry is set at an extreme level, which will not be achievable for most until long long after the content is cleared by those people. This is a problem Blizzard has not attempted to solve at all. Legion is very unfriendly to alt play, but split farming is still beneficial, and there's huge power gains to be had via titanforged & legendary items, as well as AP from playing excessively for the first few weeks of the expansion (and then every raid afterwards). The same problem is both present in Legion and worse than it has ever been.

I don't think these things are actually put in place to nerf content. They're there to get people to play more. A more reasonable content nerf would be to put an easily achievable BiS cap on gear (people who play a lot would hit it and then create their own content -- speed kills, rankings, just as we've done for 14 months of HFC now) and either slowly nerf bosses that give people a hard time, or provide a growing nerf to the raid via a debuff, so that as time goes on, everything in it becomes simpler. Then even people who newly join but don't have people to carry them through mythic raids for gear would also be able to just progress through the old raids because they've been nerfed down so that walking in with appropriate gear is on par with the difficulty level a guild would've seen after being fully geared in the gear from that instance. No more titanforged farming, no more legendary farming, just get basic gear, then go raiding. This is also far more pug friendly, no more "must have AOTC, must have 795 ring, must have 2/5 legendaries, must have maxed artifact weapon, ilvl 880+ only" nonsense.

Not only does this system not make the content more accessible, it makes staying around once you're done more pointless. You won't ever be full BiS so why try, and you can't compete with guilds that have stacked 1 guy with every tier piece roll so they're mostly socketed/wf/tf, so longs are pointless. You finished the tier and have full mythic gear, so break time until the next raid, or if it's the last raid of the expansion, quit until the next expansion. Ironically, a system implemented to increase longevity by adding an RNG based grind is actually having the opposite effect. Combine that with the exclusivity issue and it's likely that more people are leaving than joining, which is a really bad recipe for an MMORPG. This is precisely why D3 isn't popular beyond the first week or two of a new season. You won't get perfect rolls ever and have a fair competition, and unless you're grinding 4s for months you can't compete, so the reset is at most a chance to try out new changes, new sets, and see how far you can get in 1 week, and that's a reasonably interesting competition, but once you get over the fun hump, it becomes nothing but pure unrewarding grind, and an infinitesimal group of people actually enjoy that, far fewer than even the group that clears mythic raid content in WoW while it's relevant.

[Mafic]

It's a trend for gaming to be more randomized because it creates a thrill of having an unexpected reward. It's not exactly "fun" as much as psychologically encourages repetitive action for a chance at an inconsistent reward. It's reinforcement and addiction-forming. (￣3￣)

Games, specifically MMOs and mobile games, are just becoming empty thrills like drugs. The foundation of teamwork and working towards an accomplishment is being undermined by all of this randomness to keep players repetitively doing the same simple thing as much as I can for rewards on an equal or nearly equal reward to accomplish what my actual goal while playing is.

There are those of us who hate repetitive actions who've been long-time fans of the game. We strive on personal and team accomplishment, and the genre's direction will all but push people like me away. Not that it'll be bad for business since I'm sure there are more out there who'd gladly grind endlessly, but there's a sizable portion of players who are disenfranchised as a competitive team-based playing field becomes more uneven.

It's like playing a 20v20 League of Legends match where the enemy team starts out with 5k more gold before the game even starts because they played a ton of co-op versus AI games beforehand. Those who either got lucky or spend extraordinary amounts of time on the game to balance out bad luck will have an innate advantage regardless if they spent that time actually challenging themselves or improving. It's essentially gambling at that point if there's no challenge involved in getting better rewards, just without the loss of anything but time.

Oh well, I guess. If this is the direction Blizzard wishes to continue with, I suppose I can find better uses of my time playing single player games where there is nothing but progression to be had by working towards it rather than getting dealt a good hand on the 200th try. (￣ . ￣)

I agree. Good post and I have seen the trend of RNG boxes in other games as well. RNG loot was fine in MMORPGs because of known loot tables and you could work towards progress by farming. Farming for an RNG change at a box, RNG chance of stats, and RNG chance of having boost stats is way too much RNG. It reaches the point of casino and gambling gameplay and addiction which I do not find fun.

[Deleted]

To complain about a mechanism that's put in to nerf content over time, content that you're telling me you're long since done with, is incredibly self-serving. It is entirely appropriate for Blizzard to simply forget about you and your needs, because you've already met and defeated the biggest challenge they can offer you. Gear upgrades via currency are NOT aimed at you in any way, shape or form. Catering to you, in any way whatsoever, is absolutely mindless and those who are still progressing in Hellfire Citadel, a year after its release, are likely glad of the leg up.

I can offer the same argument only I haven't completed Mythic HFC. I don't want to do LFR so I can progress in Mythic (or even Heroic before that), via Valor. It is stupid design to force a repeat of content on a difficulty that is not suited for you.

I do like multiple paths to gear upgrades, Mythic Dungeons, Raids, World Quests all sound good to me.

[Nihilan]

I saw someone linking a BoE Titanforged mail piece this weekend that was iL860 with a level 101 character requirement. The rich are going to be able to gear beastly twink chars.

[Gorsameth]

I saw someone linking a BoE Titanforged mail piece this weekend that was iL860 with a level 101 character requirement. The rich are going to be able to gear beastly twink chars.

I doubt anyone will care about the 101-109 twink bracket Oo

[Nihilan]

I wasnt referring to pvp.

[Pua]

That's not the correct way to nerf content over time.

I generally agree (and your whole post was a good read).

There is an argument to resolve before you even get to how you appropriately nerf content over time; and that's whether it should be nerfed at all. I tend to agree with Jeff Kaplan when he says that a game feels bigger when you haven't seen it all, which ultimately leads to my rejection of the multi-difficulty approach and, indeed, nerfing content just so that people see it.

To date, and in my opinion, the simplest way of managing nerfs has been the Icecrown approach. I dislike the Valour approach for the reasons you listed but, unfortunately, it's the route they've taken.

I do like multiple paths to gear upgrades, Mythic Dungeons, Raids, World Quests all sound good to me.

Personally, I believe most people who think long and hard about it will accept that multiple paths to progression is absolutely the way forward. Legion is showing that, just maybe, the designers at Irvine are starting to get that.