Challenge Modes: Gear won't scale up, only down.

[Cute Chen]

•Your gear will be normalized to item level 463, even if you have inferior gear on your beta character. (Note: This is only a beta feature. On live realms, gear won’t scale up, only down.)

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I'm really excited to do challenge mode dungeons but I thought this new feature was supposed to be about skill, not gear. Will people who don't get to raid be able to do this 5-player content? Or do we have to farm raid gear after all?

[chaud]

463 gear is essentially the blues you get from running heroics.

[Aethilus]

Item level 463 is heroic dungeon level gear, so you should be able to get all items at or above 463 using only 5man loot drops and valor vendor items. Perhaps some LFR items to fill in gaps.

[Cute Chen]

Well, that was simple. So there is hope. Thanks guys.

[grisset]

Also note, set bonuses will not be active in challenge modes, so raiders will not have an advantage that way.

[Cute Chen]

Also note, set bonuses will not be active in challenge modes, so raiders will not have an advantage that way.

Which is pretty cool. I like that they're keeping it hard.

[Deleted]

the only thing that will benefit you by raiding is the access to a bigger pool of loot from which you can assemble your own challenge-mode-BIS gear. Like a fury warrior, which scales with crit like crazy, will want to have gear with crit on every slot etc. As the gear will be scaled down anyway, it wont even matter to have gear of highest item level, only the one with the most secondary stat to your liking. (although that will heavily depend on how scaling down actually is implemented)

[chazus]

I'm really curious how hard it'll be. BC Heroics were difficult even for well geared people. I figure it will be about that hard, but with the time limit constraint.

[Sildor]

It probably won't be as difficult as BC heroics, the difficulty probably lies in the strict timer. I do fear that some classes will be much favoured for it though since it will likely favour burst and AoE, classes who need buildup time to do good damage will probably fall behind since the whole idea is that stuff should die fast.

[Deleted]

I think everyone will be able to complete bronze, however going for gold is probably going to be limited to skilled players only.

[Azshira]

I think everyone will be able to complete bronze, however going for gold is probably going to be limited to skilled players only.

Sure looks that way. Will take a good amount of practice Bronze times are very high indeed, silver should be doable by most people also, probably even with a wipe. The good thing is you can reset the dungeon as much as you like once not in combat, considering gold times are all around the 15mins mark, it's very quick runs.

[Nyxolem]

Sure looks that way. Will take a good amount of practice Bronze times are very high indeed, silver should be doable by most people also, probably even with a wipe. The good thing is you can reset the dungeon as much as you like once not in combat, considering gold times are all around the 15mins mark, it's very quick runs.

A couple clarifications based on my experiences running Stormstout Challenge mode.
- Gold will be very difficult to get on all of the maps and even bronze shouldn't be a cake walk.
- Challenge modes are legitimately hard.
- You can reset the timer/instance but if you do it a couple times within a period of time you get a timer before you can reset it again.

The current Realm Best times for Stormstout on beta are:
15:44 - Mekkatorque (EU)
18:35 - Lost Isles (US)
20:26 - Gilneas(US)
57:07 - Hamuul (KR)

The gold time is 12 minutes. All but Hamuul are silver times (and silver is not easy to get).

[Ashrr]

Any idea if this can be done x-realm?

[Lefrog]

Any idea if this can be done x-realm?

GC said yes and then another dev said no, blue posts on front page from all the recent interviews. So we really have no idea right now.

[Azrile]

Some of the gold times are brutal. At some point, the devs, or some internal testers must have achieved that time (or they wouldn´t have used it).. but wow.. after seeing groups do these things 10-20 times and still be at 20 minutes.. they almost have to cut their time in half to get gold.

I am not much of an epeen worshiper.. but seriously, If I see people in that new gear.. I am going to be very impressed. Yeah, there will probably be ´tricks´ to get one or two of them.. but to find the tricks for every challenge dungeon. Huge amount of planning. Kinda like that DK that solos crazy stuff.

[Azshira]

A couple clarifications based on my experiences running Stormstout Challenge mode.
- Gold will be very difficult to get on all of the maps and even bronze shouldn't be a cake walk.
- Challenge modes are legitimately hard.
- You can reset the timer/instance but if you do it a couple times within a period of time you get a timer before you can reset it again.

The current Realm Best times for Stormstout on beta are:
15:44 - Mekkatorque (EU)
18:35 - Lost Isles (US)
20:26 - Gilneas(US)
57:07 - Hamuul (KR)

The gold time is 12 minutes. All but Hamuul are silver times (and silver is not easy to get).

Awesome clarification thank you. I just personally cannot wait until I'm geared to start challenge modes ie. full blues/some epics.

[Deleted]

with the gear scalling down, do you need to reforge more into hit and expertise so you still have enough? or will hit and exp be the same

[Criptos]

with the gear scalling down, do you need to reforge more into hit and expertise so you still have enough? or will hit and exp be the same

They have it so hit / expertise will remain capped.

[Faeglendir]

They have it so hit / expertise will remain capped.

This is something I can't fully understand.

See, if you are in full blue 463 gear, getting ready for raiding, you will probably have lot of pieces with hit to be capped in raids, you will be even reforging to hit, sacrificing other stats. But you will be capped for raids and for challenge dungeons. Your gear won't scale up or down.

But if you are in full epic raiding gear, it will have lot of hit by its own and in addition to that, high amounts of other secondary stats. You will be hit capped for raids, and if you step into challenge modes, your gear will scale down to ilvl 463. Now this feature kicks in and even when you should be way under hit cap, you are fine. But you still had large amounts of secondary stats, which, even after scaling down, are still higher than they'd be in blue gear. You get these bonus numbers, because you don't sacrifice secondary stats in favor of hit, like you did before.

[Chaltione]

This is something I can't fully understand.

See, if you are in full blue 463 gear, getting ready for raiding, you will probably have lot of pieces with hit to be capped in raids, you will be even reforging to hit, sacrificing other stats. But you will be capped for raids and for challenge dungeons. Your gear won't scale up or down.

But if you are in full epic raiding gear, it will have lot of hit by its own and in addition to that, high amounts of other secondary stats. You will be hit capped for raids, and if you step into challenge modes, your gear will scale down to ilvl 463. Now this feature kicks in and even when you should be way under hit cap, you are fine. But you still had large amounts of secondary stats, which, even after scaling down, are still higher than they'd be in blue gear. You get these bonus numbers, because you don't sacrifice secondary stats in favor of hit, like you did before.

This should answer the question about how hit/expertise works: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5208541231#5

The explanation can get a bit technical, but basically no, you don't need a separate set of gear for challenge modes.

When your gear is scaled down, we keep your hit and expertise % the same, and if needed, subtract extra from your other ratings while keeping their proportions the same. It's also worth noting that we've added 1 level to every enemy in challenge mode dungeons, so that the bosses are 93 instead of 92.

These numbers aren't accurate, but just to illustrate how it'll work: If you have 15% hit, 10% crit, 10% haste, and 10% mastery, and your gear needs to be scaled down by 20% to reach the normalization threshold, normally you might expect your stats to go down to 12% hit, 8% crit, 8% haste and 8% mastery. Instead you'll end up at 15% hit, 7% crit, 7% haste, and 7% mastery. (I know that not all stats require the same ratings so this isn't precise, but hopefully you get the idea.)

Now, I did lie a little bit: If you're very precisely trying to hit some haste breakpoints for your spec, you may end up wanting to keep a separate set of challenge mode gear, but that's the sort of behavior we expect from people who already have Gold and are trying to improve their time by a second or two for realm/region leaderboard bragging rights. But the impact of a stat point or two here or there is going to be trivial compared to basic things like how your group handles patrols, how much or little crowd control you choose to use, and so forth. If you think back to something like the original Zul'Aman bear run, success or failure was never a matter of having 1% extra crit or not; it was more typically a product of whether you let that scout make it to the drums, or whether you got too reckless and wiped to one of the bosses.

Note how it also answers the question about hit/exp capping for raids vs challenge modes, by stating that challenge mode bosses are level 93, same as raid bosses, so you want the same hit/exp values.