Dev Watercooler - Itemization in 6.2
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
In World of Warcraft Patch 6.2, we’re making some changes to our Raid itemization with the goal of improving the Personal Loot experience, creating more interesting distinctions among items, and providing rewards that more closely reflect the challenge players face to earn them.

Personal Loot Improvements
The Personal Loot system offers several advantages to certain group types, but there are still several areas where we think we can make improvements. Our goals with Personal Loot going forward are threefold:
  • Make Personal Loot more consistent and rewarding.
  • Bring Personal Loot up to be competitive with Group Loot, so players who prefer Personal Loot receive rewards comparable to those you get from groups using Master Loot or Need/Greed.
  • Celebrate rewarding Personal Loot within the group in a way that captures the excitement of receiving rewards in Group Loot.

First, rather than treating loot chances independently for each player—sometimes yielding only one or even zero items for a group—we’ll use a system similar to Group Loot to determine how many items a boss will award based on eligible group size. As a result, groups will receive a much more predictable number of drops when they defeat a boss. In addition, set items will reliably drop in Personal Loot, just like they do in Group Loot today. The end result is that groups using Personal Loot will acquire their 2- and 4-piece set bonuses at around the same time as groups using Group Loot acquire theirs.

We’re also increasing the overall rate of reward for Personal Loot, giving players more items overall to offset the fact that Personal Loot rewards can’t be distributed among group members. We know that finding that one awesome specific trinket to round out your gear set can be difficult with Personal Loot, and this should help increase your odds.

Finally, the most visible change is the new Personal Loot UI. Part of the fun of raiding is progressing and improving as a group, not just as an individual. The previous Personal Loot system celebrated your own rewards, but would bury what your groupmates received in the chat log. However, the moment when your friend finally wins that long sought-after sword can be just as important to you as that moment you won your boots—and we wanted the game to help you celebrate it, too. Now when you loot an item, everyone in your group will see what you won!

These Personal Loot improvements aren’t limited to Hellfire Citadel—we’re updating all of our Draenor dungeons, including Mythic dungeons, to use the same system.


Secondary Stats
In the early days of World of Warcraft, Raid bosses didn’t have that many items to drop—there were only 150 items in all of Molten Core, and more than half of those were set items. This small amount of total gear in a Raid meant there might only have been one or two items per slot in an entire tier that were appropriate for your class—and if you were a Hunter or a Shaman in a place like Molten Core, that meant your only option for a belt in the entire Raid zone was your class set piece. On top of that, if an item wasn’t class restricted, it was shared between many other specializations with wildly different ideas of which stats were good or bad. When very few items were available to fill any given slot, the desire to make sure they were useful for many specs led us to keep from straying too far from a 50/50 split on secondary stats.

As the game has evolved, we’ve increased the number of items that bosses drop per kill, as well as the variety of items they drop. We’ve made secondary stats more competitive with one another, and we’ve reduced the frequency of oddball items that were only useful to a few classes. This made more items useful to more people, but eroded the distinction and sense of identity that items held in the past. Too rare became the situation where you knew for sure that this drop was your awesome piece of equipment, and that feeling of finding a truly special item came less often than we would have liked.

To help bolster that sense of excitement, we’ve decided to shake things up when it comes to how secondary stats appear on Raid loot in this patch. Inside Hellfire Citadel, you’ll see a wider range of high and low secondary stat values on items than you have in a long time. Alongside some tuning adjustments that should ensure your attuned stats are the right choice, this change should also make it easier for you to identify which items are good for you in a more interesting way than just “equip the highest Item Level.” Our goal is to help make Hellfire Citadel Raid items more distinct and meaningful to you, and we hope you’ll let us know how things feel once you start collecting your new gear.

Item Level Ramp
As this expansion has progressed, it’s become increasingly apparent that there is a mismatch between challenge and reward for guilds that delve deep into large Raid zones. When the Item Level for rewards across a given difficulty of a zone is flat, a caster staff from Heroic Imperator Mar’gok is largely equal in power to one from Heroic Tectus, despite Mar’gok being the far more challenging boss. We often see and hear about guilds killing a late-zone boss like Blast Furnace for the first time, only to disenchant most of the drops because everyone already has loot from earlier bosses in those slots. On top of that, many guilds move on to higher difficulties before they fully complete a difficulty, because Heroic Darmac loot is stronger than Normal Blackhand loot—and you can get it for much less effort.

To address this, we are structuring Hellfire Citadel so that the Item Level of the loot awarded by bosses increases as players proceed deeper into the zone, culminating in Archimonde—providing both the ultimate challenge and the ultimate reward.

We’re doing this for a few reasons. First, it feels good to get higher-level items as you progress through a zone. One of the more prominent pieces of feedback we got about Blackrock Foundry was that it felt unrewarding for challenging bosses like Iron Maidens to drop loot that was just as good as—or possibly worse than—Gruul’s.

This also breaks up where your best items are in a good way. The power of the items that you can get in a particular slot will differ based on how far through the zone you are. The best boots for you will likely be different if you are on Normal Gorefiend than they would be if you’re on Heroic Mannoroth, which would be different than if you’re on Mythic Iron Reaver, and so on.

We can’t overstate how much we appreciate your feedback on topics like this, especially when you’ve taken the time to join us on the Patch 6.2 PTR and experienced the changes for yourself. As always, everyone’s encouraged to join us and other testers in the PTR Discussion forums as we prepare to unleash Hellfire.
This article was originally published in forum thread: Dev Watercooler - Itemization in 6.2 started by chaud View original post
Comments 197 Comments
  1. berdrek's Avatar
    evry time they talk about appropriate reward to match the challenge LFR pops in evreyones head like the gigantic elephant in the room that it is. lol.
  1. mmoc59b5827c7e's Avatar
    We’ve made secondary stats more competitive with one another
    For what classes? Even if some stats are closer together, there are still useless ones around. This will get reverted for the next raid of HFC.

    Man, its like children making the same mistakes as their parents currently at Blizzard - no joke, this is far off of being professional.
  1. Unholyground's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by addlemanc View Post
    I think weapons should be all the same ilvl, except maybe off the last boss. Not really fair to those that get one off an earlier boss, but don't have one later that is good for them. Unless they plan on adding many more weapons to the table.
    Well obviously there needs to be larger changes as well to address this but it is a step in the right direction I think. However raid boss difficulty is also subjective in a lot of cases based on group skill level as a whole.
  1. Layke's Avatar
    Is Blizzard just forgetting that Archimonde doesn't drop weapons for Rogues, Hunters, Tanks, or 1h DPS classes? Like, in what world is it a good idea that only an Int Staff, Healing Mace, and 2h sword drop off him?

    Like, holy crap. Weapons are the biggest upgrades that anyone can get and most of us are just getting thrown under the bus? I fail to see how it's fair that some classes will get weapons 5 ilvls higher than others. I don't mind the ilvl ramp up, but it needs to be fair.
  1. mhdoe's Avatar
    Seriously the point of a raid is the challenge of getting the ach, mount or the excitement of getting that one boss down with your friends or guild along with getting the gear to accomplish this. If your guild is falling apart and you think it is because the "item level of gear does not feel rewarding" has anything to do with it and a increasing item level per boss is going to stop the guild from falling apart it is already too late.
  1. Unholyground's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Layke View Post
    Is Blizzard just forgetting that Archimonde doesn't drop weapons for Rogues, Hunters, Tanks, or 1h DPS classes? Like, in what world is it a good idea that only an Int Staff, Healing Mace, and 2h sword drop off him?

    Like, holy crap. Weapons are the biggest upgrades that anyone can get and most of us are just getting thrown under the bus? I fail to see how it's fair that some classes will get weapons 5 ilvls higher than others. I don't mind the ilvl ramp up, but it needs to be fair.
    The big question is what is the item level of the 5/5 upgrade vs the best weapon in the raid?
  1. Mrbleedinggums's Avatar
    People are jumping the gun. Check on PTR; if the last 2-3 bosses don't drop the highest ilvl loot (so everyone has their top end weapon) then you can bitch and moan about it.
  1. Tharkkun's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by UcanDoSht View Post
    For what classes? Even if some stats are closer together, there are still useless ones around. This will get reverted for the next raid of HFC.

    Man, its like children making the same mistakes as their parents currently at Blizzard - no joke, this is far off of being professional.
    Secondary stats are so close that none are useless. You split hairs between one being valued at .53 and another .45. Yet that may come out to 100 dps in the end. Boring maybe but not useless.
  1. Spotnick's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by purebalance View Post
    Archimonde for example only has a caster staff, caster mace, and a 2H str weapon. Kill him on normal and that sets you above players who kill heroic bosses that can't use those drops.
    If you kill Archimonde mythic, your progression is over by then. Achimonde heroic weapons will be replaced by mythic weapons soon enough.
  1. Kryos's Avatar
    Does Archimonde drop a hunter weapon? If not, this is a slap in the face to all classes that don't get weapons from Archimonde.
  1. barackohmama's Avatar
    Screw loot. Just remove it and lift the level cap. Then ppl that kill Bosses and trash gets exp and lvl ups. The higher lvl you are the More power You become. Bosses reward Möre exp than trash ofc.
  1. Unholyground's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Kryos View Post
    Does Archimonde drop a hunter weapon? If not, this is a slap in the face to all classes that don't get weapons from Archimonde.
    Well to be fair bows, crossbows, and guns are all extremely under utilized/itemized because Hunters are the only class that can benefit from them so they cannot justify putting more than a few in the game making it extremely hard for a Hunter of any kind to get a weapon upgrade outside of crafting. Hopefully once they add the Dark Ranger in as a class it will solve this issue.
  1. Kryos's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Unholyground View Post
    Well to be fair bows, crossbows, and guns are all extremely under utilized/itemized because Hunters are the only class that can benefit from them so they cannot justify putting more than a few in the game making it extremely hard for a Hunter of any kind to get a weapon upgrade outside of crafting. Hopefully once they add the Dark Ranger in as a class it will solve this issue.
    That's not my problem. I'm a hunter and I see no reason why my BiS weapons should be worse than those of casters and 2 hand weapon wielders.
  1. Tharkkun's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Mrbleedinggums View Post
    People are jumping the gun. Check on PTR; if the last 2-3 bosses don't drop the highest ilvl loot (so everyone has their top end weapon) then you can bitch and moan about it.
    You can check wowhead right now by clicking PTR at the top. Only Archimonde drops the 635 weapons and doesn't have one for all classes.
  1. NakataVagrant's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Mrbleedinggums View Post
    People are jumping the gun. Check on PTR; if the last 2-3 bosses don't drop the highest ilvl loot (so everyone has their top end weapon) then you can bitch and moan about it.
    I'd imagine Archimonde will have weapons for everyone like Lich King that will be the highest ilvl obtainable and the rest of the bosses will have at least 1 option of a weapon per bracket of ilvl difficulty thus not having disparity.

    Kinda like this (fake ilvls just for the example):
    - Bracket 1 (Boss 1,2,3,4): ilvl 705 weapons
    - Bracket 2 (Boss 5,6,7,8): ilvl 715 weapons
    - Bracket 3 (Boss 9,10,11,12): ilvl 725 weapons
    - Bracket 4 (Archimonde): ilvl 735 weapons

    I think this would be the only way to be fair about it, else they'll have shitstorm brewing if there are only a few weapons that have the highest ilvl possible thus screwing over the classes that can't use them.

    Since the PTR isn't done yet we might see way more items added to the bosses.
  1. Illuminance's Avatar
    Geniuses at blizzard think that having raids only care about the last boss (and therefore guaranteeing a disenchant of all bosses before him eventually) is better than the current system where you still might get an upgrade from a previous boss.

    Did they forget how much it sucked to run a 2-3 hour molten core just for rag?
  1. mmoc66a6a172f7's Avatar
    what about getting the same items again with personal loot? ;3
  1. theostrichsays's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by xskarma View Post
    I hate this ramped up ilevel nonsense. Instead of ALL bosses being interesting cause they might have loot for you it's now ONLY the later bosses that are interesting. Instead of ALL loot being interesting it's now ONLY the later bosses loot that is interesting.

    Not to mention there's the problem of Archimonde not dropping weapons for every class/spec, so some classes will just get screwed over this tier (and being a caster I'm not one of them and I still think this is just a terrible decision).


    All in all this is just a way to artificially lengthen the time it takes for everyone to get gear, since all the pieces you need are on the last bosses, so you need to kill them a significant amount of times to get the drops you need. The fact the blog makes no mention of this is, in my opinion, dishonest.
    Honest question here.
    Would you rather see something like Madness of Deathwing, where there are other weapons dropping throughout the instance, but the final boss has all the really good weapons? Its not an amp in Ilvl, but it is clearly an amp in player power.
  1. Unholyground's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Kryos View Post
    That's not my problem. I'm a hunter and I see no reason why my BiS weapons should be worse than those of casters and 2 hand weapon wielders.
    I am just saying they have math reasons, I am not disagreeing with you, and it will likely be fixed.
  1. Gismodan's Avatar
    Too little too late.

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