Can anyone explain how RnG has materially gotten worse since Classic?

[masterjc]

I see threads
I heard guild mates complain
Over
And over

But I don’t understand why they do it. In classic loot had horrible drop chances, with some guilds going 6+ months without getting a right for their left or a left for their right.

At worse it hasn’t gotten better but it certainly isn’t worse.

Am I missing something or am I right to conclude that WoW, 14 years later, is still full of people whining about dice rolls in a Dungeons and Dragons-esque game?

1. before - Item dropped from Boss/chest etc. it was targetable
now - it can come from anywhere. but no infor/idea where it is better chance to get
2. before - items had stats. there were good items, and BiS items
now- items have lots of customizations. and each of them has RNG chance to appear
a. chance to be titanforged
b. chance to have certain azerite ability
c. chance to have socket
d. chance to have extra stat (leech, speed, etc)
so there happens to be lots of RNG now

[IceMan1763]

For instance in WotLK, you had a set number of relevant loot for you, and all you had to do was run the content it drops from until it drops.

Sorry but the people who want to dismiss critics of the current loot system will never compare it to Wrath because the Wrath loot system was CLEARLY and OBJECTIVELY better than what we have now and had in Legion. The only way to make their "Durrrr loot was always RNG NUB Git Gud" argument stick is to compare to Classic, which pretty much no one would ever want to go back to as far as loot is concerned.

[Deleted]

Back in the day, there was what was called a "Best in Slot" geat list (BiS List). This list was based on the stats your spec needs and what was available. back in the days, you had to fill certain caps, like hit rating, expertise rating, defense rating - and you had to deal with breakpoints. The BiS list gave you a list of the best gear you could wear. period.

And that meant you could work towards that. You knew exactly which bosses you needed to kill. And you knew how likely it was for the boss to drop hat item. And if your guild had loot council / dkp / whatever, you could somewhat reliably gauge how long it would take you to get that gear. It wasn't uncommon for the better guilds to have almost their entire raid in BiS gear at the end of a raid tier.

This worked fine in TBC and Wrath, and to some extend in cata.

They even added mechanism to reduce RNG. With TBC, we got badges. And you could farm those and get good gear in slots where you got unlucky. Badges were a big part of Wrath. Some BiS pieces cam from badges. If you were unlucky, you could get decent gear on several slots via badges.

Then with cata, they replaced it with valor points. valor points were a great addition. it removed the need to log in every day. you could just do all your point farming on one day if you wanted to and be free to play alts or even other games, instead of being a hamster on a treadmill.

Then they introduced reforging. reforging again reduced RNG - because you could reforge mediocre pieces to pretty good pieces, or bad ones to mediocre ones. it gave the players agency and gave them more usable loot.

And then it started to go downhill. They introduced thunderforging with ToT. Back then, thunderforging was only +6 item levels. But it was stupid nonetheless, because suddenly in order to get BiS gear, you not only had to get that gear - you had to get it thunderforged. getting all slots thunderforged was simply impossible. Weapons and trinkets were especially bad - if you got lucky and got a thunderforged wepaon and the BiS trinkets thunderfrged, you did vatly more damage then the other player who had put in just as much effort. Guilds that were lucky with thunderforging were vastly more powerful then guilds who got unlucky with thunderforging. RNG started to influence your performnace to an extreme level.

And it went downhill from there. They removed badges / valor points, and thus reduced reliable ways to get gear. WF/TF means you can no longer predict when you will get good gear, you need to hope for it to procc, and if you are lucky, you are significantly more powerful. High WF/TF rolls on trinkets or weapons are still a pretty big difference. remember the arcano shard? back in Legion, in patch 7.3.5., you could be lucky and have an arcano shard from a world boss procc all the way from 860 to 985. And that char would have absolutely destroyed everyone else that had played for the whole expansion.

the removed reforging, and thus more gear became useless again. With M+, world quests and emissaries as well as raids and warfronts, we have access to more gear then ever before. but due to the heavy RNG and their removal of player agency and predicatbility, you can not use a lot of that gear - it ends up de'd or scrapped.

Legendaries meant you could be extremely lucky. At the start of Legion, it was more effective to play another character of the same class then to farm the second legendary. if the first legendary was not BiS, people would level a new char. this was due to no bad luck protection existing. They improved upon the system multiple times, by giving you the four first legendaries significantly faster and by adding BLP. With 7.3.5, we finally saw some player agency come back and some predictability come back, when legendaries could be bought via essences. Had they done this with 7.0, a lot of people would not have cried that loud about bad RNG. Legendaies were a big part of why people were upset.

Right now, we lack:
* A predictably way to get decent gear via valor points
* A way to reforge bad/mediocre gear to something usable

but instead we get
* A shitshow of WF/TF where skill or effort has no value, but only luck

And that is why people keep saying that there is too much RNg. they removed player agency, they removed predictability and replaced it with a WF/TF lottery.

[Tiwack]

People are just as badly hung up on gear now as they were back then. Only way to beat bad odds is not participate and focus on the things that matter instead of things you'll replace soon enough.

You can't win with these people. BiS lists are just as boring as they are interesting to others and WF/TF is a feature, not a bug, its purpose is to keep the game interesting where the old lists made it fall flat.

[IceMan1763]

People are just as badly hung up on gear now as they were back then. Only way to beat bad odds is not participate and focus on the things that matter instead of things you'll replace soon enough.

You can't win with these people. BiS lists are just as boring as they are interesting to others and WF/TF is a feature, not a bug, its purpose is to keep the game interesting where the old lists made it fall flat.

No one here called WF/TF a bug... it is a feature. However it's a shitty ass feature most hate.

RNG distribution of Legiondaries was not a bug, it was an element of a feature. That doesn't mean it's not the absolute worst design decision I've ever seen this development team make. You can't abscond responsibility for shitty features you implement by pretending that critics are calling them bugs.

[HuxNeva]

You made a broad characterization of people and then dismissed them or agreed with them based on arguments you made for them. Not only that, you openly admitted that you are willing to dismiss what a sizable portion of the community wants simply because you disagree with their idea of how there should be prestige in the game. That's why I called it strawmanning.

Again, Blizzard's intent is completely irrelevant. Time after time players have and will continue to make things into grinds if the system rewards them for it, even if it makes them hate the system. Like how it wasn't Blizzard's intent for people to try and min/max AP by running islands for 18+hrs a day, yet people still did it until they burnt out. It's the same with M+ and raid farms, which I already addressed why people don't do it en masse anymore: because it's not fun. It's tedious, but the system rewards not pushing content and continually farming at a compromised difficulty (in BfA mythics, +6/+7). You have referred to it as "... not feeling compelled...", but that's you agreeing with me. While people still run the content, the majority of players don't feel compelled to do this farm as much anymore because it feels awful and is a futile effort. Many people want to be able to progress their character as much as possible but are perpetually stuck in a sub-optimal state. What you're taking as acceptance is actually a feeling of futility because there is no possible way, outside of ridiculous time investments or RNG, to make your character the best it can be.

The problem here is that what one part of the community wants is the direct opposite of what another portion of the community wants. One part wants to be 'done', another part wants "there's always something to do". Both are mutually exclusive. Blizzard went with the latter, while trying to appease the former by introducing diminishing returns.
You are right that intent is irrelevant if you just look at a single snapshot, but gives you an indication about how systems are likely to be adapted.

As for your groups farming +6/+7 (I don't get the +6, +5 gives the same loot and you need to run 3x the number of dungeons to get the same loot chance as +7), i is probably because they are not able to reliably farm +9 or +10. You need to run about 9x a +7 to get the same loot chance as 1x +10 if TF is what you are after, so if you can farm +10, why wouldn't you. It might be a bit slower per instance, but certainly not even x2.

I looked at the Legion results. I realy liked running M+, so I had a decent r.io and close to 1.000 instances run. I never did it to farm AP as I found it futile. I also found that the difference in guild between those that ran multiple high keys per day, to those that just did a single +15 per week for 'the chest' was close to non existent. The one weekly raid is ridiculously more rewarding lootwise than tons of +15 M+. I think there was just a single piece equipped for me that didn't come from either the raids or from 'the chest', and our guild didn't even run Mythic, so that is from the perspective of HC raiding only.

You should never feel compelled to run something that is not fun. I don't think TF rationally compels you. The math does not work out. There will ofc always be people that feel compelled for irrational reasons. This was my class 2. There is another system in BfA that is perversly compelling. That is the overincentivised 'Warmode'. I am completely against that, and think it is bad for the game.

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<snipped for brevity>

To me BiS lists, badges and reforging were the most boring things to exist. It feels like chomping away at chores. 0 excitement. I hope they never return.
The gearing meta game of Legion was the most interesting ever. TF introduced a ton more depth to the game. The legendaries were great. As you got more and more into the game, you discovered they all had their niche uses, non of them were 'BiS' overall. Those soc-alled BiS's were usually just BiS for standing still hitting a fluffy pillow for 5 minutes. I do agree that the rate of acquiring them was waaaay to slow for such interesting gear. It took too long to get your 5 or 6 desirable ones. For raiding it mattered less, but for M+ pushing you could be realy limited by not having the right ones.

M+ in Legion allowed you to gearswap all the time depending on the situation and your needs. I hate that this is gone. BfA is a huge step backwards.

[artam]

Back in the day, there was what was called a "Best in Slot" geat list (BiS List). This list was based on the stats your spec needs and what was available. back in the days, you had to fill certain caps, like hit rating, expertise rating, defense rating - and you had to deal with breakpoints. The BiS list gave you a list of the best gear you could wear. period.

And that meant you could work towards that. You knew exactly which bosses you needed to kill. And you knew how likely it was for the boss to drop hat item. And if your guild had loot council / dkp / whatever, you could somewhat reliably gauge how long it would take you to get that gear. It wasn't uncommon for the better guilds to have almost their entire raid in BiS gear at the end of a raid tier.

This worked fine in TBC and Wrath, and to some extend in cata.

They even added mechanism to reduce RNG. With TBC, we got badges. And you could farm those and get good gear in slots where you got unlucky. Badges were a big part of Wrath. Some BiS pieces cam from badges. If you were unlucky, you could get decent gear on several slots via badges.

Then with cata, they replaced it with valor points. valor points were a great addition. it removed the need to log in every day. you could just do all your point farming on one day if you wanted to and be free to play alts or even other games, instead of being a hamster on a treadmill.

Then they introduced reforging. reforging again reduced RNG - because you could reforge mediocre pieces to pretty good pieces, or bad ones to mediocre ones. it gave the players agency and gave them more usable loot.

And then it started to go downhill. They introduced thunderforging with ToT. Back then, thunderforging was only +6 item levels. But it was stupid nonetheless, because suddenly in order to get BiS gear, you not only had to get that gear - you had to get it thunderforged. getting all slots thunderforged was simply impossible. Weapons and trinkets were especially bad - if you got lucky and got a thunderforged wepaon and the BiS trinkets thunderfrged, you did vatly more damage then the other player who had put in just as much effort. Guilds that were lucky with thunderforging were vastly more powerful then guilds who got unlucky with thunderforging. RNG started to influence your performnace to an extreme level.

And it went downhill from there. They removed badges / valor points, and thus reduced reliable ways to get gear. WF/TF means you can no longer predict when you will get good gear, you need to hope for it to procc, and if you are lucky, you are significantly more powerful. High WF/TF rolls on trinkets or weapons are still a pretty big difference. remember the arcano shard? back in Legion, in patch 7.3.5., you could be lucky and have an arcano shard from a world boss procc all the way from 860 to 985. And that char would have absolutely destroyed everyone else that had played for the whole expansion.

the removed reforging, and thus more gear became useless again. With M+, world quests and emissaries as well as raids and warfronts, we have access to more gear then ever before. but due to the heavy RNG and their removal of player agency and predicatbility, you can not use a lot of that gear - it ends up de'd or scrapped.

Legendaries meant you could be extremely lucky. At the start of Legion, it was more effective to play another character of the same class then to farm the second legendary. if the first legendary was not BiS, people would level a new char. this was due to no bad luck protection existing. They improved upon the system multiple times, by giving you the four first legendaries significantly faster and by adding BLP. With 7.3.5, we finally saw some player agency come back and some predictability come back, when legendaries could be bought via essences. Had they done this with 7.0, a lot of people would not have cried that loud about bad RNG. Legendaies were a big part of why people were upset.

Right now, we lack:
* A predictably way to get decent gear via valor points
* A way to reforge bad/mediocre gear to something usable

but instead we get
* A shitshow of WF/TF where skill or effort has no value, but only luck

And that is why people keep saying that there is too much RNg. they removed player agency, they removed predictability and replaced it with a WF/TF lottery.

Amazing post, thank you.

[Linkedblade]

It's a few things.

Better gear is easier to acquire now, but for those who like to min/max, it's gotten harder. Items with multiple stats, and things like Azerite Traits has made 'targetting' the best difficult.

It's also a case of the carrot. Before, you knew that X item that you need dropped off X boss. You run it again, and again, until it drops. Just like mounts. But now, it's becoming difficult to determine where that best/next item may come from.

This compounded with the randomness of azerite traits and war/titanforging

[rohoz]

No one here called WF/TF a bug... it is a feature. However it's a shitty ass feature most hate.

RNG distribution of Legiondaries was not a bug, it was an element of a feature. That doesn't mean it's not the absolute worst design decision I've ever seen this development team make. You can't abscond responsibility for shitty features you implement by pretending that critics are calling them bugs.

It's a feature vocal forum autists hate***

Weapons and azerite can't tf. System is fine.

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This compounded with the randomness of azerite traits and war/titanforging

azerite isn't random. What you get from the chest is random, yes, but you can get anything from that chest. Azerite pieces always have the same traits.

[StayTuned]

I don't really get this: You're not doing anything higher than m+4, probably also not heroic raiding. So you kind of ARE finished already with the gear. 360 is more than enough to run the +4s and normal mode raids, so effectively, you already are wearing your BIS. Just because you THINK that you need more and better does not make it so.

Look it at this way: In vanilla, it took half the current content to get to where you are now already. And in vanilla it stopped until the next content came out. Now in modern wow you actually can strive to get to the next level: Doing +8s/9s/10s and hoeric raiding. For this you will then get new higher gear. A couple of weeks after that, you're in ilvl 370-375. Then you can strive to get to the next level: Doing +15s and mythic raiding.

So looking at it positively might actually let you see the real benefit of modern wow instead of simply dismissing it as garbage and praying for Jesus to save the world - i.e. Vanilla to let you time travel to a different time - which is impossible btw!

You misunderstood me.

I'm don't stop at +4 totally out of my own choice. It's just that doing higher runs requires these weird things like raider.io profiles and curves and what not. It's not that you cannot get a group for higher levels at all, my record is a "solid" +7, but it just takes so much time for me to find a group. And running one or two higher ones in the evening before I go offline is just not that fun. So I rather run multiple +4's which are easy to organize.

I really, really can't wait for Vanilla Servers. I hope they keep the mechanics like they once were and don't just offer old content with the rng procc system.

[Teri]

Vanilla : RNG on drop chance only. Dungeon gear was entirely eclipsed by raids. 8 piece set bonus on Tier.
Now : RNG Titanforging, Personal Loot, Multiple Raids available per weekly reset, M+, WQ.

[StayTuned]

Vanilla : RNG on drop chance only. Dungeon gear was entirely eclipsed by raids.

Now : RNG Titanforging, Personal Loot, Multiple Raids available per weekly reset, M+, WQ.

It's not about the quantity of loot. 99% of the items I get I destroy. I want to be able to plan my character, not play Diablo 3 with more skills.

On that note, time for some Diablo 3.

[Teri]

It's not about the quantity of loot. 99% of the items I get I destroy. I want to be able to plan my character, not play Diablo 3 with more skills.

Of course it's about quanitity, now you get a lot more, but it's never automaticly BiS.

- Many added difficulities/item sources/overlap via Titanforging means
- RNG titanforging even on Mythic raid items, they aren't automaticly the highest ilevel/socket.

Vanilla and TBC, items dropped as they were, from 1 source only. You just needed more of it for 3/5/8 piece set bonus for some classes, which could take a long time, especially Vanilla with 40 people.

They did adress Titanforging on Azerite Gear and Weapons, so it's different then Legion, still means added layers of RNG on the rest of items.

[IceMan1763]

It's a feature vocal forum autists hate***

Did you just call critics of WF/TF autistic? Seriously Blizz deserves the player base they are left with....

[rohoz]

Did you just call critics of WF/TF autistic? Seriously Blizz deserves the player base they are left with....

Yes, yes I did.

TFing makes very, very little difference in gearing your toon. Happens so rarely that people are going apeshit over a 1% probability (if not lower)

Fully TF'ed LFR heroes don't exist.

But go on

[Gavll]

I don't see why they ever dropped the badge system from TBC

[Jahrastafari]

TFing makes very, very little difference in gearing your toon.

So that cloak, the two rings and the belt that I got from WQs that all TF'd to 390+ didn't make a difference?

[Teri]

Fully TF'ed LFR heroes don't exist.

Which was never the main complaint of realistic critics of TF. LFR items capping at max itemlevel were rare.

Heroic overlapping into Mythic, and Mythic items able to go higher still due to RNG is a different story.

[Jahrastafari]

Vanilla : RNG on drop chance only. No time-gating outside of raids.

Now : RNG drop change, with RNG WF, with RNG TF, with RNG socket, with RNG tertiary, ALL wrapped up in a hard time-gated Personal loot/lootbox setup.

[rohoz]

So that cloak, the two rings and the belt that I got from WQs that all TF'd to 390+ didn't make a difference?

Do sims of those items at un upgraded itemlevels. I doubt they'd be more than a 5% upgrade. In the grand scheme of things, titanforges are nothing.

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Which was never the main complaint of realistic critics of TF. LFR items capping at max itemlevel were rare.

Heroic overlapping into Mythic, and Mythic items able to go higher still due to RNG is a different story.

It's the reverse of the original complaint that led to warforging. "why do content if i already have the best gear"
can't have it both ways.