So, item levels are getting spiked for no reason. Again.

[Lurker1]

Wow. Just... Wow. Here's the text from the post, for those who haven't read it.

- New Maximum Item Level: With great challenges come great rewards and the maximum possible item level will go up to 425.
- Battle for Darkshore Warfront: Battle for Darkshore rewards will also increase to 400 from both the outdoor boss and from Warfront quest that can be completed once per cycle. The difficulty of the Warfront will increase however, and the item level required to queue will increase to 335. These changes will go into effect after the current Warfront cycle has ended. Until that time, players will still receive Season 1 rewards.
- World Quest Emissary Rewards: World Quest Emissary weapon and armor rewards will also now scale up to 385 based on the player’s own item level. Rewards from the original Battle for Azeroth Launch World bosses will remain at item level 355 to stay on par with Uldir.
- Dungeon Rewards and Difficulty: The difficulty of Heroic and Mythic dungeons will also be increase as follows: Normal–340, Heroic–355, and Mythic– 370 (baseline).
- Mythic Keystone Dungeons and PvP: During the first week of Season 2 Mythic Keystone Dungeon rewards will be capped at Mythic 6 quality (item level 385). PvP Season 2 end-of-match rewards will be capped at 385.
- Seals of Wartorn Fate: Seals of Wartorn Fate are not being reset and this same currency can be used for Battle of Dazar’alor and Season 2 bonus rolls; the cap on how many can be held at once remains at 5.

Meh, enough is enough.

I'm not putting any more money into this because, frankly, this design team just hasn't got a clue why its systems are broken, and why so many players are resolutely unhappy with it. With a single raid tier, the item level has been well over doubled from what the expansion starts with, and rather than keeping content relevant it just gets made laughably pointless with a shallow system that players want sheer luck from in order to gear past the spots of what they're actually doing.

Welcome to Diablo 3, built by a team that has fundamentally no interest in making a game that its players are interested in.

Dungeons just jump 30 points, while WQs jump to 385.

Jesus.

Feels good man i knew if i took it easy and did casual content was the way to go i saw it coming a mile away but people laughed at me hahahaha whos laughing now who i am thats for sure LMFAO!.

[Tomana]

You aren't experiencing anything in lfr

That's not quite true, you experience the story. Putting it behind a unique-difficulty raid like in BC is simply unacceptable in my opinion.
Sure, LFR can be a simple "story mode" without loot and I'm fine with that (now that tier sets are gone) but it has to be there.

[Whistl3r]

Badges of Justice were introduced in TBC.

From memory the Kara level ones were largely crap and the BT level ones didnt come out until Sunwell opened? Such a long time ago, I certainly dont remember anything from that expansion gearing up new players fast.

[bullseyed]

The reasons are pretty obvious and make sense. A new raid is coming out, which means that current raid gear is now the entry level gear for the new raid, which in turn means that content like world quests and 5 mans, whose purpose is to help players equip themselves with entry level raid gear, needs higher level gear rewards.

I am not really sure exactly why you think this is so obviously problematic that you don't even have to explain your position?

A lot of people who want to play classic/TBC would like to go back to the old model where if you started late or rerolled, you still progressed through Karazhan, Gruul, Mag, TK, SSC, etc before going into BT.

If you do not force people to actually progress through the previous raid before the new raid, they don't know mechanics or how to raid, so you end up with high ilvl people who can't move out of fire.

The counterpoint from that era was if you had a friend join it was a pain in the ass to try to carry them though stuff to gear them up to your level. This is why eventually all the casual stuff like WQ rewards and whatnot were added as catch-up mechanics.



A lot of this problematic design dichotomy exists today, just in different forms. Most non-bads would agree that the 370 and 385 gear from the warfronts, even one piece a cycle, was overkill. At the same time, without those quests, most non-bads wouldn't do warfronts at all, at least not on their mains.

So what do you do? RIP warfronts by pushing out the good players? Or let the bads get free mythic raid quality gear, making it harder to tell who is or is not good at the game?

OP is dumb in the comments made, but there is a valid point in the less extreme version of his position. That point doesn't have an easy answer.

[MCJOHNS117]

This is what I never understood about the stat-squish and the ilevel squish. They were bandaids. They knew the root of the problem. Warforged gear increases the item level of an expansion by ridiculous amounts. Instead of fixing the fundamental problem with ilvl and gear scaling, they fix the symptoms. Patch 10.0.1 will see another stat or ilvl squish.

Personal opinion: A system where gear isn't static would serve their goals of player retention. Each time an item is repaired it would lose some durability until it finally breaks for good. This makes receiving even base ilvl items a reward because you know in the future the gear you have on will no longer be viable. It doesnt help with scaling of gear over WoW time periods (15+ years of game updates) But it could remove titanforge/warforge items, as they would no longer be needed to keep people on the treadmill.

[Kurve1776]

If you're referring to normal, noone looking for challenging content did normal past week 3 but whatever. You aint gonna get 2 different tiers of content at launch.

The discussion it's about launch, it's about additional tiers /after/ the launch tier.

[cparle87]

I still think it scales more than you are sayin, not something like 5% of 50%, I think blizzard posted something not so long ago, I'll check for it and answer you

Mobs gain power at 20% the rate you do. So it's something like you gain 50% they gain 10%. To prevent a repeat of MoP when a geared raider could gather an entire subzone of mantid, barely take a scratch, and flatten them in two globals.

[bullseyed]

The way they are calling each tier a season now, is a bit worrying. To me it seems like a push to divide the expansion into 3-4 part where they just reset everything, making the stuff you did in the previous season almost irrelevant. The extreme of this model is to change the expansion model and make it something like Fortnite where they sell you each season. I know is tin foil hat conspiracy, but it would be a way to do annual expansions, something that they always wanted to do but never were able to accomplish.

To those that ask what is different, is the shear amount of gear you get now(and to a lesser extreme in Legion). Before there was some sort of reset every tier, but the stuff outside of raids didnt scale to the new rewards. Now we have WQ, m+, m+ weakly chest, warfronts, expolsuim. I can get a new character and hit ilv 400 in 2 weeks, making it pointless to play on the first season(outside of cosmetic rewards).

If they cut a $60 expansion into $15 tiers, that would be an extremely pro-player pro-customer move. At that point thought they might as well increase the sub from $15 to $20 and have the expansions be "free" for everyone.

Seasonal play is great when Path of Exile copies it from Diablo, but bad for everyone else?


There is something about seasons that goes a little counter to a game with a "story", but the alternative is people complaining about power creep. You dumbdumbs won't stop whining about how in Legion we were the leader of our class and defeated titans and now we have to fight podunk little nobodies, so the alternative is seasonal play where there is less overarching progression.

[Kwaai]

I do think there is something to the argument that there's too much gear out there, in general. During Uldir I got to ~378 in mid October and depending on what Azerite traits I'm running I'm between 384 and 388 now. Going up 6 ilvls in 3 months, after having gone up 30 ilvls in the preceding month is just a strange feeling. I'm fine with large ilvl jumps between tiers, but I would like the gearing curve to even out a bit.

Personally I think the culprit is the weekly m+ cache. I'd prefer it only give out currency for Azerite gear. Maybe double the amount it gives in exchange for removing the random item. That slows down the initial ilvl gains we're going to see (especially people who don't immediately jump into mythic), and also makes it easier to eventually have a lot more choice in what traits we get to pick.

[Terongor]

It's been nothing like this 'for a long time'.

Absolutely nothing like it.

It largely started in Legion, but was nowhere near as bad as this.

Those arguing to the contrary are largely telling me that they've been playing the game for a few years; at best.

Magister terrance was loot was all in all about the same difficulty the same as shattered halls and all other max level tbc dungeons but gave alot better items which worked mechanics which let people to get better loot without raiding so casualising. Wotlk had trial dungeons and icc dungeons which all very pretty easy like all wotlk dungeons and through them casual people collected badges for better raid level loot and quel'delar which was better than most raid weapons in icc10 so that was too illogical casualising ilevel increase for non raider. Cata too continued with same trends adding badges and dungeons to max level which gave better loot than original max level dungeons and were about the same difficulty as original dungeons but with cata case alot easier than original hc max level dungeons(until nerf because pugs sucked) and in the adding lfr for mop and extremely strong rep gear, with op thundering and timeless isles gear with scenarios rewards. WoD added mythic dungeons for no reason and the gear was too good compared to the actual difficulty.

Blizzard has always given us catch up mechanics which were compared to difficulty they actually were too good.

[bullseyed]

We went +200 ilvl in just one raid tier. Blizzard made their ilvl/stat squish meaningless within a few months, it's shocking how they keep butchering the character progression by throwing endless gear/ilvl/difficulties into a blender.

395 - 355 = 201

Yep! Math checks out.

[rohoz]

If you weren't good enough then you weren't good enough, you could try to get into better guilds but you wouldn't succeed there if you weren't good enough. You had a reason to become better, now you just afk in LFR and think you're pro for having high ilvl gear and having seen "all the content" within a day.

Its a system for instant gratification people (often referred as kids) and because of such systems we're seeing content, like raid tiers, being delayed just over month away from content patch release so they can get another month of $$ from those people.

Activision is that kind of players, old Blizzard was actual, real, players so their systems were better in this regard.

Didn't expect a tinfoil hat from you. But then again, how well do you know people on the internet, really?

[bullseyed]

I do think there is something to the argument that there's too much gear out there, in general. During Uldir I got to ~378 in mid October and depending on what Azerite traits I'm running I'm between 384 and 388 now. Going up 6 ilvls in 3 months, after having gone up 30 ilvls in the preceding month is just a strange feeling. I'm fine with large ilvl jumps between tiers, but I would like the gearing curve to even out a bit.

Personally I think the culprit is the weekly m+ cache. I'd prefer it only give out currency for Azerite gear. Maybe double the amount it gives in exchange for removing the random item. That slows down the initial ilvl gains we're going to see (especially people who don't immediately jump into mythic), and also makes it easier to eventually have a lot more choice in what traits we get to pick.

I mean I leveled my DH just in time to hit both warfront quests, got a world boss drop and jumped into heroic raid, bonus rolled the first two bosses and got 2 items, plus 1 boss drop (that TF'd to 385 with a socket). Didn't even kill the other bosses in raid.

I know that was extremely lucky (hadn't gotten upgrades on my main in a month prior so I deserved it). Went from new character not at max level to 377 ilvl in about 2 weeks.

[Sting]

From memory the Kara level ones were largely crap and the BT level ones didnt come out until Sunwell opened? Such a long time ago, I certainly dont remember anything from that expansion gearing up new players fast.

They were still considered the original welfare epics by a lot of players. I remember a meme from ages ago that was basically a level 1 dwarf covered in BoJ with the caption "t6 gear revealed". Personally I don't see what the big deal is, even in TBC and WotLK the badge gear wasn't optimal compared to current tier raid drops and required a decent amount of dedication to get. On top of that, they were usually only for specific gear slots and nowhere near a full set.

- - - Updated - - -

Didn't expect a tinfoil hat from you. But then again, how well do you know people on the internet, really?

He's not wearing a tinfoil hat, you're wearing blinders.

[rohoz]

The discussion it's about launch, it's about additional tiers /after/ the launch tier.

Ah, so you wanna go back to tbc where rn you'd be languishing in heroics and kara pre prince? gotcha.

[cparle87]

We had 2 difficulties in wrath. 10 and 25 man were separate progression paths not difficulties. LFR didn't exist until the last patch of Cata and Flex didn't become a thing until Siege.

Wrath also introduced heroic difficulty beginning in ToC and ICC.

[Dilbon]

The go-through-every-step approach of TBC may be good in theory but it just doesn't work in an MMO where casuals and tryhards play together.

[bullseyed]

They're simply increasing everything based upon Previous tier Mythic (Raid) is now LFR, i.e. +30 levels.

What were you expecting?

I don't think it is unreasonable to say that someone who buys BFA today should have to clear Uldir like the rest of us before going into the new raid.

I think that would make the game healthier overall and decrease burnout since people will be sick of the new raid in a few weeks, just like how people quit Uldir after a month.

So many people liked TBC and whatnot because it was more fun to do your alt runs in SSC and TK than to run BT 4x a week on different characters. Variety increased satisfaction. And achieving a boss kill was timeless rather than temporary.



There were negative tradeoffs to how the system used to be, and many of those negatives would be amplified in today's gaming world where basic effort is seen as too much work... but... classic is coming soon. I'm personally not going for classic, but I will be going for TBC servers if they do that. Might level on classic just in case.

[rohoz]

They were still considered the original welfare epics by a lot of players. I remember a meme from ages ago that was basically a level 1 dwarf covered in BoJ with the caption "t6 gear revealed". Personally I don't see what the big deal is, even in TBC and WotLK the badge gear wasn't optimal compared to current tier raid drops and required a decent amount of dedication to get. On top of that, they were usually only for specific gear slots and nowhere near a full set.

- - - Updated - - -



He's not wearing a tinfoil hat, you're wearing blinders.

Again, raids launch when sufficient time has passed for most of the playerbase to progress.
Noone liked hanging out in ssc when BT launched. you for real? Lol. Releasing raids when they are done would invalidate previous tiers the same way that they would at a set schedule, difference being the completion %

Is it a bad idea to ensure that content has a high enough completion rate before making it irrelevant?


Also, you're wrong about badge gear. A lot of the badge gear items were heads and shoulders better than alternatives from raids. Leather boots from the ZA vendor (something's tabi boots) were bis until sunwell. Better than anything in T5/6

[cparle87]

If people are doing them to progress then they're relevant. Pretty much all raids were relevant in TBC throughout the expansion because you didn't have instant catch-ups on alts.

You simply weren't farming one raid on multiple difficulties but multiple raids on one, it was all around a better system that is ruined by players with "I paid money thus I deserve to get everything handed to me" attitude.

Let's transplant the raiding scenario from BC over to Legion, why don't we.
Half of raiders would do EN and see just a bit of ToV. About a third of raiders would get to see some of ToS. And only like 5% of raiders, which meant like 1% of the total playerbase, would get to see Antorus. Can you really see the modern playerbase accepting this?