Have you even played the game at all before? This is normal and has happened tons of times already.
Have you even played the game at all before? This is normal and has happened tons of times already.
People don't forgive, they forget. - Rust Cohle
Sorta? People have foggy memories about Sunwell badge gear. It only existed for three or four slots. You couldnt just completely gear a toon that way (well, you could, but youd have a weird mix of iLevels - mostly of the base badge gear level, 2-3 pieces of the T5 equivalent, and 2-3 pieces of Sunwell/T6 - and no weapon better than a dungeon blue unless you were a fee very specific specs that could get drops from a Heroic or you ground your face into Thrallmar rep (or the Alliance equiv) for a Heroic-level caster weapon).
It was NOTHING like what we have now.
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Not really. You just need to not have giant iLevel leaps. Vanilla-LK we only went through 264 iLevels. Because there werent massive iLevel gains from tier to tier. It made going back to do older content completely viable, because sometimes a weapon, or other item was better for a certain spec or class than a “current tier” item because of a proc, better stat allocation, etc... because it was only 13 iLevels different, not 60.
Only for a few slots. There was a wdie-ish selection of the Heroic-Dungeon-Final-Boss drop iLevel (which were available at launch, and were not “catch up”, bu trather vital for even being able to enter Kara), but only 2-4 pieces of the T5 iLevel (which, mind you, was only 13 iLevels higher than Kara) depending on your class and spec, and then (later), 2-4 pieces (which sometimes overlapped with the T5 iLevel items, again depending on class and spec) of T6 iLevel gear.
It was NOTHING like it is now.
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Uhh... no.
The patch after the DM patch also re-balanced and re-itemized all of the loot from the max level dungeons, as well, which was intended to ship with the DM patch and just wasn’t finished in time.
And ZG could in no way ever be considered “catch up” since the main issue with raiding in Vanilla was finding enough competent people to clear the encounters. You needed 40 because 10-15 were going to be deadweight. ZG was actually HARDER for a lot of people to clear because there was no easement for carrying bads.
And, as i’ve pointe dout numerous times, the badges thing in BC.. people are just remembering wrong. You could never fully gear from badges, even after the Sunwell launch.
And “PvP gear from BGs” wasn’t a thing until the TBC pre-patch. At that point it was irrelevant.
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Nope. 10 Man “Hard” droped a six-iLevel split, just like the last bosses of the tiers droped a six-iLevel split item. (Six ilevels higher than the rest of the raid, but 7 lower than the base of the next raid, as there were 13 iLevel gaps between raids).
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And then, only if you were doing Hard mode ICC and 277 was LK only.
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The expansion started at 210, FYI.
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There was also a hard limit on badges, you could only do each Heroic once/day. There was no random queue that let you avoid the lockout.
Why is that bad? Playing just for ilvl is the most autistic goal I can think of. Why should Blizzard choose that model over what they have now? Where your progression lies in actually doing the content and players aren't fucked for months if they (have to) take a break?
Mythic raiders probably care least of all about this since they play for the (raid) progression phase and to a lesser degree for parses.
As always it's the filthy casual scrubs who are crying for a way to make the game more autistic, after they already got us AP grinds.
And yet my guild is no more since wotlk because playing WoW became a second job. You grow, you start working for a job and for a family and suddenly you realize you have no more 3-4 hours a day to play a game isolating yourself from the rest of the world.
You say “oh well, let’s see what happens if I play 1 hour per day instead and not even all days”. In about a month you see you’re simply left behind in every aspect of the game and you quit.
In the meantime a new generation of “bite and run” games and players appear and your business model based on subscriptions nerdies starts to fall. You have now to choose between staying the hardcore way and drop incomes, eventually abandoning the game, or taking the casual bandwagon to survive.
I'm... confused. Is the argument here that the general concept of item level increase is a bad thing? Because that has been in the game for a very long time. Or that low geared players now have more sources to acquire gear which make it easier for them to get into the new raiding and M+ seasons? Because i don't see anything wrong with that.
The way I see it is that this is a great change. This should mostly affect alts, returning players and newcomers. And that demographic especially should not feel alienated or blocked from accessing certain parts the game because of their item level. Heroic raiders and above on the other hand will hardly even notice any of these changes.
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted" ~Einstein
Wish more people would take that to heart.
When in the history of WoW has it been like this? Never. Super inflated ilvl's, they have to reduce and change it every xpac now, it's crazy. It happened KIND of like now in the past xpac, Legion, but we're literally now having such ilvl inflation that they are probably going to have to nerf everyone again DURING this xpac ... when they previously went 6 xpac's without having to do this.
It's stupid. And hasn't been like this for 15 years ... it's been like this for 2 and a half, of the worst years in WoW history when they've lost nearly all of the players.
Agreed, but I would say at least since end of TBC, with a higher tier entry raid (ZA), new dungeon with higher ilvl (MT) and badges - together with a new raid.
The factions introduced earlier in TBC also had some useful items. WOTLK just made it more consistent.
And, of course, TBC was in itself a massive catchup mechanism.
The people who dislike those mechanisms should have quit at that time and not start complaining now, I know one that did quit due to the hysteria surrounding badge-gear.
2-3x the subs? Did you mean 1/5 (at best) to 1/6 of the subs (though it's likely a lot less)? That's what actually happened. You were referring to 12 million people subbed to without any doubt, based on any metric, we'll give you the benefit and just go with the absolute HIGHEST possible estimate and go with 2 million still subbed?
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When 10+ million people quit doing something, sorry for you fanboys out there, but that's legitimate cause for concern.
It begins with absence and desire.It begins with blood and fear.It begins with....