I'm pretty comfortable if we want to go with 185 to 277. That puts the difference at 92 (which another poster mentioned) from four tiers, plus a pre-expansion raid; so we're talking about five raid sessions and an entire expansion that was perfectly rewarding at less than a hundred points. This expansion is already past the hundred, and the reason I'm suggesting that this is its first tier is because the first tier has been the second raid since Mists of Pandaria (Mogu'shan Vaults in Mists, Highmaul in Warlords, the Emerald Nightmare in Legion and Uldur in this one).
Sigh.
It's been explained, multiple times, why it hasn't existed since vanilla. Read a few posts from the pages and learn. That's all I ask, but don't expect.
I enjoyed your post, but there's another response I made that you may have missed. This is it, via a link.
The fun part about that is that you could go back to Ulduar 10 man and do Thorim HM as a warrior for the Armor Pen Trinket (Mjolnir Runestone, remember the name btw) because it was extremely good until you got the ICC 25HC trinkets. Or going back to TotC to get the Death's Choice trinket. That trinket was even BiS for many classes even when you cleared ICC 25HC. Relevant items even 1(.5) Tier(s) later... wtf. That was an amazing System. Or being able to mix and match your items no matter if it was mail or plate when you were a holy pally because that way you could get more MP5 than with pure plate.
Then the fun police came and gave us "more choices" by removing pretty much all of them.
The longer I think about the state of the game, the worse it gets. Wtf do we only have 4 stats to chose from? Ofc I won't care about my Items when there's only 2 good stats for my class and I'll pick whatever has the highest itemlvl with those stats. That's the stat template system from Legion PvP with the illusion of actually having a choice.
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That is incredibly flawed math. Just don't ever post something like that again please.
Easier to balance, simpler to understand.
Not every player has the time or the will to go around and look for hit cap or diminihing return or thhe fact thar arpen over 100% was effectively a buff.
The game has dumbed down every xpac in the hope to attract casual, which are not coming nor staying.
At the cost of fun and actually caring what you got.
Int used to give casters spell crit, spell power and increased your mana pool. Interesting in 3 ways.
Strength gave plate classes 2 AP and parry. Interesting in 2 ways.
Agi gave leather classes 1 AP, melee crit and dodge. 3 Interesting components.
Then there were spirit, MP5, crit, haste, armor pen, hit, expertise, dodge, parry, AP and SP. In TBC you had even more stats.
For PvP you had that + Spell pen and resilience.
Today you have only 4 secondary stats, because primary stats do nothing but increase AP/SP. Two of those are relevant. Which means you can only care about ilvl. Blizz showers you with ilvl. So in return you don't have to/can care about your items. Nice system.
#morechoices
There is nothing flawed there. WoW reached 100 million players in 2014 with concurrent subs never being much above 10 million. That means 90 million people already left the game prior to that. In those "glory days" when the game was so great with only a meager 90% turnover rate.
It is 90% of accounts not players. Also time where game lost most of its playerbase was during wotlk, cata and mop not during vannila and tbc. Vannila and tbc had high retatantion rate and Wotlk started huge player drop off as game complelty changed its direction which something what many vannila and tbc players turned off.
Its a double edged sword. Existing players feel a lack of power progression and frustration of being "reset" each expac. It allows them to attract new players who will not feel daunted at trying to catch up. A lot of older players, enjoyed the aspiration to to gear up over a long period of time to emulate others they have seen in the game. These days, more and more players want "Plug and Play". The game devs and publishers cater for this as each new player is potential new revenue.
The problem lies as we have seen with WoW, when the existing player base becomes unhappy and starts to leave, and new players are not engaged enough to stay.
I'll take my welfare loot for now as I have no choice to stay competitive with my peers.
But I'd rather have quality over quantity and feel rewarded instead of entitled.
Yes was fun but today would hardly be manageable. There are 3 more classes than used to be, and class design today is very spec specific. Balancing all those stat for each class/spec it's a huge task and i get why blizz scrapped them.
Also, completely separated by the ilvl lottery. Stat simplification could easily have been done keeping the bis system.
Instead, it's gone the total opposite direction where every single piece of gear needs to be simmed. ArPen was an amazing stat because it gave you choices, hit cap was fine because it forced you to gem for it (and sockets were plentiful) and then you could replace with +stats when you had your hit cap. MP5, spirit, all the defensives, it all mattered and gave players choice.
This is something what Blizzard have to make proper decision for themself. They want to make great game and earn good cash or want to go medicore and be grewdy to earn even more cash. Ufortunately i dont think Blizzard is cappable of creating games for masses like Epic games with Fortnite or Riot with League of Legends. They now doubling down on DI. What if this game fails? I dont think Blizzard is cappable to capture big playerbases like Riot or Epic games no matter how many mobile games they will create.
Yeah, so thats created accounts which counts all the "free pass" accounts ever created. Its only a marketing trick and nothing else. If we were to check accounts that actually bought game time (aka subscribers) I'd imagine we'd have far less actual players (which is why we'll never get confirmation on it)
Its like saying f2p mobile games have hundreds of millions of players when they actually mean hundreds of millions of downloads.