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

[Lorgar Aurelian]

I am fully heroic raid geared,i raid heroic raids. I shouldn't replace that gear with blues from rehashed effortless content.

Mabye aim for mythic? Your gear doesn’t seem to be at the same level as your pride.

[grexly75]

I wonder whatever happened to people raiding because it was fun. As for the colors on gear, I've been saying that should go away since like Wrath.

Good point, it used to be that raiding was fun more so when doing it with friends and guildies, and the accomplishment of downing a new raid boss.. These days it seems more about getting gear and that is about it..

[Lorgar Aurelian]

it's the ease of obtaining gear that invalidates the prior tier than is the problem. At least in BC/Wrath etc you had to actually participate is some of the previous tiers in order to be 'raid ready' as raids and some badge gear were the only sources of gear (crafted gear was good too). Even some items/trinkets obtained from previous tiers were worth holding on to.

Now I can just go do afk world quests and some timewalking to invalidate the previous tier. It's probably gone too far, especially after 4 months.

This is normal quaility gear though in wrath trial of champions was on par with normal ulduar and the icc dungeons were Proabbly on or with normal trial of the crusader though I haven’t checked. If you were aiming for the lowest difficulty you could do it with out gear from the other raids as the dungeons were good enough to get you back into normal. Sure normal or heroic as it’s now called isn’t the lowest tier any more but it’s still unchanged that the catch up dungeons are just as good as the last tier.

[rhorle]

I am fully heroic raid geared,i raid heroic raids. I shouldn't replace that gear with blues from rehashed effortless content.

You are not heroic raid geared anymore. It isn't that hard to understand. The base gear has increased. You can already get Heroic level gear with out killing one heroic raid boss. So your whine is just a whine.

[grexly75]

Hasn’t this been a thing since wrath Mabye even bc? New stuff comes out that replaces the normal raid gear like say toc replacing normal ulduar gear and the icc dungeons replacing normal toc (raid) gear?

Exactly it has been that way since TBC and probably vanilla itself.. Actually that is probably true in that if raiding Naxx 40 one would be replacing gear from previous raids.. So in a sense this sort of thing is nothing new, but to a lot of people it does seem new to them..

[Devilyaki]

Made me go do them, forgot about them honestly

[MoanaLisa]

Raiding is fun, but if LFR/Normal/Heroic/Mythic all dropped the same iLvl gear how many people do you think would do the harder difficulties?

When I was raiding I guess I was one of those rare birds that enjoyed doing the difficult content for its own sake. Our guild was happy when we got down a boss on heroic difficulty for the first time. This was in Wrath and T11 in Cataclysm. It was never really about the gear for me. And it was never ever about "showing off" or any of that.

If you're one of those that would always take the easiest path then that's your choice of course. It's a choice that's difficult to respect though.

On a more personal point: If you're like this now, I'd hate to be around you when your end raid mythic gear starts getting replaced in the next expansion for carrying Farmer John's boar poop from one side of his field to the other. Deny if you like that somehow it's different but it's exactly the same mechanic.

Time passes ----> Numbers go up. It's a terrible way to do progression (clothing) but it's what there is.

[Echocho]

375 isn't even good and it most certainly isn't " Heroic Geared " in Season 2.

Heroic Uldir drops 370 gear. How is 375 not heroic geared??

[Protean]

Thanks blizz for letting me know that all my heroic raiding in Uldir was completely pointless. I guess I'll just stop trying and sub for a month each "season" and get the same gear in one thousandth of the time and effort by doing trivial bullshit content.

Is this your first time raiding or something?

[Bryntrollian]

Heroic Uldir drops 370 gear. How is 375 not heroic geared??

Since the latest raid's normal mode gear is 385.

Welcome to Season 2, now you can continue raiding heroic and replace those 370s with 400s.

[rhorle]

Heroic Uldir drops 370 gear. How is 375 not heroic geared??

Heroic gear in season 2 is the key words. Blizzard shifted the base item level for content upwards. Some content still awards based on Season 1 (launch tier). The rest is now Season 2 8.1 tier.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...season-2/73698

[Th3Scourge]

This is normal quaility gear though in wrath trial of champions was on par with normal ulduar and the icc dungeons were Proabbly on or with normal trial of the crusader though I haven’t checked. If you were aiming for the lowest difficulty you could do it with out gear from the other raids as the dungeons were good enough to get you back into normal. Sure normal or heroic as it’s now called isn’t the lowest tier any more but it’s still unchanged that the catch up dungeons are just as good as the last tier.

You still had to do some of the previous content to be raid ready. The later catch-up dungeons did invalidate previous tiers but this was in patch 3.3 with ICC and if I remember one of them was no cakewalk. If it's towards the end of an expansion I have less of an issue with it than if it was in the first quarter of an expansion

[Icaras]

Color doesn't matter. Who cares? It'll be replaced soon anyway with probably either LFR or raid gear (or crafted)

Exactly, gear and stats are...well gear and stats. You only care about the source of the item or the rarity for reasons that don't involve bettering your character...I'd suspect for reasons of being wanting to feel superior. IE: I have epics you only have rares...I'm better. Or My epics are RAID DROPS....yours are merely world quest gear.

If you raid merely to feel superior because of how much rarer in game your equipment is...I'm sorry, but that is (IMHO) a little sad.

Me? I just like to get new stuff and get stronger.

[Ielenia]

and that im ok with but now time walking.

Why shouldn't Timewalking give relevant rewards, considering it's an event that lasts only one week out of a month?

[Sorshen]

lol, the gear power creep is more out of hand than in Legion.
The whole adding 30ilvls to everything across the board is shit design.

[dexx]

Blizz will always raise the iLvl to keep people coming back.
But I agree that they are making the jumps too big. Each new tier should see gear increase by only 6-12 iLvl. ie; previous normal becomes new LFR, previous heroic becomes new normal, etc.

[kamuimac]

dont worry they will spike even higher with welfare 400 itlv gear for allience

[Xath]

Now you're just dreaming. Raiding was always a niche activity. Always. You think magically the numbers for previous tiers were infinitely better? Raiding as a whole was a niche activity, and after the entry tiers participation dropped off even more sharply. Saying that only a tiny majority only saw the final tier was a very positive spin they put on that. Most people didn't raid, and most people that did raid never moved into BWL in Vanilla, or beyond SSC in BC. Raiding didn't radically change every single expansion until the end of Cata because it was successful. Lol.

Kara was incredibly popular and if you want to talk about niche activities over half the wow population at any one time is sub 120 either just screwing around with leveling a few hours every month or just rping. Being max level is a niche activity raiding once one hits max level is not and never has been. You could be raiding mc for years and be quite happy chilling with friends and slowly clearing it maybe eventually moving up to bwl. Not everyone has to see all content that's what youtube exists for. Hell the idea of pushing content is what got me into raiding in the first place because I wanted to push forward I wanted that awesome axe helm and I ended up clearing mc then ony then bwl then aq40 then naxx and so on. Now if LFR had existed who knows if I even doing that I probably go get my axe helm feel very little sense of accomplishment and drift away from the game. If it wasn't for that awesome looking gear I don't know if I would have even got into raiding and no lfr isn't raiding it's heavily detrimental to the raiding scene in fact.

- - - Updated - - -

dont worry they will spike even higher with welfare 400 itlv gear for allience

Yeah but blizz already got like 500 dollars in transfers from limit cause of that so working as intended?

- - - Updated - - -

This is normal quaility gear though in wrath trial of champions was on par with normal ulduar and the icc dungeons were Proabbly on or with normal trial of the crusader though I haven’t checked. If you were aiming for the lowest difficulty you could do it with out gear from the other raids as the dungeons were good enough to get you back into normal. Sure normal or heroic as it’s now called isn’t the lowest tier any more but it’s still unchanged that the catch up dungeons are just as good as the last tier.

You realize that when they started to give full sets of badge gear not just pieces ie toc is when the growth rate started heavily slowing. Retention stayed decent largely because people would stay for arthas but after toc a lot of people I talked to said there was just something missing and post ICC is when the first major loss in subs happened. It became rollercoasterish through mop then started a heavy downward trend. If you clear shit on normal or heroic the amount of time needed to move up into mythic to fight the same boss is just incredibly daunting and you aren't getting unique items just a different color with a few more frills added on. When you killed gruul you wanted to move into ssc and tk and get your t5 now though you would be moving to mythic gruul which has a few new mechanics is the same model and drops pretty much the same gear.

[Echocho]

Heroic gear in season 2 is the key words. Blizzard shifted the base item level for content upwards. Some content still awards based on Season 1 (launch tier). The rest is now Season 2 8.1 tier.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...season-2/73698

It's a catch-up mechanism. You catch up to people who have been playing the game for 3 months. Why the hell would you catch up to content that's not even out yet?

[Daffan]

No, many systems in older MMOs actually are frustrating. Mostly systems that punished death were common and frustrating. Why would it be a good idea to make characters lose their items/experience/levels when dying in the world? That makes you feel like shit when you have to go out in the world. You can't just wander around and explore. That also forces the devs to strive for max. balance between classes/specs and we've learned in the past 15 years that balance isn't the most fun or best thing for the game.

WoW was popular because it was a good game. Not perfect but still really good.

There is a reason some games have item loss on death, those games usually have a fully developed economy and crafting gameplay that requires item loss to stimulate supply and demand.