425 non-socketed benthic gear with bonuses can be better than 455 gear

[beeftotem]

I dunno, outside of (gated) ICC, every raid since wotlk has been a week 1 clear affair. I've no idea what "back then" was to you bc I def killed every boss back then week 1/2. Esp when heroic became a thing, week 1/2 normal clears were what almost every guild I've been in has done.

Did you raid heroic or Join a heroic raiding guild? You would only use normal as "training" or gaining a few extra ilvls to start pushing heroic.

[SirCowdog]

Because some mythic raiders cannot stand filthy casuals even getting one piece that equals anything they can get.

It's called "Special Snowflake" Syndrome.

It's not quite as simple as that.

Don't get me wrong here, there are legit people who think exactly the way you described. But at the same time there are some pretty serious ramifications to the health of the game when the balance of the reward structure doesn't make any sense.

So when one player spends the time to coordinate with ten or more others, buys consumables, learns the boss mechanics, and eventually invests the time to down the boss.....it doesn't make a lot of sense for another player to just faceroll semi afk through mindless autoattacking trash mobs solo and get the same or better reward.

The value proposition of those two scenarios is massively disparate. Expand that too far into too many aspects of the game and the whole thing starts to fall apart. Why run a mythic raid at all when you can go EZ mode for better rewards?

This is why I said Blizz needs to figure out a better reward system for raiding. It's not to hold the casuls down. It's to give players a legit reason to play the content.

EDIT: On a tangent, this is the same reason why TF is so bad for the game.

[arkanon]

It's not quite as simple as that.

Don't get me wrong here, there are legit people wgo think exactly the way you described. But at the same time there are some pretty serious ramifications to the health of the game when the balance of the reward structure doesn't male any sense.

So when one player spends the time to coordinate with ten or more others, buys consumables, learns the boss mechanics, and eventually invests the time to down the boss.....it doesn't make a lot of sense for another player to just faceroll semi afk through mindless autoattacking trash mobs solo and get the same or better reward.

The value proposition of those two scenarios is massively disparate. Expand that too far into too many aspects of the game and the whole thing starts to fall apart. Why run a mythic raid at all when you can go EZ mode for better rewards?

This is why I said Blizz needs to figure out a better reward system for raiding. It's not to hold the casuls down. It's to give players a legit reason to play the content.

EDIT: On a tangent, this is the same reason why TF is so bad for the game.

Agree with everything in here. All of it. I would add one thing though - I want there to be meaningful progression outside of raids for players who prefer to play solo, and farm WQ and similar content. I am absolutely fine with that gear serving more than one purpose, as well. I think there is the foundations of a really cool system here, its just the implementation and tuning that is way off. Even the staunches defenders of this gear have admitted that it is too strong in raid content. What i would like to see is Have the catchup gear system, but with a chance for WQ / solo players to upgrade that gear to allow them to grow and advance their character in a meaningful way, that impacts their gameplay positively.

Lets look at it this using Benthic gear, but a clean slate. Benthic gear drops, and is 400 ilvl. Continuing to collect pearls will allow you to upgrade that item, but not its Ilvl instead, it looks like this:

25 Pearls = you talk to NPC, and he adds an equip bonus from a pool of options (your choice). base level might say "increases damage by 5% while in the open world"
10 pearls = 7%
15 pearls = 10%
20 pearls = 15%

Once fully upgraded, you have the option of purchasing a gem slot as well, for XX pearls. The numbers dont matter here, but what i am trying to say is make sure that the gear is still perfectly viable as catch up gear - and will allow an alt to START m+, raiding, or pvp, based on its ilvl alone. It doenst overlap with other content, but is a great starting point.

When a player enters instanced content, the bonus is disabled, but the gear is still 400ilvl with a socket, so would still be very strong gear to start with.

I want those bonuses to be EXTREMELY powerful out in the world. When fully upgraded, they should be above mythic raid or conq pvp gear when completing WQ and moving around the world. I want them to feel like gods among their part of the game - if they are willing to put in the time and effort required to obtain and upgrade the gear. I want those players to be able to have meaningful progression that allows them to complete their chosen gameplay tasks faster, more effectively, and obtain better rewrads.

Spitballing some ideas for those bonuses (which can be increased):

- increased mount speed
- reduced damage taken
- dmg reflect (thorns)
- hearth stone reduced
- increased gold rewards
- trinkets with powerful procs (including flashy visuals)
- increased flightpath speed

i would love to see what ideas for equip bonuses some of the WQ players would like to see? Im open to suggestions. Personally, i dont see a negative here at all. For anyone.

[SirCowdog]

Agree with everything in here. All of it. I would add one thing though - I want there to be meaningful progression outside of raids for players who prefer to play solo, and farm WQ and similar content.

I actually agree with that as well. However, in order for that to happen I think open world content would have to increase in hitpoints, damage, and complexity in a similar way that raids and dungeons do.

I can already see some people rolling their eyes and getting angry thats their solo farm faceroll is being threatened. The arguments about the value of always having that base level easy open world are fair, but that doesn't preclude having optional difficulty increases for players who want additional challenge, in the exact same ways that raids or M+ have higher settings.

Even if all we did was include the Mage Tower with a M+ like increase in mutators, that would still be a vast improvement over the mindless grind of WQs.

And the rewards could be just about anything. Gold, AP, essences, or weekly gear chests. Just as long as the rewards were in line with the difficulty relative to M+ or raids.

[BananaHandsB]

Classic WoW.

nah. I mean I loved vanilla WoW, but the one thing that isn't better is the raiding. It was good, don't get me wrong, but way too ez for today's players. Especially as an hpal, can't stand just spamming essentially a single spell, along w/ bosses with such simplistic mechanics. If your enjoy a slower, easier raid scene where you can still feel leet by killing bosses, I guess I see the appeal, but at least for me, today's mythic raids are so much more appealing. That's where it ends though. Outside of raiding, I enjoyed classic WoW much more (and I still very much enjoyed classic raiding, but I was a different player at the time). The awful part of mythic raiding today isn't the raids themselves, but all the boring nonsense you have to do outside of raids to stay relevant.

[beeftotem]

Agree with everything in here. All of it. I would add one thing though - I want there to be meaningful progression outside of raids for players who prefer to play solo, and farm WQ and similar content. I am absolutely fine with that gear serving more than one purpose, as well. I think there is the foundations of a really cool system here, its just the implementation and tuning that is way off. Even the staunches defenders of this gear have admitted that it is too strong in raid content. What i would like to see is Have the catchup gear system, but with a chance for WQ / solo players to upgrade that gear to allow them to grow and advance their character in a meaningful way, that impacts their gameplay positively.

Lets look at it this using Benthic gear, but a clean slate. Benthic gear drops, and is 400 ilvl. Continuing to collect pearls will allow you to upgrade that item, but not its Ilvl instead, it looks like this:

25 Pearls = you talk to NPC, and he adds an equip bonus from a pool of options (your choice). base level might say "increases damage by 5% while in the open world"
10 pearls = 7%
15 pearls = 10%
20 pearls = 15%

Once fully upgraded, you have the option of purchasing a gem slot as well, for XX pearls. The numbers dont matter here, but what i am trying to say is make sure that the gear is still perfectly viable as catch up gear - and will allow an alt to START m+, raiding, or pvp, based on its ilvl alone. It doenst overlap with other content, but is a great starting point.

When a player enters instanced content, the bonus is disabled, but the gear is still 400ilvl with a socket, so would still be very strong gear to start with.

I want those bonuses to be EXTREMELY powerful out in the world. When fully upgraded, they should be above mythic raid or conq pvp gear when completing WQ and moving around the world. I want them to feel like gods among their part of the game - if they are willing to put in the time and effort required to obtain and upgrade the gear. I want those players to be able to have meaningful progression that allows them to complete their chosen gameplay tasks faster, more effectively, and obtain better rewrads.

Spitballing some ideas for those bonuses (which can be increased):

- increased mount speed
- reduced damage taken
- dmg reflect (thorns)
- hearth stone reduced
- increased gold rewards
- trinkets with powerful procs (including flashy visuals)
- increased flightpath speed

i would love to see what ideas for equip bonuses some of the WQ players would like to see? Im open to suggestions. Personally, i dont see a negative here at all. For anyone.

Why would blizzard do this? It goes completely against why they added ilvl scaling.

More of a personal question here, but why exactly do you want to be a god amongst men if the only content you do is wq?

I get why a raider would want to smash through wqs, or a pvper, but a solo player whos only content is was wq. It just makes it sound like you only do wq for the emissary caches and you need to get them out of the way.

[Raelbo]

And what about normal and heroic?

What about them?

Gear power should be somewhat in line with the difficulty/effort required to obtain it. I don't see any obvious reasons why normal or heroic raiders should have a problem with benthic gear.

[Axxil]

If you know me so well...you should know by now im a filthy casual who never puts foot inside a raid.
So i only care about item level when it comes to benthic gear...i dont care about the special effects that only work inside Eternal Palace.

And i replaced the piece i spent 100 pearls on with this (on a Demon Hunter) :

Well to be fair the benthic bracers you had were the shitty ones.

[Raelbo]

Diminishing returns on AP gains is a pretty good start. But at the same time has the drawback of creating an even larger emphasis on sinking even MORE time into getting that final 5%.

One of the things Blizzard could do to curb the advantage of raw time-sinks in order to gain an advantage would be to move further away from gear and stats trumping all other considerations when it comes to performance. Even in super-cutting-edge groups like Method, gear determines peak performance. Which is how things like split raids became prevalent in recent times.

Stop. As I keep trying to get across: The time-spend issue has nothing to do with game design. It's about players competing with each other.

Split raids came about precisely because Blizzard tried to put systems in place to limit the amount of time one could spend in order to get ahead. Highly competitive players who were hitting their weekly caps on everything simply found other ways to use their time to gain an advantage.

What exact form would that take? I'm not entirely certain. It seems pretty clear that gear being the top contributer to performance is an issue.

I think that's a false conclusion. A red herring if you like. Gear is only such a major focus because when you have 2 groups that are so closely matched in terms of skill, it becomes a way to differentiate groups on the basis of raw effort. Remember that you're really only talking about a tiny fraction of the playerbase for whom this is even an issue: Most players play the game at the pace they're comfortable with rather than against some competitor.

I think there's a happy medium in there somewhere. Obviously gear has always been a core part of WoW's progression, and I don't think that removing it entirely from the equation is a good solution. But something clearly needs to be change in order for WoW to move away from the problems that over-emphasis on gear creates.

Or you take a step back and realise that the root of this "problem" isn't game design related at all. It's a side effect of inter-group competition that has been escalating for 15 years. Of course the requirements to "win" the race against other players has become insane. The solution is obvious of course: Realise that the game is designed to cater to anyone trying to play at their own pace, which means that the entire responsibility for setting our own pace is on us.

- - - Updated - - -

The value proposition of those two scenarios is massively disparate. Expand that too far into too many aspects of the game and the whole thing starts to fall apart. Why run a mythic raid at all when you can go EZ mode for better rewards?

But EZ mode doesn't offer better rewards. It never has. So your point is entirely moot.

In case you missed my earlier comments, I already explained why the idea that benthic gear is better than mythic raid gear is actually a fallacy based on an inadequate understand of the facts that emerged from the analysis presented on WoWhead (linked in the OP).

The TL;DR version is that while, yes, the best set of gear includes a few (read 1-2) pieces of benthic gear, the vast majority of any mythic raider's gear is going to come from the raid itself.

This is why I said Blizz needs to figure out a better reward system for raiding. It's not to hold the casuls down. It's to give players a legit reason to play the content.

Honestly, if the only thing driving someone to raid mythic are the rewards then I'd argue that they shouldn't be raiding mythic. I am not saying that mythic raiding shouldn't offer prestigious rewards (which it already does), simply that the real motive for raiding mythic should be the desire to achieve the extraordinary. It's about prestige, a sense of personal accomplishment and a desire to challenge oneself.

To that end the game's gear reward structure has it right. No one needs to raid mythic to get sufficiently good gear to participate and play in the various features of the game. This leaves us, the players, to choose what level we want to play at.

EDIT: On a tangent, this is the same reason why TF is so bad for the game.

We've had this discussion numerous times, and as far as I am concerned you have lost that debate decisively. I think you need to learn that there is a difference between preaching (which is what you do) and debating - which entails listening, considering and then adapting your argument according to the inputs of those you're debating with. Essentially you haven't grown in this debate in like 2 years....

[burek]

Personally, i dont see a negative here at all. For anyone.

Without benthic gear as powerful as it is, the new zones would become pointless, avoided and shat on by the playerbase. The only reward players truly care about is gear, if something doesn't reward gear it is proclaimed shit or "not content". So they made two new zones and added some powerful gear to it - a trinket in mechagon and a few benthic items in nazjatar. That way everybody has a reason to do them (there are collectibles as well for those who somehow don't care about gear), and there are no complains about how the patch has no content.

Instead there are some idiotic complains by two or three people here who keep remaking this same thread over and over, but that is much better than what would have happened with the "no content" crowd.

[Raelbo]

Just to clarify, this isn't framed as a non-mythic raider outperforming a more skilled mythic raider, but on an individual simming basis and how players feel about the system as a whole.

I would argue though that player feelings on this subject are based on perceptions that are largely inaccurate. The problem is that there is a massive difference between what people think that analysis says and what it actually says and now we have an entire thread full people arguing on the assumption that benthic gear >> mythic raid gear resulting in ridiculous conclusions like:

"Why should anyone bother with mythic raiding when the EZ mode benthic gear is superior?"

I was even conservative in using non-socketed instead of socketed (though it seems like people are mostly upgrading socketed anyway). I usually try to be careful with semnatics just to avoid controversial technicalities that can derail a thread.

The problem wasn't that the info given was false. It's that it was incomplete. There is no argument against the fact that the right set of benthic boots is, hands down, BiS. The issue here is that most people in this thread have extrapolated the argument to extend to all benthic gear being better than all mythic gear.

On another note, one other thing if it helps anyone, and I'm gonna drop this in the initial post starter, if people want to see the real world impact of benthic gear, here's the leaderboard for the first mythic boss. You can click on the inidividual players to see gear and all that.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/23#boss=2298

Check it out and look how lower ilvl benthic is already apart of the mythic raiding paradigm this tier and not just a sim only thing.

Dude, I don't even need to look at the data to know with absolute certainty that no one in that list will have any mythic raid gear equipped. And it has nothing to do with the existence of benthic gear.

- - - Updated - - -

I was able to hit world 7th in SoO in mop playing 16 hours a week raiding with roughly a hour or so to aoe grind coins / play the ah.

A questionable claim to start, which, even if taken at face value, proves what exactly?

The simple fact here is that even during MoP, there were numerous threads on all WoW related forums complaining about how much non-raid content raiders were "forced" to participate in order to be competitive.

And it didn't matter what Blizzard tried to do to protect players from themselves, people insisted on finding ways to burn themselves out. For example, at the start of MoP there was the whole debacle with the rep/VP items from the various factions. Blizzard specifically locked those items behind both rep and VP to limit the amount of time that people would be required to devote to the rep grind. You see, because the items were purchased with VP which had a weekly cap, there was no need to grind for exalted with all the factions at once in order to unlock them. The whole system was designed to allow players to pace the rep grind and essentially focus on one faction at a time. But what did the herd do? Yup, they all did all the factions asap, hitting exalted in the first week, complaining bitterly about it. Then, because they now couldn't get their rewards until they could get enough VP, which had the weekly cap, they compained about being gated.

This is a very clear example of players are going to do whatever they can to try and get ahead regardless of the design intent. You don't try to address such an issue by opposing it, you figure out a way to direct it.

On titanforging and warforging we won't agree I see them as what they are pointless gambling to hook low skilled players into subbing longer.

Oh please. You see them how you want to see them in order to support your narrative. That is why we can't agree.

[Quotey]

do you really not think there is a difference between the strictly limited mop dailies and the almost literally (and in legion's case, literally) endless ap and endless m+ grind?

[Raelbo]

do you really not think there is a difference between the strictly limited mop dailies and the almost literally (and in legion's case, literally) endless ap and endless m+ grind?

Whoa, you really missed the point there bud.

Players won't constrain themselves according to limits put in place by Blizzard. They will complain about the limits and then find ways to circumvent them. For example split raiding. In fact, pretty much every limit that the game has in place can be circumvented by repeating that content with an alt (or 10). And even if Blizzard tried to regulate how much you could do with an alt, people could simply make multiple accounts.

That is why we have the endless AP "grind". It's to give players a legitimate, controlled path to the endless play that a lot of players clearly want. The big secret of course is that it's not mandatory to grind it endlessly, only as much as you feel like.

[Quotey]

if a dps at my level wanted to raid in mop, they did dailies on 2 characters, capped valour weekly and did the raids (which was incidentally, only one lockout and lfr instead of the 3 we have now). a couple of weeks into the tier you don't need to do the dailies or the lfr because you've hit revered or outgeared the valour gear.

if the same dps wants to raid in the same guild they have to get 2 characters to at least 55 neck level, do the same amount of dailies + additional rep grinding, and several hours of m+. a bit more time, except it doesn't actually end until a bit after the last boss dies. but then of course you don't want to fall behind for the next tier...

the time taken to play the game at the same level has vastly increased, but all the player wants to do is raid with the same people. i don't really care about world first players who went from 4 characters then to 12 now or whatever.

[arkanon]

What about them?

Gear power should be somewhat in line with the difficulty/effort required to obtain it. I don't see any obvious reasons why normal or heroic raiders should have a problem with benthic gear.

So you consider right clicking 3 starfish or playing candy crush to be on par with mythic raiding?

[Soikona]

The raids were one of it's biggest downfalls. Since the barriers to get into raiding created the same toxic player poaching Mentality of TBC. The Attunements made most People avoid them to begin with.

Attunements =\= raids. The raids were fantastic and very little people would disagree with that.

- - - Updated - - -

It failed because the developers listened to the echo chamber on the forums that consisted of the tiny fraction of the playerbase that wanted the game to cater to the super hardcore that shouted down any other feedback. And because the developers believed that too, which was blatantly obvious in the way they talked about attunements and raid content, they believed they could sustain a game off doing so. By the time they realized their game was going to tank and they tried to backpedal (i.e. heavily nerfed the attunements as one easy example) it was too late. Too many people had left. You can talk about a lot of mismanagement (which to be fair is present in about any company ever), but the average player didn't care/didn't see that at all. They cared about the game content which crapped on them if they weren't ultra hardcore min/maxers.

- - - Updated - - -



And what about the bulk of the playerbase that has no intention of playing a game like a job? Many of us lived through our adolescent/college years playing MMO's. We still play, but we've ridden that merry go round and we grew up. We don't value a video game more than family, friends, a career, our health, etc. and have no intention of scheduling the amount of time necessary to Mythic raid that we can't attend to children, spouses, or just anything else that's more important that comes up during raid time. And that's not counting the out of raid requirements to farm AP, grind M+ for BiS forged trinkets, etc. There's no amount of incentivizing us to do it because the reason we're not doing it has nothing to do with rewards. It has to do with the time commitment. And you can't fix that. I raid Heroic with a group of like minded players. We raid at most 4 hours a week. We're happy getting Ahead of the Curve. And if we can't raid one day/week/month because too many people have something going on, no sweat, don't prioritize the game. Like right now. We have 4 raiders including one of our tanks and one of our healers on vacations with family atm. So we simply put off raiding until August.

To put it simply, if you raid Mythic you value the game differently than other people. And there's no reconciling that. And we all pay the same amount of money a month. You don't deserve to be gods among men because you no life the game. You can get your 5 ilvl bump over the M10+ chest and you can share 4 pieces of loot out of 15/16 with people who are normal/heroic plebs. By the end of the tier there's going to be the typical ~20 ilvl gap from top to bottom. And that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

Again, the raids were not the reason the game failed. Read my response again, as I am not going to repeat myself.

[czarek]

I hate ilvl system. Burn it to the ground.

[Vapo]

I hate ilvl system. Burn it to the ground.

literal wat.

[Final Verdict]

accessibility!
some rlly need to realise easier access to raids (via alternative gear sources) as beneficial for raiding in general. those 2-4 benthic pieces dont diminish (challenge and) prestige of mythic raiding, but increases it, as more r likely to try (as they have easier access via alternative gear sources)...

overall accessibility as design paradigm saved raiding and WoW, as pl dont feel excluded (from content btw) by artificial gear barriers, but invited by (relativly) easy gear acquisition.

[niil945]

Again, the raids were not the reason the game failed. Read my response again, as I am not going to repeat myself.

Wildstar did not fail because of its raids or any PVE content however. It failed because of piss poor management.

I saw your post. You're still wrong. Side note: 'very little people' would agree with the claim that the raids were fantastic too. Because the bulk of players got locked out behind ultra no lifer attunements. It wasn't mismanagement. They intentionally catered to the ultra hardcore, they explicitly and condescendingly told people that. And when the bulk of their playerbase started leaving in droves they attempted to backpedal, but it was too little and far too late. When they realized they couldn't save the game the scapegoating excuses started coming out about 'mismanagement'. I was there playing the game, providing feedback, listening to the comments, and being bashed by the echo chamber of stupidity on their forums. Had they not tried to cater to the ultra hardcore audience to the detriment of the bulk of their players I'd probably still be there. But they didn't. So I'm here whey they do cater to the bulk of their playerbase, feeding off the tears of the tryhards