Tier Sets: "You think you want them back... but you don't."

[Charge me Doctor]

That's a low bar to set.
Previous Tier sets required 4 pieces, not 6.
If you've been using 6 pieces, that means those 6 pieces have premium stats.

Or you've been using mandatory legendary items in these slots, which doesn't help with argument in favor of simultaneous lock of multiple itemslots

Or you just see it as progression...?
The only gear based alternative is the Azerite system, which in turn makes you farm the same pieces every season, which is a serious flaw to the point where even Blizzard flat out admitted it.

It's not a matter of seeing, it's a matter of balance, if your spec has a tier set bonus that significantly benefits your DPS (which is the point of tier sets), your spec will be balanced around having it on your character, which means that your DPS without this set will suffer significantly. To counter that blizzard have to make tier sets less impactful which kills the purpose of tier sets to begin with. It's like having that "awesome" artifact perk that increases damage of your ability by 100%, you quickly realize that damage on this ability is simply cut in half if you don't have it.

Azerite gear is great compromise as it's a "customizable" 3-slot-tier-set, i hope they'll expand it further and make it better (instead of straight away returning to tier sets as means of character progression), because currently you just stack whatever the best perk there is (and looking at new covenant and the forge system in shadowlands i see that they are moving in right - as in "i like this more than what we have now and what we had before" - direction)

[sam86]

Problem is, tier sets were one of the best "feeling of pride and accomplishment" things in the game

not just u, for everyone, i know ppl who left wow since years and they still check tier sets with every raid out, it is one if not most interesting part of wow ever

[Great Destiny Man]

That's a low bar to set.
Because a system such as Azerite require by default way more work to be balanced, which Blizzard wasn't willing to commit because the system has inherit flaws and thus wasn't worth the effort.

I mean, they also changed the Sunfire trait for Resto in 8.3, affects only high end M+, but hey, they're balancing traits!
These are just changes that make the system barely hover maintenance mode, they're using the Azerite system for class balance, not to balance Azerite in itself.

Trait balance is in the exact same place talent balance is. I.e. some talents will shine in specific content and while Blizzard's overall philosophy is to keep things fairly in line we eventually get stagnation in the balancing that leads to specific talents shitting over the others in specific situations.

By your logic should we also scrap talents because it has inherent flaws and isn't worth the time?

Overall the massive structural problems with Azerite have been mostly addressed (namely the crippling lack of choice we had due to one outer ring, and the stupidity of neck level determining whether we can reaquire traits we had previously for higher ilvl pieces). The system isn't perfect, absolutely, but I do still prefer it over tier sets.

[oplawlz]

The worst feeling about a tier set is when you get an non-set upgrade and can't use it, because tier set bonus is that powerful, so, yeah, i don't miss them and don't want them back

This is such a silly non-argument. The set bonuses were part of the stat budget, therefore if the item you got wasn't more powerful than both the item itself and the set bonus it wasn't an upgrade. Should blizzard also remove the chance to ever get loot that isn't a direct upgrade to what you're already wearing?

[Willias]

The worst feeling about a tier set is when you get an non-set upgrade and can't use it, because tier set bonus is that powerful, so, yeah, i don't miss them and don't want them back

This is backwards logic. The item just isn't an upgrade.

Item level being king is one of the dumbest things WoW has done.

[Jetstream]

@Title

Would you all please get over it? Seriously. How many years have people been using that one gaffe? It's old now. He went back on it. Get over it. Brack doesn't matter that much.

[Kralljin]

Or you've been using mandatory legendary items in these slots, which doesn't help with argument in favor of simultaneous lock of multiple itemslots

Yeah, but you can't sign the blame for legendaries onto tier sets.
Legendaries suffered from the same problem, because people constantly went "oh, i need that if i get that legendary".

That aside, legendaries didn't exist in BfA, so there's that.

To counter that blizzard have to make tier sets less impactful which kills the purpose of tier sets to begin with.

Funny, poster above tells that Tier sets were so OP that Method even used ToS ones on Argus, can't have both.

Azerite gear is great compromise as it's a "customizable" 3-slot-tier-set

No, the biggest failure of the Azerite system was that it was split over three slots, which on top of that made customization difficult because it required multiple pieces if you wanted to properly test certain traits.
Certain traits were completely diluted based on that you had to acquire them on three different pieces to have a meaningful impact, especially looking at the defensive traits here.

On top of that, it's blatantly obvious that the progressive nature of the system had its impact on the design of traits, every traits need some absolute numerical value that scales with Ilvl.
That never was the case for tier sets, the difference of design between tier sets, the good ones, and Azerite is obvious.
You have a handful of set bonuses that inspired later baseline effects or talents for a spec, not sure if we can say the same about Azerite traits.

In my opinion, if they don't want tier sets, they should move away from that sort of customization based on gear entirely and turn to a system similiar to the essences.
So you earn a given bonus at a certain point and get to keep it without having to constantly re earn it.

By your logic should we also scrap talents because it has inherent flaws and isn't worth the time?

Compare Legion patches to BfA patches, look at this Patch from Mid Legion:

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Patch_7.2.5

That's Blizzard giving a shit about Talents, BfA has been abandoned in terms of class design because they realized BfA is kinda a lost cause.
They also promised Enhancement some re work, just got some talent re balance in 8.1.

[Varitok]

See, you can't have Tier sets. You need to grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind until you get that 1 in 101050590230952 titanforged belt drop and then repeat it for every single slot.

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@Title

Would you all please get over it? Seriously. How many years have people been using that one gaffe? It's old now. He went back on it. Get over it. Brack doesn't matter that much.

He's the President of Blizzard and until Blizzard stops having this "we know better than you" attitude to their development, people will keep saying it. What is worse is people getting mad that others keep saying it, like a slight towards Brack reflects on them.

[Raugnaut]

Tier sets grant bonuses only by equipping a lot of the set, which ends up taking up many of your equipment slots so you can maintain the bonus even when a piece of armor which would normally be an upgrade is available to you. This prevents players from progressing in power as they would normally through normal gear upgrades, and kind of locks them into handfuls of weaker gear that provide these powerful bonuses together.

A possible solution to this is just being able to have the bonus with even just one piece of the armor, as long as you have one of them equipped. But then you kind of have the inverse - perhaps people don't go after any other tier pieces if they are weaker than non-set pieces, meaning people don't end up collecting the unique appearances of the tier sets at all and are left sometimes with the off-class appearances granted by non-tier armor pieces.

In order to placate the demand for armor, I think the situation needs to be available that lots and lots of loot just needs to be distributed while also the set bonuses can perhaps be acquired by ANY of the given gear that drops in that raid. (Armor dynamically providing your class' set bonus for the tier.) This way, even the normal pieces that drop are all tier pieces, and everything ends up granting the bonus so all you would have to worry about would be getting what gear gives your ideal stats. (And then of course, you only have the bonus of one set at a time, with the most recent or powerful set bonus overwriting the other so people don't just wear one piece of armor from each tier to have all the bonuses.)

Personally speaking, I feel that a middle ground would be good - Raid-based tier sets. Essentially, equip any X number of pieces from a raid to unlock the raid's set bonus. This encourages the M+ crowd to once again get into raids without completely locking in equipment slots - You'll want I.E. 4 pieces from the raid for the set, but they can be ANY 4 pieces.

This allows Blizz to continue to be lazy with armor design, while also allowing for that power spike and encouraging raiding once again

[Jetstream]

See, you can't have Tier sets. You need to grind and grind and grind and grind and grind and grind until you get that 1 in 101050590230952 titanforged belt drop and then repeat it for every single slot.

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He's the President of Blizzard and until Blizzard stops having this "we know better than you" attitude to their development, people will keep saying it. What is worse is people getting mad that others keep saying it, like a slight towards Brack reflects on them.

It's not that shitting on him bothers me, it's just that the constant harping gets boring and stupid after a while. Like nobody can think of an actual argument so they just go back to "this guy said a thing we didn't like years ago!"

It's asinine.

[Nathasil]

The worst feeling about a tier set is when you get an non-set upgrade and can't use it, because tier set bonus is that powerful, so, yeah, i don't miss them and don't want them back

Yeah, because getting totally random items with totally random stats pooped into your bag whenever anything in your remote vincinity dies is so much more exciting and totally motivates you to run content repeatedly....oh wait, it isn't.

I think the majority of players who actually raided in the last 15 years will agree that running raids on farm feels completely pointless without tier. It demotes raiding into a one-shot-activity....and since WoW offers exactly NO other content that you can do with your guild...this promotes guilds dying even faster and content being not played which Blizzard spends a lot of ressources into to make. Also, raiding is the only content in this game where most specs actually work.

If you look at player activity - and especially raid activity - in BFA compared to previous expansions, i think it will be very hard to argue in favor of having absolutely no worthwhile loot in any of your content. And yes, individual pieces are at the end of the day not worthwhile. They can and will be replaced much, much faster and easier, which causes you as a player to not care about them.

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I am not saying your argument is wrong - i am just saying that the feeling of being able to upgrade all of your slots individually only looks like a good thing in the extreme short-term. In the mid/long term it totally demolishes every reason to actually care about any loot at all.

[Tradu]

Azerite gear is better then teir sets.
prove me wrong.


azerite gear effects are actually more unique and interesting then teir gear.
that plus you get more choice
allllll pieces are azerite so you never have to worry about replacing
and you can actually customize each individual piece.

Woulda spent some time to actyually make it line up, but i aint got time for that. nor do i wanna open AE.

Azerite effects are the same shit as tier bonuses, either 2 or 4set depending on the trait in question.
There's no actual choice/customization in either system, numbers are involved.

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Benthic item is just that - an item (that benefits you only in latest raid), tier set locks up to 6 pieces, tier sets are also a pain in the ass to balance, leading to idiotic situations like "yeah we know that this spec sucks balls, BECAUSE WHEN YOU GET YOUR FULL TIER SET IT'S GODLIKE!". I'm fine with singular items being incredibly good (mechagon bracers on a fire mage for example), but imagine being locked out of 6 gear pieces for the same effect? "Oh crap i can't replace that 420 boot for my lucky 450, because i'll lose my tier set bonus that ables my spec to do any sort of damage"

There's no difference between the 2 situations, in both cases you can't use a higher ilevel piece because a lower ilevel piece gives you a stronger effect(whether that's as the 4th tier piece or because the item itself has it)

[Great Destiny Man]

Compare Legion patches to BfA patches, look at this Patch from Mid Legion:

https://wow.gamepedia.com/Patch_7.2.5

That's Blizzard giving a shit about Talents, BfA has been abandoned in terms of class design because they realized BfA is kinda a lost cause.
They also promised Enhancement some re work, just got some talent re balance in 8.1.

Are you arguing with yourself that Legion talent balancing was better than BfA? I mean I already know that myself but that's not the point I was making.

[Nadiru]

Aesthetically-themed class sets? Yes please. Forcing me to give up four item slots "beCaUsE sEt bOnuSeS"? Miss me with that bullshit.

[valky94]

There's no difference between the 2 situations, in both cases you can't use a higher ilevel piece because a lower ilevel piece gives you a stronger effect(whether that's as the 4th tier piece or because the item itself has it)

there is choice, for example demo wants different traits for raids and m+, destro wants different traits for single and cleave

[Tradu]

People find ways to make comparables across all walks of life. Doesnt mean the view has to be shared.



Matter of perspective. I certainly don't view things like streaking stars as "x% flat damage increase".



On individual items, I'd agree. With 4 or more items in combination I'm less keen on that.



Trinkets have always been the subject of balance issues. That's not a new situation.

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Intent of nerf is irrelevant. My point was traits can and do change. None of what you said refutes that point.

I mean, they objectively do apply to both systems. Traits have different levels of impact on different specs(Disc spec traits are basically all trash, while a spec like Shadow has very strong spec traits), just like set bonuses aren't equally good for every spec. Both tier and azerite could in theory be tuned/altered over time, and it has happened in both cases(but nowhere near enough in the case of azerite, for what the system is meant to be). Not every trait is interesting, there's a few like Streaking, arguably Wild Fleshrending or Cascading Calamity, but for each of those traits there's like 10 Spiteful Apparitions, Cold Steel Hot Blood, Secret Infusion, Expurgiation etc. Just like with set bonuses.

Intent of the nerf is extremely relevant, and "traits can and do change" is a terrible argument for why azerite is good, because the amount of changes they've made since the first like 2-3 months of the expansion has been a complete fucking joke. It doesn't matter that they can change traits if they don't do it. Just the same as tier sets, except tier sets forcefully changed every tier.

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This is backwards logic. The item just isn't an upgrade.

Item level being king is one of the dumbest things WoW has done.

Tried to do, they haven't even been able to do that because they don't understand how math works so they keep fucking up secondaries vs primaries.

[Kralljin]

Are you arguing with yourself that Legion talent balancing was better than BfA? I mean I already know that myself but that's not the point I was making.

No, just highlighting that Blizzard did give a shit about talents previously.

It's just a strawman argument on your part.
Azerite has flaws, therefore it's been abandoned by Blizzard.
Talents also have flaws, thus Blizzard should abandon talents as well.

Those flaws aren't on the same level as Azerite, thus Blizzard is willing to put effort into it if half of the expansion isn't a halfbaked shitshow.

[valax]

Tier sets and set bonuses always added flavour to raiding IMO , not a coincidence many people lost interest quickly in raiding when you can get better gear or equal by just spamming mythic + , especially so if the sets they design to take tier place look like garbage .
Even progressing was incentivized by tier sets , you'd be always excited when a boss who drops helms or shoulders went down.

[shade076]

Just seems lazy to me removing them. Its a lot easier on the art team I guess. I would have just removed the tier bonuses instead of removing the class sets all together.

[Razion]

Personally speaking, I feel that a middle ground would be good - Raid-based tier sets. Essentially, equip any X number of pieces from a raid to unlock the raid's set bonus. This encourages the M+ crowd to once again get into raids without completely locking in equipment slots - You'll want I.E. 4 pieces from the raid for the set, but they can be ANY 4 pieces.

This allows Blizz to continue to be lazy with armor design, while also allowing for that power spike and encouraging raiding once again

Well, there are 12 pieces of armor, so to prevent the stacking of 4-piece set bonuses three times at the end of the expansion... while that would be wild and wacky and awesome in its own right to do just once to have all the cool spec synergy at once, it does perhaps make balancing a lot more difficult and so I think restricting to having only one set bonus active at a time, and having that activate based on highest item level and being granted by a minimum of one piece means that people don't really need to worry about the problems of gear that tier sets would normally provide. It definitely can be fun to have a lot of items as necessary for a tier set, but now I think it's a little antiquated and holding the system back with what players expect on being able to gear their players up by stats on flat pieces of neutral gear drops. Having everything be tier dynamically and only needing one piece from that tier and having that highest item level piece overlapping any other older tier bonus I think fixes almost all the issues tier sets have currently.