Gear madness

[Ragnarohk]

Opinion:

I believe the current gear model is broken.

Convoluted systems that require parallel maintenance (HoA and Azerite Gear, essences and now cape)

Gear resets every patch. Mythic+0 grants heroic EP gear. And even worse, you have to re-earn the same gear from Mythic+ just because of an ilvl increase.

Warforged/Titanforged/Corrupted gear.

Opinion again:

A linear 1, 2, 3 model felt more rewarding. Gear "mattered" more. You even knew items by their name.

[kranur]

I did not know this. Thank you for this enlightening blog post.

[123youshowme]

Opinion:

I believe the current gear model is broken.

Convoluted systems that require parallel maintenance (HoA and Azerite Gear, essences and now cape)

Gear resets every patch. Mythic+0 grants heroic EP gear. And even worse, you have to re-earn the same gear from Mythic+ just because of an ilvl increase.

Warforged/Titanforged/Corrupted gear.

Opinion again:

A linear 1, 2, 3 model felt more rewarding. Gear "mattered" more. You even knew items by their name.

I still know items by name
I hate running old content for "relevant" gear

The system is convoluted if your only experience with it is 2ndhand reports on fansites.

[khazmodan]

But omg you are gonna get corrupted gear in 8.3, this means you can fill your bags with stuff that you can't wear unless you want to go full moron old school warlock and have healers hate you and avoid healing you when they realize what you are trying to do. At least with Titanforged you didn't feel disappointed when getting a new piece of high level gear.While the no lifers will min max this on a ridiculous level, the rest of the player base will deal with a system which includes the vaguely unsatisfying over complicated Azerothian armor, the essential but insanely grindy essence system and the new "legendary" cloak which you can level up a WHOLE 2 LEVELS A WEEK. Oh and good luck with alts because just the questing to get the "legendary" cloak will be 3-4 hours per character and its not optional content.

[klaps_05]

Game has moved on from gear matters to skill matters. The only somewhat convoluted part is simming and upgrades estimation, but tbh if you remove that from WoW gearing, the game will be extremely boring.

[Aphrel]

The more i have to do in the game, the happier i am. I like getting gear from various sources as opposed to a formula where raid and only raid is the only place where gear upgrades can be found.

[alexs]

Yep, it's messed up

[Nathasil]

The more i have to do in the game, the happier i am. I like getting gear from various sources as opposed to a formula where raid and only raid is the only place where gear upgrades can be found.

I would love to have more to do in the game....but as a matter of fact 8.2 has been the first time my casual F&F raid has taken a break for more than a month before the expansion-gap-lul. Running the same raid for gear is completely pointless without Tier-Sets. There is no loot worth the time investment. Running Mythic is not an option for us, as our numbers vary far too much and we would never bench people or recruit outsiders that have nothing in common with us just to be able to raid (hence, F&F raid).

Our weekly M+ runs are on life-support, since we have completed keymaster months ago and collecting more loot before 8.3 was, again, pointless.

Compare this to Legion: Running more content gave you a chance at getting more Legendaries (in 7.3 even Legendaries you could mail to Alts). Running raids (all Tiers of them) gave you actual Transmog-Sets. Running the current raid was relevant until the patch hit because everybody wanted the best version of his old Tier set before the new Tier launched.

Call this an opinion if you like, but i think having an incentive to actually run content is better than not having one.

The sad truth is that even WoD - an expansion that had far less content than BFA - had more incentives to actually play the game than BFA does.

The only loot of BFA i cared about getting so far were specific trinkets from M+; and while those trinkets are fine, it is not ideal if after each patch you just want to get the same trinket all over again from the exact same source and with the exact same difficulty. I would actually call that lame. I would also argue that getting CM Gold felt more rewarding than running a +10 each week and wait for one of those 2 or 3 faceroll affix combinations where basically everybody can get keymaster. Can you go beyond +15 in time? Of course! But it feels exactly like doing Onyxia with 10 people in Classic: An arbitrary increased difficulty that does not really reward you with anything worthwhile.

I sure as hell hope that they do EVERYTHING differently in Shadowlands - but so far it looks like they won't....which is not good for players like me and my friends. But if it is your ideal version of WoW....by all means...more power to you.

Edit:
Professions feel more pointless than ever before, too. And it's not like Legion was great for professions.

[sunxsera]

I dont see a problem with gear coming from multiple sources. That was a good addition.

I see a problem with all these systems they added - random azerite gear ( because who wants to wait 6-8 weeks to get a specific upgrade? ) / Neck AP farm / essence farm / ( benthic farm )
And now a cloak you have to level & maintain for months.

I liked the gearing progress in MoP - do some hc dungeons / do the legendary questline / do an older raid and you are hc raid-ready.
I dont want to spend weeks for a stupid OP essence just to compete. It `s also not fun to grind pvp on an alt - or to kill king mechagon the 20th time.
Now you need to hardcore grind to get a new alt raid-ready. If you are missing essences / Neck AP ( Benthic Gear ) you just cant compete with other players. And it `s just not 1k dps; it `s a lot more.

I also saw a lot of people stop playing on my realm / friendlist etc. mid-progress, they were just burnt out from the benthic / AP / M+ farm. Of course that doesn`t prove anything. But normally those people only took a break when there was no content - or they cleared the raid.

[Vynx]

Game has moved on from gear matters to skill matters. The only somewhat convoluted part is simming and upgrades estimation, but tbh if you remove that from WoW gearing, the game will be extremely boring.

That's a thing I'm getting increasingly aware of...and I like it. It's time those boosted ass scrubs should know their place.
And I don't get those complaining that gear is becoming irrelevant again. What do you expect, to have the gear set from season 1 be relevant the whole expansion?
The only thing I can think of is the approach they have in D3 with legendaries each season, modify or add new loot in dungeons. But I think that's asking too much from the current team that is not even bothering to properly tune the dungeons.

[Raelbo]

Gear resets every patch. Mythic+0 grants heroic EP gear. And even worse, you have to re-earn the same gear from Mythic+ just because of an ilvl increase.

The alternative is we have nothing to do.

Power progression through doing content is an integral part of being an MMO and when that stops happening the game basically ends. Right now, the game has basically ended because most people aren't really progressing. The only thing that keeps it alive is the knowledge that new content will be arriving, at which point we'll be able to go through the cycle again.

If you really want the game to stop setting new goalposts, so that you can be "done" with gearing then that basically means you've lost interest in playing. And that's fine. But surely it'd be a whole lot easier to just decide to stop playing than to make it so that everyone may as well stop playing? The great thing about gear resets is that if/when you do decide to come back, you're not going to have to spend months trying to finish content that no one else is really interesting in doing anymore.

A linear 1, 2, 3 model felt more rewarding. Gear "mattered" more. You even knew items by their name.

By which I assume you mean no catch mechanism (except for new expansions, because clearly forcing everyone to play through 8 expansions worth of content before being able to join the mainstream would be utterly insane) and everyone has to progress through all the raids in the expansion in order to gear for the current content?

Sorry, but that has been proven to be a terrible design that basically resulted in a significant segment of the playerbase getting stuck on lower tiers and never progressing to the later tiers.

Besides, if you actually play the game continuously, you do get the linear, 1,2,3 model of progression anyway. Gear resets only really affect people who don't complete tiers while they are current.

[cuafpr]

gear from various sources is good.. The issue is the level of rng on gear imo

[123youshowme]

gear from various sources is good.. The issue is the level of rng on gear imo

Anything past base il is a bonus. What rng? You can farm all your gear in whatever timeframe you choose. No different to how it's always been.

[Grimbold21]

They should at least remake the gear from mythic + so we don't get the feeling of farming the exact same geae over and over but just on different and growing ilvls

[cuafpr]

Anything past base il is a bonus. What rng? You can farm all your gear in whatever timeframe you choose. No different to how it's always been.

RNG of it dropping or not... bring back badges of justice/valor and a vendor to buy items off of equal to the raid for each badge. Also some of those bonuses were OP (something they do seem to have worked on)

[Aphrel]

I would love to have more to do in the game....but as a matter of fact 8.2 has been the first time my casual F&F raid has taken a break for more than a month before the expansion-gap-lul. Running the same raid for gear is completely pointless without Tier-Sets. There is no loot worth the time investment. Running Mythic is not an option for us, as our numbers vary far too much and we would never bench people or recruit outsiders that have nothing in common with us just to be able to raid (hence, F&F raid).

Our weekly M+ runs are on life-support, since we have completed keymaster months ago and collecting more loot before 8.3 was, again, pointless.

Compare this to Legion: Running more content gave you a chance at getting more Legendaries (in 7.3 even Legendaries you could mail to Alts). Running raids (all Tiers of them) gave you actual Transmog-Sets. Running the current raid was relevant until the patch hit because everybody wanted the best version of his old Tier set before the new Tier launched.

Call this an opinion if you like, but i think having an incentive to actually run content is better than not having one.

The sad truth is that even WoD - an expansion that had far less content than BFA - had more incentives to actually play the game than BFA does.

The only loot of BFA i cared about getting so far were specific trinkets from M+; and while those trinkets are fine, it is not ideal if after each patch you just want to get the same trinket all over again from the exact same source and with the exact same difficulty. I would actually call that lame. I would also argue that getting CM Gold felt more rewarding than running a +10 each week and wait for one of those 2 or 3 faceroll affix combinations where basically everybody can get keymaster. Can you go beyond +15 in time? Of course! But it feels exactly like doing Onyxia with 10 people in Classic: An arbitrary increased difficulty that does not really reward you with anything worthwhile.

I sure as hell hope that they do EVERYTHING differently in Shadowlands - but so far it looks like they won't....which is not good for players like me and my friends. But if it is your ideal version of WoW....by all means...more power to you.

Edit:
Professions feel more pointless than ever before, too. And it's not like Legion was great for professions.

While i almost entirely agree with your rant, i don't see how moving all the loot progression into raiding is gonna fix the problem. I dont think i ever felt that farming raids were particularly important or made a big impact. Its just something you did to make sure the guild didnt fall apart.

Challengemodes was great... once. Problem was lack of replayability imo.
With current model we atleast get plenty of fun for a couple of weeks from several activities once a patch hits. Thats probobly the best we can hope for. And reusing dungeons for each teirs is imo the right choice, better than not having anything at all imo. The seasonal affixes does spice it up alittle at least.

I don't even know myself anymore what i would consider "the perfect" design for a wowexpansion... It feels like no realistic design that has a content budget could possibly be interesting to play and farm for 2 years with the hours i put down on a daily basis.
The best i hope for is a few months at launch then mby a month or 2 each patch of entertainment. The rest is just a "farm period" where i raidlogg.

[Ange]

I don't even know myself anymore what i would consider "the perfect" design for a wowexpansion... It feels like no realistic design that has a content budget could possibly be interesting to play and farm for 2 years with the hours i put down on a daily basis.

Perfection would be if I can play my main-char the whole expansion without regretting of not having alt's at all. BfA MAIN heavy shift for casual players like me was pretty close to my ideal scenario.

If there was no timegating and people could endlessly progress characters it would make some 6/12/24month prep for content possible, but thats what you get everywhere else from hardcore MMO's and WoW is simply not that kind of game.

[KYZ123]

Gear has mostly reset each patch for over a decade now. That's just how the game has to work if it's not going to force you to go back to old content to get gear. (Remember the reaction to farming old raids in Legion for AP and legendaries, that didn't go down well.)

A lot of your post seems to be complaining that M+0 gives gear equivalent to heroic EP, despite being easier than it. This is false; M+0 gives ilvl 400 loot, and heroic EP gives ilvl 430 loot. Yes, it can titanforge 30 item levels, but the only reason that heroic EP gear cannot titanforge 30 item levels with equal chance is because the current cap is 455. They both have an equal chance to titanforge 5, 10, 15, 20, or 25 item levels.

[Rucati]

I'm torn on the issue personally.

On the one hand it feels really weird doing the same 10 dungeons all expansion long and getting the same gear at higher and higher ilvls, whereas in the past you'd obviously be doing newer dungeons for new pieces of gear. Trying to get Harlan's Dice over and over again feels really weird for example, and now we're going to be trying to get it again on +15 next patch.

At the same time though, gear has always "reset" with each major patch in one way or another, so I don't really think this system is all that bad. This is certainly a lot less work for Blizzard, since they don't need to make new dungeons/gear, but I also think it's kind of nice as a player in its own way too. I know what pieces are best, I don't need to keep looking up loot tables trying to figure out what pieces are required for my spec each new patch since it's always the same. From an RPG standpoint that's kind of awful, but from a convenience standpoint it's actually kind of nice.

I honestly think the biggest issue is M+ is just the only way to really get gear, so it feels a lot worse than it should. World quests cap at like 390 ilvl or something, arenas/BGs drop like 400ilvl gear once a month, raiding is okay but you're likely to only get one or two pieces a week, but mythic+ can get you fully geared in like two days with a good group. Hell, you don't even really need a group, I've gone from 400ilvl to 430 on 5 different alts in about 2 weeks just running with a tank friend and pugging the rest.

The fact that m+ drop so much gear and are so easy to complete just make everything else feel pointless, even the heroic raid honestly. You can clear like 4 +10s in the time it takes to do the heroic raid once, and you'll likely get more gear, and then you can keep doing that all week long. Really makes doing anything else feel like a massive waste of time because you know you'd gear faster just grinding M+.

And I don't want anyone to think I'm hating on m+ or anything, I actually really like them and it's probably my second favorite thing to do after arenas, but doing the same 10 dungeons for an entire expansion and having that constantly be the only real way to gear a character is a little bit silly.

[Greyvax]

Yes geared mattered at one point. Specific items with static stats were crucial to some classes. The problem is the difference in mentality which used to be:

"My warrior will do excellent DPS now that i acquired X item"

now its more pessimistic:

"My warrior's DPS sucks unless i get X item"

Nothing is fun about certain items being "required to stay competitive"