Will BiS lists return?

[Lochton]

One of the things I like about wow classic is that there are bis lists, you know where to get each piece you need and you can go throw it one by one.
Titanforging kinda killed that. Now that it's gone, will we see BiS lists return?

I sort of hope not.

[ymirsson]

the way of the dodo.

"That was our last female!"

[HeyImPilot]

I also imagine it will take like two weeks to get full pre-raid BiS, and then it'll just be grinding for raid upgrades after that. Kind of nice since you won't really need to do M+ after the first couple weeks, kind of dumb since you'll basically just log on to raid and then have no other gear to work towards.

Do you really think people will only be doing M+ for the first couple of weeks? Look at M+ through the expansions. You'll be doing M+ all expac to fill holes in your gear or even to replace raid gear that's obsolete vs a +15 keys loot. On-top of that people aren't going to abandon M+ because they have a free piece of gear with a choice from the weekly chest., This is just an uninformed opinion.

[Eyechewer]

m+ is such a popular feature, I think people will do them all expansion long. Even in a world without titanforging.

[Kaver]

This is a fallacy. Titanforging and systems like it did not kill BIS lists, it's really annoying people started saying that. Titanforge was not 100% chance. You still have specific pieces that are better than others as long as all pieces were the same ilvl. If a piece of gear dropped that titanforges high enough, than that one slot loses it's BIS piece to the titanforge one. It doesn't invalidate all other slots as well.

This is a technicality. To get BiS you would need to get a max titanforged specific piece of gear in every slot. Which is completely unrealistic. But yes, technically there was a BiS with titanforging.

[facefist]

m+ is such a popular feature, I think people will do them all expansion long. Even in a world without titanforging.

You'll be surprised at how quickly people drop an activity that doesn't reward them. Do you remember challenge mode dungeons? M+ without possible gear upgrades is essentially challenge mode, which were not that popular. I personally know that one of the drivers that kept me running M+ even when I was heavily geared, was the possibility of a proc that would be an upgrade. Without procs I have 0 chance of getting upgrades from M+, so I would probably only run a weekly and thats it.

And this is my only fear with the system as well. Once I get my bis item from a dungeon, I have no incentive to go back in there. I'm not sure if there is a perfect solution to this, I don't like bis lists because then you have no incentive to play your character once you've got all your bis stuff, but procs aren't very good design either, at least not when they are gamebreaking like they are right now.. There needs to be a way to balance the reward to keep people interested in it throughout the expansion.

[Kaver]

Do you really think people will only be doing M+ for the first couple of weeks? Look at M+ through the expansions. You'll be doing M+ all expac to fill holes in your gear or even to replace raid gear that's obsolete vs a +15 keys loot. On-top of that people aren't going to abandon M+ because they have a free piece of gear with a choice from the weekly chest., This is just an uninformed opinion.

Also the incentive for running M+ doesn't have to be titanforged gear. They can easily make other rewards. They could make a currency that you got from M+ which you could use to buy upgrades for your gear like special enchants and cosmetic rewards like mounts. Also, the game will have craftable Legendaries. They could easily make M+ drop something in relation to those legendaries. There are a thousand different options. They don't need titanforged gear to be the incentive at all.

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You'll be surprised at how quickly people drop an activity that doesn't reward them.

There need to be an incentive for people to run M+, yes.

Does that have to be titanforge gear, no.

They can make a thousand different types of rewards to give players something for their effort. People act like titanforged gear is the only possible type of reward.

[Azerate]

I get the point you're making with there always being a theoretical upgrade in the world of titanforging and corruption, but there were still BiS lists out there despite those existing. Personally I've been following BiS lists for my class through all Legion and BfA

m+ is such a popular feature, I think people will do them all expansion long. Even in a world without titanforging.

People who push them for fun/challenge, yeah, but not your average Joe who just wants some gear.

[Zentail]

I'm largely confused as to why you think BiS lists were gone because of TF/WF. They have always been present and they always will. As long as WoW lets us choose what gear to equip, they will always exist.

[facefist]

I'm largely confused as to why you think BiS lists were gone because of TF/WF. They have always been present and they always will. As long as WoW lets us choose what gear to equip, they will always exist.

I personally think that he meant a BIS list like it was in vanilla. You know, once you are done, you are done, and there is zero possibility of getting an upgrade. Currently you will never have an actual pre-raid BIS gear because there is always a small opportunity for an upgrade.

Also the incentive for running M+ doesn't have to be titanforged gear. They can easily make other rewards. They could make a currency that you got from M+ which you could use to buy upgrades for your gear like special enchants and cosmetic rewards like mounts. Also, the game will have craftable Legendaries. They could easily make M+ drop something in relation to those legendaries. There are a thousand different options. They don't need titanforged gear to be the incentive at all

Yeah, I wasn't saying that titanforging should be the way of rewarding, as I quite clearly said that random procs are not a very good way of rewarding either, nor is cosmetic stuff. It needs to be something that increases your characters power.

For a casual player procs are probably the best way of rewards though. There is a problem with infinite grinds for players who put limited time into the game, as the reward is only tied to the amount of time you are willing to spend. Therefore I would guess that players who only now and then log in are happy with the current system because there is a possibility they get a good reward without increasing their time spent.

[Qnubi]

I think Blizzard even stated they were flirting with the idea of removing socket procs on gear if they could do it in a way that wouldn't be too detrimental to jewelcrafting (which would in turn require fixed gem slots on gear, so who knows if that'll happen).

Couldn't they simply add one baseline (1) socket to each equipment slot? No drawback, just design the gems around that and reduce the stats on them if necessary.

[HeyImPilot]

Also the incentive for running M+ doesn't have to be titanforged gear. They can easily make other rewards. They could make a currency that you got from M+ which you could use to buy upgrades for your gear like special enchants and cosmetic rewards like mounts. Also, the game will have craftable Legendaries. They could easily make M+ drop something in relation to those legendaries. There are a thousand different options. They don't need titanforged gear to be the incentive at all.

I really like the idea of having additional things to achieve in M+ like the addition of cosmetics where you could lock pieces of transmog or special effects behind like a seasonal bracket where at the end, higher key players get their skin and so on. (Like ranked arena I guess with brackets based on key completion). All an opinion and open to discussion, just want a great game like everyone.

[Rucati]

Do you really think people will only be doing M+ for the first couple of weeks? Look at M+ through the expansions. You'll be doing M+ all expac to fill holes in your gear or even to replace raid gear that's obsolete vs a +15 keys loot. On-top of that people aren't going to abandon M+ because they have a free piece of gear with a choice from the weekly chest., This is just an uninformed opinion.

Do you not know why people do +15s? It's for gear. Because you can get warforged/titanforge/corrupted gear. Once all that is gone the value in m+ drops fucking massively.

Talk about uninformed lol. Some people will still try to push +25 keys, but the average people who just do +15s for gear won't be bothering since you won't have any chance of getting upgrades after a couple weeks.

Just look at classic WoW, everyone spammed dungeons for a couple weeks and got full pre-raid BiS and then stopped doing dungeons because there's no more gear for them there. Now the only people still running instances are alts and casual players.

[kaminaris]

Do you not know why people do +15s? It's for gear. Because you can get warforged/titanforge/corrupted gear. Once all that is gone the value in m+ drops fucking massively.

Talk about uninformed lol. Some people will still try to push +25 keys, but the average people who just do +15s for gear won't be bothering since you won't have any chance of getting upgrades after a couple weeks.

Just look at classic WoW, everyone spammed dungeons for a couple weeks and got full pre-raid BiS and then stopped doing dungeons because there's no more gear for them there. Now the only people still running instances are alts and casual players.

Yep, thats exactly what is going to happen, no amount of mounts or cosmetics will save that. And being able to choose from the weekly chest will going to kill M+ even faster.

[exochaft]

Yep, thats exactly what is going to happen, no amount of mounts or cosmetics will save that. And being able to choose from the weekly chest will going to kill M+ even faster.

Through interviews, Blizz has suggested doing more M+ dungeons per week will have some implication on the loot you get from the weekly chest. The example given was roughly rewarding players with more choice in the weekly chest by doing more M+. They obviously understand that if there is no scaling loot from the dungeon, M+ would be a one-and-done every week (which is likely is for many people already) as there's literally no chance of getting something useful from the dungeons themselves if there's no WF/TF/corruption/etc after filling a slot.

Will BiS lists return? Yes and no. Yes, as there will likely be items (especially trinkets) that will tend to gravitate to the top. No, as in there will probably be enough slots where either crafted/legendary items will dictate what you acquire or RNG will still be RNG. I've had many instances over the years where I've gone entire raid tiers (or longer) where I could not get a BiS item to drop for the life of me, these changes will not solve that issue in the slightest.

[AlmightyGerkin]

One of the things I like about wow classic is that there are bis lists, you know where to get each piece you need and you can go throw it one by one.
Titanforging kinda killed that. Now that it's gone, will we see BiS lists return?

With TF/WF and corruption gone in Shadowlands (Thank fucking god) could see return of BIS lists coming back and having certain gear to aim for.

[Kaver]

as the reward is only tied to the amount of time you are willing to spend.

It's also tied to the difficulty of the content you do. That is an very important aspect of it. If you do the hardest content then you will get good gear even if you don't put in a completely massive amount of hours. That's the way it should be. That's how it has always been in MMORPGs.

A player that does a +20 key should get a better reward than a player that does a +10 key. And a player that clears a Mythic raid should get a better reward than a player that clears a Heroic raid. That's how it should work in a MMORPG. A person that only do heroic raiding should never be able to get one single piece of BiS gear. If you want to progress your gear you will also have to progress the content. You cant be doing the same easy content over and over again, and then expect the rewards to become better.

The difficulty of content matters and hopefully Blizzard have started to realize that more by scaling down on all the wellfare gear.

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Yep, thats exactly what is going to happen, no amount of mounts or cosmetics will save that. And being able to choose from the weekly chest will going to kill M+ even faster.

Not if they make some great pieces of gear drop from M+ and have it's ilvl scale with the key level. That will incentivize people to push higher keys to get the highest ilvl instead of just spamming +14 keys all the time. The current loot system are not incentivizing people to progress. There should be a very clear line between gear progression and content progression. If you want to progress your gear you will also have to progress the content you do. Completing a +20 key should just give a much better reward than completing a +14 key.

If they make BiS gear drop from Mythic raiding and +20 keys then most people will never get BiS and they will have something to strive for all the time. You don't need RNG based wellfare gear to incentivize people to do content.

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Through interviews, Blizz has suggested doing more M+ dungeons per week will have some implication on the loot you get from the weekly chest.

Yes, Ion said this. And there is a thousand different things they can do to incentivize people to run M+. People like Kaminaris make it sound like that proc-based systems like Titanforged gear is the only possible solution in the whole universe to incentivize people to run M+. But there are so many things they could do. Especially now that they introduce the Covenants and craftable Legendaries. They could (as an idea) easily introduce some kind of reward from M+ that help you progress your Covenant and Legendaris.

And also, it's not Blizzards goal to have people spam M+. They said in the interview that it's fine to be "done for the week". They want to let people feel that they are done with their mains for the week, so they also have a chance to play some alts. Right now the game incentivize you to spam +14 keys instead of progressing to higher key levels. This is bad. The game should be designe to incentivize you to push the difficulty of the content if you want better rewards. You shouldn't be spamming +14 keys.. you should try to progress and maybe end up doing +20 keys.. but the game system right now doesn't incentivize you to do that.

[Capultro]

Maybe that means that I can finally have a legendary sword to match for my warrior? Because until now, there hasn't been any ...

[Azerox]

Hope so.
Have the rank 2 stars weap 470 from fury.
Just got a 445 ring with rank 3 rituals from empire chest.
Sim says: Clear that rank2 stars and remove that 460 ring so u can use that 445 with rituals 3 (1.5k more dps).
Sigh....

[themaster24]

Detrimental as compared to what it is now or what it could be? It's not like you can actually make any gold with any profession other than farming professions (or crafting things from what you farm). It's extremely inefficient, and in some cases impossible, to make a profit from buying mats and crafting anything to resell. So, I don't think removing sockets would make anything worse than it is now.

Detrimental as in, what would be the point of JC then? If sockets became limited to only a the small handful of crafted pieces a certain person can make, why would someone go JC, unless they made JC have super useful elsewhere. That's kind of the point of what they were talking about. You can't just removed gem socket procs without either A.) adding an alternative source for sockets on most gear or B.) hard shifting the focus of JC into something else, like high level BoE Necks, Rings, and possibly Trinkets.