Let loot be Loot - Ion2020

[shadowlandsx]

all I know is I'm going to have to run a dungeon min at least 1000 times to get one piece I can use the same go for raids..

so when he said that that is what I interpreted.. they got to keep you playing in game that is their goal ..that why there is rng..

if you got your piece of gear in the 3rd run then you would not play as much.. get it got it good... they will never give you want you want and make it easy.. that for sure..

[Kuntantee]

Reminds me of how he keeps saying there's no AP grind and people insist there still will be one because its the same letters as AnImA pOwEr!!!!1

There are reasons why some people are skeptical. They made the same assertions when azerite and artifact grind was the same thing presented under different names.

[Marc7]

There are reasons why some people are skeptical. They made the same assertions when azerite and artifact grind was the same thing presented under different names.

I don't remember them ever saying, during development of BfA, that azerite wouldn't be a similar grind to artifact power. In fact, I mostly remember them hyping up the fact that you don't get AP as clickable items anymore, and that Artifact Knowledge is completely behind the scenes from the start, and that AP rewards won't scale up but rather requirements will scale down. All of that happened, none of that made any difference.

We will clearly have a grindable currency again that will be used to upgrade our covenants. From what they've said, however, there's a (low) cap on how much you need per reset to stay competitive. I'm sure some people will say its just the same, but having some currency-grinds in MMOs is just a part of the experience. It's like how people complain about borrowed power (a thing that can be an issue) and seem to want a world in which none of the expansion's systems actually do anything, because everything needs to be baseline.

[Beefhammer]

I don't remember them ever saying, during development of BfA, that azerite wouldn't be a similar grind to artifact power. In fact, I mostly remember them hyping up the fact that you don't get AP as clickable items anymore, and that Artifact Knowledge is completely behind the scenes from the start, and that AP rewards won't scale up but rather requirements will scale down. All of that happened, none of that made any difference.

We will clearly have a grindable currency again that will be used to upgrade our covenants. From what they've said, however, there's a (low) cap on how much you need per reset to stay competitive. I'm sure some people will say its just the same, but having some currency-grinds in MMOs is just a part of the experience. It's like how people complain about borrowed power (a thing that can be an issue) and seem to want a world in which none of the expansion's systems actually do anything, because everything needs to be baseline.

But the kicker is many of these people complaining about rental powers would be up in arms over ability bloat and too many buttons.

[Morssoe]

epic and leges drop only from mythic raiding, thats good dream.

[kaminaris]

I just don't know why we couldn't have a blend of both systems.

WF/TF + the ability to upgrade your gear through something similar to valor points so even if you got unlucky, you could still upgrade X piece to be BiS.

Ex: item level cap is X, Mythic is -15, heroic -30, normal -45, lfr -60.

An item could WF/TF as high as it wanted (so a WQ could still item level cap) but items could only be upgraded a max of +15 item levels, +socket, a choose your own tertiary.

So you could get lucky and get a max ilevel weapon with a socket and leech, but if it just dropped, you'd have the option of upgrading it.

Convoluted gear tax on top of WF/TF that ultimately absolutely doesn't do anything for gearing except making unnecessary ilvl boost.

[Thage]

epic and leges drop only from mythic raiding, thats good dream.

Legendaries are one thing, but at what point in the game's life did epics only drop from the top of top-tier raiding? 'Cause I've got some bad news regarding some items from even back in Classic. Hell, just doing dungeons you could kit up in Dungeon Set 2, a good third or half of which is epic items, and several dungeons had epic drops--off the top of my head, SM Library dropped an epic ring, and BRD, BRS, Strat, Scholo, and Sunken Temple all had at least one epic drop in there, to say nothing of world-drop epics.

[Gorsameth]

I don't remember them ever saying, during development of BfA, that azerite wouldn't be a similar grind to artifact power. In fact, I mostly remember them hyping up the fact that you don't get AP as clickable items anymore, and that Artifact Knowledge is completely behind the scenes from the start, and that AP rewards won't scale up but rather requirements will scale down. All of that happened, none of that made any difference.

We will clearly have a grindable currency again that will be used to upgrade our covenants. From what they've said, however, there's a (low) cap on how much you need per reset to stay competitive. I'm sure some people will say its just the same, but having some currency-grinds in MMOs is just a part of the experience. It's like how people complain about borrowed power (a thing that can be an issue) and seem to want a world in which none of the expansion's systems actually do anything, because everything needs to be baseline.

The difference between SL and Legion/BfA is that there is a weekly cap on Anima Power so the grind isn't endless. But depending on how hard/easy that cap will be to attain it will still be a grind and if the cap is to high there will be no real meaningful difference for most people.

[Craaazyyy]

The funniest thing about the whole "They got rid of Maelstrom" thing is that it doesnt change a single thing. Its going to play exactly the same.

that's not true lmao.. as elemental your gameplay in pve was literally lava burst after lavaburst, everything else was just an afterthought. And you didn't really care about maelstrom. Without maelstrom many things already changed, it's also not all about lava burst anymore, chain lightning > earthquake interaction is back, fulmination is way better than having to just dump maelstorm

also enhance is different because they reintroduced proper lightning bolt and chain lightning to enhance. Also changes seem to be making stuff like lava lash actually worth pressing now

[kaminaris]

It allows WF/TF to still exist while allowing you the option of upgrading a piece of gear if you don't get a BiS roll.

Which makes it unnecessary gear tax that partially invalidates WF/TF because if you can upgrade anything to at least +15 ilvls, it's the same as having everything +15ilvl baseline (but with a tax)

[Thestrawman]

But the kicker is many of these people complaining about rental powers would be up in arms over ability bloat and too many buttons.

I'm not so sure. I mean yes there will be complaints about everything but if the rotation was fluid and the spec felt good to play they wouldn't complain.

The problem with rental powers is that the specs feel worse without them. Some of them are almost unplayable without the rental powers. Just look at the state of Enhancement Shaman or Shadow Priest on Alpha for example.

[chiddie]

Not counting the really satisfying randomness from, for example, warfront. One of my toons has ONE 460 piece in all the equipment and of course out of 14 pieces the chest reward was the ONLY piece I already had at 460. This is really bad game design, considering that it’s a once a month event it should give you 100% a piece that is an upgrade. Only when your equip is full 460 the reward goes random.

Weapons world loot also is non sense, I have a lot of toons with ilvl 450+ without even entering a M+ that have weapons at 405-10 because weapons rewards from WQ and emissaries are almost non existent.

[kaminaris]

The difference between SL and Legion/BfA is that there is a weekly cap on Anima Power so the grind isn't endless. But depending on how hard/easy that cap will be to attain it will still be a grind and if the cap is to high there will be no real meaningful difference for most people.

That's not a difference at all.
Endless grind with weekly cap or not is still endless. Real difference is how much power it provides.
In Legion AP was really powerful because artifact was powerful. Thus you felt pressure to keep farming it.
In BfA you just had to get to the point where all dps rings were unlocked. After that each level was minuscule upgrade.

Long story short, for people without OCD Azerite is going to work exactly the same as Anima power.
And the only real difference will be a possibility to spend extra on some cosmetics.

[Beefhammer]

I'm not so sure. I mean yes there will be complaints about everything but if the rotation was fluid and the spec felt good to play they wouldn't complain.

The problem with rental powers is that the specs feel worse without them. Some of them are almost unplayable without the rental powers. Just look at the state of Enhancement Shaman or Shadow Priest on Alpha for example.

I meant if we kept everything from every expansion. There would be too much

[Marc7]

But the kicker is many of these people complaining about rental powers would be up in arms over ability bloat and too many buttons.

Yes, franky I think its obnoxious how the community always latches onto some high-level design concept and decides its all black-and-white good or bad. People used to be all about complaining about rng and timegating, now its borrowed power and timers (all timers in all situations, as though those were not an extremely useful and widely used design-tool in all gaming). These things can cause problems, but especially when it comes to borrowed power discussions I find a lot of it incredibly counterproductive. In an RPG, when you engage with a system you'd hope that would result in meaningful character progress that changes your playstyle. Its a separate issue that some of the classes in WoW just suck without these systems, and that should be fixed, but I think its very cool that different expansions have different systems like the artifact weapons that change and deepen the gameplay of your character. In BfA it clearly took way too long for us to get beyond the stage where classes feel barebones, and I hope that's what is fixed rather than pivoting towards a design where we never get any cool and impactful systems and toys that augment the feel of the classes in specific expansions.

The difference between SL and Legion/BfA is that there is a weekly cap on Anima Power so the grind isn't endless. But depending on how hard/easy that cap will be to attain it will still be a grind and if the cap is to high there will be no real meaningful difference for most people.

A weekly grind is ok. I don't get why people are so against that. We've always had mandatory grinds and we will always have them, as they are a part of the DNA of games like these. If someone plays so little they are not even close to hitting a (hopefully) reasonable cap, none of this makes any difference to them. People who, in the start of BfA, only did content that rewarded items with low azerite requirements (say, those who slowly progress heroic raiding and everything below that) were never affected by the system in an unreasonable way. For those players the grind was reasonable in that as long as you played the game you progressed enough to keep your armor functional, and you realistically didn't really need to pay much attention to your neck-level. Again, I feel like there's a lot of bandwagoning going on, people latching-on specific complaints and widening them in a way that leads them to demand all content that even remotely reminds them of something is removed from the game forever.

That's not a difference at all.
Endless grind with weekly cap or not is still endless. Real difference is how much power it provides.
In Legion AP was really powerful because artifact was powerful. Thus you felt pressure to keep farming it.
In BfA you just had to get to the point where all dps rings were unlocked. After that each level was minuscule upgrade.

Long story short, for people without OCD Azerite is going to work exactly the same as Anima power.
And the only real difference will be a possibility to spend extra on some cosmetics.

Yeah you're right. And Azerite grinding or Artifact Power were never genuine issues at all to those, as you so antagonistically put it, without "OCD". You are pretending as though the competitive part of the playerbase are all idiots, when it is Blizzard that decided that in Uldir mythic especially dropped armor that took an obscene amount of grinding to get online. You keep saying that the first DPS rings were automatically unlocked, but that is a change they made in 8.1 when they brought in another throughput ring to epic azerite armor, and the whole deal got a lot better to everyone at that point.

[kaminaris]

Yeah you're right. And Azerite grinding or Artifact Power were never genuine issues at all to those, as you so antagonistically put it, without "OCD". You are pretending as though the competitive part of the playerbase are all idiots, when it is Blizzard that decided that in Uldir mythic especially dropped armor that took an obscene amount of grinding to get online. You keep saying that the first DPS rings were automatically unlocked, but that is a change they made in 8.1 when they brought in another throughput ring to epic azerite armor, and the whole deal got a lot better to everyone at that point.

Uldir was first iteration of azerite armor. Lets be honest, we all knew it was going to have issues. But it was mostly fixed in 8.1 so pretty quick. As opposed to legiondaries in legion which took entire expansion to fix. Point is, you don't feel so much pressure because after you hit this softcap (unlocking last dps ring) you are done and can chill, which happened relatively quick.

Anima power to azerite is next gen with only differs in having option to spend it on some cosmetics.

What majority of players did with azrite?
3x island expeditions a week + maybe emissaries

What people will do with anima power?
Do some stuff weekly + thorgast

Activities to acquire will be the same - pretty much all the sources like pvp, pve, dungs, raids etc
End result will be the same - your character will gain power through entire expansion.

My only hope is that I won't have to do world quests

[Marc7]

Uldir was first iteration of azerite armor. Lets be honest, we all knew it was going to have issues. But it was mostly fixed in 8.1 so pretty quick. As opposed to legiondaries in legion which took entire expansion to fix. Point is, you don't feel so much pressure because after you hit this softcap (unlocking last dps ring) you are done and can chill, which happened relatively quick.

Anima power to azerite is next gen with only differs in having option to spend it on some cosmetics.

What majority of players did with azrite?
3x island expeditions a week + maybe emissaries

What people will do with anima power?
Do some stuff weekly + thorgast

Activities to acquire will be the same - pretty much all the sources like pvp, pve, dungs, raids etc
End result will be the same - your character will gain power through entire expansion.

My only hope is that I won't have to do world quests

Yeah you're right. I'm not quite so quick to say that the 8.0. state of Azerite was acceptable, since they really didn't seem to take feedback into account, and also the original powers were much worse than what we have now. Correcting that failed azerite armor system seems to have taken way too much development time for them, which lead to many of BfAs problems. We can hope they've learned, and even though a lot of people seem very skeptical about it, I still think it looks like they have.

What I hope softcaps instead of artifact knowledge will do is make catching up genuinely less of a pain in the ass.

I 100% agree on WQs. I don't mind if they are useful to do in the beginning, and if whatever the system that replaces emissaries is remains useful for a longer period of time, but I'm completely over doing WQs as a mainstay of the endgame gameplay-loop.

[Morssoe]

Legendaries are one thing, but at what point in the game's life did epics only drop from the top of top-tier raiding? 'Cause I've got some bad news regarding some items from even back in Classic. Hell, just doing dungeons you could kit up in Dungeon Set 2, a good third or half of which is epic items, and several dungeons had epic drops--off the top of my head, SM Library dropped an epic ring, and BRD, BRS, Strat, Scholo, and Sunken Temple all had at least one epic drop in there, to say nothing of world-drop epics.

I don't know why everything should be capped however game used to be. Like do you think it was "perfect" any given time?

[Thage]

I don't know why everything should be capped however game used to be. Like do you think it was "perfect" any given time?

Bit of a loaded question. Ideal means different things to different people. So long as they don't go back to the WoD loot philosophy, I can roll with just about anything.