Why is blizzard so against PvE badge gear?

[Kralljin]

Because back in the day, the game didn't have four seperate difficulties, meaning it's a huge pain with every additional source of gear to figure how where to properly place it in terms of rewards.

[razorpax]

Dunno, what you talk about, because I started playing BFA in 8.2, as always, when flying was enabled. And I couldn't do Nazjatar properly, because I didn't have fully leveled heart and proper essences. And I was able to slowly "catch-up" on one character only. My main. 8.3 content allowed my to "catch-up" only because corruptions were so OP, so they gave me big power boost pretty fast. Problem is - they required cloak => cloak required visions => visions required dailies. And I hated that content. Again, I had no desire to do it on alts.

And WotLK had smooth content progression. 180ilvl while leveling => 200ilvl in 3.0 heroics => 220 ilvl in 3.2 heroics => 240 ilvl in 3.3 heroics => jumping strait to ICC.

It was also true for any intermediate patch. 3.0 had Arca and Sart, that were at LFR level of difficulty and allowed players to get tier pieces. Mali was a little bit harder and extra loot. Each raid had 2 "difficulties" with different ilvl requirements and rewards - 10 and 25. Each raid had wings with linear difficulty ramping. Even casuals could complete wing 1 and 2. And progress further with time.

Current xpacks are hell in comparison with it. They are extremely time/grind/RNG-gated. And in most cases certain rewards are gated behind certain kinds of content, that makes them mandatory for your, even if you don't like them. You can't just do, what you like to do and skip everything else.

8.2 essentially removed the azerite grind to unlock the traits and the only grind for azerite was the essence slots

Unable to do nazjatar must mean not overgearing it

8.3 allowed you to get geared for normal in a few days and as far as corruption resistance the catch up was added in a mini patch including account wide essence unlocks

[Drusin]

Literally how pvp gear works but for PVE
Similar in nature to MoP VP rewards, badge gear like justice point vendor I dunno but upgradeable gear seems good.

[razorpax]

Nope, we had people switching classes in 8.1 and 8.2, I did two switches myself, one in BoD and second one in Nyalotha.
It was ez and fast.

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Once you realize curve will be at minimum of 210 ilvl in like 2 weeks (because of vault) you will realize how mistaken you were.
There is an effective difference between dungeon end reward vs vault reward of about ~25ilvls (which is about the same mathematically as new ~ +16).

So you had a fresh 120 with essence slot unlocks and rank 3 essences in a couple weeks?

8.1 just had the neck grind which based on how you say you play the game is probably what you did but 8.2 main swapping was not fast if for nothing other than the neck and essence grind

Also the difference between end of run and vault is like 14 or something. My +2 got me a 203 outta the vault

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Literally how pvp gear works but for PVE
Similar in nature to MoP VP rewards, badge gear like justice point vendor I dunno but upgradeable gear seems good.

Timegated upgradable pve gear currently capped at 177 going up 7 levels each week capping at 200 is in the game

[Echocho]

I got geared much easier in SL than I did back in WOTLK, faster too. First set that allowed me to skip Normal grinding = from the AH. The rest I got from HC dungeons, then Mythic, now raiding.

I'll take getting the gear from the source over farming a currency that I'll have to wait to spend at a vendor to get actually useful pieces, all the while selling every piece that drops for me in the dungeons as I cap the currency, tyvm. My memory of WOTLK's currencies was that people capped them for the week, then sat in cities waiting for reset.

The only real positive with badge gear was that bad and/or casual players had something to work towards. They'd spam trivial content for badges in order to eventually get a good set of gear. Having something to work towards is always a good thing.

As a raider they were just annoying since it felt a lot better to get the gear from the source but you had to farm badges in order to fill in the blanks.

[Drusin]

Timegated upgradable pve gear currently capped at 177 going up 7 levels each week capping at 200 is in the game

MoP did all dungeon or greater gear, also JP/VP vendor gear

[Yayeet]

Because the current system is infinitely better

It isn't though.

[Kaver]

Reforging only let you set aside a portion of the stats. I was mostly making fun of the insane super tryhard guys in my post. Back in WoD one ret pally in my guild went on such a rip snorting rampage finding out the leggo ring had his worst stat the GM had to kick him. I simmed his character out of boredom and vers was his worst stat by literally 0.1% and all were within 0.75% of each other.

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You mean one piece for two or three slots?

No I mean the current assortment they have in M+ they could just transfer to a vendor. Then it would be the same assortment and the problem you presented wouldn’t exist.

[Kumorii]

Dunno, what you talk about, because I started playing BFA in 8.2, as always, when flying was enabled. And I couldn't do Nazjatar properly, because I didn't have fully leveled heart and proper essences. And I was able to slowly "catch-up" on one character only. My main. 8.3 content allowed my to "catch-up" only because corruptions were so OP, so they gave me big power boost pretty fast. Problem is - they required cloak => cloak required visions => visions required dailies. And I hated that content. Again, I had no desire to do it on alts.

And WotLK had smooth content progression. 180ilvl while leveling => 200ilvl in 3.0 heroics => 220 ilvl in 3.2 heroics => 240 ilvl in 3.3 heroics => jumping strait to ICC.

It was also true for any intermediate patch. 3.0 had Arca and Sart, that were at LFR level of difficulty and allowed players to get tier pieces. Mali was a little bit harder and extra loot. Each raid had 2 "difficulties" with different ilvl requirements and rewards - 10 and 25. Each raid had wings with linear difficulty ramping. Even casuals could complete wing 1 and 2. And progress further with time.

Current xpacks are hell in comparison with it. They are extremely time/grind/RNG-gated. And in most cases certain rewards are gated behind certain kinds of content, that makes them mandatory for your, even if you don't like them. You can't just do, what you like to do and skip everything else.

What do you mean, not being able to it properly?
Everyone I knew including me went to Nazjatar asap for benthic gear since that was some of the catch up gear.
Cloak had catch up mechanics as well.

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Reforging only let you set aside a portion of the stats. I was mostly making fun of the insane super tryhard guys in my post. Back in WoD one ret pally in my guild went on such a rip snorting rampage finding out the leggo ring had his worst stat the GM had to kick him. I simmed his character out of boredom and vers was his worst stat by literally 0.1% and all were within 0.75% of each other.

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You mean one piece for two or three slots?

Ridiculous fkn guild...
It's the same now with people not forging a non-bis leggo which still gives a huge performance boost because they don't want to "waste" soul ash to upgrade the bis leggo to higher ilvl...

I simmed myself with the 190 vs the 210 and the dps difference was 20dps for me. So i crafted my 2nd bis leggo first week, destroyed m+ and normal raids and then got my bis leggo the week after. People are going overboard with the min-maxing thoughts for sure.

[Skorpionss]

It worked in cata. It worked in wrath. It sort of worked in mop but it was gimmicky. Ever since then there has been maybe one patch per expansion with badge gear. I don’t understand why they can’t just bring back valor points? Running a daily heroic felt good. Finally upgrading a low ilvl piece you had due to a bad luck streak felt good. Getting shards once you can’t get anymore upgrades from the vendor felt good.

Why the helll don’t they just bring this back? Why are they so adamant to make gear purely RNG?

What's more infuriating is that M+ doesn't even drop gear for everyone... did 5 runs in a row with no drop for me...

[Nnyco]

Probably because running a heroic dungeon every day to get geared was... extremly boring.

[Swnem]

Badges were okay back in the day, but I got used to the game with no badges and I think I wouldn't want them back again.

I prefer to do a dungeon and have an item drop or not, rather than having to do a fixed number of dungeons to gain enough badges for an item. I don't want daily dungeons anymore, I want to have the freedom to run 5 dungeons in a row on one day if I feel like it, and no dungeons throughout the rest of the week should I feel like that.

Besides, if we're talking badges as means for catch up for casual players, there are many other methods for that right now, all of which are more interesting.



You won't feel like you're wasting time if you run the dungeon knowing that you might not get it.

Getting 1 badge each time, and getting the item after 10 dungeons, makes it feel like a real life job. Especially when you tie it to some shit daily system which forces you to run the content every day regardless of whether you feel like it or not.

The other method forces you to run it everyday all the same. You can be lucky and get it in your first run or it can take twice as long. Which one feels like a job then?
Look, i am not saying they should replace one with the other. But a badge system being complementary, so you can fight the sense of helplessness when an item you need refuses to drop and just brings frustration and resentment.

But, it is a fact to me that a deterministic reward will always be a better experience than a random one.

[Rumex]

Today you have way more ways to get gear tho, even if the drop rate is kinda low. Raiding, m+, PVP, world quest etc.
But i still think m+ could use some sort of currency you can use on toys/mounts/transmog, maybe even make it season based.
Specially with the low drop rate in m+, running 4-5 dungeons without seeing any loot can frustrate some players.
But if you have more to 'play' for earning some sort of currency it might be more interesting for players to do m+

[razorpax]

MoP did all dungeon or greater gear, also JP/VP vendor gear

It did however it also had fewer gear sources
You had scenarios which led to heroic dungeons which led to valor which required like 2 weeks worth for one piece

Now you have the covenant set for those who don’t do much else

I think 3 more weeks gets the max level which is on par with normal raid which MoP only had if you maxxed lfr gear

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I think it is different strokes for different folks. Now people still run heroics and mythics of the same places every day and do dailies...well...daily. Some find a predictable gearing boring, others hate RNG gearing.

I would rather run 4 times through a quick 15 man heroic on my mains and alts like it was in WotLK than do calling like today where you need to ride through and into an area that is full of hostile elites that each give 4% on a completion bar. It is bearable these days, but in 4 months on an alt likely impossible (because nobody is there to help and that alt just gets swarmed and killed by even getting to the objective - talking about the current House of Chosen calling in Maldraxxus)

Everyone will have the calling so you’ll still have groups and likely out gear it

[Eurhetemec]

It worked in cata. It worked in wrath. It sort of worked in mop but it was gimmicky. Ever since then there has been maybe one patch per expansion with badge gear. I don’t understand why they can’t just bring back valor points? Running a daily heroic felt good. Finally upgrading a low ilvl piece you had due to a bad luck streak felt good. Getting shards once you can’t get anymore upgrades from the vendor felt good.

Why the helll don’t they just bring this back? Why are they so adamant to make gear purely RNG?

I think the underlying reason is that badge/valor systems specifically feel cheap/easy and encourage some really mindless grinding, as well as encouraging or even requiring people to do content which has no other rewards for them at all, over and over and over.

You say it "worked in Cataclysm", but I'd say Cataclysm showed it didn't. People got incredibly burned out repeating Cataclysm dungeons and so on to hit the cap. Getting shards did not, in fact, "feel good" to most players, even if it did to you for some strange reason.

And the reality is, it's pretty damn easy to gear up, easier and more reliable, I'd say, in SL than it ever was in Cataclysm with valor - and less time-consuming too. You think doing a daily heroic "felt good"? What the fuck? It felt like yet another daily chore you were forced into, on a pile of other daily chores. In an expansion which had dungeons which were initially boring, ugly, tedious and demanding, and then simply because boring, ugly and tedious.

[Onikaroshi]

I think the underlying reason is that badge/valor systems specifically feel cheap/easy and encourage some really mindless grinding, as well as encouraging or even requiring people to do content which has no other rewards for them at all, over and over and over.

You say it "worked in Cataclysm", but I'd say Cataclysm showed it didn't. People got incredibly burned out repeating Cataclysm dungeons and so on to hit the cap. Getting shards did not, in fact, "feel good" to most players, even if it did to you for some strange reason.

And the reality is, it's pretty damn easy to gear up, easier and more reliable, I'd say, in SL than it ever was in Cataclysm with valor - and less time-consuming too. You think doing a daily heroic "felt good"? What the fuck? It felt like yet another daily chore you were forced into, on a pile of other daily chores. In an expansion which had dungeons which were initially boring, ugly, tedious and demanding, and then simply because boring, ugly and tedious.

Gearing in SL hits a hard wall. Once you're past that M0 area gear starts trickling in at a farts pace. 8 M+ this week an zero loot, 10 bosses in raid, zero loot.

[Eurhetemec]

Gearing in SL hits a hard wall. Once you're past that M0 area gear starts trickling in at a farts pace. 8 M+ this week an zero loot, 10 bosses in raid, zero loot.

I mean, I think there's a "hard wall" and there's "astonishingly bad luck", and you're kind of confusing the two there, but gear coming pretty slowly at a certain point is not new nor unique to any specific expansion. Anyone who played Vanilla or TBC went a week or two or even more without an upgrade from time to time. Also, you presumably got your 1 pieces from the Great Vault, no? You seem to be suggesting not. Plus presumably upgraded your Legendary?

[StillMcfuu]

this explains everything you want to know

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urijgWXLYck&t=8m20s

im too tired to make a tldr though...so please watch

Honestly... I've always disliked this video as it's basically a non-answer to the problem at hand. And their change away from token vendors created more problems than the very few issues vendors ever had. The top comment is also apt, it's not a real criticism of the situation, but it's always worth the chuckle; He's condemning the gearing situation of the game when it was at it's most popular, with a ravenous fanbase, and presenting that the gearing system when the game started to massively decline in popularity is "better". Anecdotally, a lot of people hate recent gearing. It's definitely been an objective step backwards, as random forging, sockets, raining gear has been bad, etc...
He condemns players "farming" IE actually playing the game, in old raids, and dungeons getting badges as "Bad" but then fails how much forging created forced farming and other recent issues.

Basically, this whole video is shit and one of the games major issues is encapsulated in that he says the team got to a point "where they stopped caring".

Seeing as SL has spent significant time reversing the decision of the last 6+ years, I think it's safe to say this guy was wrong.

End of the day, the Badge system was "clumsy" at it's worst. The worst thing that would happen is when the vendor sold an item for a slot a player needed, but with stats they didn't want. But in that scenario there were usually multiple issues with what the "player wanted" or how much content/gear attempts they were getting anyway. IE if the player just ran dungeons, the gear that they could buy after a significant time investment was better that their gear, period... If the person was running raids and they just had some bad luck and the best they could buy from the vendor had off stats... it was still an upgrade and if they are raiding and getting the gear they want in other slots, were likely already butting against their soft caps, massively devaluing their preferred stats. What the badge system did do was give lower end players a chance to get some normal raid gear. It was after such a significant amount of time that no real raider cared because they moved on from that gear as it was or they had it for months.

Really the whole question of liking badge gear or not is subjective. It was a different system, but on the whole it had way less issues than the systems that replaced it and that's not subjective.

[khazmodan]

this explains everything you want to know

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urijgWXLYck&t=8m20s

im too tired to make a tldr though...so please watch

Did you even watch the video? in it he talks about the problems with putting badges in RAIDS and people losing the "excitement" because of grinding badges...kind of like the honor and conquest points we grind again for pvp and the soul ash we grind for legendaries or the stygia we grind for venari rep and gem sockets.

[Relapses]

Really the whole question of liking badge gear or not is subjective. It was a different system, but on the whole it had way less issues than the systems that replaced it and that's not subjective.

"I preferred badges therefore it's my subjective opinion that this system had less issues."

Yeah. Super objective opinion there, friendo.