The Great Vault is rubbish.

[Aphrel]

The great vault is imo, way way too powerful for gearing.

It becomes the dominating gearing feature of the game...

[Kikazz]

Every single week I've gotten at least one solid upgrade. Maybe you should tone down your expectation of "item must have perfect BiS stats" and just look for upgrades over what you have instead? Usually higher primary stat outweighs the difference in secondary stat weighting. This week i effectively had the choice between 220 weapon and 220 belt with socket. I chose the belt. Know why? My current belt is 184 with bad stats so it was a solid upgrade. I already have a 216 weapon so the upgrade would be barely noticeable. Worry about BiS later on in the tier once you get your gear rounded out.

if you had picked the weapon, when you had a 220 belt with a socket....... for a choice, i would have slapped you.

[Stormwolf64]

Got the last boss weapon from doing 3 lfr bosses. Pretty happy with that tbh

[Orwell7]

That said - I don't think Vault is rubbish, I think PvE loot system they did is trash. They really went stingy as fuck with that one. I can understand what they were thinking: "we removed the AP hamster wheel and need to keep people subbed otherwise", so they went back to the "good" old times of gear drops being low.

The good old days were a liiitle different.
Now we have Normal5, M0, M+, LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic.
Norm5 - 158
HC5 - 171
M0 - 184
LFR - 187-194
Normal - 200/207
Heroic - 213/220
Mythic- 226/233.

26 ilvl difference from raids
55 ilvl from HC5

Wotlk had, at it's best (ICC):
Normal5 - 219
HC5 - 232
Normal10 - 251
HC10 - 264 (!)
Norm25 - 264 (!)
HC25 - 277

26 ilvl difference from Normal to HC raids
45 ilvl difference from HC5 to HC raids

A few differences:
-5-man geared player could jump into raids much easily (29 ilvl vs 19 ilvl difference)
-10-player HC dropped the same quality loot as 25norm, BUT the loot tables were different, which increased replayability, some classes wanted some armor penetration form 10-man hc IIRC and other shenanigans
-if you want to Mythic raid, your only option is Heroic + great vault because 210 ilvl goesn't get you far, the avg (!) ilvl on first Mythic kills is 210-215
-in wotlk, you could do 25norm AND 10hc
-PLUS WE HAD EMBLEMS: you could get a "lower" emblem from practically everywhere and got you ilvl245 items (icc25hc was 277! 32 ilvl lower, so if you could buy 194 now)
-and a "higher" Emblem of Frost, which was a reward for high-end pve content. Got you - 264ilvl gear! Like Castle Nathria HEROIC (213)!

TLDR;
Wotlk had low drop rates like now BUT you could get CN-Normal quality gear by farming easier content and CN-HEROIC gear from doing ICC10-25. Including NORMAL ICC10-25! And you could even buy a few pieces of your set armor!
And this is replaced by the Great Vault. One item per week. And we wonder why casuals don't like this anymore.

[Netherblood]

I'm a pve player and mainly focus on raiding mythic and this were my choices in last row this week.

https://imgur.com/a/TkHDaCW
My M+ and raid choices were all mostly useless too. Sometimes you get unlucky, it happens.

[Netherblood]

The great vault is imo, way way too powerful for gearing.

It becomes the dominating gearing feature of the game...

PVP is way too powerful for gearing atm imo, with conquest you can target your weakest slots and then upgrade those all the way to mythic ilvl. Ilvl is fine, no problem with pvp giving mythic ilvl, just being able to target specific slots is super OP when raids drop 3 items per boss and its pure RNG, sometimes you just get 3 cloaks.

[Jonnusthegreat]

I'm pretty sure that in Legion and BfA secondary stats were valued much higher than they are now. We saw some crazy corruption stacking (Mages+Mastery, Rogues+Haste were stupid OP) in Ny'alotha and that depended much less on ilevel and much more on the secondary stats.

Primary stat is always best until you have a bajillion primary. When ilvl gets so high, they give you so much primary stat that it doesn't really matter, but the secondary budget is low comparatively. So when people have 21,000 agility, another 100 doesn't mean as much as 100 of your best secondary. It's just simple diminishing returns.

[Mouri Kogorou]

So I was open minded about the Great Vault being an interesting addition to the end of week rewards. It sounded like an interesting evolution to the weekly chest.

But now, 2 weeks running I’m thinking it’s either broken or just complete garbage.

2 weeks running, I’ve had 6 unlocks in the vault for 6 choices, and of those 6, 5 are just an ilvl upgrade of something I’m wearing that I want to replace, and 1 is some other piece of rando gear.

With having 12 choices the last 2 weeks, I think I’d have been lucky to have gotten 1 piece of gear with haste. But no, it’s all the same crappy crit gear I’m trying to replace with haste gear.

Anyone else noticing extraordinarily bad “luck” when it comes to the vault choices? What are the odd of it offering me 5 choices of the exact item I’ve already equipped if the selections were completely random?

ilvl upgrade is usually an upgrade for whatever spec you are, main stats is usually 100-200% more important than secondary stat.

simulate your options with raidbot and 100% you will find good upgrade.

[Gasparde]

Man, with the gearing of bfa, and no tf, people would be done with gear already.

Shit, can't have that, need gearing to be a 3 months long process! And it has to be something that you can't actively push past a certain point but that you instead just need to wait for every single week for a single upgrade. That's just how it has to be! Because being done with a character after putting in 200 hours is just too early!

Like, I love how everyone keeps telling people that they shouldn't be upset about getting fuck all gear because playing for gear reasons is silly - meanwhile, apparently, if the game just gave you all the gear you wanted relatively quickly it'd be a bad game because gear progression seems to be of utmost importance.

[Athorha]

I'd rather the vault just not exist so I wouldn't have to listen to dumb people argue about the strength of their completely free and unnecessary "rewards" from doing content they would've already been doing

[Bigbazz]

So far I've had

Thunderous Echo Vambraces x2 (highest ilvl one week)
Azure Venom Choker x2 (+1 on alt)
Ring of Perpetual Conflict x3 (and highest ilvl option for 2 of those weeks)

This week was the latter ring + another Verse/Mas ring that wasn't an upgrade. The only way I could have avoided this mess is having grinded out 10 high keys, which is not really a possibility on my time frame, while pugging as a dps Warrior. The only non ring/neck/bracer loot option i've had was legs one week, but the lowest ilvl option and the first week the ring showed up.

You got people getting weapons and trinkets and all these fat upgrades and I get the same loot every week. I wish they would just remove the vault and end of week cache from the game and give you a currency you earn and spend, this will actually make me unsub because I do not have the time to invest maxing out all content so I don't get fucked over.

[Zmagoslav]

I had a similar experience thus far, but as bad as it is, it is still an upgrade over the weekly chest of disappointments of last expansion.

[Cypheo]

The great vault is alot better than what the weekly chest used to be. The gearing system is also alot better than BFA. No matter what they do, people still complain. Even if they made a gearing system that is perfect for YOU, I bet others would be spamming the forums about what they don't like about it. Feels like a no win situation. The community need to change. Stop crying about eveything. Rather give constructive criticism. Tell them what you like, what you don't like and how you think it can be improved.

[Araya]

I've been averaging 7 choices per week, and each week its been really hard to choose which I want to take. Really liking this new Cache.

[Rusken]

One of my guildies this week got offered 6 rings in his Vault. I had 2 viable options (only did Normal last week) and got one of my BiS dungeon pieces.

RNG is RNG, always has been, always will be.

[Bigbazz]

The Vault is definitely an improvement over the weekly Legion chest. (It was in Legion first, I won't let the shitstorm BfA claim it!) Gets people into more activities more times a week for one, and for two, gives you a better chance at a good reward.

That said, it was kinda nice being able to just log in and do the one +15 for the week and know you were getting the max reward for the chest. I think this was the right move for them to make, but I can see why some people would view it as a "downgrade" having to do more in order to have equally as bad luck as they did before.

I think it's a negative though, before your primary upgrades came from doing the content directly. With the vault you're encouraged to do a metric tonne of content to avoid the frustration of getting bad or multiple repeat items, but because direct content now drops less loot and M+ loot quality is lower you're actually relying on that end of week reward as your main way to gain ilvl.

Now imagine you were a player who came home from work, raided and went to bed, maybe do 2-3 dungeons a week or even just the one for the cache. This kinda player is literally screwed, and the more hardcore (fill out every option) guys have an astronomical advantage. I lived and breathed on raidlogging in the past, it was the only way I could do it, and in TBC/Wrath/Cata/MOP/WOD my char was geared to the balls and all I had to do was show up to a raid 2x a week.

Now I'm like a peasant while friends who live inside the game do more dungeons in a week than I can do in a month. And I think I try to squeeze out 2-3 vault options a week while picking up no upgrades along the way and I get the same items several times over, 2 weeks with ilvl 216-223 items in cache and no upgrades.

[Bigbazz]

They're gearing up equally as fast as you are - One item a week.

They just give themselves more chances at loot they need.

That's literally the most sensible way they can make this system. It's unfortunate that you are experiencing a stroke of bad luck in your 2-3 chances a week, but 2-3 more chances a week doesn't guarantee you an item any more than your original 2-3 chances. And since you still only end up with ONE item, it's literally no different than rolling an item off a boss loot table and picking which of the rewards you get.

The lowered loot drops in Mythic+ just means you have a lower ceiling. The chest still gives the good stuff, as it did in BfA giving several item levels higher than the max drop in Mythic+ dungeons. And the chest is balanced by being 1 item earned a week, no matter how many chances to roll an item you need that you get.

Yes, playing more SHOULD net you more chances at something you need. I don't know why that's hard to understand.

The difference in BFA was that you got a currency you could spend on azerite gear. So even if you got bad luck (and I had both great items and duplicates in BFA) you could still get an upgrade from it, at least when you're in the stage of "if it's an ilvl boost and I can equip it, it's a bonus". So lets say instead of picking an item (or in addition like in BFA) I got a currency I could use as bad luck protection, that would be great.

To have a system where they are like "yeah we will give you options so you don't get 3 sets of bracers in a row"... But then to have it like "but you're gonna have to work for it and you could still get 3 sets of bracers to choose from, after getting bracers the week before. As for my friends, the difference is also that for example one of them did 10 runs at M+15 last week, all their options were maximum. With limited time and not raiding it's not realistic, and 2 weeks of no upgrades has compounded the issue.

In 8.3 I played super casual, geared up like a champ and hit a diminishing returns at around 473-475 ish with good corruptions, that's better than heroic raiding gear level, while in SL that point is below normal raid gear. I long for the days of pre-legion gearing, to be honest.

[Kalisandra]

What annoys me is that I keep getting basically only rings and cloaks... it's like BFA's chest-of-disappointment all over again but you get taunted 5-6 times instead of 1.

Believe me or not but last week I took a ring from the chest, this week I took the exact same damn ring (due to higher ilev) and everything else was trash. You can place your bets on what I will get tomorrow..........

Whereas last week the only two potential upgrades I got were both minor upgrades to my chest. This week of the three possible, one was a ring - and both I have had better stats, one was yet another chest (same deal), leaving the gloves which fortunately were an actual upgrade. Meanwhile I still have an awful trinket in one slot. RNG is RNG and sometimes it seems like it's being guided by malevolent spirits.

[Cazze]

The difference in BFA was that you got a currency you could spend on azerite gear. So even if you got bad luck (and I had both great items and duplicates in BFA) you could still get an upgrade from it, at least when you're in the stage of "if it's an ilvl boost and I can equip it, it's a bonus". So lets say instead of picking an item (or in addition like in BFA) I got a currency I could use as bad luck protection, that would be great.

To have a system where they are like "yeah we will give you options so you don't get 3 sets of bracers in a row"... But then to have it like "but you're gonna have to work for it and you could still get 3 sets of bracers to choose from, after getting bracers the week before. As for my friends, the difference is also that for example one of them did 10 runs at M+15 last week, all their options were maximum. With limited time and not raiding it's not actually an option, and 2 weeks of no upgrades has compounded the issue.

In 8.3 I played super casual, geared up like a champ and hit a diminishing returns at around 473-475 ish with good corruptions, that's better than heroic raiding gear level, while in SL that point is below normal raid gear.

You got currency because azerite gear couldn't actually drop from dungeons, and you could target the piece but it still had random azerite powers(much worse than wrong stats for example.)

[Neuroticaine]

This week is the first week I didn't have any clear upgrades, but I also forgot to run any mythics last week. Otherwise, I've had clear upgrades, and a couple of them have been very good pieces, stat-wise. RNG gonna RNG. Just because you have more options doesn't mean RNG won't screw you over from time to time.