9.1 seems to be addressing the casual gearing concerns

[SoundOfGuns]

KSM is account wide....even the actual components are as in you can do a 15 of a different dungeon on each of 10 characters and get KSM. Mind you it's also tiered. There's absolutely no excuse a "casual" cannot get KSM.

Then i must have been drunk the last times i checked. I guess i got to look again later!

[kamuimac]

Its just a way of saying it, they are gonna be 237 tops, which is still 2 ilvl below heroic, and when they get to 237, heroic raiders and specially mythic raiders will be already done with the tier for weeks if not months, if you check the video, its renown gated, which means they will need like 15 weeks to start getting 237, most mythic/heroic guilds are gonna be way past 237 ilvl by the time we get to that 15th week.

also people will get better gear just by VP upgradeing m+ drops + 15 weeks of GV will make it completly obsolete even if people just do like +5 tops.

its amazing system for freshly dinged alts - so they dont have to go through "mud of 2-9 keys " only can jump in straight to 10-14 when dinged like 5 months into tier.

if 9.0 had similiar system it would keep so much more people subbed in .

i know i would level up more then 4 toons to 60 if it was in for 9.0 . will definetly now level up my lock , shaman dk and monk in 9.1 when i know i will be able to gear them up via world content without hassle of applying to m+

[Daffan]

Except that isn’t how it worked since the beginning. You could get very, very good gear doing casual content at almost any point in the early games history. There was a legitimate set of “final” gear you could work toward.

It is simply bad design for your game to not allow the average player to target a “final” set of gear. Sense of completion is extremely important in a game like this. Whatever weird jollies you get knowing other people aren’t having fun is not worth the overall health of the game.

Blizzard does not want the game to end.

If they give away free stuff, it reduces the time of playing.

The amount of welfare and catchup in this game is so crazy even right now (high) that Blizzard is forced to come up with artificial systems and gating them just to keep people invested (soul azz, AP etc)

[Daffan]

Yeah the amount of the time gating in this game is crazy i didnt played a mmo in my life that had this amount of forced time gating
If you put out a ressource let people grind it or redesign your reward system in the frist place instead throttle systems

re-design your reward system is the real answer, however if you even dare to re-design and remove welfare/catchup, people call you elitist.

Ion even wrote about this in 2008 pre-hire, pretty funny in 2020 we still dealing with it.

[Osmeric]

Nobady will ever bother do harder content just to get some stupid achievement or cosmetic rewards which this games have thousands upon thousands alredy.

So, if the only reason people do harder content is to get meaningless gear, it sounds like harder content really isn't serving any purpose. So let's just not include it. Gear disparity solved.

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Blizzard does not want the game to end.

If they give away free stuff, it reduces the time of playing.

As opposed to the current system, which is working SWIMMINGLY at keeping people subbed, right?

[Shaetha]

M+ has invalidated heroic raid for the last 3 expansions now. In Legion you kinda had to be dedicated to M+ for it to invalidate the raid, but I'm sure the majority of M+ tanks and healers in Legion were all over-geared for Heroic the moment the raid came out. That's basically why they started staggering the release of everything.

M+ has changed the game for the worse in my opinion. Now you need a completely whole new end game for people who can't be bothered to play e-peen games with M+. You have people who completely disregard PVP as if it doesn't exist, you have people who refuse to do M+ and you have people who strictly only raid and they're all divided across shards and phases. That is a really unified, coherent gaming community you've got there lmao...
Socially, who would wanna touch this game with a 10 foot pole? It's a social disaster.

So it's no different from any other game with more than one mode, then.

[deenman]

If it's true I'm sure their will be some dumb arbitrary restriction because other people (re:casuals) can't have nice things.

imagine thinking the hardest content in the game should MAYBE reward better gear than just runing around like a headless chicken filling a bar...damn those toxic elitists!

[Osmeric]

imagine thinking the hardest content in the game should MAYBE reward better gear than just runing around like a headless chicken filling a bar...damn those toxic elitists!

Imagine thinking that principle is required, even a moral necessity, rather than a design choice that may or may not work.

[Kaver]

why any normal player that play hundreds of hours in the game vs a mythic raider who do the same number of hours and both pay the same subs should have less stuff ?

Because you want to reward players who are able to overcome difficult content and achievements/cosmetics are not enough. Better rewards for doing harder content is pretty normal in a video game.

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Imagine thinking that principle is required, even a moral necessity, rather than a design choice that may or may not work.

What does this even mean?

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If it's true I'm sure their will be some dumb arbitrary restriction because other people (re:casuals) can't have nice things.

Sure casuals can have nice things. And they should have nice things. But players who are able to overcome difficult content should have even nicer things. That's a pretty standard design element in video games. You know.. rewarding impressive accomplishments.

[Lurker1]

It such a shit game it makes no sense to keep up with it
Show me hard proof (aka source) what you're claiming is true

it's not true at all and i played it my server barely has players and i was on ff14 this mourning went back to wow instead.

[Ragedaug]

I have no problem with casual players being able to obtain the best gear in the game, but at a slower pace than folks completing the highest level content.

I would suspect that more than half of WoW's players are incapable of completing mythic raids, so gating gear behind it as the only way to get it seems silly.

[Wangming]

Because you want to reward players who are able to overcome difficult content and achievements/cosmetics are not enough. Better rewards for doing harder content is pretty normal in a video game.

I understand that. But if you already cleared the hardest fight the game has to offer. What do you need the even stronger gear for? You get an exclusive achievement, exclusive transmog, maybe a pet or a mount.

[Lurker1]

If gear is the only reason you do content you need to rethink why you play the game.

This is why most people play the game so your talking about almost every player then here.

[Wangming]

I have no problem with casual players being able to obtain the best gear in the game, but at a slower pace than folks completing the highest level content.

I would suspect that more than half of WoW's players are incapable of completing mythic raids, so gating gear behind it as the only way to get it seems silly.

Which is pretty much the idea behind relic weapons in FFXIV. They are not the best gear in game. But they are pretty effin strong and have a unique look. The way to get them is a long grind. You don't need to raid savage (highest raid dificulty) to get it.

[Crimson Spears]

I think a large part of this is how people view success without really understanding the steps involved.. I see a lot of people thinking that simply having better gear will gain them access to the playerbase that doesn't struggle in the game. That if they have an ilv close or identical to those players it will get them invited into the groups that quickly and without drama solve problems and overcome content.

What they fail to realize is they are not at a level of play that will allow them access to that portion of the playerbase. All that increasing the starting ilv does it set a new minimum to enter those "hallowed halls".

Tossing free gear to people just adds a time gate to new players interested in harder content.

[Kaver]

I understand that. But if you already cleared the hardest fight the game has to offer. What do you need the even stronger gear for? You get an exclusive achievement, exclusive transmog, maybe a pet or a mount.

This logic would only apply to the very end boss then.

Besides, better gear for harder content has always been a standard reward in WoW.

[Varaben]

I understand that. But if you already cleared the hardest fight the game has to offer. What do you need the even stronger gear for? You get an exclusive achievement, exclusive transmog, maybe a pet or a mount.

I wonder what the game would look like if Mythic dropped the same gear as Heroic, but dropped mounts or literally just transmog gear (with no stats)? It would certainly make mythic challenging since you couldn't outgear it until the next tier. And it would mean PVPers wouldn't feel like they need to run Mythic early on in the expansion (and vice versa).

I've been against LFR for a while, but it's not really the idea of LFR that's a problem for me - it's that adding more tiers creates too much disparity between raid tiers - which could be solved by no Mythic gear too. I don't raid mythic, so I don't have a horse in this race, but if this system was in place on top of the gearing changes in 9.1, that would mean casuals basically get the best gear each tier, albeit later than others.

[Kaver]

I see a lot of people thinking that simply having better gear will gain them access to the playerbase that doesn't struggle in the game. That if they have an ilv close or identical to those players it will get them invited into the groups that quickly and without drama solve problems and overcome content.

This is EXACTLY what people said in WOD. They were complaining that they couldn't get into content because of ilvl. Then Blizzard added Titanforging so everyone could get higher ilvl and what happened next?... RIO happened! People could still not get into content because at the end of the day ilvl doesn't matter if the player is bad. We clearly saw that the same players were still not able to join groups no matter how much welfare gear they got.

[Varaben]

This logic would only apply to the very end boss then.

Besides, better gear for harder content has always been a standard reward in WoW.

Not always - recall in the first tier of Wrath you had "hard mode" boss fights that were just variations on the same fight, which rewarded the same gear but also achievements (and an exclusive mount). This is obv not the standard, as this was immediately removed and never done again after Ulduar (not to my knowledge at least). I'm not sure why it was removed.

[Ragedaug]

I think a large part of this is how people view success without really understanding the steps involved.. I see a lot of people thinking that simply having better gear will gain them access to the playerbase that doesn't struggle in the game. That if they have an ilv close or identical to those players it will get them invited into the groups that quickly and without drama solve problems and overcome content.

What they fail to realize is they are not at a level of play that will allow them access to that portion of the playerbase. All that increasing the starting ilv does it set a new minimum to enter those "hallowed halls".

Tossing free gear to people just adds a time gate to new players interested in harder content.

I've played with some pretty mediocre players and can tell you that without catch up badge of justice gear we would never have progressed through T5. And our catch up wasn't due to missing time played, it was just required to catch up to better guilds.

I'm sure I'll be flamed for being an old man, but I can remember once upon a time when we played games because they were fun to play. We didn't ask game developers to bribe us with phat loots to play thier games.

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This is EXACTLY what people said in WOD. They were complaining that they couldn't get into content because of ilvl. Then Blizzard added Titanforging so everyone could get higher ilvl and what happened next?... RIO happened! People could still not get into content because at the end of the day ilvl doesn't matter if the player is bad. We clearly saw that the same players were still not able to join groups no matter how much welfare gear they got.

If wasn't about getting into content for most. It was about being able to complete the content. Players who aren't as good as you actually need better gear than you had to complete the same content.

As far as RIO, that makes a lot more sense as a gating /measurement tool for grouping than "what gear do you have", so I take your argument as a good thing.