Is it time to end gear gatekeeping?

[neescher]

90% of the difficulty is around not having the gear required enough to complete it, once you get gear as the weeks go on the raid becomes exponentially easier.

That's... kind of the point of an RPG like this...?

Hard content requires good gear. It's the cornerstone of RPGs. It's the motivation for many to play the game. To power up their character, so they can tackle harder and harder dungeons/bosses.


If you really think Lost Ark fights are harder than wow mythic raids, then it's possible you're getting carried by healers in wow... in Lost Ark, when you fuck up a mechanic, you die (or waste one of the very limited health potion charges). In wow, when you fuck up (most mechanics), the healer can compensate. Sure, there are one-shot mechanics in some fights, but there is a LOT (and really, A LOT) of avoidable damage that many DPS players don't even know about, because the healers will just compensate if a few players fuck up. In Lost Ark, this stuff just adds up and will eventually kill you.

[Woods123]

That's... kind of the point of an RPG like this...?

Hard content requires good gear. It's the cornerstone of RPGs. It's the motivation for many to play the game. To power up their character, so they can tackle harder and harder dungeons/bosses.


If you really think Lost Ark fights are harder than wow mythic raids, then it's possible you're getting carried by healers in wow... in Lost Ark, when you fuck up a mechanic, you die (or waste one of the very limited health potion charges). In wow, when you fuck up (most mechanics), the healer can compensate. Sure, there are one-shot mechanics in some fights, but there is a LOT (and really, A LOT) of avoidable damage that many DPS players don't even know about, because the healers will just compensate if a few players fuck up. In Lost Ark, this stuff just adds up and will eventually kill you.

Yes I know that’s what an rpg is about, I never said it wasn’t? I also never said this was necessarily a terrible thing either. I just said this is just artificial difficulty and it doesn’t really mean the game takes more skill, it just takes more time. Which is my entire damn point lol.

The difficulty of a raid from where you start off in terms of the gear you have and from being full geared is insanely different. Even not taking into account of you actually learning anything.

Also I’m flattered you say I’m carried by the healers because I play a healer, thanks boo .

Lost arks fights are exactly how you describe them, but also it goes a step further like I mentioned before with how it deals with random mechanics and reaction time to figure out where you need to go. THAT requires skill. Even if a fight might take you a shorter amount of time to complete than a wow mythic raid, it still took more skill. Just because a mythic raid took you a month to down because you were waiting on everyone to get geared and for everyone to learn the fight doesn’t mean that it’s magically more skillful. It just means it littered with artificial difficulty. And that’s what wows pve is basically all about.

[Utrrabbit]

If you can not do the content. You do not deserve the gear. Period.

If you do not have the time to do the content. You do not deserve the gear. Period.

If you can not pull the numbers. You do not deserve the gear. Period.

If you only do lfr. You do not deserve any gear higher than that. Period.

[Varaben]

Gearing has become irrelevant in this game, at least in context to earlier expansions.
Gear in the old days of classic, used to carry a gravitas and a sense of prestige.

Now gear is just something to be discarded with each new season.
It is cheap, expendable, and is relatively easy to do for mythic raiders/plus'ers, and high end pvp'ers.

Because of this, I would assume that the majority of players in high end content are pursuing these goals because of the intrinsic fun involved in the activities, along with bonus titles and mounts.

My question is, does giving max ilvl gear to world/daily questers take away from the experience of high end players, or do they even care?

IMO, it's not about "taking away from the experience" of others, it's to give yourself a sense of character power/progression. The path you're suggesting could also boil down to "why not just boost every character to max level?" After all, that doesn't take away from anyone else's experience who enjoys leveling right? The whole point of an MMORPG is to create a character and progress them through content while getting stronger through gear, levels, and/or whatever power progression system the game has at that time.

I'd also say, why do world/daily questers need better gear in the first place if that's all they're doing? Unless Blizz is going to make challenging and/or fun world content (it hasn't been in the last expansion or two), why would they reward you with character progression for doing so?

I don't think it's gatekeeping as much as its rewarding players for effort/skill (boosting aside) with gear. I kind of agree with OP though, it would be great if the content was just fun to do without needing a carrot on a stick. But that's tough to do for an MMO. Most people aren't going to chase toys and mounts if they aren't rewards in addition to gear/power. I think you're asking for a pretty big shift in design philosophy and player behavior.

Unfortunately, Blizz doesn't really design systems to be fun.

[Utrrabbit]

"The old days" prestige?
You mean, back when we could craft a lot of extremely high ilevel gear?

The obsession with ilevel is getting old. It's 2022 - cosmetics have replaced the "prestige" factor of ilevel, which is mostly just a way to pace and tune content difficulty and tiers.

If some dude spending 50 hours working on crafting quests and gathering getting a Mythic ilevel piece bothers you so much, then perhaps RPGs are not a genre for you. The gutting of various forms of end game through the year to cater to a mostly raider's ego over stat increases has caused this game to fall behind massively in terms of overall game content. And frankly, some guy wanting various forms of end game to have traditional stat progression isn't "ego" - narcissistic gatekeeping absolutely is though.

The faster people realize not everybody wants to do extremely high end content, but also wants to progress in an RPG, is the moment we can actually have a full game again, not just a raid simulator with scraps for people who want more.

Nope. If they cant complete the high end content. They do not deserve the gear and should he stuck in white/green (maybe a few blue pieces). All open world (ugh dirty useless) should be easily visible as with the worst gear in game.

[Varaben]

If you can not do the content. You do not deserve the gear. Period.

If you do not have the time to do the content. You do not deserve the gear. Period.

If you can not pull the numbers. You do not deserve the gear. Period.

If you only do lfr. You do not deserve any gear higher than that. Period.

I don't even think it's about "deserving the gear." It's that the entire purpose of gear is to make you stronger, so you can take on harder content and get better gear (rinse repeat). If you aren't pushing for harder content, why would gear matter to you? I guess you'd want to do your dailies a little bit faster, but why would Blizz bend over backwards to let you play LESS?

[Tyris Flare]

90% of the difficulty is around not having the gear required enough to complete it, once you get gear as the weeks go on the raid becomes exponentially easier. .

I mean, this is delusional. Before the giga nerf the other day, only like 400 guilds had killed mythic jailer when there are hundreds of thousands of characters with enough high ilvl.

[Woods123]

I mean, this is delusional. Before the giga nerf the other day, only like 400 guilds had killed mythic jailer when there are hundreds of thousands of characters with enough high ilvl.

It’s not delusional at all. How many people are even attempting mythic raids? How many logs does mythic raids even have compared to heroic? This just solidifies my argument that it’s mainly about time, people just straight up do not want to even put in the time to do it.

[Tyris Flare]

It’s not delusional at all. How many people are even attempting mythic raids? How many logs does mythic raids even have compared to heroic? This just solidifies my argument that it’s mainly about time, people just straight up do not want to even put in the time to do it.

Even with low participation, if was only about gear, the number would be dramatically higher. The same way that if DPS were only about gear, you wouldn't have such a huge delta in logs between players.

You can hate gear prog all you want, but your assertions are just dishonest and easily disproven by basic data

[Woods123]

Even with low participation, if was only about gear, the number would be dramatically higher. The same way that if DPS were only about gear, you wouldn't have such a huge delta in logs between players.

You can hate gear prog all you want, but your assertions are just dishonest and easily disproven by basic data

First of all, I never once stated it was all about gear. I specifically said it’s mainly about time invested, which includes gear in order to get to that point. It also has to do with the fact that you have to go into the raid and waste a shit load of time for almost no benefit just so your group learns the dance of the fight. There is barely any ‘skill’ involved in that. A subpar skilled gamer can watch a YouTube video of the place over and over again and walk in and do the raid perfectly if they dedicated the time into doing so. There are games out there that actually require skill and you could watch all the video and tutorials you want but you would never clear it if you straight up weren’t skilled enough. Wow has SOME of this, but not a lot. It’s mainly about time.

And I never said anything about hating gear progression at all. Didn’t even imply it. I am just telling you what it is. It’s just a time sink and honestly nothing more. Nothing wrong with that, but that’s what it is.

And my points aren’t easily disproven with data because the data is on my god damn side dude lol. You can say “only 400 guilds” completed it, but that data works on my side only when the data shows guilds aren’t even wasting their time with attempting to do it.

Go look up parses for how many people even attempted mythic jailer. Only 12,056 parses across all classes. Divide that by 20 for raid size and you get 602 attempts in the last 2 weeks(it’s attempts and not players because people can upload multiple attempts obviously).

So Christ man that kinda showing you the data is 100% not on your side considering people aren’t even bothering with it.

[Goatfish]

That's actually not the way it typically works.

While it's true that the more people you have, the more likely there are to be errors, multiplayer games have to account for that reality and are designed to be more forgiving of errors whenever you increase the number of players involved.

Think about single player games. It's absolutely true that a single mistake in, say, Mike Tyson's Punchout will end the game right there. In single player games the onus is on the one player to perfect the mechanics and they only have to do it perfect once.

But in a multiplayer game, you cannot fail the entire group just because one player fails in some way. Consider the fact that even on Mythic you can beat a raid boss with 75% of the raid, or less, still active. Multiple people can fail over and over in a multiplayer setting because the game allows for and expects that not every player will all be perfect at the exact same time.

The challenge in multiplayer is not because you are more likely to fail, it's because you have to coordinate more than just yourself and succeed as a group. Multiplayer is actually easier for each individual player and more tolerant of individual mistakes. It takes a collection of mistakes to reach a fail state in a group game.

Yes and no. It really depends on how the encounter is designed, and as we saw in SoF you can add a bunch of mechanics that mean a single person fucking up will wipe the whole raid. Then if you were to look at it from a probability standpoint, a single player doing their job right in solo content is going to have a better chance at completing the content than 20 players doing their job right. As a long time raid leader, sometimes the real raid boss is the players and not the boss. I've been helping out a small guild recently who pretty consistently has 4-6 hard carries and I definitely need to bring my 'A' game a lot more strongly than I do my own farm raids or any solo content I do. Much of the time though it doesn't help over much because random abilities targeting the wrong people just ends up resulting in a raid wipe. My solution would be to kick those people, but their solution is to pug enough people that hopefully the shitters don't ever get targeted by raid wipe mechanics and in other cases when they die (since they always die) it's easier to make up the difference. They just recently killed H-Anduin so I guess it only works so well for them.

Honestly I find most solo challenges quite a bit easier because they might be tuned to the top 1-5% of players but I don't have to work around babysitting a bunch of other people. It's easier for me to get a 95% on a test by myself rather than to get a group of 20 people to aggregate a 90% score. You can't say that getting that 90% is easier just because it's a lower number though, it's just a different game. It's not like you can drop from giving 95% individual effort to giving 90% effort and have an easier time by raiding. Rather you most likely have to push 98% effort to make up the difference.

- - - Updated - - -

First of all, I never once stated it was all about gear. I specifically said it’s mainly about time invested, which includes gear in order to get to that point. It also has to do with the fact that you have to go into the raid and waste a shit load of time for almost no benefit just so your group learns the dance of the fight. There is barely any ‘skill’ involved in that. A subpar skilled gamer can watch a YouTube video of the place over and over again and walk in and do the raid perfectly if they dedicated the time into doing so. There are games out there that actually require skill and you could watch all the video and tutorials you want but you would never clear it if you straight up weren’t skilled enough. Wow has SOME of this, but not a lot. It’s mainly about time.
.

That's just straight up false. There is a huge difference between watching videos of something and doing something. This is like saying I could watch 100 videos on playing a Mozart Concerto and then go do it, it's just absurd. A lot of playing games at a high level is building the muscle memory and skill involved. Raids it's a bit more like an Orchestra, PvP it's a lot more like Jazz, in either case you need to develop the skill at playing the instrument first and foremost. Unless you're one of the incredibly rare savant's that can hear something and immediately play it, then even seasoned musicians need to practice new songs and chord progressions. They can't just listen to a song 50 or 100 times and then play it perfectly. Gaming is the exact same way, and WoW raids are no exception despite your baseless condescension here.

[ellieg]

"deserve"??

Maybe take a step back and take a deep breath.

Change deserve to need

[Woods123]

That's just straight up false. There is a huge difference between watching videos of something and doing something. This is like saying I could watch 100 videos on playing a Mozart Concerto and then go do it, it's just absurd. A lot of playing games at a high level is building the muscle memory and skill involved. Raids it's a bit more like an Orchestra, PvP it's a lot more like Jazz, in either case you need to develop the skill at playing the instrument first and foremost. Unless you're one of the incredibly rare savant's that can hear something and immediately play it, then even seasoned musicians need to practice new songs and chord progressions. They can't just listen to a song 50 or 100 times and then play it perfectly. Gaming is the exact same way, and WoW raids are no exception despite your baseless condescension here.

This analogy only makes sense if wow took a serious amount of skill to play in the first place. Which is the argument I’m making that it doesn’t.

I know this is a ‘simpler’ fight to explain but a lot of people struggled with this one, and I’ll use this example because I'm assuming most people here know this fight

Think of the fight Magtheridon. Let’s say you have never once even heard of this fight. You watch a YouTube video 30 times on how to do it. You learn you have to kill the casters, have tanks hold one caster each, if your a warlock you banish infernals, then you enter the next phase and you setup people to hit the cube when he casts on a set timer, then you dps him down until he is at 30%.

So if your a warlock the only thing you need to know is:

1. Kill casters in order
2. Banish infernals
3. Click the right hand cube on the second cast

And that’s essentially it. There is really nothing more to it. There isn’t any skill required besides just understanding how to press your buttons.

Relating that to an extremely artful skill like playing the piano is disingenuous at best and idiotic at worst. Because even if you knew how to play the piano, and you watched a video on how to play a certain song, you literally might not be able to do it because there’s certain riffs (idk if that’s what it’s called I only played guitar) or patterns that you straight up do not have the skills for yet even if you KNOW how to do it.

In wow there is no skill in knowing when to click the cube and right clicking the cube. That’s laughably hilarious if you’re even going to attempt to make that connection.

I’ll agree muscle memory does play a factor for a lot of people, but that muscle memory is literally just switching targets/clicking items/running in a certain direction/spreading out/caving in (depending on the fight) which isn’t skillful at all in comparison to other games, it just isn’t. 90% of wow is just having the time to do the raids in the first place and just hope someone in the group doesn’t get distracted and forget to click the cubes. Sorry but I’m not going to sit here and even humor the idea that this is super skillful.

[Tyris Flare]

First of all, I never once stated it was all about gear. I specifically said it’s mainly about time invested, which includes gear in order to get to that point.

You said: 90% of the difficulty is around not having the gear required enough to complete it

A subpar skilled gamer can watch a YouTube video of the place over and over again and walk in and do the raid perfectly if they dedicated the time into doing so.

Again, if this were true you'd have much higher completion rates of all content.

Also, it is less time consuming than ever to gear the necessary gear in this game. I have multiple alts at 275+ that I play less than an hour or two a week.

Only 12,056 parses across all classes. Divide that by 20 for raid size and you get 602 attempts in the last 2 weeks(it’s attempts and not players because people can upload multiple attempts obviously).

We're five months into the patch, and it's not just about the jailer. Most people who kill a mythic boss or two don't finish the raid. But if all they had to do was watch a youtube video and get gear the number would be much higher. That's hundreds of thousands of players across all regions who failed.


But this is cartoonish levels of dishonest posting, so have fun

[Woods123]

You said: 90% of the difficulty is around not having the gear required enough to complete it



Again, if this were true you'd have much higher completion rates of all content.

Also, it is less time consuming than ever to gear the necessary gear in this game. I have multiple alts at 275+ that I play less than an hour or two a week.



We're five months into the patch, and it's not just about the jailer. Most people who kill a mythic boss or two don't finish the raid. But if all they had to do was watch a youtube video and get gear the number would be much higher. That's hundreds of thousands of players across all regions who failed.


But this is cartoonish levels of dishonest posting, so have fun

If I said the gear thing then I apologize because before that I mentioned over and over that time was the biggest issue which the gear in order to complete it falls into that category and I must have just said that off hand, yes gear does play a major major role in it but time is the biggest factor (that gear also happens to fall into)

Again, if this were true you'd have much higher completion rates of all content.

No? Why would this be true? You also have to dedicate a massive amount of time to go into this raid to complete it for minimal rewards. Which is my entire point. If anyone wanted to do it and take the time to find a group and do it, they can. It’s not that hard it just requires time.

We're five months into the patch, and it's not just about the jailer. Most people who kill a mythic boss or two don't finish the raid. But if all they had to do was watch a youtube video and get gear the number would be much higher. That's hundreds of thousands of players across all regions who failed.

Go look up parses for other fights dude, people just straight up don’t do mythic very much. You can say “only so many guilds completed it” and that sounds sexy and all, but when your attempts over the course of two weeks in under 1k that doesn’t sound so great anymore.

I’m not being dishonest at all, if I were being dishonest I wouldn’t be directing you toward the actual real hard data my dude. This is reality, you just don’t want to hear it.

[ellieg]

If I said the gear thing then I apologize because before that I mentioned over and over that time was the biggest issue which the gear in order to complete it falls into that category and I must have just said that off hand, yes gear does play a major major role in it but time is the biggest factor (that gear also happens to fall into)



No? Why would this be true? You also have to dedicate a massive amount of time to go into this raid to complete it for minimal rewards. Which is my entire point. If anyone wanted to do it and take the time to find a group and do it, they can. It’s not that hard it just requires time.



Go look up parses for other fights dude, people just straight up don’t do mythic very much. You can say “only so many guilds completed it” and that sounds sexy and all, but when your attempts over the course of two weeks in under 1k that doesn’t sound so great anymore.

I’m not being dishonest at all, if I were being dishonest I wouldn’t be directing you toward the actual real hard data my dude. This is reality, you just don’t want to hear it.

I use this approach for all things I haven't done as well. "Nah man it's actually easy. It just takes too much time and I'm not actually interested in it so I don't do it. A lot of other ppl haven't done it either and its obviously because of how long it takes, not the difficulty."

[Woods123]

I use this approach for all things I haven't done as well. "Nah man it's actually easy. It just takes too much time and I'm not actually interested in it so I don't do it. A lot of other ppl haven't done it either and its obviously because of how long it takes, not the difficulty."

Well that’s great and all but I’m looking at it as someone who has played wow for quite some time, and understands this game very well, and comparing it to other games I have played for quite some time and seeing the vast differences in skill involved.

It’s very very difficult to even consider a game that revolves around pve to require a ton of skill outside of a very few handful of titles that are specifically designed around it testing your reaction time and on the fly decision making. Most of wows fights are so easily scripted we have addons that countdown mechanics for you for Christ sake man lol.

I just find it super hilarious when I see wow players act like the end game of wow is so super hard and difficult then they get thrown into a competitive game like csgo or StarCraft or even a game like god damn elden ring and they are just absolute trash at it. It’s sort of funny.

Yeah sure if you have never touched a video game in your life, barely know how to place your fingers on the keyboard, then I guess I could see how wow looks like a super skilled game to you.

[Goatfish]

This analogy only makes sense if wow took a serious amount of skill to play in the first place. Which is the argument I’m making that it doesn’t.

I know this is a ‘simpler’ fight to explain but a lot of people struggled with this one, and I’ll use this example because I'm assuming most people here know this fight

Think of the fight Magtheridon. Let’s say you have never once even heard of this fight. You watch a YouTube video 30 times on how to do it. You learn you have to kill the casters, have tanks hold one caster each, if your a warlock you banish infernals, then you enter the next phase and you setup people to hit the cube when he casts on a set timer, then you dps him down until he is at 30%.

So if your a warlock the only thing you need to know is:

1. Kill casters in order
2. Banish infernals
3. Click the right hand cube on the second cast

And that’s essentially it. There is really nothing more to it. There isn’t any skill required besides just understanding how to press your buttons.

Relating that to an extremely artful skill like playing the piano is disingenuous at best and idiotic at worst. Because even if you knew how to play the piano, and you watched a video on how to play a certain song, you literally might not be able to do it because there’s certain riffs (idk if that’s what it’s called I only played guitar) or patterns that you straight up do not have the skills for yet even if you KNOW how to do it.

In wow there is no skill in knowing when to click the cube and right clicking the cube. That’s laughably hilarious if you’re even going to attempt to make that connection.

I’ll agree muscle memory does play a factor for a lot of people, but that muscle memory is literally just switching targets/clicking items/running in a certain direction/spreading out/caving in (depending on the fight) which isn’t skillful at all in comparison to other games, it just isn’t. 90% of wow is just having the time to do the raids in the first place and just hope someone in the group doesn’t get distracted and forget to click the cubes. Sorry but I’m not going to sit here and even humor the idea that this is super skillful.

Except that is still being disingenuous, and not just because Magtheridon is an incredibly simple fight with very few relevant mechanics. You might as well have picked Patchwerk as an example of how WoW takes no skill. We can instead look at any guide for any modern mythic fight and see multiple pages explaining what the heck is even going on. I wouldn't even bother trying to simplify and list it because it would still be a massive wall of text.

You also greatly overestimate player skill at the very basics. Just moving your character around properly, handling the camera, and performing your rotation properly take a significant amount of skill to do right. I'm not going to pretend it's the same thing as a piano, but it's quite similar in basic function. Most players suck because they can't even handle the basics of paying attention to their environment while doing even a simple rotation. When you get up to the more difficult content, you need to do your simple rotation, keep environmental awareness and manage current and future positioning in relation to other players, watch for semi-random and non-random abilities (usually in sets of 3-5 in sequence), manage cooldowns to be used at opportune times within multiple ~2-3 minute windows, and manage defensive cooldowns and consumables responsively.

That's a lot of things for the average player to manage and do well. If you don't understand that, then you really need to play with more average players. Either way your hyperbolic "a subpar gamer can just watch a video enough times and do it perfectly" is still bullshit. I assist in a couple mentorship and teaching communities, I can assure you that subpar gamers need some serious handholding throughout the whole fight and personal experience doing the fight to have any possible chance at killing normal and heroic bosses, let alone mythic. Watching the video just doesn't stick in their head at all, these are the kinds of people you call for a tranquility and it might be cast 8 seconds later after the player remembers what key it's bound to, and is literally doing nothing else but looking for their tranq button for those 8 seconds.

[Woods123]

You also greatly overestimate player skill at the very basics. Just moving your character around properly, handling the camera, and performing your rotation properly take a significant amount of skill to do right.

Look man I could go back and forth all day on this, but if you honestly truly believe this right here then there isn’t going to be any middle ground whatsoever we are going to fall on.

That isn’t skillful relative to any other video game. What you just mentioned is borderline child’s play at this point. I’m even a dad gamer now and I can acknowledge that this is just ridiculous if you’re going to say moving your character around and moving your camera around is a ‘skill’. Sorry dude but that’s so ridiculous I can’t even respond to it.

[Goatfish]

Look man I could go back and forth all day on this, but if you honestly truly believe this right here then there isn’t going to be any middle ground whatsoever we are going to fall on.

That isn’t skillful relative to any other video game. What you just mentioned is borderline child’s play at this point. I’m even a dad gamer now and I can acknowledge that this is just ridiculous if you’re going to say moving your character around and moving your camera around is a ‘skill’. Sorry dude but that’s so ridiculous I can’t even respond to it.

Spend more time in mentorship communities. Go do some Torghast with these subpar players and see how good they are at dodging simple traps with obvious timing. You're just so secluded from what a subpar player actually is that you don't know how wrong you are.

I'm just telling you how it is bro. I actually help these people and spend time in discords with them. We're talking folks with 50-70% active time on bosses without dying. Is it really so hard to admit you said something dumb? We can swap it off music and gaming to something real simple. We can all agree that most people know how to use their hands, wiggle their fingers, grab things. Do you think that someone could watch a video on peeling and chopping onions and could do it perfectly on their first attempt?

I find it really hard to believe you could actually make this argument in any sort of good faith. It's ok to say you were wrong, but if you're going to sit here defending that statement to the death then it's pretty damn obvious that you're just here to stir shit.