Will DF have better reward structure than ZM?

[Accendor]

ZM is the most boring, pointless zone they ever made. There is literally no reason to do even a single daily or WQ there once you have the 2nd legendary item.

Who cares about zone-wide progression that makes you stronger ONLY in the zone when it's trivially easy to kill enemies and do the quests begin with?

I get that some whiny raidloggers complained about the evil of doing Korthia and the Maw for lame conduits, but if a zone offers virtually no player power, it's a waste of space. Doing silly daily quests and killing stupid rares to get ugly recolored mounts is not content.

If THIS is the kind of "content" they want to double down on in Dragonflight, oh boy.

Yes, if that what it's going to be, it will be the third expansion going down the drain in a row.

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For world content, no. That's pretty much the best possible case situation for them. Powerful gear if you put the effort in, but the best gear will always be from group-based content that is meant to be difficult.
Luckily with the profession changes it seems like you might have more access to that sort of thing.
But at the end of the day Zerith Mortis is probably the pinnacle of what they can do with world content. Enough power to make a huge impact in the zone itself, a thousand cosmetics to pursue so you have a ton of content ahead of you, and no gamebreaking reward structures that make you need to farm world content to have an advantage in progression content.

Really can't ask for anything more in my eyes.

At the end of the day, the reason you should do ANYTHING in this game is for fun though. If you don't enjoy it, tacking on additional rewards to try to convince you to enjoy it is just a psychological trick. You won't play it for long, and you wont feel satisfied.
Try to find activities you love in a way you could do for months without feeling like you lost a reason to do so.
If that's not world content in WoW, then you have answered your own question indirectly.

I completely disagree with you here. Character progression is what makes RPGs fun for a lot of people. The reward is part of the experience for every content. If all content outside of raiding and m+ does not provide Power progression, all other content might as well not exist from our point of view.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that is universally true, but I want to point out that there is large portion of the Playerbase that thinks this way. You might be agree, fair enough, but that does not make them wrong.

[Toppy]

I like how people are just so used to the raid or die reward structure of WoW that any complaint that raid or die is bad, which was the common mentality for WoD and why WoD was such a giant failure.

Giving people strong high ilvl gear for none-raid, none-mythic+ tasks is fine. There is no reason why its not fine. Raiding offers far more rewards than just ilvl, and people raided back when people could get raid quality gear via other means. More people in general were around in those times, and WoW, greatly, owes its success to the ease of doing such things when compared to other MMO, and likewise, FFXIV is seeing a massive rise in popularity, due in part to their own reward structure being, you know, actually rewarding and allowing for ease of raid quality gear.

anyone against the notion of easy to get gear, is only whining. History doesnt back the argument that people wont play if its easy, quiet the opposite. There is NO REASON why gear should only be for a minority of players doing one kind of content. WoW's own history shows how stupid and wrong that mentality is.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Every indication so far is minus anima the reward structure and gearing tactics will be unchanged for DF.

Which isn't great, no.

[Niwes]

Common Blizzards' rule - to make new xpack according to last patch of previous one, that is considered to be "perfect". And I'm scared. Because ZM has terrible reward structure. If that's, what Blizzard call "No mandatory content - everybody does, what he wants", then we're in trouble.

Progression route and reward structure - are two major problems of several recent xpacks. When I come to ZM, I ask myself simple question: what should I do here? And here are answers:
1) Doing WQs
2) Doing dailies
3) Killing rares
4) Collecting treasures
5) Collecting mounts and pets

Second question is - for what purpose?
1) Sometimes they have nice rewards, but once you're 246, they're mostly pointless, except may be extra anima (see below). Reputation? There is no valuable rewards for it, so I don't need it.
2) Same, as #1, but their major reward - cyphers. Do I need this Poc-poc thing? No, I don't think so. Poc-poc customization is something for kids. And I'm not fan of zone-specific buffs. Yeah, I understand, that it's fun for some players. But I prefer to rely on my character's abilities only.
3) For what purpose? Anima? It's income is still too slow to be worth doing. I wanted to complete 9.0 content, but had to abandon it, because it takes too much of my time. It also requires souls and gifts. While gifts from rare and treasure are relatively quick to get, dailies are intentionally made extremely slow. Another rewards? Relics? Yeah, they're only valuable rewards in ZM. But there is too few content around them. Just weekly quest, daily chest and pair of rares. That's it.
4) Same as rares, but much worse rewards.
5) I'm not interested in pets and pet battles, but I like to collect mounts. But I don't collect them just for sake of collecting. I collect certain mounts, I like. I'm more transmog collector, than mount/pet collector.

So, I can barely find anything interesting for me in ZM. I don't want to say, that "no mandatory content" design is bad and content should be forced. But DF should have better reward and progression structure. When I come to location and ask myself simple question, for what purpose should I do content X - I should have some answer.

tbh, i care way less about the reward structure in general, than i care for the support of high level alt characters. i am one of this ~20-30% players, that change their „main“ char with every season (or at least 1-2-3 times an xpac). just because i like many classes and how they feel to play (rotation, spells, role, etc). but we still need to do x quests again and again and again to get the unity girdle. still no accountwide reps. and so again and again farm rep for 278 conduits, or the augment rune. we still have to do x m+ runs first, to get all 252 or 265 conduits. what ppls like me want, is to play a „competitive max level alt“ and its just about the gear to collect. nothing else. like it was in the earlier expansions. it’s just not fun to repetitive do all that boring things. again and again and again. just for „switching your main“. and it seems DF will not change this much, even when there is no borrowed power systems (conduits). still no accountwide reps. still no accountwide campaign quest, you do just once on some character and that’s it. DF will not be much different than it was in wow since a long time.

what does this has to do with reward structures?

in the same way they not change, evolve or redesign their reward structures and stick to such stupid conservative old design philosophies, they stick to their stupid alt/main philosophies. and since the later is also a part of the rewards and reward structure, it means the same thing. it seems they just can’t get away from this stupid, old, conservative stances. and this is why it seems my wow career will end with DF. this company is lazy amd greedy AF. they won’t evolve the game and just milk the good old cow. you want an evolving wow, making things better? you want a 2022 compatible wow? forget it. these ppls will never change their minds, or stuff like that in wow, until even the last player quitted.

[Tylanthia]

Giving people strong high ilvl gear for none-raid, none-mythic+ tasks is fine. There is no reason why its not fine. Raiding offers far more rewards than just ilvl, and people raided back when people could get raid quality gear via other means. More people in general were around in those times, and WoW, greatly, owes its success to the ease of doing such things when compared to other MMO, and likewise, FFXIV is seeing a massive rise in popularity, due in part to their own reward structure being, you know, actually rewarding and allowing for ease of raid quality gear.

What's annoying is that FF14 copied the WoW blizzard gearing model from wrath through mop and it works perfectly. I'm not sure players actually had an issue with badge/valor gear--wow devs did.

[varren]

What's annoying is that FF14 copied the WoW blizzard gearing model from wrath through mop and it works perfectly. I'm not sure players actually had an issue with badge/valor gear--wow devs did.

It's hilarious really. Wrath-MoP gearing was pretty much perfect and Wrath was the peak in terms of subs, and now you get shouted down if you ask to go back to a similar reward structure that even other MMOs have copied at this point.

It's like the game population is now mostly just hardcore Mythic raiders and ultra casuals who are fine picking flowers in ZM, with nothing in between.

[WowIsDead64]

We also need to do something with broken RNG, cuz it's getting out of hands. Devs don't like, when players are cheating. But why devs assume, that players wouldn't feel bad, if devs would be cheating too? Duplicate rewards - it's their current way of stretching character progression. Yeah, RNG is RNG. Duplicate rewards happen. But sometimes it's too obvious, that they're "programmed".

All dailies and WQs rewarded exactly the same item I already had yesterday. Guess what? Today's WQ offers exactly the same item. It's 4th the same reward in a row. And you know. This reward can be any of 13 slots. Different items can be offered for the same slots. Such as DPS or heal/tank item. 4 same items in a row? Lol what?

[lordjust]

What's annoying is that FF14 copied the WoW blizzard gearing model from wrath through mop and it works perfectly. I'm not sure players actually had an issue with badge/valor gear--wow devs did.

There are two interesting talks from Blizzard devs from some developer convention. One where they talked about badges and one where they talked about Diablo 3. In the one about badges they talk about how they as developers felt it was confusing and tedious to find out where to get which badge and the right vendor and thought about how to fix that problem. In most cuts from the talk they cut the questions section and one asked if they looked at the system because of player feedback and their answer was no, the players didn't realise it would be a problem down the road. So their decision that badges are a problem was a result of developers deciding it's a problem thinking that if they feel it's a problem, then the general player population will probably also see it as a problem.

On the other hand in the Diablo 3 talk they heard player feedback, did an in-game event to test how players react to their suggest fix and because of a bug they increased loot not by 50% but by 100% and got massive positive feedback from the players and with the expansion they increased loot by another 100%. So the Diablo team got feedback that not enough loot drops and they changed it according to player feedback.

With all things I've seen around dragonflight it seems the wow team still thinks they know better. Player feedback is that dracthyr soear is great and a lot of positive videos are made how much fun it is to fly with 950% movementspeed through the old world and Blizzard decides it's a problem and nerfs it and tells players that they will have the same amount of fun despite players saying they're having fun because of the high movement speed. Another example would be the slime cat mount. People asked for months and talked for month if it's available through LFR and Blizzard decides at the last minute that it shouldn't. Gets a lot of feedback that it's a bad decision and they do it anyway because they think they know better.

As for Dragonflight. Nothing will change. Yes, they take some feedback about class design and balancing but they already showed that they stand to some of their bad decision like the hunter marksman talent tree. Class guide writers and world first raider say this and that is bad because it isn't fun or is badly tuned and Blizzard says they won't change it because it's working the way they want and don't want people to play the way players suggested. Will it be better than Shadowlands? Probably, but it shows more and more that it's still the same team with the same philosophy of they know better and with a genereal uptrend around wow they more and more discard feedback and disagree to push their own ideas and vision that players already don't like.

[SinR]

ZM's better than the BFA final patch content (Rehashed Cata and MOP zones)

[unfunnymeme]

Shadowlands has one of the worst ilvl disparities I think I have ever seen in an expansion. I really think it's time to tone down ilvl a lot.
It's to a point that you look at the queue for random BG and think "why should I even bother with this?", because you 100% know you're going to be fighting 10+ other people with 30 to 40ilvls on you(even in full base noob PvP gear) and it's just not fun to deal with that. It's not fun to go into something and get shit on 100% of the time and contribute nothing. Actually, you don't just contribute nothing, you're a detriment to your team.

They either need to get ilvls within a much closer range to each other, or bring back Legion's pvp scaling for randoms. This all mainly applies only to PvP, because I'm fine sticking to my cuckshed in LFR, but I have no cuckshed to hide in with PvP that keeps me from being a detriment.

[Nymrohd]

It's to a point that you look at the queue for random BG and think "why should I even bother with this?", because you 100% know you're going to be fighting 10+ other people with 30 to 40ilvls on you(even in full base noob PvP gear) and it's just not fun to deal with that.

There isn't even base noob pvp gear. You still have to grind honor to get there and upgrading is gated by rating.