All These Different "Tiers" of Gear Are the Worst Thing WoW Has Ever Done

[eschatological]

Maybe you just need to read a class guide and play better ? Cause the bolded part is not true.
Or perhaps you're not utilizing all the gear up's available to you ?

All the sims for my class seem to suggest in 546 ilvl, I should do about 210k damage, max, single target. I can hit pretty close to that most of the time. Yet that's useless in a heroic raid (at least at the latter bosses), despite being 10 ilvls higher than heroic gear from the previous tier.

People in heroic gear, anywhere from 20-30 ilvls above me, do almost double that to down their bosses. There is no possible way I could ever even break 300k single target, because of my gear, yet that's what gear inflation allows you to do, and what heroic guilds expect from their raiders.

The inflation is out of control, like the OP said.

- - - Updated - - -

Let's keep in mind, this is a problem unique to this tier, which introduced flex. Because they wanted heroic mode raiders to flex, they made this tier's flex to be higher than last tier's heroic. So they set it at 540. They set LFR at 528, a full TWO TIERS above the previous LFR to make it better than last tier's normal mode gear....which is ridiculous.

Then, they set normal mode at 553, a tier above flex, and heroic a tier above that at 565.

Keep in mind, before MoP, a tier used to be 13 ilvls between normal/heroic gear, and about a tier and a half between corresponding tiers in consecutive tiers, and half a tier between the previous tier's heroic and the new tier's normal.

T14-T15:
496 normal, 509 heroic to
522 normal, 535 heroic

because of the addition of thunderforged....

T12-T13
378 normal, 391 heroic to
397 normal, 410 heroic

because of the addition of LFR tier


T11-T12
359 normal, 372 heroic
378 normal, 391 heroic

T9-T10
245/251 normal, 258 heroic (IE, 10 man vs 25 man) to
264 normal, 277 heroic

T8-T9
219/226 normal, (10 vs. 25), to
232/245 normal, 251/258 heroic

with the introduction of heroic modes.

Ilvl gaps increase every time they add a new mode, and now with 4 raiding difficulties, and 2 sub-ilvl jumps in Warforged, the gap between tiers is larger than ever - 26 ilvls in LFR (2 whole tiers), 31 ilvls in normal (a whopping 2 1/2 tiers), and 30 ilvls in heroic, another 2 1/2 tiers.

[Trubo]

OP, I feel your pain...

I was also a pre-nerf heroic progression raider, and I quit in April (a few weeks into ToT) for some RL issues. I came back near Blizzcon, and since my guild had stopped raiding, have been trying to find a new one at the same level of play I was used to.

Good luck with that. Because of my gear (which I've managed to eke up to 546 ilvl through a regular flex group I had to practically prepare a brief to convince to let me in), none of the guilds with what I'd consider a similar skill level will take a look at me despite having solid logs (for my ilvl). I'm pretty much at the max ilvl for what I have access to, unless I get lucky with some Ordos drops. Forget even slightly lesser quality guilds...I'm getting interest from 1-4/14H guilds, which is well below where I should be. And to an extent, I can understand guilds not wanting to dump gear on an unknown quantity, and *then* evaluate them, especially if they're still progressing (as I've been looking mainly for 12+/14H guilds.

Lower your expectations? If you're as good as you say you are you will dazzle any 6/14 Heroic guild. Seems a bit greedy to think that just because you were amazing a tier or two ago that you should be able to demand a core raiding spot from whatever guild you want.

So now we're both stuck with the same option: guild/group hop, which I will have to server transfer for, or work your way through a shitty guild to get the gear you need just to be considered by the better guilds. Both options are shitty, to me, because I hate guild hopping, and I don't think its fair to the stepping stone guilds I work my way through, who want to have long term raiders. At this point I'm probably just going to do normal modes in a friend's guild until WoD when gear is equalized. When I quit in April, I had a 518 ilvl, which I killed H-Durumu with during our guild's progression (the world first guilds had an average of 520ish ilvl, we had much higher, I was just behind in gear).. Now heroic guilds want all 565+ which is basically full heroic gear. It's frustrating, and I'm applying a RL strategy of filling out a few applications a day since the New Year.

Nah, that's mostly Normal mode SoO gear with a smattering of Flex. Normal is 553/559 and valor upgrades are 561/567. Add in the cloak, which itself is 60 ilvls higher than Flex 2/2 and comes out to being almost 5 average ilvls by itself, and it's really not that hard to get 565 if you have access to Normal mode runs.

I may be seeing something weird here, but if you were in full KZ + Mag + Grull gear would guilds gladly take you in for Sunwell Plateau without knowing who you are?

On another note, there are plenty of High End guilds actively recruiting now that they have cleared Heroic Content already. If you can write a good apply, show logs and have a good, serious talk with any decent Guild Leader / Recruiter they will see that you'll be worth the two weeks of being rushed in Heroic content to get gear upgrades.

That's another option. If OP and others really have proof that they were as good as they think they are via logs then Heroic guilds may be interested in gearing them up; just not at the pace that they would like.

Maybe you just need to read a class guide and play better ? Cause the bolded part is not true.

I would actually agree with the person you replied to about the ilvl power creep. If you're running around in 518 there's really no reason to expect to do the output of a decent player in 550+. But yes, there are plenty of options for easy-to-get gear that can be utilized.

[Milkyz]

(...)Because they wanted heroic mode raiders to flex, they made this tier's flex to be higher than last tier's heroic. (...)

Heroic Raider here is quite vague. By Heroic Raider you mean people who cleared normal SoO mode on 1st week? If so, considering you were already getting Heroic Items on 2nd week of SoO, was there really a need to do Flex? One specific item in one or two bosses? Ok. A necessity to clear Flex every week? That's stretching a bit.

So, considering you were a Heroic Raider, would you spend Valor upgrading a Flex item considering you're farming all bosses on normal mode + your Heroic Progression?

I did this for one item, Immerseus' caster trinket, but it was one single item. It was the only reason I ever had to enter Flex gearwise.

[Deleted]

Don't act as if Warforged is an extra tier of gear / content. It's just a random chance to get more. If you get it, it's a nice bonus, but it's nothing to strive for and pass on items until the Warforged item drops.

The only reason you don't pass items is because gear is friggen everywhere. Bonus rolls and just the pure amount of loot from easy bosses, gear you up in no time. Warforged is annoying because it inflates the numbers so much for people who have it. World of Logs competition is so dumb for example. Raid finder gear (why is this even here), Flex, Normal, Normal Warforged (why is this even here), Heroic, Heroic Warforged (I don't like you, but I get why they did it; it didn't work out though)

EDIT:

Maybe you just need to read a class guide and play better ? Cause the bolded part is not true.

It really is true. These are estimates of the numbers that I recall at different itemlevels:
463 = 70k (not higher than 75k unless something was broken - HotW for instance)
502 = 100k
512 = 130k
522 = 150k
535 = 210k
550 = 300k
570 + = 400k + + +

[Musca]

Having been through what the OP is complaining about and managed to come out the other side, I completely agree. Back in Cata I took FL off and came back for DS and gearing up was just a matter of running LFR and the new 5-mans, plus buying the BOE valor boots/bracers. In MOP I was out for nearly a year, came back in the middle of ToT and yeah, complete drag trying to beg guilds to accept me even with 2/3 of the leg. questchain complete, gear about as high as you can get without a regular group (520 at the time), and logs showing near impeccable play. Most guilds don't look at logs except to see what numbers you pull, and mostly the few guilds with raid leaders that are smart enough to look at rotation/execution won't accept someone undergeared.

I was really lucky in the end to find through a friend a guild that agreed to help gear me up just before 5.4 came out. They're being rewarded now with a top 50-ranking hunter. That was a long, painful search, though.

That said, my pet theory is that they purposely made gear inflation insane this xpac so that people would complain about the item squish less. Don't know if it worked, though.

PS, my guild is recruiting rdps & healers and totally goes by the "you can fix gear but you can't fix skill" mentality. Drop me a pm if you want to know more

[Deleted]

Just want to remind that the first 6 bosses in SoO normal are tuned for about 510-520 illvl. It is not Blizzards fault if the guy making the group wants to make the run easier by bringing in people with better gear.

I think the best thing to do is to get the legendary chain done as getting the meta and legendary cloak is easily 10%+ dps increase. Also buy the crafted belt and legs. If you are cloth user it is really cheap otherwise a bit more. Then ofcourse Ordos and Celestials drop good gear. With LFR, legendary cloak and 2 crafted pieces it is pretty easy to get 540+ilvl. Then with a bit of luck you get few Ordos Pieces or tiers from Celesitals and you are 550ilvl.

On My Server about 525-530 gets you to Flex easily.

[Deleted]

PuGs always been like that, they dont give a donkeys ass about your past heroic raids. Atm its just a fact that you cant afford to take full raid of ilvl 520 randoms to flex, risk is too high that theyre not even average players and you wipe horribly. Taking 535+ gives so much buffer for the inevitable scrubs that got into the raid.

Do your own group, or join a decent raiding guild.

[Tharkkun]

@OP: You should provide a link to your armory page. Maybe there's something you're doing wrong or you're extremely undergeared.

[Fluttershy]

Flex is the worst thing they've done for raiding next to mandatory 3 month legendaries.

The difficulty is non-existent it might as well be named LFR, it inflated gear (gives us +13 item levels more) and is pretty much mandatory anyway like LFR, and it makes catching up harder.

Back in DS/mogushan/etc you can do LFR which gives you 384 gear vs 397 so it wasn't so bad getting a good item level before you raided. Now you get 528 vs 553 from LFR which is awful so you have to do flex, but you can't do flex because everyone wants 540 item level(I have 11/14 HM achievements and I still have problems getting in groups at times lying I have 535 on my rogue instead of 525), so now you have to grind LFR plus world bosses before doing flex, then 3 months of flex doing your legendaries before normal.

It's 100% redundant, flex is the same retard-level difficulty filled with bad players as LFR, only difference is they ask for an item level returnees/alts can't get, what a crockfull of !@#@! it's literally nothing more than an extra hoop to go through so you spend more money on subs and take longer to do heroics. Warforged/thunderforged is fine except for 25mans being welfare players getting far more of these bonus items disproportionally.

[Glyphtics]

Warforged / Thunderforged gear needs to go IMO. Too RNG for progression.

[NuLogic]

For organized raiding it's still normal and heroic. Warforged is just to keep old bosses interesting and to not need to nerf bosses as much later on. Flex is usually only used for some quick gear such as trinkets or weapons.

[theyanger]

Seriously, we have LFR, Flex, Normal, Normal Warforged, Heroic, Heroic Warforged - where does it stop?

I took a break early on in ToT from just being burned out, recently some friends convinced me to come back and play, and getting geared up for the content I want to do has never been more difficult. I've taken breaks like this before and I have never, ever had this much trouble getting back into the game. All these options to make the game more casual and new exciting ways Blizzard has decided to hand out gear has done nothing but throw up extra walls for returning players.

When I left I was getting top 50 ranks fairly regularly on World of Logs. So, I come back, pick up whatever new freebies are available, and decide to start looking for normal mode pugs. Just kidding, you need full Flex gear before they'll take you. Fine, I guess. Flex seems alright, sort of like what LFR always should have been. I start trying to find Flex groups. I get laughed out of the ones that will even take me for my "pathetic" 110k dps. What the fuck? I mean, really, what the fuck? People are pulling over 200k dps now without even trying thanks to all these different flavours of gear. We started this expansion doing 50k and now top logs are over 500k.

So, here I am, used to fully clearing heroic content pre-nerf and I can't even get into a normal mode group. Not because I'm not skilled, but even with all the skills in the world I can't outplay someone with warforged normal mode weapons because they're like 50 ilvl's higher than my HEROIC EMPRESS mace. Give me a break.

Maybe all these different tiers of gear are great for some people. But for me its fucking cancer, I'm relegated to LFR for the next two months to play catch up on my gear to do any sort of interesting content. I've always been able to skip a tier, come back, and be competitive on the pick up group level with my old gear. Sure, I was never getting parses or topping meters, but I've never been a liability or a carry like I would be in any group now. What were they thinking when they made the game like this? I'm shelving WoW until WoD.

Thats my rant. Has anybody else had this issue?

110k dps is possible in gear like 50 ilevels below what people are trying to get you to use in Flex. It's not unreasonable to expect you to have some of it.

[Trubo]

Flex is the worst thing they've done for raiding next to mandatory 3 month legendaries.

The difficulty is non-existent it might as well be named LFR, it inflated gear (gives us +13 item levels more) and is pretty much mandatory anyway like LFR, and it makes catching up harder.

I'd have to check to make sure but I believe there was a GC tweet that stated Flex was what they wanted LFR to be but the LFR we have now will never go away due to its convenience for those that can't do regular organized runs.

Back in DS/mogushan/etc you can do LFR which gives you 384 gear vs 397 so it wasn't so bad getting a good item level before you raided. Now you get 528 vs 553 from LFR which is awful so you have to do flex, but you can't do flex because everyone wants 540 item level(I have 11/14 HM achievements and I still have problems getting in groups at times lying I have 535 on my rogue instead of 525), so now you have to grind LFR plus world bosses before doing flex, then 3 months of flex doing your legendaries before normal.

How is 528 awful when the first wing of Flex/Normal is tuned for upgraded ToT LFR/ToT Normal gear? If you're having an issue finding a flex run that isn't 540 ilvl, you're not using resources such as openraid to their fullest.

It's 100% redundant, flex is the same retard-level difficulty filled with bad players as LFR, only difference is they ask for an item level returnees/alts can't get, what a crockfull of !@#@! it's literally nothing more than an extra hoop to go through so you spend more money on subs and take longer to do heroics. Warforged/thunderforged is fine except for 25mans being welfare players getting far more of these bonus items disproportionally.

Nah, LFR is a raid that's been completely stripped of dangerous mechanics aside from the related fight wipe mechanic. Flex mechanically is the same as Normal but obviously with less damage taken and damage dealt needed to down bosses.

[crunk]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ssage/advanced

Feel free to pick it apart or do whatever it is the internet needs to do. here's a smattering of logs i could find. by no means all of them but i had to do a lot of guild hopping this expansion because guilds kept breaking up on me. a big part of the reason i took a break.

http://raidbots.com/epeenbot/us/blackhand/fews/

i'm not saying that i'd be the next big thing in blood legion or method or anything, just that i'm a good player and should be able to hop into the latest content without having to make a big fuckin' deal about it. blizzard has set that expectation over the years. they've purposefully put easy catch up mechanics into the game. so, yeah, that's what i expect to be the case. the game isn't a journey anymore and hasn't been since TBC - everything resets patch to patch and you just do some 5 mans or whatever to get caught back up. for better or worse, that's what they've turned wow into. now all of a sudden you gotta gear up for flex so you can gear up for normal so you can gear up for heroic so you can still be below all the dudes with capes who will put 10% over on you no matter what - until you get one too, because its 2014 and errybody gets a legendary!





Now, like I said, previous tiers in previous expansions I have taken my leave of WoW for one reason or another. Either a guild I really liked threw in the towel, something important came up IRL, or whatever, and it has never been like this. I came back in late, late Firelands and had enough gear to be within 10-15% of other people who even had DTR by the time Dragon Soul hit. I was fine. Why? Because a 372 ilvl was enough to get you into Firelands PUGs. Most decent groups asked for 380, but with a pre-firelands Sinestra achievement and a little talk with the raid leader I could get in. This is 100% different. Now, with gear that should be 1 step above what I have (Normal ToT -> Normal SoO, skipping LFR and Flex because those settings aren't for me), I'm getting straight doubled which makes me useless. That is absolutely ridiculous.

What it was tuned for initially isn't even part of the equation because anybody who has been playing for the last 3 months has VP upgrades, warforged, flex, and whatever else. The rest of us are left totally in the dust by all this ilvl inflation - this inflation then becomes the new standard and everyone else is clearly bad and can go to hell. I mean really, have you ever tried to put together a PUG or something if you're below these standards? People take one look at you and say "LOL I'm not carrying you, scrub, go back to LFR." That is the reality of the situation and if somehow you don't agree you either A) play on the nicest most understanding imaginary server in the game or B) have never organized a group from Trade (or Open Raid, or Oqueue) or C) don't mind fielding a raid of a bunch of 521 ilvl ungemmed, unreforged people on their 11th recruit-a-friend alt.

And yes, a freshly dinged level 90 moonkin in dungeon blues was doing 50k - 70 on a really good day.


I'm glad I'm not going crazy and other people have noticed this too. I really hope its a moot point with the pending item squish, but I'm afraid that Flex, X-Forged, VP upgrades, LFR, and all that other shit is here to stay. I have this sneaking suspicion that from here on out we're looking at 30-50 ilvl spreads per tier, which is absolutely terrible unless you NEVER STOP PLAYING. I'm just bitching here on the MMO-Champs because I like WoW and want to continue playing it, but I don't think I'll be able to if its like this.


Also, yeah, the thread title is hyperbolic. I've noticed thats the only way to get people to post in threads on any WoW forum. If you give it a reasonable title or try to spark a rational debate the thread gets buried in like 12 hours. But look! Over 1,200 views.

[theyanger]

A lot of your gear is 2 tiers old. There are EASY upgrades you could be getting.

You're not talking about having Sinestra experience to get into Firelands runs, you're talking about having Sinestra experience to get into heroic dragon soul runs in terms of how far behind the curve you are. Flex and LFR have increased the gap between tiers, but that only matters when you skip ENTIRE tiers, you've basically missed the expansion in terms of gearing. You can catch up, easily I might add, with just the timeless isle and LFR, but you'd rather come here and complain about it. That's pretty ridiculous. I wasn't even talking about your gear specifically before, simply stating that 110k dps is not 'acceptable' for Flex, regardless of whether you think it should be or not. If you can't find someone who wants to take you because of ilevel? that sucks. That's always existed, if you find someone willing to take you and they say you're doing too low dps? That's largely on you. That is fixable. I'm not saying you need to be amazing at wow, but it's your main, you might need to put some work into it, and some of it might in fact be gear, but that's also on you to fix.

I've gotten 3 alts from trash-can to perfectly normal Siege capable in just a couple months, you can too.

[Totaltotemic]

This happens literally every expansion. You cannot quit raiding when you're not even halfway through the 2nd tier and come back to the game 4 months into the final tier and expect to be in any kind of real guild by the end of the expansion.

In vanilla if you weren't raiding from the very first year the game came out, you weren't going to kill KT.

In BC if you didn't have Illidan on farm before Sunwell came out, you weren't going to be kill Kil'jaeden.

WotLK made things a bit easier, but if you still hadn't done at least half of 25 man ToGC you weren't getting into a 25 man guild closing in on heroic LK unless it was post-30% buff.

In Cataclysm if you had killed normal Ragnaros one time and you showed back up at 15% or 20% on the DS buff, you weren't going to be killing heroic Madness until at least after it hit 30%.

In MoP, there are no raid-wide nerfs. Instead, we get more gear scaling so that the "you get to overgear this and kill it for free" phase only applies to people that have actually been raiding. Garrosh effectively has a 15% nerf... if your raid is at 575 ilvl instead of the 566 ilvl he was balanced around. The only difference now is that you don't get it for free. If you just want to see bosses, that's exactly what LFR is for. If you want a challenge that you get to slowly overcome with a team of people over a long period of time, that's what heroic raiding is for.

[Deleted]

WotLK made things a bit easier, but if you still hadn't done at least half of 25 man ToGC you weren't getting into a 25 man guild closing in on heroic LK unless it was post-30% buff.

In Cataclysm if you had killed normal Ragnaros one time and you showed back up at 15% or 20% on the DS buff, you weren't going to be killing heroic Madness until at least after it hit 30%.

those claims are just wrong. Gear was much easier to obtain than in Vanilla and TBC which made Wotlk and Cata raids much more "trivial to catch up". Also it took 4-5 resets to get whole gear from DS or ICC (ofc there is exceptions) and the latter content doesnt mather at that point.

[AeneasBK]

Maybe you just need to read a class guide and play better ? Cause the bolded part is not true.
Or perhaps you're not utilizing all the gear up's available to you ?

Leading your own normal pug, even if only for the first 4 bosses.
Flex
Timeless isle, burdens.
LFR
BoE gear.
20% nerf to TOT in addition to crossrealm.
Heroic scenario's.

If you started this expansion doing 50k, you were not only doing low dps, you were not getting any ranks either, talking msv first week heroics.
If you don't bother to replace a tier old weapon you shouldn't really complain about dps, read above for advice on how to get said weapon.

I was doing flex first week of dinging on my last alt. 512 ilvl. Reset day of 2nd week i did 8/14 normal pug. 522 ilvl. Ended the week at 532.
Sure, i bought all boe's and pushed it but its been the same for all my alts give or take a few ilvls depending on luck / rng drops.

If you had the skilled you claimed, skipping a tier is still as easy. Just sayin'

First post to make sense

[Larynx]

So, are you complaining about having shitty DPS, having shitty DPS due to gear, or not being allowed in normals because of shitty DPS?

110k is ToT normal entry. As in, 490 ilevel. You should be doing LFR, anything else is just a carry.

Takes less than a day to get to 495 ilevel. Takes a single week lockout to get ready for Flex. You could in theory create a new character right now, and by next week join a guild starting SoO normals.

[Elios]

Oh my GOD i cant catch up with "People that are Raiding every week and farming Timeless island for Months"...

No shit.

"My dps isnt the same as a Guy that farmed the whole legendary Quest for months and now is doing triple my dps"...

*blames blizzard for not doing moar dips than the guy that farmed gear for 6 months more*...

You are smart...