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

[clevin]

Oh no, you quit and now have to catch up?!?!? Poor kid.

Look, put yourself in the position of people who *didn't* quit. Someone who's been raiding through ToT, then through SoO. IF they weren't getting significantly more powerful... why raid? Why play? Advancement is a key motivator in the game yet if someone like you could come back and almost immediately jump in and do as well as people who've been playing for the last 6 or 7 months, then the game would be screwing THEM over.

There are advantages to playing and continuing to gear. There are costs to stopping and then wanting to come back. Deal with it.

[Milkyz]

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.

Your stat priority is off. Right now you have 8173 Haste, why is that? At your level of gear, it's much better to play on the lower Haste Breakpoint, 5273. After that, all stats should be directed to Crit. Please don't quote me with a "Have you seen my percentiles on epeen bot, I know how to play this". I'm just pointing out the obvious.

[Rosstafa]

I do think thunderforged/warforged gear inflate numbers too much, so maybe they should be replaced by tertiary stats on gear in WoD to make running old bosses potentially rewardable.

That said, it's incredibly easy to get geared now, more so than ever. It's a longer trip to get to the top, but it's faster to get on it. You can now ignore most of the old raids, go straight to SoO LFR and Timeless Isle, which will put you around the 530 mark with burdens. The you have the celestials, from which you can get a full tier set, as well as Ordos if you have the legendary cloak. Loads of people put on flex runs, and even though some ask for unreasonably high ilvl, many don't. My guild asks for 515 for the first 2 parts.

You might be used to raiding at a higher level, but you have to accept that having a a break means playing catch up, and doing what everyone else has done to get geared. I know people who have managed to get multiple alts geared for normals because they put the time in, did celestials every week, did flex, did Ordos etc. It's not impossible to catch up. You can't just come back and expect to slip right in to high-dfifficulty raiding again. People complain that Blizzard give out loot too easily as it is.

[Echocho]

I agree, but mostly because gearing has become a major hassle. There's no BiS and no obtainable goal to work towards. I used to love checking things off from my wishlist and the feeling when you were "done". Now it's more like "what's the point?", "why bother?".

In my opinion there should only be three tiers per content patch. One for the casuals, one for the normal raiders and one for the heroic raiders.

And I also think there should be an option to gather casual and normal gear iLvls by doing solo content or small group content. It should take longer to complete the gearing process compared to doing raids but the option should exist. Gear for valor points was acceptable in my opinon but a bit boring and there weren't gear for every slot. I want what I do outside of raids to actually matter, unless I'm in a heroic raiding guild.

Lastly heroic guilds shouldn't be forced to raid normal mode for x weeks before starting heroic. Choose a difficulty and stick with it, doing the same content in different difficulties is crap to be honest. First tier, sure to get iLvl to actually be able to complete heroic. iLvls should be something like this in my opinion:
Tier1 Normal: 500
Tier 2 Normal, Tier 1 Heroic: 520
Tier 3 Normal, Tier 2 Heroic: 540
Tier 4 Normal, Tier 3 Heroic: 560
Tier 4 Heroic: 580

[Milkyz]

Lastly heroic guilds shouldn't be forced to raid normal mode for x weeks before starting heroic.

Doesn't make any sense.

You are only "forced" to do normal mode for X weeks before starting Heroic if you CAN'T clear normal mode. If you can't clear normal mode, that means you don't have gear/skill to do Heroic and thus need to nerf content by acquiring more gear.

You are only really "forced" to do normal mode one week.

[mistahwilshire]

The quantity of similar gear is only getting worse with the new model, you'll be having what we have no along side randomized stats and varying primary stats.

Long gone are the days when you new an item based on it's name.

Sadly it won't be going away, only continuing to get more fragmented as Blizzard finds more ways to try and keep people running farm content.

Having played diablo recently now I've quit WoW, I can see why they want to keep pushing this. Diablo and WoW PvE are both built on the pillars of rerunning old dungeons/raids dozens of times. Diablo's randomized loot system kept people invested far longer than WoW ever could. So alas we see a push towards Diablo loot in a 20 man raid environment.

Everyone in my guild still calls current tier items by name. Not sure what you're talking about.

People put way too much effort in to over thinking shit like the very premise of this thread. I've played this expansion from the viewpoint of an LFR only player to a pretty close to server first heroic progression player and I've got to say, it's really not that bad from any angle. WoW has been a loot driven game since I started in UBRS10 and that hasn't and won't change.

[eschatological]

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.

I don't think I was clear. I don't think they did it because they expected heroic raiders to be farming flex every week. I think they wanted some incentive for the higher-skill raiders to say, take their alts into flex on occasion, and most heroic raiders have alts in a mixture of normal/heroic gear. They essentially didn't want to bypass a whole tier of people with the raid.

[threads]

Reading through some of these replies gives me a headache.

IMO they screwed up big time when they added ilvl upgrades + thunderforged. That's when ilvl started getting out of control and why there's these huge gaps between dps. For some reason the devs don't see how bad this is and say they'll continue with the model in WoD, so obviously we'll be dealing with this for awhile.

There's nothing fun about working your ass off trying to execute your dps perfectly, and seeing people a few ilvls higher doing 100k above your dps. If you don't think this is a problem you're retarded.

[Qualia]

Reading through some of these replies gives me a headache.

IMO they screwed up big time when they added ilvl upgrades + thunderforged. That's when ilvl started getting out of control and why there's these huge gaps between dps. For some reason the devs don't see how bad this is and say they'll continue with the model in WoD, so obviously we'll be dealing with this for awhile.

There's nothing fun about working your ass off trying to execute your dps perfectly, and seeing people a few ilvls higher doing 100k above your dps. If you don't think this is a problem you're retarded.

Tbh, if people are doing 100k above your DPS (assuming both players are playing the same class and not SP vs Warlock or something similar), they either outplay you, or more than "few ilvl higher" - more like 15-20 ilvl, or both.

[Echocho]

Doesn't make any sense.

You are only "forced" to do normal mode for X weeks before starting Heroic if you CAN'T clear normal mode. If you can't clear normal mode, that means you don't have gear/skill to do Heroic and thus need to nerf content by acquiring more gear.

You are only really "forced" to do normal mode one week.

Which means that X in that case is 1. What I mean is that there should be a linear progression no matter what difficulty you choose. Sure if you can't kill anything in heroic mode you may want to farm previos heroic tier a while or current normal tier but assuming your guild is in full tier x heroic gear there should be no need or even reason to do tier x+1 in normal mode.

You should however be able to "finish off" the raid in normal mode if you wish. But again, if your guild are in full heroic gear from the previous tier there should be no reason to.

[threads]

Tbh, if people are doing 100k above your DPS (assuming both players are playing the same class and not SP vs Warlock or something similar), they either outplay you, or more than "few ilvl higher" - more like 15-20 ilvl, or both.

Thank you for solidifying my argument that ilvl plays more into dps now than it should.

[eschatological]

I mean, the thing is, I wouldn't mind ilvl gaps if I could still be competitive. Heroic raiders are about 50 ilvls above me (and in 546 ilvl, that's less than 10% more) but are doing 100% more damage (IE, double). That's not sustainable. I literally *cannot* compete with that, and high end guilds cannot afford to gear me up if they're still doing progression. And if they're not still doing progression, they need to gear me up in farm before they can reasonably analyze me. I think it's perfectly legit (on their part) to not want to take my app.

But I'm on a dead server with no normal mode PUGS which hasn't been connected yet, and I'm pretty close to my max ilvl in flex gear...so where do I go from here? Transfer to a high pop realm in hope of just pugging normal modes to get gear? That's going to cost me $25-$55 every time I realm hop, but that's what I'm considering at this point.

As to the person who said "Lower my expectations," ummm...no. I'm not a douchebag who uses guilds as stepping stones, and I'm not going to stick around a 6/14H guild once I've gotten adequate gear. Conceivably I'd go to a guild who doesn't mind being a stepping stone....but what mid-range guild doesn't mind? They're all looking for longterm raiders so they can take the next step to being high-end guilds.

[Marema]

That's kind of funny considering I have rarely done LFRs on my 2 main toons and somehow still manage to be in a normal (soon to be heroic) raiding guild. And the flex I do run is primarily with guildies and maybe a couple of pugs.

Which is exactly what I did last tier; and the one before that; and the ones in the last expansion; and the expansion before that.

[weedburst]

a decent guild will clear all normal bosses in 1 week and start on heroics the next week and you'll never have to bother with lfr or flex. basically stop complaining and find a guild. i do agree that the gear will become retarded with warlords and warforged/tertiary stats going on at the same time. if you get bad tertiary stats on a warforged and pefect ones of a normal version you're going to have to go test with both and see which yields a better result. this will happen constantly and will be more annoying than reforging is now.

[Marema]

Thank you for solidifying my argument that ilvl plays more into dps now than it should.

ilvl has played a part in dps since Molten Core.

[Kivimetsan]

Agreeing with OP.

Its not like its hard to get geared, its just time consuming - the attempt to attract the casual through free epics has just caused massive barriers for good players who want to experience end game raiding.

Not everyone liked Vanilla or BC attunements, but we basically have them back anyway. Sure you need some degree of walling off content with gear catchups, but not to the extreme whereby you must go into a shit version of the cool raid and clear it many times before then entering it, where you will burn out again because you've ran that raid SO MANY TIMES ALREADY.

This is not a fun wall, make me raid normal MsV or something, not lobotomized-version over and over.

[clevin]

I mean, the thing is, I wouldn't mind ilvl gaps if I could still be competitive. Heroic raiders are about 50 ilvls above me (and in 546 ilvl, that's less than 10% more) but are doing 100% more damage (IE, double). That's not sustainable. I literally *cannot* compete with that, and high end guilds cannot afford to gear me up if they're still doing progression. And if they're not still doing progression, they need to gear me up in farm before they can reasonably analyze me. I think it's perfectly legit (on their part) to not want to take my app.

But I'm on a dead server with no normal mode PUGS which hasn't been connected yet, and I'm pretty close to my max ilvl in flex gear...so where do I go from here? Transfer to a high pop realm in hope of just pugging normal modes to get gear? That's going to cost me $25-$55 every time I realm hop, but that's what I'm considering at this point.

As to the person who said "Lower my expectations," ummm...no. I'm not a douchebag who uses guilds as stepping stones, and I'm not going to stick around a 6/14H guild once I've gotten adequate gear. Conceivably I'd go to a guild who doesn't mind being a stepping stone....but what mid-range guild doesn't mind? They're all looking for longterm raiders so they can take the next step to being high-end guilds.

I get your issue, but what's the alternative? To have a fully geared heroic raider be just marginally better than a flex geared raider? The thing is each tier should be very noticeably more powerful than the tier below it. This wouldn't be an issue for you and OP if you'd not taken a long break but you did and you're coming back at a bad time (high end progression still happening, late in the expansion so there's little incentive to gear you for the next tier since there isn't one).

The fact is that if a group is going to get a bit screwed it's probably better for the game that it be people who have been gone for a long time and not the people who've been playing. To repeat myself, if the difference between you or OP and someone who's spent the last 6 months gearing was trivial, how do you think that person would feel? Right.

[Qualia]

Thank you for solidifying my argument that ilvl plays more into dps now than it should.

I was going to reply, then I saw this post below

ilvl has played a part in dps since Molten Core.

^ that, gear has always been playing a part in DPS since MC. Possibly worse back then, since you don't really have a good way of catching up - the 5m dungeon come with next patches do help, but they are, at best, of help as much as Flex at the moment. It's just a bit less noticeable since 20% of DPS back then is two digits number (or four, if you use Cata's numbers), while it's six digits now. Doesn't change the fact that it's 20% of DPS, though.

[Deleted]

1. Set the group up yourself.
2. So your empress mace isn't good enough for SoO ? You mean exactly like BWD weapons were useless for DS ? Or exactly like Prince's dagger was crap when going to sunwell ? Please tell me what has changed here. 2 tiers old gear has always been pretty useless for current content.
3. Run LFR + Flex + timeless island + normal and in what... 3 weeks tops you'll have enough for the first bosses in HC. In previous expansions GL on getting the items to close the gap without getting totally PL'ed through old content by your guild.

[Thelxi]

I don't like the enormous gap in power between my alts and my main within the same tier.

I used to be able to do some dungeons at my own pace on my alts, maybe get some vendor epics, and when I felt like it I could jump on my alt instead of my main during farm without being too much of a burden. Bis preraid gear was easier to get by with a little bit of grinding.

Now, I have to spend much more time on my alts and deal with weekly lockouts just to be in decent preraid gear, NOT bis preraid gear, and even then the power difference between my alt and main is enormous that I feel a huge burden to my team whenever I feel like playing my druid.

Basically what goes over people's heads entirely (especially non raiding casuals') is that at this point you are working much harder and spending a whole lot more time for the same, if not weaker, gear that used to be provided by dungeons. What you could achieve in one hardcore weekend 3 years ago now you have to endure X weekly lockouts and RNG for. smh.