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  1. #1

    Dev Watercooler - Itemization in 6.2

    Dev Watercooler - Itemization in 6.2
    Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
    In World of Warcraft Patch 6.2, we’re making some changes to our Raid itemization with the goal of improving the Personal Loot experience, creating more interesting distinctions among items, and providing rewards that more closely reflect the challenge players face to earn them.

    Personal Loot Improvements
    The Personal Loot system offers several advantages to certain group types, but there are still several areas where we think we can make improvements. Our goals with Personal Loot going forward are threefold:
    • Make Personal Loot more consistent and rewarding.
    • Bring Personal Loot up to be competitive with Group Loot, so players who prefer Personal Loot receive rewards comparable to those you get from groups using Master Loot or Need/Greed.
    • Celebrate rewarding Personal Loot within the group in a way that captures the excitement of receiving rewards in Group Loot.

    First, rather than treating loot chances independently for each player—sometimes yielding only one or even zero items for a group—we’ll use a system similar to Group Loot to determine how many items a boss will award based on eligible group size. As a result, groups will receive a much more predictable number of drops when they defeat a boss. In addition, set items will reliably drop in Personal Loot, just like they do in Group Loot today. The end result is that groups using Personal Loot will acquire their 2- and 4-piece set bonuses at around the same time as groups using Group Loot acquire theirs.

    We’re also increasing the overall rate of reward for Personal Loot, giving players more items overall to offset the fact that Personal Loot rewards can’t be distributed among group members. We know that finding that one awesome specific trinket to round out your gear set can be difficult with Personal Loot, and this should help increase your odds.

    Finally, the most visible change is the new Personal Loot UI. Part of the fun of raiding is progressing and improving as a group, not just as an individual. The previous Personal Loot system celebrated your own rewards, but would bury what your groupmates received in the chat log. However, the moment when your friend finally wins that long sought-after sword can be just as important to you as that moment you won your boots—and we wanted the game to help you celebrate it, too. Now when you loot an item, everyone in your group will see what you won!

    These Personal Loot improvements aren’t limited to Hellfire Citadel—we’re updating all of our Draenor dungeons, including Mythic dungeons, to use the same system.


    Secondary Stats
    In the early days of World of Warcraft, Raid bosses didn’t have that many items to drop—there were only 150 items in all of Molten Core, and more than half of those were set items. This small amount of total gear in a Raid meant there might only have been one or two items per slot in an entire tier that were appropriate for your class—and if you were a Hunter or a Shaman in a place like Molten Core, that meant your only option for a belt in the entire Raid zone was your class set piece. On top of that, if an item wasn’t class restricted, it was shared between many other specializations with wildly different ideas of which stats were good or bad. When very few items were available to fill any given slot, the desire to make sure they were useful for many specs led us to keep from straying too far from a 50/50 split on secondary stats.

    As the game has evolved, we’ve increased the number of items that bosses drop per kill, as well as the variety of items they drop. We’ve made secondary stats more competitive with one another, and we’ve reduced the frequency of oddball items that were only useful to a few classes. This made more items useful to more people, but eroded the distinction and sense of identity that items held in the past. Too rare became the situation where you knew for sure that this drop was your awesome piece of equipment, and that feeling of finding a truly special item came less often than we would have liked.

    To help bolster that sense of excitement, we’ve decided to shake things up when it comes to how secondary stats appear on Raid loot in this patch. Inside Hellfire Citadel, you’ll see a wider range of high and low secondary stat values on items than you have in a long time. Alongside some tuning adjustments that should ensure your attuned stats are the right choice, this change should also make it easier for you to identify which items are good for you in a more interesting way than just “equip the highest Item Level.” Our goal is to help make Hellfire Citadel Raid items more distinct and meaningful to you, and we hope you’ll let us know how things feel once you start collecting your new gear.

    Item Level Ramp
    As this expansion has progressed, it’s become increasingly apparent that there is a mismatch between challenge and reward for guilds that delve deep into large Raid zones. When the Item Level for rewards across a given difficulty of a zone is flat, a caster staff from Heroic Imperator Mar’gok is largely equal in power to one from Heroic Tectus, despite Mar’gok being the far more challenging boss. We often see and hear about guilds killing a late-zone boss like Blast Furnace for the first time, only to disenchant most of the drops because everyone already has loot from earlier bosses in those slots. On top of that, many guilds move on to higher difficulties before they fully complete a difficulty, because Heroic Darmac loot is stronger than Normal Blackhand loot—and you can get it for much less effort.

    To address this, we are structuring Hellfire Citadel so that the Item Level of the loot awarded by bosses increases as players proceed deeper into the zone, culminating in Archimonde—providing both the ultimate challenge and the ultimate reward.

    ... it feels good to get higher-level items as you progress through a zone.

    We’re doing this for a few reasons. First, it feels good to get higher-level items as you progress through a zone. One of the more prominent pieces of feedback we got about Blackrock Foundry was that it felt unrewarding for challenging bosses like Iron Maidens to drop loot that was just as good as—or possibly worse than—Gruul’s.

    This also breaks up where your best items are in a good way. The power of the items that you can get in a particular slot will differ based on how far through the zone you are. The best boots for you will likely be different if you are on Normal Gorefiend than they would be if you’re on Heroic Mannoroth, which would be different than if you’re on Mythic Iron Reaver, and so on.

    We can’t overstate how much we appreciate your feedback on topics like this, especially when you’ve taken the time to join us on the Patch 6.2 PTR and experienced the changes for yourself. As always, everyone’s encouraged to join us and other testers in the PTR Discussion forums as we prepare to unleash Hellfire.
    Last edited by chaud; 2015-05-20 at 05:08 PM.

  2. #2
    Having read over this i am liking the changes to the Personal Loot system, the Secondary stats area of this im still confused on,

    and the last system just baffles me high hell as to why it might be good or bad

  3. #3
    Deleted
    good read.

  4. #4
    nice thing

  5. #5
    That item level thing should have based on wing progression long ago, but at least they decided to do it, and it makes good sense. Are we sure this is a Blizzard Dev?

  6. #6
    The whole range of ilvls in the raid should only really apply to heroic and mythic since the whole scenario they described only occurs in those difficulties. Also, the bosses with max ilvl better have a piece for every slot for every spec otherwise you're running into class stacking later on.

  7. #7
    I just hope that they are not increasing the itemlevel jump from pre to post HFC. I think we are already scaling up too quickly which is causing content to become obsolete at a staggering pace.

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Unholyground View Post
    That item level thing should have based on wing progression long ago, but at least they decided to do it, and it makes good sense. Are we sure this is a Blizzard Dev?
    It's a terrible idea. Final boss sure, but having multiple bosses with higher ilvl than previous bosses? You're asking for class stacking to happen if there's 3 slots of cloth drops and caster weapons and 2 of leather and no agi weapons(example) off the higher ilvl bosses.

  9. #9
    Herald of the Titans MrKnubbles's Avatar
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    I really like the idea of having later bosses drop higher ilvl gear. Just like the example, I often move up to a higher difficulty before killing the final bosses because I've farmed earlier bosses and no longer need loot from the last boss.

  10. #10
    They should have some system in place that allows you to upgrade the item level of pieces of gear from earlier in the instance if you're able to defeat the later bosses.
    For example, your hunter gets a bow from boss 10 at item level 720, then a few weeks later you kill boss 13, and your warrior gets a 2hander with item level 730. Your hunter is sad but then over the following weeks if the hunter gets 3 or 4 kills on boss 13 he can upgrade his bow to be 730. Still get rewarded for going for more challenging bosses which feels good and also you end up on the same level as everyone else.

  11. #11
    Glad to see a Dev Watercooler. I thought they had been abandoned.

  12. #12
    Scarab Lord Tyrgannus's Avatar
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    I understand the final boss dropping a higher ilvl and previous expansions did that a lot before MoP, but the full ramp will eventually make all the earlier bosses obsolete in the eyes of min/maxing. I understand where they are coming from, but I think the first 12 bosses should be X ilvl and Archimonde should be X +10, because 15 is a difficulty and I don't want Archimonde's loot to replace things from the difficulty above.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by purebalance View Post
    It's a terrible idea. Final boss sure, but having multiple bosses with higher ilvl than previous bosses? You're asking for class stacking to happen if there's 3 slots of cloth drops and caster weapons and 2 of leather and no agi weapons(example) off the higher ilvl bosses.
    Who cares if ~1% of raiders class stack?
    READ and be less Ignorant.

  14. #14
    Sounds like good changes to me.

  15. #15
    This item level progression is a bad idea. They've essentially made the items that drop off early bosses useless. Heroic gear that drops off Archimonde is better than most Mythic gear until you get to Archiomonde again. You're bis offset piece is determined by ilevel instead of stats. Some specs have available weapons that are 5 ilevel higher than others.

    I don't understand this. They are fixing a problem that didn't exist.

  16. #16
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Unholyground View Post
    That item level thing should have based on wing progression long ago, but at least they decided to do it, and it makes good sense. Are we sure this is a Blizzard Dev?
    There's often a pretty huge mismatch between wing progression and boss difficulty.

    Flamebinder is relatively far on in progression usually (About halfway through BRF?), but she's probably the easiest boss in the instance.

  17. #17
    I think weapons should be all the same ilvl, except maybe off the last boss. Not really fair to those that get one off an earlier boss, but don't have one later that is good for them. Unless they plan on adding many more weapons to the table.

  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by IIamaKing View Post
    Who cares if ~1% of raiders class stack?
    Because it won't be 1%, but don't cry to me later when back water guilds sit and tell you that you're not wanted.

    Melee have never been bad and yet sure min maxers carry less, but sure enough the whole "melee are bad" went like wildfire in Cata and melee shot themselves in the foot since nobody would take them.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Shambulanced View Post
    I hadn't really considered the weapons/trinkets issue. They're so important to throughput, far more than other pieces, so I'm not sure that item scaling for those will be fair/smart.
    Archimonde for example only has a caster staff, caster mace, and a 2H str weapon. Kill him on normal and that sets you above players who kill heroic bosses that can't use those drops.

  19. #19
    Deleted
    This also means you can disenchant all eairly loot. and get the option to pass bosses, cuz when progress is over. first 10 bosses out of 14 will be retarded to do and waste of time. since they drop shit loot...

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Nagassh View Post
    There's often a pretty huge mismatch between wing progression and boss difficulty.

    Flamebinder is relatively far on in progression usually (About halfway through BRF?), but she's probably the easiest boss in the instance.
    I'd say most tiers there's 1 or 2 hosses out of place, though T17 only Flamebender was extremely egregious.

    Anyways, what they are trying to avoid still makes sense regardless of difficulty of the actual boss: mass dis enchanting of later boss gear is an issue no matter how hard or easy it was.

    Personal loot was great changes all around I think.
    Quote Originally Posted by Unmerciful Conker View Post
    What?! They said soon? Well you dont hear that everyday, I dont know about you guys but that has put my mind at total rest.

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