Is the current Benthic gear horrible game design?

[Gatto]

Eh, I disagree with this assessment. There is something really good about this - it facilitates world activity and IMO that is worth the drawbacks. Implementation is not perfect, but I am ready to pay this price, even if I'd love Blizz to chill there a bit.

Besides, WoW forever was about "gambling" if you put this way - bosses dropping random gear is a thing since forever, compared to that benthic is really something you can reasonably achieve and fast, because you can target drops. For all intents and purposes 5 manapearls is like raid boss kill that has a chance for BiS drop for me and instead of one attempt per week I get 30+ attempts per week.

But, giving the fact that the season is not started, it is obvious that you will be inducted to optimize your farm in order to get socketed stuff.

This could make the difference in terms of raids ( think about the 2 raids competing for the same challenge, and the difference between a flat 425 and a socketed one ) and pvp, at least at the beginning of the season.

I don't know if a special ability ( the random one given to every benthic piece ) and a socket could compete to 445 gear, but I am pretty sure that they will eventually overcome the 430/435, with no difficulties.

[Gaidax]

But, giving the fact that the season is not started, it is obvious that you will be inducted to optimize your farm in order to get socketed stuff.

This could make the difference in terms of raids ( think about the 2 raids competing for the same challenge, and the difference between a flat 425 and a socketed one ) and pvp, at least at the beginning of the season.

I don't know if a special ability ( the random one given to every benthic piece ) and a socket could compete to 445 gear, but I am pretty sure that they will eventually overcome the 430/435, with no difficulties.

Realistically, it won't make a difference.

Naturally contenders for world first will try their best to farm it out, but when you are taking my guild as example, who are 127th world 2 day raiding guild - you have like 3-4 people giving enough damn to even try this and in reality maybe 1-2 will end up lucking out and having the item by the time progress starts.

In grand scheme - it won't matter for us any and if that is the case, then it won't matter for anyone +70/-1000 ranks delta from us. We will have our cutting edge and possibly Famed Slayer no matter whether we will have 2 more people giving a damn about benthic farm or not. Why I bet by the end of the tier we will be oneshotting M.Azshara in our sleep, just like M.Jaina.

[Gatto]

Realistically, it won't make a difference.

Naturally contenders for world first will try their best to farm it out, but when you are taking my guild as example, who are 127th world 2 day raiding guild - you have like 3-4 people giving enough damn to even try this and in reality maybe 1-2 will end up lucking out and having the item by the time progress starts.

In grand scheme - it won't matter for us any and if that is the case, then it won't matter for anyone +70/-1000 ranks delta from us. We will have our cutting edge and possibly Famed Slayer no matter whether we will have 2 more people giving a damn about benthic farm or not. Why I bet by the end of the tier we will be oneshotting M.Azshara in our sleep, just like M.Jaina.

The fact that it doesn't count for us pleebs it's a thing, and I share your same thoughts.
But still it makes me wonder "why" ( and can't help but think about those who aim for the first realm, or even world ).

They talked about the possibility to remove War/titanforging, which was one of their worst choices ever ( even if it's hard to list all their bad choices ).
Benthic had a chance, but as they removed the ilvl, they add another stat and allowed players to gamble on equip and then, once obtained a good 385, to max it till 425, which will be way better than a m+ drop or heroic raid ( 430 ilvl ).

And many will be probably farming pearls after the next week on their main, because the result would be greater than anything they could achieve in other modalities.

[Redecle]

Oh, you mean sitting semi naked in Goldshire Inn on Moonguard? Sorry, that's not very interesting to anyone except Moonguard crowd.

Well that doesn't really have anything to do with role playing, well it does and it doesn't. But touching yourself whilst talking to a "girl" or a girl in chat isn't exactly progressive rp. It's just a whole other wormhole of something, but at least some of them in there are trying. Trading favors that way isn't called the worlds oldest profession for no reason. Which is the point they are claiming to be something they are not, hence role playing. They have a backstory, they have a character "path", they have a CHARACTER that's not just pixels of different colors.

I was more referring to having a character in a world. Being that character, playing and acting as the character and not the person behind the keyboard looking for shinies.
Being part of a sandbox eco system and having an impact or on the other hand of not having one. Having a backstory, where you come from, who this character is, what is their future trajectory in the eco system is among other characters. Currently everyone is an adventurer of one scale, noob or the hero of the world. But if we compare that to the real world (the biggest rpg where everyone has already chosen their character), not everyone here is an adventurer, professions tell us apart, our goals and desires tell us apart. It's weird that in a rpg where you can literally be anything you want, that you might not even irl be. Everyone is just an adventurer and following only npc character stories of Blizzard. When Blizzard isn't writing your story, they are writing npc characters and the overall world themes. Players should be writing and forging their own stories, but everyone is too busy running on treadmill for basically absolutely nothing, because it all resets every patch.

WOW, Diablo, Destiny and a lot of other games have progression based on gear. If wow had progression based on something else, then we'd care about that something else. But it's gear based at level cap since vanilla, and hasn't changed ever.

Progression is what you make it to be. Gear is one tool, but one tool only. Those Moonguard guys don't give two shits about the gear. Yet they get their fix from the game. Just hypothetically if gear wasn't like this.. What if you get one upgrade every 6 months, that's a 1% increase in power and that's it. You get a level and skill increase once per month, as one could probably get in a tabletop rpg. Where all of this was pretty much started and based on. There the progress is telling stories, getting loot is just a bonus when it rarely comes around to you.

Granted it's not the case, cause we've made it this current way, by min-maxing everything, for the sake of what? Those 5 esports guilds who does it for living. A lot of people arguing about who should receive the best loot in the game on behalf of the top guilds, who on their own sake don't give a fuck about the gear, their pride and glory comes from the kills, gear is just a tool for them. And let's face it, ain't no one typing here actually killing mythic Azshara and calling benthic gear a problem.. Vanilla people were happy to get white gear pieces that were an upgrade to armor, it wasn't a debate should benthic be bis or not. What actual difference does it really make that one or 4 bis pieces come from somewhere else in the game than raiding? Really? It makes zero difference, outside of that some imaginary epeen is lost in the process cause one person thinks they are better than another over some colored pixels.

[Taeldorian]

I am not a fan.

I can see what Blizzard maybe is trying to do, judging from their PvP essence reply where they said it's ok for people who care to have these things in unusual activities for them.

It could be they are trying to make things less on the rails - where it's ok to have occasionally BiS gear from unexpected sources, much like in earlier WoW. This could make people go out of their way to the world to farm for that.

I think it's an interesting experiment on the other hand, but I'm sort of on the negative side about it at the moment.

I think this sums everything up well. I’m curious to see what they’ll do with the system if anything going forward but I’m not really too positive about the current system. I definitely don’t mind having a BiS item come from somewhere else in the world as long as it’s some form of grind, I think that’ll be pretty cool and everyone I’ve spoken to has actually enjoyed doing pvp for the essence or grinding for rep or whatever activity they had to go and do.

The problem with the benthic gear is that people want their BiS item but with a socket which comes down to another form of RNG gambling. However, it really isn’t that bad because manapearls are very easy to come by and there’s more than 1 way to get benthic gear. So overall, I’m not too keen about the system but I’m not completely against it and I’d like to see where they can take it.

I certainly dislike titanforging but I really don’t mind if 1 or 2 BiS pieces come from a grind that’s outside of raiding or m+ honestly. If it’s locked behind a grind then it’s a guaranteed reward which is great, means you have something else to work towards like with essences.

[Sanguinerd]

Who cares if its balanced or not.. just because theres a small chance on something happening - that for most of us won't - doesn't mean it should be changed because some people have such a fragile ego they can't stand others having that kind of luck.

[Eazy]

Yes, some pieces are better. But it's really worth farming that thing 24/7 because you're going to get +500 DPS difference?

I think it doesn't even matter for the high-end guilds as much as for the casuals.

Realistically, it won't make a difference.

Naturally contenders for world first will try their best to farm it out, but when you are taking my guild as example, who are 127th world 2 day raiding guild - you have like 3-4 people giving enough damn to even try this and in reality maybe 1-2 will end up lucking out and having the item by the time progress starts.

In grand scheme - it won't matter for us any and if that is the case, then it won't matter for anyone +70/-1000 ranks delta from us. We will have our cutting edge and possibly Famed Slayer no matter whether we will have 2 more people giving a damn about benthic farm or not. Why I bet by the end of the tier we will be oneshotting M.Azshara in our sleep, just like M.Jaina.

Exactly.

[Gaidax]

The fact that it doesn't count for us pleebs it's a thing, and I share your same thoughts.
But still it makes me wonder "why" ( and can't help but think about those who aim for the first realm, or even world ).

They talked about the possibility to remove War/titanforging, which was one of their worst choices ever ( even if it's hard to list all their bad choices ).
Benthic had a chance, but as they removed the ilvl, they add another stat and allowed players to gamble on equip and then, once obtained a good 385, to max it till 425, which will be way better than a m+ drop or heroic raid ( 430 ilvl ).

And many will be probably farming pearls after the next week on their main, because the result would be greater than anything they could achieve in other modalities.

Why? So that people will go out in the world and do shit there such as rares and so on, instead of being locked in their little instances whether it's dungeons, raids or PvP. To that end I think it's mission accomplished really and I am quite content with that.

Other than that - farming or not is up to a person, because realistically for Mythic raiders (that do not gun for World First etc) these items don't really make much difference, simply because the deltas between these items and mythic drops are pretty small. Now, don't crucify me here, some benthic items are certainly very powerful, but overall we're talking like what 300 DPS or so more than mythic equivalent? It's nice, but when we're projected to have 40k+ DPS in new gear, that's ±1% give or take in extreme case.

[Gatto]

Why? So that people will go out in the world and do shit there such as rares and so on, instead of being locked in their little instances whether it's dungeons, raids or PvP. To that end I think it's mission accomplished really and I am quite content with that.

Other than that - farming or not is up to a person, because realistically for Mythic raiders (that do not gun for World First etc) these items don't really make much difference, simply because the deltas between these items and mythic drops are pretty small. Now, don't crucify me here, some benthic items are certainly very powerful, but overall we're talking like what 300 DPS or so more than mythic equivalent? It's nice, but when we're projected to have 40k+ DPS in new gear, that's ±1% give or take in extreme case.

The problem here is that content stuff should be designed to excell in that specific content.

Not all the people lock themselves in instaces, raids or pvp because they want to raise their ilvl, but because they want to achieve difficult encounters.

While you say "you don't have to lock yourself into m+", maybe that person only enjoy m+ content.
And the same goes with arenas, rated bg, raids, and so on.

I am going to make an example to explain this even better.

I am a m+ player which receive 430 gear at the end of the instance and through the weekly chest, and I can barely push because there's no granted better ilvl reward. Benthic 425 will give me a way to push through m+

And let's go even further and leave benthic gear alone for a while.
What about essences?
I play a specific game mode but the essence which works better for my class comes from another.

Definitely not the best choice.

While I do accept the fact that you could sometimes find yourself locked to a specific game mode, you should remember that many like just one specific mode and were happy with it.

If BFA customization was not good untill now, to me has gotten even worse.

[Marrilaife]

Well that doesn't really have anything to do with role playing, well it does and it doesn't. But touching yourself whilst talking to a "girl" or a girl in chat isn't exactly progressive rp. It's just a whole other wormhole of something, but at least some of them in there are trying.

There's a reason why there's a sub group of "RP servers" and they aren't the majority of servers. RP isn't the main focus of wow. I played on an RP server back in wotlk and can't say majority of people on that served RPed even. Most of them didn't. Except the goldshire clowns most other RPers were just closed hermetic communities and majority of server population didn't interact with them much. I somehow doubt it changed much by now.

I was more referring to having a character in a world. Being that character, playing and acting as the character and not the person behind the keyboard looking for shinies.
Being part of a sandbox eco system and having an impact or on the other hand of not having one.

Wow was not really meant to be a sandbox game, it was always more "themepark than sandbox", and over the years got more and more on rails, freedom to choose what you want to do got slowly replaced with a daily list of chores and tickboxes to fill. Wow is not even well suited to be a sandbox, there's little to no framework to implement player choice, impact, or dynamic events. Closest they got to it are rares on a randomized respawn timer or tug of war point control world pvp, this is still very on rails and far away from being a sandbox - and it never meant to be one. The profession system is also very on rails and far away from the systems sandbox games have, where it's a pillar of creating... well basically everything in game.

Yes, you can load up a solo RPG and be the shaper of the future of the in-game world. You can load true sandbox online game where players create content, economy and wars - I'm not a fan, but people who play games from EVE online to Minecraft enjoy it exactly because there's very little framework and theoretically, you can do whatever. Unfortunately that has a drawback that in multiplayer sandbox games you can be easily exposed to scams and griefing, because that's the price of freedom to do whatever.

Yes, you can ignore mainstream wow being an on-rails gear treadmill and focus on RPing or pet battling or playing the AH, but these are treated as side activities. You can see where the dev's focus goes, foremost on creating content that is meant to be grinded for gear and other player power upgrades (ap / essences), then cosmetics (mounts, pets, transmog, toys), then everything else.

The fact that RPers have to rely on addons and none of it was implemented baseline (contrary to many raid / dungeon addons being in some way implemented baseline like aggro indicators / threat meters, updated raid and party frames, updated nameplates, focus frame, improved cast bars and buff bars, ilvl indicator, most of that stuff didn't exist in vanilla or was only covered by addons) shows that they don't care much about RPers, it's more of a "live & let live" approach and all they ever did is maybe force rename people with non-RP compatible names on RP servers or temporarily ban people who griefed RPers and got reported.

Wow is closer to hack & slash action RPGs and looter-shooters than actual solo player RPGs that focus on story, choice and impact, because it's really hard to implement the second one well in MMOs. SWTOR tried, and ended up feeling more like a solo questing game than MMO. In group content it felt like something between democracy vote and random roll (if votes tied). But still, the main storyline had to pick the "canon" outcome, otherwise what do you do? Fracture the playerbase into 100 different shards depending who picked which outcome of various story turning points?

I know it's a long answer but TL: DR: wow is ill-fit to be a sandbox, or single player RPG with focus on story and choice, however it fulfilled the role of themepark gear grinder very well over the course of its lifespan. Can't really blame it for attracting the playerbase that was interested in gear grinding and min-maxing in that aspect.

[Arainie]

I think it's actually great design and I do raid Mythic. Personally I'd like certain pieces from older tiers still be viable/BiS in new tiers, because I think your character should be a long term investment/development and not something you switch for each tier. Whether you like my opinion or not is up to you.

EDIT: I guess I should clarify that I don't necessarily think having 4 Benthic BiS items is great, but one or two being marginally better than Mythic equivalent pieces really does not hurt the game in any shape or form.

[hulkgor]

In a patch with horrible zone design, horrible achievement design, horrible collectibles design and horrible pvp design you're surprised pve design is horrible too?

Really stretching it there, uh?

[Wilfire]

Who the fuck cares if it's better than Eternal Palace mythic gear or not. The #1 issue is that Benthic gear completely nullified any and all time investment mythic raiders put into clearing and farming BoD for the last 6 months. Never before has an entire tier of gear been completely trivialized by vendor gear. Why the fuck even bother playing WoW at this point if nothing you do gets you any lasting advantage?

[Twdft]

The #1 issue is that Benthic gear completely nullified any and all time investment mythic raiders put into clearing and farming BoD for the last 6 months. Never before has an entire tier of gear been completely trivialized by vendor gear. Why the fuck even bother playing WoW at this point if nothing you do gets you any lasting advantage?

What are you talking about? There was vendor gear in Burning Crusade that replaced earlier raid gear, and pretty much every expansion after that had it.

Also... lasting advantage... just unsub and come back a year later to solo raids. Playing curent content clearly makes you mad.

[Wilfire]

What are you talking about? There was vendor gear in Burning Crusade that replaced earlier raid gear, and pretty much every expansion after that had it.

Also... lasting advantage... just unsub and come back a year later to solo raids. Playing curent content clearly makes you mad.

"Just unsub" - have fun playing with the remaining 10 fanboys that will gladly enjoy eating a literal turd if Blizzard tells them that it's content.

[Tiwack]

I think this is great and I can't wait to hear how it all gets put to use in the raid - expecting it to be matching the benefits through difficulty or not get repeating nerf-passes like previously.

It's PvP that's the eternal headache with laughable scaling and lacking balance in between the classes. Atm a full party of fresh 120s can't do shit against a fully decked competitive endgame raider. Secondary stats always go through the roof at this point in the expansion cycle.

[Gaidax]

"Just unsub" - have fun playing with the remaining 10 fanboys that will gladly enjoy eating a literal turd if Blizzard tells them that it's content.

Take a chill pill... this is nothing new, so I am not sure why you are even screeching. At this point we have many years of new content patches obsoleting previous patch gear one way or another and fast.

Heck we had this en-masse in Wrath already and somehow WoW did not die.

- - - Updated - - -

Really stretching it there, uh?

He's one of "those", you know.

[Wilfire]

Take a chill pill... this is nothing new, so I am not sure why you are even screeching. At this point we have many years of new content patches obsoleting previous patch gear one way or another and fast.

Heck we had this en-masse in Wrath already and somehow WoW did not die.

- - - Updated - - -



He's one of "those", you know.

New raid gear or gear rewarded through badges made previous gear obsolete. Not grindable casino gear.

[Xath]

Who the fuck cares if it's better than Eternal Palace mythic gear or not. The #1 issue is that Benthic gear completely nullified any and all time investment mythic raiders put into clearing and farming BoD for the last 6 months. Never before has an entire tier of gear been completely trivialized by vendor gear. Why the fuck even bother playing WoW at this point if nothing you do gets you any lasting advantage?

For some classes it is as good or better than base mythic gear with the right bonus and a socket. That's kind of dumb.

[justandulas]

The 4 raid difficulties set apart by 15ilvl, WF/TF and raising reward ilvl every season is the horrible game design.

It really is hideously awful game design. Lazy at that too. A real team would make different raids for different tiers and difficulties like tbc

The seasonal approach to wow isn’t working