For me it was doa because everyone who meets the upgrade tier reqs will already have better gear.
recently leveled 2 alts and valor is pretty nice - pretty much any item i can get to 220 with just a few upgrades while before gearing was really hard capped.
Well... yes. Those who were hardcore enough to farm +2s reached the cap and / or upgraded whatever they wanted. I myself upgraded one item by only doing 4 mythic+ per week and emmisaries. Might've been 5, but anyway, it is just high keys for vault and not for valor.
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You must be super lucky. I still have 5 slots under 220. Back, neck, one ring, trinket, feet. Oh and shoulders, but i only use those when switching out legendary. Still, 220 ilvl overall because i actually got and upgraded one of the trinkets (The scale that is bis for tanks). And yes ive had keystone master for quite some time, shit just wont drop in the 4-5 keys i do per week. Nor is my vault very lucky with only two options and i cba to do 10 for one extra.
Last edited by Loveliest; 2021-03-25 at 04:22 PM.
Yeah, no. Or rather, sure, if you can take your recently leveled alts and 1) time +10s or 15s (all of them), 2) get the item you want to drop and 3) get enough valor to upgrade said items.
You're not doing that on freshly leveled 60s unless you have a group of friends who carry you because no one is taking a new 60 into 15s or even 10s.
That's the problem with this iteration. There are too many hoops to jump through:
1) Need to re-farm the loot.
2) Need to time all 5s, 10s or 15s depending on what you want to be able to do
3) Need to then run M+ enough to get the VP for upgrades.
The problem is that this doesnt address the people who could have benefited most - people stuck at 195-205 or so, who don't raid heroic and were doing some M+ but not farming the hell out of 15s. When this was first announced, I thought that maybe they'd found a way to get over the soft cap they'd created.
You can so easily get to ~200 that it renders all of LFR, M0, Normal CN and all of the low level keys completely irrelevant from a loot perspective. If you're already at 200 your gear is already as good as or better than the drops in those places with a few exception, mostly trinkets.
I thought this system would let people in that fix time some 5s, get some VP, upgrade gear, time out the 10s, etc. In other words, another avenue to gear up. Instead, there are so many barriers that I just don't bother. I can do all of that, but since I can't upgrade the existing M+ gear that I got prior to 9.0.5, it feels like a chore. And, well, eh. With 9.1 relatively soon, why bother grinding for gear now?
My main is already 218 or something. But there is also ZERO chance in hell of ever doing all +15s on time.
Being required to have the gear before you can get the gear makes valor non existent.
It would work for any alts I have, and I do keep my Mage as an Alt. But I don't run enough dungeons to get all +10 on time. So it remains FAR easier to just gear up in the raid. Valor is not part of any natural gearing process for me.
Literally didnt set foot into any m2-5 for valor. You get so much per run just capped the 5000+ easily by doin 15+ runs.
Its harder to get the item than valor anyhow.
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
It's a good idea for a system, but (in normal "first pass" style) just has so many downsides.
1) The rate of farming to spending is insanely slow. Some pieces cost 250 to upgrade, which works well, but a majority are in the 400-500 range.
2) The seasonal cap limits how you want to spend it.
A) You never want to upgrade anything below 210 (or 207 if you're willing to stretch it).B) You never want to upgrade anything that is not part of your best gear (maybe you got 210 boots, but you're better off saving that valor for 210 boots from some other dungeon).3) Farming a piece is just tiring. With two pieces a run, it can take a very long time to farm that one trinket you're hunting for.
Something I'd really like to see is improving the experience of upgrading an item that is not perfect. Valor cost should scale with ilvl (going to 213 - the cap for KSC should be cheap!). Valor also needs to be uncapped in some way. Maybe you can refund it by selling the item you upgraded, or maybe the seasonal cap could only apply to upgrades spent past the dungeon cap (i.e. upgrading anything to 210 would still cost valor, but valor spent in this way would not count towards your seasonal cap).
There is no jump in difficulty. The problem is that many people play on they key lvl they're running.
My alt has 7 days played 217 ilvl already and finished all 14 in time.
If I join a 5 or 12 it takes the same time as a 14.so what's the point of running lower keys? Ppl who run 11 or 13 are usually not good enough for 14. That's why you get horrible results there.
14 or 15 is often easier than running lower keys. I joined a +5 key yesterday and the tank died 3 times. I'm the healer.
Last edited by GnomeEU; 2021-03-25 at 05:13 PM.
Point is that even if I’m healer noone will accept me for a 14 with 989 rio and 211 ilvl unless they are desperate.
But it’s the pug scene, not much I can do about it apart from trying running with guildies, last week I had a luxury to make a Mists 14 plus a PF 13 (my first 14 ever and my first timed 13 ever) with the guild and seeing how smooth they went I felt even more depressed about the pug scene.
Really no idea on how that hella lot of dps made to reach the 11-13 bracket, the amount of them being able to do absolutely nothing apart from staying in the fire while performing their rotation (with horrible results also number wise) is just astonishing.
Ngl, I actually have about 4 item slots at 213 ilvl and could potentially benefit from upgrading to some 220 items in those slots.
But at this stage of the patch, I simply cannot be arsed to further upgrade my character beyond what I get from the vault by doing a single m+ every week.
This week I got the option of a 226 cloak I already had at 226 (but wasn't using due to terrible stats for my class), so I chose the consolation price of 750 Stygia instead, even though I won't bother grinding for sockets either.
Imho it was instantly pointless. Between regrinding existing gear and having annoying milestone requirements (my group didn't even see some keys for like 2 months now), the system is just flat out useless to me >90% of the time.
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You need to get quite alot of renown before you can even finish the campaign. Unless you are the type of person that regularily wins the lottery this is quite a bit of grinding just to fill the Renown gaps. Not to mention all the anima you'd need to upgrade all that gear as well.
Last edited by Cosmic Janitor; 2021-03-25 at 08:17 PM.
You are welcome, Metzen. I hope you won't fuck up my underground expansion idea.
It didn't die, it was killed in the womb before it was born.