Originally Posted by
Soeroah
Korthia did it well, almost. The grind was too much, but I think it was about the highest a non-instance player could push their ilevel doing solo content. So if they could refine that to be more in line with raid progression, I think that would be good.
My never-gonna-happen wish for how to fix the issues, on paper, has two parts:
1) The non-ilevel route: zone-specific 'borrowed power'. Similar to how the Garrisons had those special zone abilities, or how Zereth Mortis looks like it's going to have its own talent tree, I think outdoor zones should have that sort of feature that you can unlock over the course of a patch, gaining power to offset the lower items levels, and, importantly, does not carry into raids/dungeons/battlegrounds. Perhaps at the end you can unlock a slice of those buffs that carry into other outdoor zones in the expansion. That way raiders, dungeoneers and PvPers can completely ignore the system if they want, while casuals still get to enjoy feeling as powerful in outdoor/solo content as mythic dungeoneers/raiders when they come to an outdoor zone.
2) Failing that, the ilevel revamp route: more upgradable gear tokens like in Korthia, tuned to be just a little less grindy, perhaps shortcuts for doing challenging pieces of outdoor content. Stuff like Horrific Visions, where you could actually earn decent gear, as opposed to Torghast, where you cannot. But the core part of making this work, without making it feel mandatory for raiders or mythic dungeon runners, IMO, is to segregate ilevel from the content.
A bit confusing, but I'll try to explain. Raiders generally say, from what I've seen, that casuals shouldn't get ilevels higher than a normal raid. So let's say LFR is Tier 1, Normal is Tier 2, Heroic is Tier 3 and Mythic is Tier 4. Flag each piece of a gear a player can earn as coming from one of the four pillars of endgame content: PvP, Raids, Mythic Keystones or Outdoor/Casual content. When used in the same type of content as it was earned, the gear is at its full ilevel (eg a Mythic Raid weapon is at whatever the Tier 4 ilevel is set at for that patch). When used in a different type of content, the ilevel tier for that piece drops by two tiers.
That way a casual player can earn 'mythic' gear with enough investment in their own content, but if they go into a raid they still need to earn raid gear, so they can't circumvent the progression by doing the 'easy' stuff. Likewise, a mythic raider will still have decent gear for outdoor content, but they won't have the best gear for outdoor content without progressing through outdoor content. Basically means players can get the full gamut of power from doing their main content and some progression on the side in other content, but they can't just do on type of content to overpower the rest of the game without doing anything there, which seems to be what raiders want when it comes to casuals obtaining powerful gear.
Personally I'd prefer the first scenario, but I could live with the second.