Which era of PvE itemization did you like best?

[ThrashMetalFtw]

All casters except for Ele got stuff like extra Crit, Sp or Hit from Spirit at a worse conversion rate in WotLK.

The 1:1 conversion to Hit was added in Cata, not MoP.


I liked the WotLK/Cata/early MoP loot system the best, which is basically what we have now in SL and DF with minor adjustments. Well itemized gear without any random procs, but the amount of loot being low enough that you won't have full BiS after 2 resets.

MoP with fixed 6+ iLvl Warforging was ok, but still worse, likewise for WoD with the same forging and random socket procs.

Legion/BFA Titanforging was the worst form of cancer, and should never have left the board of ideas in the first place.

[Omians]

I miss reforging from cata personally. Squeezing as much haste on my enh shaman as i could during cata lol.

I did enjoy the random chance of thunder/warforging as it gave a reason to keep running the raid a bit longer even if you got your base BIS. But i get how people didnt like the mechanic

Edit: wrong forging

[VinceVega]

Cata. Gear was still semi-intersting. Reforging, while useless was kinda fun. No legendary everyone had. What the fuck is legendary about something everyone has?

Hero has been hard so the earlie purples had some kind of accomplishment. The fucked that up so by nerfing them into oblivion.

Everything after that... i cannot even tell you one piece of armor since then. Can't remember. Gear is meaningless.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

I agree with this as someone who only clears content one time and refuses to farm anything it was nice when it happened for either you or your team but i guess some people play for entire season get mad that they did not win on the lotto ticket and thus it was gone.

Yeah umlike a lot of people here I'm not going to make a sweeping claim about what's best for the game lol, but just speaking personally, being able to get titan forges while running weekly dungeons with friends and alts was very fun

[Loveliest]

I think maybe Legion. I could still swap legendaries in M+ and gear sets at that point. And I really liked some legendaries. And I liked the artifact weapons and the titanforging.

[D3athsting]

Still baffled how they added terrible stats like expertise, multistrike , armor/spell pen and never thought about crit dmg

[Skildar]

WoD also had crafted gear that was highest level and weekly loot from adventure table.
Which to me was clostest to the best.

[loras]

TBC.
Uncomplicated and effective.
No childishness; you get what gear you get.
No 10/25 man versions, no lfr/normal/heroic/mythic versions. No warforged/titanforged/whateverforged.
Just gear.

Frankly the present system could be fine- if they axed at least two "tiers" of gear per raiding tier.
And honestly the rng is the worst of it; just make every piece upgradeable to a single highest itemlevel over tims, the dropdifficulty only determining the starting itemlevel.

So yeah, only normal and heroic tiers of gear, LFR rarely dropping anything, mythic as pure challenge mode only featuring cosmetics of heroic gear quality.

Would fix their repeated stupid self-inflicted scaling issues too.

[Myradin]

I'd lean WoD. Its main issue was content, while design wise things were pretty solid.

Hit/Expertise were dumb stats.

Still baffled how they added terrible stats like expertise, multistrike , armor/spell pen and never thought about crit dmg

Probably because crit damage is too dependant upon crit itself. Most stands stand alone but Crit DMG and crit would scale specifically well together compared to everything else.

[Fkiolaris]

MoP
Reforging helped make sidegrades more impactful, thunder/warforging combined with Valor upgrades kept people coming even during farm, tier and trinkets were amazing without facing the slot limitations of legion and without going completely off the rails like with HFC in WoD. Meanwhile Valor gear offered a meaningful progression to more casual players that was slow enough to never really create an issue for the hardcore who could use it together with the coin to make up for RNG. Crafting could have been better. Tons of enchants and gem slots helped those professions be important.

All of this, 100%. The only issue for me that MoP had was the gear from badges was behind reps, and some of these reps originally were behind other reps. So by the time you grinded one of them, never mind both, in order to get a specific item there was a good chance you already had a better item already.

I would also add that all activities were giving some sort of badges, Justice or Valour, and as such everything felt useful in some way.

If the question was for PvP gearing, though, then WoD is the best (and for my taste, perfect) gearing system they ever made.

[Essem]

Items nowadays just blend together in a soup.
Mainstat
Stamina
+xxxxx
+xxxxx
Every item is like this. Nothing is momorable or exciting. Oh hey this got better ilvl lets equip. Also they arent very nice to look at.

I much prefer the TBC-wotlk-cata era.
Where items are more varied.
Agility were different from strength and intellect was different as well. You had Attack Power as a stat on Agi items. I also like the fact that there we things that had HIGH value such as hit/expertise until you reach different caps. Yellow hit cap, dual wield cap, spell cap etc. It made items and gearing more interesting.

Also items were much more inviting to look at.
63 Agility
45 Stamina
Equip: Improves hit rating by 51.
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 33.
Equip: Increases your Attack Power by 127.

[Bigbazz]

I wouldn't really say "8 piece sets" remained in TBC. T6 was a 5piece set that had 3 extra set pieces added a year later when Sunwell launched but there was still only a 4 set bonus and both T4/T5 had only 5 pieces. TBC healing items eventually had spell power added and vice versa but the values were much lower so the items were not shared between roles, that happened in WOTLK.

Weapon speed was already normalised by the end of Vanilla. Weapon skill stat got converted to Expertise mid TBC, it was removed entirely in WOD. The biggest change between TBC and WOTLK gearing was simply bonus healing/spell damage being turned into one stat. Other smaller changes were Crit rating being turned into a single stat for spell/melee and Ignore Armor being turned into Armor Penetration rating. From a melee dps perspective, gearing in TBC/WOTLK remained much the same, you just had way more options because so much more loot dropped, and more gemming possibilities.

[deenman]

blows my mind how people look at titanforging as a good thing,never being able to have bis gear isnt fun one bit,yeah that lucky moment of a big proc felt good,but wasnt worth all the other issues...atleast if it was capped below next difficulty more like in wod

anyways,i enjoyed cata most,having to deal with the armor types is fun in a singleplayer rpg,but in an mmo...its better they changed it,mastery and reforge gr8 additions,the numbers still felt good wile being progresive from last expansion,wile in mop they felt to high and now the squish wile needed just feels odd

[Onikaroshi]

I'd like an amalgamation and some changes personally.

Bring back hit, exp, defense but make them useful above the "cap"
Bring back tank stats
Remove Vers, it's boring
Bring back spell power and attack power
Bring back stat mixing (ie str and agility both being useful for melee)
Etc.

[Loli-Knight]

I'd like an amalgamation and some changes personally.
Etc.

This is essentially my answer as well. The last time itemization actually felt like an RPG was back in vanilla with all the weird and wonky things you could do. Most of it wasn't mandatory, but helped as we've seen with people replaying Classic. I want that kind of weird potential, but I also want the flavorful stats like armor/spell penetration (armor penetration was the game's coolest stat, bar-none), reforging, and Pandaria's basic Thunderforging. In other words, I want more choices and flavor. Aka more potential. Heck, I also liked PVP gear having very obvious differences like either more stamina, resilience, or PVP power. I like choice and variety. I want all the weird crap that I can do in all sorts of other games that're perfectly viable to work in my MMOs too. Streamlining things too much is such a bloody waste of potential.

[mrgreenthump]

Sort of a difficult question, because many expansions have had good systems and then worst ones at the same time. Like BFA, you had limited titanforging unlike the sillyness in Legion, but then you had Azerite armor and Benthic gear. Shadowlands was decent, but you had the vault, which killed M+ for mythic raiders.

In general I don't think I like to think expansion as a whole, because itemization has been redone every patch since WotLK. And if I think with patches, there's nothing quite like what ToT felt like. Being able to get thunderforged gear, but then also upgrade your non-forged gear to the same ilevel felt good. M+ in BFA felt good with M+ 15s giving really good gear if you put some effort into grinding, unlike in SL where you didn't put any effort into grinding M+ because it was pointless past first weeks and valor caps certainly didn't help, cause even if an upgraded piece could've been good, you got something better from mythic raid or vault before you could've even maxed out the upgrade.

As is I still see M+ a bit of a side game, which is sad, because it truly had hope when it came out in Legion and somehow, I've just felt we've been going backwards with it. But we'll see the first week gearing has been sort of refreshing, even though Blizzard really wants to spoil the fun and not let us get anywhere near even normal raid item levels, even when some people already got theirs at high item level.

While not particularly about gearing, the min-maxer in me is probably going to go nuts with the alchemy crafting system. Seems to be so far from being able to make quality 3 crafts reliably.

[God Save The King]

Burning Crusade
--Weapon speeds were normalized in either BC or Wrath not sure exactly. Daggers also got special modifiers to prevent tanks using them at some point.
--8 pc Tier sets remained

Wrath of the Lich King
--Holy pallies and elemental/resto shamans were MUCH easier to gear than druids, priests, warlocks, and mages

Warlords of Draenor

Weapon speeds were somewhat normalised in WotLK, and totally in cataclysm (e.g. weapons still had different speeds, and rogues/enh shamans wanted slow weapons).
8 pc tier sets remained in t6, where you had 8 possible items for your set, but there was nothing beyond the 4-set bonus. Only Classic had more than 4-set bonuses.

It WotLK all caster dps (except Elemental) had benefits from spirit. So in reality ele/resto were some of the hardest to gear requiring pretty much only mail intellect gear. There were some leather/cloth without spirit on it, but they weren't commonplace. Holy paladins had the benefit of using leather/cloth mp5 gear along with all caster plate/mail, so they were super easy to gear, especially since most groups only ran one.

In WoD reforging was removed.

- - - Updated - - -

While not particularly about gearing, the min-maxer in me is probably going to go nuts with the alchemy crafting system. Seems to be so far from being able to make quality 3 crafts reliably.

Work order the blue profession gear, get your 'weapon' with Inspiration. That'll go along way. Beyond that, use 3 star ingredients, and spec properly for what you're crafting. It'll take a while until you can reliably 3 star everything, but I can 3 star any potion at will right now (maxed out potion mastery/lore and some into batch).

[AlmightyGerkin]

Thunderforging they had in 5.2 was the best of "upgrade" they had. Every other "forging" they did after was absurd.

[garicasha]

You know for all the years I’ve been trollin mmo-champ this is one of the few things that there isn’t an overwhelming majority on. And pretty much every expac has people that legit liked it.

[mrgreenthump]

You know for all the years I’ve been trollin mmo-champ this is one of the few things that there isn’t an overwhelming majority on. And pretty much every expac has people that legit liked it.

Maybe it's the negative andy in me, but I don't think any of the expansions so far got everything right. And looking back am here standing staying "not bad" for most of them and then we had Azerite Gear.

I really think it could be so much better with them removing the vault and giving us deterministic ways to get gear, be it valor ranking till max or anything really. Make it so it's slower, so majority engaging weekly get there by the end of the patch without much of an effort and those putting effort get there faster or even slightly higher. As is I can't see loving DF M+ again with doing 10x M+ at the start again for 2 weeks and then instantly stop doing it, because mythic raid gear is much better.

I guess what am trying to say is that I don't really like the notion of protecting the players from themselves. If someone turboes to max ilevel in a month with a massive grind, why aren't they allowed to do it, when you can already get there with clever gearing in raids. Both take effort but different kinds. Instead we get dev comments like M+ gearing being slower doesn't matter as much because the end goal is high ranking at the end of the season(think it was a comment about why there isn't Catalyst from the start). We could take the same to PvP I suppose, only getting highest PvP item level from the vault while raiders have +10-20 item levels on you for the first weeks or so and you slowly catch up after that.