My brain when I visited the timeless isle after 1+ year of not playing wow.

[The Madgod]

Is that a common thing to have a few screws loose? I mean I've always been told that wow players are insane.

Well I know I am.

[foxHeart]

You could run instances in Cata over and over and get 378 purples. The ilevel of relevant normal gear at that time was 397. That's a 19 ilevel gap. Now, in the present timeless gear grants 496 gear. It's easily acquired, but the stats are random and often bad. It is also FIFTY-SEVEN ilevels below normal SoO gear... It is 32 ilevels below current lfr. Hell, even last tier's LFR gear is 8 ilevels higher...

I mean, ermahgerd welfair perples. Casuals are taking over. The game is dying.

[Granyala]

Is that a common thing to have a few screws loose? I mean I've always been told that wow players are insane.

I studied physics (in engineering). You don't survive something like that with your sanity intact and no one talked Freya down yet.

[Normie]

Nope, but I think any crafted epics should still require at least 1 component that drops from monsters that require a group or raid to kill, like it used to be

You don't think 21 or 30 days of personal cooldowns is enough "work"?

[Dantil]

You could run instances in Cata over and over and get 378 purples. The ilevel of relevant normal gear at that time was 397. That's a 19 ilevel gap. Now, in the present timeless gear grants 496 gear. It's easily acquired, but the stats are random and often bad. It is also FIFTY-SEVEN ilevels below normal SoO gear... It is 32 ilevels below current lfr. Hell, even last tier's LFR gear is 8 ilevels higher...
.

1. The time it would take to gear every slot with a 378 epic from Dragon Soul 5 mans is exponentially higher than how long it takes to get full 496 from the isle. Particularly if you were a dps, half your time would be spent waiting in dungeon queues, the other half actually doing the dungeons, and then having to roll against other players for loot that may or may not even drop. Then we have the quality, and given that there was basically only one item for each slot for a given spec, and that those items had to tailor to all specs for that role and armor class, basically everyone who was wearing a full dragon soul 5 man set was gimped to some degree from non-optimized items. From the isle, if you get a badly rolled epic, get another one and roll it again, problem solved. There's no point in even comparing these things, the isle will gear you up in a tiny fraction of the time that DS heroics would.

You're also forgetting about burdens, as you can get a guaranteed one from an easily attainable chest, a guaranteed one from a quest that requires a small amount of rep farming, and a very likely 3rd one from either straight up coins, or coin gambling at kukuru's. That's 3 easily attainable 535 items.

2. Item level is irrelevant, the gap in item levels has been increasing steadily for a long time, as have the stats themselves. What's important is the percentage increase in stats between one set of gear and another. The difference between 378 and 397 epics stat wise? Roughly 75%. The difference between 496 and 553? Around 60%.

3. BoA. Period.

There is no dispute, timeless isle is infinitely more generous than any previous form of attaining gear.

[Kuul]

I guess we should be happy that we don't have anything worse to complain about the game nowadays than the color of items they're giving.

[Raintola]

"Omg the epics the welfares the gears!"

I imagined a vanilla or tbc raider looking at it, its brain will explode.

edit: PS. I imagine the reason blizzard did it was that they wanted to give those epics "bound on account" anyway. So instead of giving them on a blunt boring interface menu, they are on a magical/bizarre/weird "island".

At least it's not as bad as the "welfare gear" in BC that gave you T6 equivalent, or do people still conveniently forget about that?

[Bathory]

I'm a vanilla player, I like the isle. I realize the game has changed a lot since then, and thank god for that.

[Deleted]

Yea, those welfare epics several tiers below current gear =\ Even after 1+ year break they shouldnt matter. Also, going to the island in blues will probably get you killed outside of the chests.

Lolno, My mage who just dinged 90 with an ilvl of 390~ went there and got a few pieces and done some quests which requires me to kill elites.

[Samaramon]

Hey. Guess what.

You can like, NOT GO on the Isle.

[Bloodjunky22]

welfare epics or not gear does not = skill. people put to much stock in gear, while you can tell if someone is a complete moron by looking at their gear, its not about the color of said gear its about the stats on said gear that make or break a player.

[Orlong]

You don't think 21 or 30 days of personal cooldowns is enough "work"?

Actually Id like to see them get rid of the daily cooldowns in favor of more components coming from raid drops

[Dantil]

At least it's not as bad as the "welfare gear" in BC that gave you T6 equivalent, or do people still conveniently forget about that?

You seem to have conveniently forgotten that those items cost quite a lot of a currency attained from doing dungeon and raid content repeatedly, as well as the fact that you were limited to chest, legs, boots, weapon and 1 ring. You're still not raiding Sunwell with 5 BT quality epics if the rest of your gear is green.

[Darion]

I personally only have an issue with the fact that Timeless Isle drops 535 epics. Even if it is an incredibly low drop rate, you can still get geared better than Raid Finder and just below Flex Raiding just by farming the Timeless Isle. I would have no problem at all with the Timeless Isle if it weren't for that single factor. 496s dropping is ok, if players had to raid through every tier of content in order to get geared for the current tier with the massive difference in ilevels these days probably only 5% of WoW players would even get to see SoO LFR let alone Flex or Normal Mode. Back in BC before the Isle of Quel'danas dropped, most servers had maybe a 10-20 guilds in SSC and TK, and maybe 5 in Hyjal and BT because the gear catch up was rather insane for people who hadn't kept up with the gearing the whole way. I would feel terrible for newer players if they had to go through another gear catch up because most of them wouldn't get to see the SoO storyline until next expansion.

[Arbs]

"Omg the epics the welfares the gears!"

I imagined a vanilla or tbc raider looking at it, its brain will explode.

edit: PS. I imagine the reason blizzard did it was that they wanted to give those epics "bound on account" anyway. So instead of giving them on a blunt boring interface menu, they are on a magical/bizarre/weird "island".

I'm a Raider from Vanilla / TBC & my brain is still intact, Timeless Isle is good for people who don't raid & wanna be able to gear up to experience all the LFR versions.

But for those who raid, Timeless Gear means nothing. I do think they need to change the color atleast & make the gear Blue. Than maybe people will not freak out so much over such little things they make seem like a big deal.

[Mormolyce]

You don't think 21 or 30 days of personal cooldowns is enough "work"?

Ironic isn't it? Those raid purples sell for less of a profit margin than I make on Sky Golems lol.

[foxHeart]

1. The time it would take to gear every slot with a 378 epic from Dragon Soul 5 mans is exponentially higher than how long it takes to get full 496 from the isle. Particularly if you were a dps, half your time would be spent waiting in dungeon queues, the other half actually doing the dungeons, and then having to roll against other players for loot that may or may not even drop.

Run with a tank or healer.

Then we have the quality, and given that there was basically only one item for each slot for a given spec, and that those items had to tailor to all specs for that role and armor class, basically everyone who was wearing a full dragon soul 5 man set was gimped to some degree from non-optimized items. From the isle, if you get a badly rolled epic, get another one and roll it again, problem solved. There's no point in even comparing these things, the isle will gear you up in a tiny fraction of the time that DS heroics would.

You talk about "quality"? Really? Difference between HoT and DS normals? 19 levels. Difference between Timeless Isle gear and SoO normals? 57. Who cares if the itemization for HoT gear was lol "non-optimized", it is a whole Hell of a lot better than TI gear. If they existed side by side today, it'd be gear that has 38 higher ilevel vs gear that was easily attainable and total shit. Plain and simple. And yeah. You can try again for TI again, but even with good optimization (good luck getting that, btw, and unless you've got an army of alts, more luck getting an everlasting supply of pieces to attempt with), the gear just loses completely due to primary stats/stam from ilevel/gem slots.

You're also forgetting about burdens, as you can get a guaranteed one from an easily attainable chest, a guaranteed one from a quest that requires a small amount of rep farming, and a very likely 3rd one from either straight up coins, or coin gambling at kukuru's. That's 3 easily attainable 535 items.

One of those burdens is guaranteed, one is spending a few hours grinding mobs (fun), and one is blind luck. We can't count on luck, so it's really two, given you're willing to grind. Even with a measely 3 pieces of 535 gear, the overall gain from HoT heroics was vastly better.

2. Item level is irrelevant, the gap in item levels has been increasing steadily for a long time, as have the stats themselves. What's important is the percentage increase in stats between one set of gear and another. The difference between 378 and 397 epics stat wise? Roughly 75%. The difference between 496 and 553? Around 60%.

Timeless Isle gear is on par with the first tier of this expansion. HoT was on par with the second of Cata. How's that for relative?

3. BoA. Period.

Burdens are BOA? No. And they're the only thing that matters.

There is no dispute, timeless isle is infinitely more generous than any previous form of attaining gear.

Infinitely? What is hyperbole? It's easily attained and vastly more inferior to HoT heroics. That's what there's no dispute about. Timeless Isle could actually get you better gear if you got a burden for every single piece of gear. To that I say, good luck have fun farming 10+ burdens. Also, have fun having to get extra burdens to try for gear that turned out to be sub-optimal garbage with a single stat on it.

[Bathory]

And honestly, the ilvl is nice, but the gear itself is pretty bad stats wise. It's a nice catch up, but you won't be performing on the levels that you need to be to do harder content.

[Apexis]

I don't think you understand what welfare means. There is basically no reason for someone geared in current normal mode raid epics to farm timeless isle for the BoA epics, other than perhaps to loot the one time only chests. Starting on the isle in blues is by no means grounds for concern. Within 4 hours of hitting 90 in quest greens and a few dungeon blues, I had a warlock geared in full 496/535 epics with the exception of a second trinket and a weapon (476 from the AH).

Welfare means giving someone something for doing basically nothing, which is exactly what the timeless isle is. Looting chests and tagging a mob with one spell to get enough free gear to be able to immediately jump into a current raid is not what vanilla or BC were about. It started in Wrath, and now has become out of control. And no, it has not always existed. The only way to get epics in vanilla was to buy them from the AH if you were lucky, get one from a specific dungeon boss if you were extremely lucky, or raid. If you wanted more than 2-3 epics, you were doing at least Zul'Gurub, most likely MC. And while those raids became much easier as new raids were released and people were able to be carried through them by players with higher tier gear, it still required time, effort, drop luck, etc.

If you spent a few nights a week raiding during the first tier of this expansion, then you took a break and came back and discovered that any could go 1-90 and out gear you all in the span of a week, wouldn't you be a little pissed off?

As someone that actually spent most of his time in the LFR since 5.0 and whom has manged to get at least most characters to at least tier 15 LFR gear. I found this whole give tokens from nothing more than looting a chest on the ground, pretty sad to say the least. Most say that running the LFR is like giving gear away, well at least I manged to get through them with all the numb nuts on weekly basis and not go over to an island and loot a chest. LFR might lack machanics, but when you have half a raid die on the simplest of bosses or are one of a handful that can actually pull there weight. There is at least some small sense of accomplishment in that, not just flying over to and island and loot a chest to get a piece of gear.

Sure I could have joined a guild and done at least normal raid tier, but that is not the point. Point is I spent the time for more than a year to get what I have. I don't see why someone returning to the game after so long away should just be given at start point in which to start from.

Many that have whined about the LFR and the loot give away seem to not have as much of problem with really given them away now. If your going to be up in arms over LFR gear give away, you should be even more pissed about giving gear for looting a chest, because this does require anything and is extremely lazy on Blizzard to have allowed this in the first place.

Because people will now be expecting this from now on, they can just take most of an expac off and come back and gets some gear tokens to catch up. Seriously what is the point of wasting money and time for a year plus. When you can just jump in at a later time and get right into the game.

[zazuch]

No not really. Mainly because when they released this if you were playing just slightly they wouldn't out gear you. I have 4 90s and with exception of a select few items most of the timeless gear i found i sent to my enchanters to d/e. Rest is sitting on a bank alt just in case i want so gear to help a alt I make in WoD jump from MoP questing greens to make it a bit easier.