How I want gear to be in Shadowlands

[Kumorii]

I'd prefer a countdown over just throwing time away in the hopes of something. Incremental rewards are more fun than pray and hope system but we just disagree.

In mop, I ran 4 for one spec in bfa. It's 2 max.

Absolutely, we do indeed. Which is why designing a system that works for everyone is difficult.

[ssjgohan4life]

Sounds like lots of Valor grinding. Would prefer to combine two pieces of the same gear into a higher rank one. But honestly I think fixed sockets and no rank and no tf/WF is best.

There is this game Kingdoms of Reckoning: Amalur where you could break down like items and build another combining attributes from the two, I so wish wow had that.

[Wildpantz]

Honestly keep azerite but allow them to upgrade lets say you have the traits you want a higher ilvl drop you infuse it to get ilvl up. I love corruption so much fun building sets i having a blast atm. Remove the corruption from boes we are very close to propee pay2win now its a risky slope. Essences is also nice just make them account wide. More flavour items like the icc trinket which transformed you stuff like that.

[msdos]

Bring back defense on gear. Combine dodge, parry and avoidance for defense. Then combine leech and versatility.

I think there are too many offensive stats and then all these floater stats exist but can't really be budgeted for, like leech and avoidance. I think they could budget these better and allow tanks to choose between being avoidant or more hard hitting. You could budget avoidance really well to make sure leech and versatility weren't dominating.

You could introduce a new stat called Rapidity that makes your cooldowns refresh faster instead of having it be a random corruption effect that you may not even be able to use.
I dunno, bring back some of the RPG to WoW?

[Nurvus]

I like some of those ideas but I think if you are going to have Set bonuses, then at least 1 of them should be representative of the Set, and not a generic "insert Essence here".
Simultaneously, I think Major Essences should go away.
Let Class, Spec and Trinkets define what abilities we use, and everything else should be passives.
So replace that 4-Piece Bonus with a Set-specific passive and I think it's golden.

Still, my dream for the future (probably not in Shadowlands) would be something like this:

• A new Ethereal Cube (placeholder name) replaces Heart of Azeroth, but instead of being a Neck, it's a new UI Element.
  Lorewise it would be something meant to both empower you and protect you from the power you wield.
  It would still be the way by which you unlock and activate Essences (and more - see below).
• Legendary Items, Azerite Gear and Artifacts become categorized as "Unique" gear and coexist with regular gear without "locking" gear slots like Azerite Gear did.
  To accomplish this, 2 measuers need to be implemented:
  1 - All endgame gear has the same ilevel/stat budget (not counting Unique effects) and Unique gear can be upgraded across Difficulties and Tiers (perhaps by sacrificing regular gear).
  2 - Past restrictions can remain the same, but once you obtain the Ethereal Cube, Unique effects must be activated with the Ethereal Cube, with each Effect occupying a certain Capacity in your Ethereal Cube.
  This means that even if you are fully equipped exclusively with Legendaries, Azerite and Artifacts, most of them will behave like a regular Epic.
• The Capacity required would vary per Unique effect - even within the same type of item (Legendary vs Artifact) or slot (Bracer vs Glove).
  If hypotetically this Capacity is 10, you could imagine Legendaries = 1 to 3, each Azerite Ring = 1, Artifacts = 3, Minor Essences = 1 and Major Essences = 2.
• Resistance is back as the Magic counterpart to Armor (no resist chances).
  The reason for this is that Magic damage naturally outgrows Physical damage as an expansion goes on, which makes it even harder to balance specs.
  At the beginning of an expansion armor is mitigating 30% of Physical damage, but at the end it's mitigating closer to 50%.
  And this isn't a melee vs ranged thing, because plenty of melee specs deal mostly Magical damage.

This allows players to make use of any and all Legendaries, Artifacts and Azerite Gear in the game, without breaking it!
Blizzard can assign the appropriate Capacity requirement to each Item, thus making sure none of them is mandatory.

[Echocho]

So everything locked being rng or valor, and normal raiders get the same gear as mythic raider, that's just bad.

That all depends on how much it costs to upgrade the iLvls. Notice that I just wrote "upgradable through valor". Maybe there isn't enought valor in the world to upgrade all your gear 3 times and fully socket it before the next patch comes out?

It also doesn't say how impactful each gem will be. This is more of a proof of concept, you still have to balance a lot of numbers so that mythic raiders still come out on top of those that just do world quests.

- - - Updated - - -

With the model OP linked, without knowing the drop rate of "valor points" by activity, you have no grounds to make this kind of wild accusation.

Thank you. I mean if you could get 10k valor point each week and every upgrade/unlock costed 50 valor points yes it would be a pretty crappy system.
If you could get 2000 valor points each week and and iLvl upgrade costs 8000 and a socket unlock costs 1000 it's a completely different thing.

These are just example numbers and doesn't represent an opinion

Amazingly positive discussion going on so far, I expected it to be a shit show :P

[Rendark]

Remove the upgrade levels, random sockets and the essence stuff and it would look great.

[bullseyed]

So everything locked being rng or valor, and normal raiders get the same gear as mythic raider, that's just bad.

Except normal raiders would never earn enough valor to afford the upgrades.

So it actually would be bad luck protection where mythic raiders can reclear normal, get an item and upgrade it if mythic is being dumb about dropping it.

- - - Updated - - -

You may get you want, but there will probably be a TITANIC load of RNG attached to the whole concept. I like the broad strokes of your idea, particularly how the whole progression is mapped out right in front of you with segmented upgrades. The idea is 10x's better than corrupted gear then again just about everything is better than corrupted gear.

Exact opposite, actually. All RNG would be countered by spending "valor points" so while you could get lucky early on, a mythic raider would have a date by which they'd be guaranteed to be fully geared / done.

And at some point part way through the tier, heroic raiders could be "half mythic geared" to boost their prog, but never get fully mythic geared without running mythic. Same with normal -> heroic.

[Boricha]

I wouldn't have essence slots as tier bonuses. They should just add more baseline, class-specific abilities and have normal tier set bonuses like we used to. Otherwise I like it.

[bullseyed]

Bring back defense on gear. Combine dodge, parry and avoidance for defense. Then combine leech and versatility.

I think there are too many offensive stats and then all these floater stats exist but can't really be budgeted for, like leech and avoidance. I think they could budget these better and allow tanks to choose between being avoidant or more hard hitting. You could budget avoidance really well to make sure leech and versatility weren't dominating.

You could introduce a new stat called Rapidity that makes your cooldowns refresh faster instead of having it be a random corruption effect that you may not even be able to use.
I dunno, bring back some of the RPG to WoW?

Tanks today can choose to run tank trinkets or DPS trinkets.

Therefore the designers have to decide if the tanks will be oneshot for using DPS trinkets... and they decide against it.

So all tanks use DPS trinkets because there is no reason not to.



There is no way for "tanky tank" and "DPS tank" to exist within the current raid framework. If you don't get oneshot, you do DPS stuff. If you get oneshot, you are forced to choose the tanky build. It's a false choice.

I'm not against bringing back block, dodge, parry, defense. It would also require forcing all tanks into the "tanky tank" build. And we'd get whining about "WQs are hard" as a result. Blizzard won't do it. It isn't realistic for 2020-era players.

[Edward Wu]

It's probably obvious what OP and most people want.

For RNG to stop controlling so much of the gearing process, and for effort to be rewarded once again instead. Will Ion and his team design for that? Of course not. They are pigheaded on this issue to the nth degree.

[kaintk]

Feel free to flame me as you see fit!

are you mad ?????

you want to remove the BIG RNG that blizzard are so proud of ??? .... :P

but you right it should be like this, its a mmorpg, rng should just play a tiny role while upgrading item should be about the grinding

[SoulSoBreezy]

At a glance, this looks like a critique of RNG grinding hoping for the best thing versus GUARANTEED grinding to power up every single piece of gear. Not to mention slot locking with set bonuses.

[Nerovar]

Sounds like lots of Valor grinding. Would prefer to combine two pieces of the same gear into a higher rank one. But honestly I think fixed sockets and no rank and no tf/WF is best.

Why not have both? Either combine two pieces or upgrade through currency.

[Nevcairiel]

With the model OP linked, without knowing the drop rate of "valor points" by activity, you have no grounds to make this kind of wild accusation.

Accusations? You should really get your tone down.

But eitehr way, as long as the drop rates are in any way or form reasonable, then this exact problem will absolutely happen.

[cuafpr]

hard pass from me.

[Shakana]

Well i don't flame anyone. About the post, i really like something about that, for starters i want valor points back, and i just think 3 sockets might be not the best thing to do, but at least, instead of RNG, items getting permanent sockets and not "a chance to get a socket" as we have now. About the essences, i'm not sure how much i want them, but i totally would like for blizzard to add class traits of the azerite gear to talent rows or just to spellbook(baseline), cause somethings really have a synergy that will be lost in the transition to SL.

[Relapses]

It's probably obvious what OP and most people want.

For RNG to stop controlling so much of the gearing process, and for effort to be rewarded once again instead. Will Ion and his team design for that? Of course not. They are pigheaded on this issue to the nth degree.

Go ahead and describe to the class how exactly gear can be effort-rewarded with M+ existing. Raiders will simply only ever do M+ to get their BiS. Corrupted gear acquisition rates suck but it's a necessary evil to keep raid gear relevant.

If your solution is to delete M+... well. Good luck on that front. :^)

[Shakana]

Go ahead and describe to the class how exactly gear can be effort-rewarded with M+ existing. Raiders will simply only ever do M+ to get their BiS. Corrupted gear acquisition rates suck but it's a necessary evil to keep raid gear relevant.

If your solution is to delete M+... well. Good luck on that front. :^)

M+ is fun, would never put an end to it. And it's a nice option for those who prefer doing more M+ than raiding. But there's always this trinkets or rings that are better from raids or something you need from raids. Still the RNG is clearly something we are getting tired of, i think, removing a bit rng wouldn't do any bad, such as not getting magically a socket or something like that.

[Cainium]

I like it if players make up creative ideas on how things could be developed.

As for gearing in general, there are a few things to keep in mind for any system:
- How things are named is not really important for the system itself, only for the players to get a glympse of what it might be like.
- RNG is in the game to create an exciting moment for every kind of player.
- Grinding is a difficult topic, espacially if the systems allows the possibility of "wasting" the currency.

- The system posted here looks very grindy and has the potential for a proc which might render previous invested currency worthless.Thats not good.
- Fixing this by some sort of refunding renders the process of careful thinking what to do with the currency, and thus it's "importance" useles.
- With that many sockets per item and the current state of secondaries and gems it's very likely for upgrades which don't have sockets to be useles.

A socket can make up for ~10-15 itemlevels currently depending on the secondaries and their weights. Three sockets would be ~30-45 itemlevels. So a good drop can't be used unless fully upgraded and while in the process of being upgraded the progress can be rendered useless due to an RNG proc on another item. This enforces palyers to be very careful, and to upgrade only items with BiS-secondaries where the next possible proc-based upgrade (or raid based upgrade) is very far away.

I would like a system like the following:

First part - Special Effects:
- Crafters can create "enchants" which unlocks set bonusses for a specific class/armor type combination.
- This enchants can be used on any item of that particular armor type.
- That would negate the downside of tier sets, make crafting important again as well as adding a unique flavour per patch to any class (for me it feels very bad that they stopped updating classes with content patches).
- No armor type specific professions like jewelcrafting could provide the same as a "neutral" bonus, such as the legendary neck from Legion (which was a very good legendary).

Second part - Itemlevel:
- NO RNG Itemlevel procs.
- Itemlevel fixed per difficulty where the item came from.

Third part - Sockets:
- Guaranteed socket on helm/chest/legs.
- Random sockets on trinkets, neck(?->), rings(maybe?, depending on the power of secondaries)
- No other sockets.

Fourth part - RNG and "excitement":
- Items only come with one secondary, the second secondary is random
- Double procs allowed
- An RNG element that can be a decent upgrade (best secondary twice), or a good trading option, but not nearly as powerful as the current RNG
- MAYBE keep tertiary stat procs, but allow players to grind them otherwise (they are minor in terms of performance, so a potential waste isnt as painful and players might be able to finally utilize them as something good)
- More useful items for the entire raid, more feeling of working together as a group
- Reduces loot tables for more simplicity

Fifth Part - Gear from "low" content:
- As with horrific visions, allow players to adjust the difficulty
- Remove "NHC" and "HC" labeled dungeons from the equation, just have a base difficulty of "0"
- Difficulty "0", maybe up to "3" available through dungeon browser
- WQ scale with something like the masks from visions which increase their rewards
- No "forced" scaling, no "iteelevel thresholds" that need to be reached before WQs gear scales up, anything content can be meaningful for any player 'cause of variable difficulty anywhere.

Sixth Part - Raid difficulties:
- Remove these fixed difficulty levels, and implement a system similar to mythic+ without a time limit.
- Let bosses gain abilities based on the raid+ level
- Use fixed raid sizes again for easier balancing (nhc and hc are a complete joke in 8.3)
- Base raid level available through LFR with raid opening (without suprt strong RNG procs theres no need for delays).
- The reasons claimed for the flexed size NHC/HC verions and fixed size mythic versions weren't fullfilled, so they can both go away.
- Balancing for 10/25 man isn't that much different than implementing a scaling system which sometimes benefits different group sizes based on the boss design and just call it a day.

This would be MY almost perfect WoW.