Why can't gear just be gear? Why all these shitty systems?

[ano2024]

There is content, you do that content, you get gear. The more difficult the content the better the gear with better stats. A good formula, it worked for ages.

Now, I'm not one to stifle progress. You want to add new systems to freshen things up, fine. But it's already been many, many years of systems after systems that have been very poorly received. Criticized ceaselessly by both casuals and hardcore players.

And yet they haven't learned at all. Instead they seem to be doubling down, creating even shittier systems. It's like when they say they'll get rid of a certain annoying part of the game, they somehow make it worse. Like with removing titanforging which was supposed to make the game less RNG, to adding corruption which is more RNG. Is this company just completely out of touch? So they hire a lawyer as a game director to use his lawyer-speak and constantly put out fires that he started with his own lies.

[Talrath]

I think it would be better that they make the normal rotations more dynamic instead of trying do it immediately with the gear.

[Dracullus]

"Worked for ages". Of course you don't remember growing "nothing to do" and "AFKing in capital" problem that reach it's peak during WoD. Now you don't even have to remember this, just watch what 60s usually do in Classic.

[The Butt Witch]

Dude, apparently the Path of Exile talent system is the latest rage. It's a fad among the gaming community to want complicated shit that's complicated just for the sake of being complicated.
Simple systems are deemed "casual" and avoided like the plague. Already Diablo 4 is getting flak for showing the talent system as being the regular talent system you saw in previous Diablo games, instead of being the size of several screens, and filled with "do 1% more damage", "cast 1% faster".

[Heathy]

I think I preferred previous itemisations, there is more stat weight on gear than there was and legion saw a huge increase in the amount of gear with equip effects. but if there is one thing I dislike its trinkets with procs that only work in specific dungeons or raids. the gear in retail I think for me is just stale in general when you're replacing bits of gear with 100int 100stam 100 crit 100mastery 100 haste with another piece of gear that is 110int 110 stam 120crit 120 mastery etc etc. the gear all just feels bland to me if it doesn't have an equip or an interesting stat weight. it all feels very samey. some gear makes sense if its part of the progression, each expansion had gear that was specifically for that content. legendary items in general haven't been that legendary as of late. legendary in stats, but not legendary in availability.

[Capultro]

nice question.i anwert fast.becuse it is a tactic for u spend more time playing,so more time subs eurs.this is a shi t really...

[Elias01]

nice question.i anwert fast.becuse it is a tactic for u spend more time playing,so more time subs eurs.this is a shi t really...

So you would rather have nothing to do and quit?

[Trumpcat]

"Worked for ages". Of course you don't remember growing "nothing to do" and "AFKing in capital" problem that reach it's peak during WoD. Now you don't even have to remember this, just watch what 60s usually do in Classic.

It's true, there is a lot more content to do now for casuals and for hardcores than older expansions put together. But that's not Azerite or Corruption systems. All these rng systems do is annoy me on top of the poor class design.

Besides raiding I enjoy doing progressively harder content and earning towards further power ups or cosmetics showing certain achievement of "prestige" such as the Legion artifact traits and appearances, the M+ dungeons, the mage tower, the BfA essences, the Horrific Visions and the Wrathion cloak. NOT the rng drop legendaries, rng Azerite traits nor rng Corruption, these are as the OP called it shitty.

Worst is that unlike the effects of legendaries Azerite traits and Corruptions have no effect on the gameplay whatsoever, just passive background procs which only function is to add numbers.

[nyjl]

"Worked for ages". Of course you don't remember growing "nothing to do" and "AFKing in capital" problem that reach it's peak during WoD. Now you don't even have to remember this, just watch what 60s usually do in Classic.

Yes, the idea of being able to somehow complete the game is atrocious.

[Dakara]

Individually, I don't mind each system (if they were implemented properly) but having an additional one each patch definitely took things too far.

I like being able to customize my character a bit more via AZ Traits/Essences, and being expansion specific solves the problem of ability bloat going from expansion to expansion. However...

Azerite gear requiring an AP farm to activate traits was just moronic. Especially when you got identical gear at a higher ilvl and couldn't use the traits you already had.
Acquiring essences, especially on alts, was far too grindy and saw players pushed into content they potentially didn't enjoy (PvP) just to get their BiS essence.
Corruption is just bad... the amount of gear I have cleansed/banked because I can't use it is maddening and the fact it can make WQ Blues better than Mythic Raid gear goes against everything Blizzard have said they were aiming for in terms of gearing (Higher Ilvl being an upgrade for example).

If gear went back to just being gear I think (on a whole) the community will reject it. An expansion specific system has great potential if they implement it correctly and expand on it each patch rather than simply adding another system ontop of it.

[Razion]

People complained they ran out of things to do, so they implemented a way for you to level up a certain piece of gear that doubled as a way for trivial content to always give you something that could progress your character.

You say things were fine before, that there was nothing wrong with it, why did they change it. Well, people once upon a time weren't fine with it. They complained up through the ceiling about running their tiers dry in the first weeks of release, having their full BiS lists and then having nothing else to do until the next raid released.

[mysticx]

Yes, the idea of being able to somehow complete the game is atrocious.

It is for a MMORPG, people who "Complete the game" (Inb4 "So you've done mythic N'Zoth already?") tend to unsub, which is bad for business with a subscription-based game, that's why we now have endless grinds, RNG on RNG (With a side-dish of RNG), and other forms of dragging things out.

I can see both sides of the argument, these systems on systems are getting unwieldy and a pain to catch up on with alts or after a break, but i also understand that Blizz want to keep people playing and not reaching that "Ok, i have BiS everything, i'm done"-point, it's a tricky situation and i don't know the solution either...

[ano2024]

Yes, the idea of being able to somehow complete the game is atrocious.

No, no, you have to have "content" you see. You have to be forced to grind mind-numbing, timegated tasks in order to have something to do! God forbid you play the game for a healthy amount of time and then stop after you've consumed enough. No, we need infinite content, doesn't matter if it's shittier and shittier every time.

[Ghostile]

No, no, you have to have "content" you see. You have to be forced to grind mind-numbing, timegated tasks in order to have something to do! God forbid you play the game for a healthy amount of time and then stop after you've consumed enough. No, we need infinite content, doesn't matter if it's shittier and shittier every time.

Good for you. Now stop trying to take the possibilty to grind indefinitely from those who prefer it

[Justpassing]

No, no, you have to have "content" you see. You have to be forced to grind mind-numbing, timegated tasks in order to have something to do! God forbid you play the game for a healthy amount of time and then stop after you've consumed enough. No, we need infinite content, doesn't matter if it's shittier and shittier every time.

Are you completely oblivious to the concept of a "business" and "money"? Did you just move into our capitalist world from an undocumented tribe in the Amazon or something?

[Eazy]

You don't complete the game when you have best gear. Just as you don't complete the game when you get highest possible level.

That argument is stupid.

OT:
I agree with OP, we should still have BIS gear lists/options instead of the RNG-fest we've got right now.

[paragraphgorilla]

So you would rather have nothing to do and quit?

Or play a second character.. shocking, I know.

[Palapop]

"Worked for ages". Of course you don't remember growing "nothing to do" and "AFKing in capital" problem that reach it's peak during WoD. Now you don't even have to remember this, just watch what 60s usually do in Classic.

I don't think gear is the issue why people sat /afk in capitals/garrisons.

[HuxNeva]

There is content, you do that content, you get gear. The more difficult the content the better the gear with better stats. A good formula, it worked for ages.

Now, I'm not one to stifle progress. You want to add new systems to freshen things up, fine. But it's already been many, many years of systems after systems that have been very poorly received. Criticized ceaselessly by both casuals and hardcore players.

And yet they haven't learned at all. Instead they seem to be doubling down, creating even shittier systems. It's like when they say they'll get rid of a certain annoying part of the game, they somehow make it worse. Like with removing titanforging which was supposed to make the game less RNG, to adding corruption which is more RNG. Is this company just completely out of touch? So they hire a lawyer as a game director to use his lawyer-speak and constantly put out fires that he started with his own lies.

What you are not seeing is the feedback loop.
There is content, you do that content, you get gear. The more difficult the content the better the gear with better stats. The better gear with stats, the easier the content, so the more better gear with stats, so the more difficult the content has to be ... This creates a bifurcation, a split, where above a certain threshold you are accelerating through the ever increasingly difficult content, and below which you are falling further and further behind.

In systems terms you have created "balance" around an 'unstable equilibrium', meaning that if you get slightly to the left or the right of the balance point, you are falling further and further away from it.

As a game designer this is the opposite of what you want. You want a system the has a stable equilibrium to balance around. Rather than accelerate away, a deviation from the point the trajectory the game had in mind it requires more and more energy of the player the further they are away from balance to maintain the imbalance. So 'better' players can run ahead, but face increasingly harder odds to get better gear, while 'worse' players will fall behind, but will have increasingly better chances of catching up. At the very least you want variance in player power from gear to be within a rather tight range at the drop of a new expansion, or you'll face ever further disparity and soon find you can not possibly accommodate such a wide range of player power within the same game.

In the 'old days', the way this worked was through encounter nerfs. You just reduced the health/mechanics of encounters to give the stragglers a chance to get with the program again. It works on some points, but failed dramatically on player psychology. Those that had 'failed' before the nerf came in felt bad, as they had obviously failed and were exposed as such, those that had defeated the content before the nerf, now had even less content as even repeating a kill was now even more trivial than it had become already with the better gear they now had.

Modern systems are more subtle. Rather than nerfing the encounter explicitly with a certain reset, they provide continual statistical gear catchup as an implicit gradual nerf over time as long as you are not close to the current cap. So stragglers now will get improved odds at beating the content over time, and there is no real "you failed" moment, besides CE or AotC, but those are far more accesible things than 'pre-nerf" ever could be.

Titanforging was mathematically a beautiful systemic solution. If you studied the implementation you couldn't but marvel at how good it was done. What they had completely forgotten was human psychology. They way less systemic, less mathematically savvy players would experience the system was ofc not 'objective', but fed by the outliers in a massive social echo chamber, just like everything else in society. So cries on the forums about 'my freind of a friend saw an LFR dude get a cap ilvl TF' were ofc treated with a reserved reasoning on probability and fact checked with available data from the armory and warcraftlogs and ... no, it was a shitshow, obviously no data, no rational argument would convince a rabit mob of players that getting Mythic geared through LFR wasn't possible before the heat dead of the universe, nor that TF did not mean the end of meritocracy but just a way to converge on content, just like the old ways but better.

So TF had to be sacrificed to the angry mobs shouting 'off with it's head', and instead we got 'Corruptions', a system funnily enough hailed as 'better' by the pundits, which just required one look at the implementation to realize that rather than sophisticated this was just a completely blunt and near unbalancable sledgehammer, and that was even before you realized it would be on BoE's to.

[Thelyron]

So you would rather have nothing to do and quit?

Yes? I don't understand how this question comes up every single time a topic like this gets created. Of fucking course i'd rather have nothing to do and quit. I want to be able to ""complete"" the game, at least temporarily, to free up time for other things, other hobbies. No game should keep you on the hook the entire fucking time. Why would you not want that? Do you want to be addicted? To play the same game every single day?