No problem. I’ll just quit my job, leave my wife, and not eat for about a month…at that point I SHOULD have enough valor to have the weapon to 213 at least!
Another great system guys 
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Ya, fun fact about that. At 750 per week, even if we assume a 26-week (6-month) season (iirc, the average is closer to 20ish), that’s only 19,500, plus however much higher the first week cap is. Upgrading a single 2-handed weapon from the drop cap to the upgrade cap costs ~15% of that total. Upgrading a single 2-handed weapon from the drop floor to the upgrade cap costs over half of that entire-season total. And all of that to cap out half a tier below mythic itemlevel.
So ya, sure, they added Valor. But they also went out of their way to make it as useless and irrelevant as possible.
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You’re not supposed to upgrade low ilvl gear to 220. Valor upgrades was designed to fill the gap at the higher tiers where players were waiting around for the vault to give them any remaining upgrades beyond 210. If you are running lower keys, it is best to save your valor and just continue upgrading as you run higher keys.
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Then why even have the lower stuff be upgradeable? Why have upgrade thresholds for +5 and +10, if the entire system was fundamentally tuned around upgrading 210’s to 220’s? They could have just made items only upgradeable by 10 itemlevels, for a single block charge.
Or they could have done the smart thing and have the cost scale with upgrade level, similar to how the covenant armor sets get more expensive to upgrade as you upgrade them. That would retain there being some benefit to getting a higher itemlevel base drop, and retain the relative cost of getting a 220, without it being hilariously unwise to use Valor on anything that’s not a 210+ out of the gate.
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You can get 210… for free.
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No some people can get 210 for doing 15s it’s not free, even higher end players need to go out of there way to do 15s or more for 210s as otherwise only need 14 for vault.
While quite a number of players either don’t or are incapable of doing 15s making 210 not only not free but require significant amount of work based on the player.
Valor is not just for going from 210-220 it’s for going from the highest ilvl you can get with your skill to near/to vault ilvl, so if this means 10s are all you will ever be able to do start upgrading from 203 that drops in 10s (or was it 200 been awhile since did a 10). If you can do 15s than start from 210. The upgrade caps support this by giving a similar ilvl gained via valor for a player that can only do 10 with a 10 tour va a player that can do 15s with ksm. Placing the items cap near your vaults ilvl from m plus.
Valor is made as a system to give a fourm of bad luck protection to those that are having bad vault luck. Giving a way to target a set item or slot and get it near your vaults ilvl. It is not made to be the main way to get gear nor is it made to outfit all your slots with vault or near vault level gear. Just like it’s not made to get everyone 210 gear as otherwise would be no reason to require ksm or the other achivments. While no you are not expected to upgrade from base ilvl unless m2 is all you are able to do. You are expected to get gear from your content level than upgrade from there.
Yes they could of made the upgrade increment 10 ilvl vs 3 for triple the cost but than you are forced to spend that much at once vs having the option to upgrade by stages week over week if you want. While yes I dislike many elements in the valor system smaller upgrade amounts vs forcing 10 ilvls or one threashold (10 tour to 15 tour level) at once is not one of them.
This isn’t actually true. It’s not really part of Valor’s “design” at all.
If you are running lower keys, it is best to save your valor and just continue upgrading as you run higher keys.
This is true (currently), and that’s the problem.
In the vernacular, we call this an anti-pattern.
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Yeah people keep explaining how valor is ‘supposed’ to work, but that’s my point. It’s a completely stupid system because of the arbitrary high amounts of valor it takes to upgrade at ANY level
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No, this is exactly true and how the valor system is designed.
This is a bad faith argument. If you’re running 15’s and getting 226’s from your vault, odds are you’re ending the season at around 223 or higher by proxy of the great vault. Standard deviation is +26 to item level from mythic to mythic on a tier to tier basis.
Therefore, a 226 weapon is the equivalent of a weapon that’s dropped from a +10, but because of how the mythic plus system scales in-between seasons you’ll be starting at 11 or 12 assuming you’re doing 15’s today. So weapon drops that you get, will much likely be significantly higher than base items.
But, this is besides the point because that’s not how Valor works because that’s not how conquest worked and they’re the same system.
If you invest valor into a two handed weapon, then you’re wasting your valor. You wouldn’t waste conquest in a 2 handed weapon because the PvPers would prioritize weapons as top priority for their weekly box.
And this is also assuming a world where you’re not heroic raiding. You can easily clear all +15’s in 213 gear currently, which is higher than the value of any weapon drop in M+ outside of the weekly chest.
If you’re not planning on playing your current main right now in 9.1, I have no idea why you’re not at least doing +10’s and spamming low level valor to go up to full 220 by end of season this season.
Because the point of the system is to be scaling linear for a new player, but people are for whatever reason applying the norm of a standard character to a new player. A new player, with 0 gear going into the patch will have desirable upgrades when they complete +5 and +10’s across the board.
They’re not supposed to be upgrades for the majority of the playerbase and those that regularly take part in M+, it’s designed like that to not fully cripple brand new players and those that can not have a transference of the achievement to push higher itemlevel on gear obtained in itemlevel appropriate dungeons (IE, late in a season you’ll see people drop upgrades on a well itemized ring from a +8 to get it to 220).
I’m going to call [citation required]
Valor’s annoucement came with a clear intent:
We’ve seen a lot of feedback about the pros and cons of the various sources of gear in the Shadowlands endgame. After a rewarding first few weeks, we know that many dungeon-focused players reached a point where the only relevant rewards from the system come from the Great Vault. While the Vault should represent a major goal and the source of the best rewards the endgame has to offer, we want to find a way for the loot from the chest at the end of a challenging Mythic Keystone run to feel relevant, without bringing back random upgrade systems such as Warforging, which partially solved this problem in the past. We also want to provide a more consistent reward for the effort for players who do not receive an item at all.
Note that the two points are:
- Bridge the point where the only relevant rewards come from the Great Vault
- A more consistent reward mechanism for players who don’t receive an item at all
None of this is exclusive to very high keystones, especially since the Vault is already awarding the equivalent of the drop cap (210’s) at +5. It’s probably even more pronounced now that people are able to consistently get into the ~200 range with just Covenant/WQ gear compared to the start of the expansion when that was timegated, meaning actual loot drops have a fairly narrow range of usefulness (without dumping Valor into them).
The actual intention is more to ensure that people have an alternative that isn’t just “Wait for the GV to churn out upgrades” from the point at which they need to be looking to improve themselves to work their way higher, and that can happen before +15, especially so if someone is having terrible RNG. The idea behind a reliable upgrade system is for you to be able to spend it when you need it to improve yourself to advance higher, not to make it optimal to hoard it until you’ve “won” - assuming the goal is getting to +14/KSM.
Note that getting to KSM is not the end-goal of everything doing Mythic+.
This is a bad faith argument. If you’re running 15’s and getting 226’s from your vault, odds are you’re ending the season at around 223 or higher by proxy of the great vault. Standard deviation is +26 to item level from mythic to mythic on a tier to tier basis.
Therefore, a 226 weapon is the equivalent of a weapon that’s dropped from a +10, but because of how the mythic plus system scales in-between seasons you’ll be starting at 11 or 12 assuming you’re doing 15’s today. So weapon drops that you get, will much likely be significantly higher than base items.
But, this is besides the point because that’s not how Valor works because that’s not how conquest worked and they’re the same system.
I literally have no idea what this is trying to say. Also, Valor and Conquest are not the same system. They both share a cumulative cap, but they function very differently to the player.
If you invest valor into a two handed weapon, then you’re wasting your valor. You wouldn’t waste conquest in a 2 handed weapon because the PvPers would prioritize weapons as top priority for their weekly box.
The fact that Valor can be “wasted” through RNG is its own separate problem.
A new player, with 0 gear going into the patch will have desirable upgrades when they complete +5 and +10’s across the board.
Will they? A new player going into the next patch is going to have better gear than we have now from WQs, and other casual content, which currently lets you get gear that is comparable to what drops in Mythic 6-10 (197-203). A new player is going to have desirable upgrades from the Great Vault, but are the actual dungeon drops going to be desirable for what they might be entering with? And even if they are, will they even drop in meaningful amounts?
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But according to you, they’d be wasting that valor. According to you, the intent of the system is not for them to upgrade at that level, and instead to pool all of it until they start doing 15’s. So why on earth would those items even be upgradeable if the devs, according to you, never intended players to upgrade them at that itemlevel? Why add something that is, according to you, an intentional trap?
Maybe, just maybe, because your inferences and assumptions about the system and the dev’s motives with it are simply wrong.
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so…is that 7 +2s? at 20min a pop it is… 2.5 hours? I think you can do that in a worknight. a raidnight is 3 hours.
Hilarious that the same people who defend every stupid system are here defending this.
It’s obvious that it shouldn’t cost the same to upgrade a 187-190 as it does to upgrade a 216-220. It’s the most obvious thing in the world.
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I think people have been brain poisoned by legion(sort of) -bfa-SL. The game wasn’t always a treadmill of gearing and awful systems. In fact valor itself was implemented in a vastly superior way in the past xD. Back in the before times you could “play the game” and “have alts” without worrying about pointless systems!
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im capped on valor on almost 3 characters its not hard to get the valor cap is the problem.
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That sounds miserable
unless you like doing M+. then it’s awesome.
So players only doing 5s-10s can still use it?
Agreed. I did TOP and Mists for I dunno… three weeks straight? You can check my raider io . I did like 20 or so Mists and 15 or so TOPs. Not a single weapon drop. Not even with item stacking with two frost DKs did a one hander drop. I was rocking a 197 for a long time. I was contemplating leveling my 187 weapon from a +2 DOS only to see that it would drain all my valor and still be hot garbage. I got lucky and got a 220 from the vault.
I actually leveled up my Hakkar trinket from 187 to 220. I am not gonna do DOS ad nauseam for a mere chance of a trinket at a higher level. This system is a joke. If they want to keep loot low fine, but let me upgrade my stuff whenever I want.
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The point I was replying to was asserting that the devs intentionally designed the system with the intent of it only be used to “fill the gaps” from the vault by upgrading 210’s to 220’s. That the prices are so obscene because the devs didn’t intend for items to ever be upgraded more than about 3-4 times.
If that were the case, why would the lower stuff even be upgradeable?
Basically, it’s a reduction to absurdity. If the devs intended the system to only ever be used to upgrade 3-4 levels at the top, then making the lower stuff upgradeable was an intentional trap that added. So either the devs are maliciously trying to trap players, or the original assertion, that the devs never intended the system to be used for anything but those final few upgrade levels from 210-220, is wrong.
I’m arguing it’s the latter. I’m arguing that the costs for upgrades should scale with upgrade level, just like the covenant armor, so upgrades at lower itemlevel are immensely cheaper. That helps players pool valor for higher itemlevel well still boosting their itemlevel directly, and it makes it less of a hilariously unwise waste to use Valor on anything sub-210.
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