After first doing an achievement that proves they’re good enough as a player to be “worthy” of 220 caps (not even 226 in its current design), they get the option on their alt to skip one achievement threshold and push 2 ranks past the 213 cap to 220 - if they’re getting a full set of 203 gear from M+10, they’re probably naturally going to get Keystone Conqueror depending on the spread of viable loot drops, so that gap is the only actual difference you’re talking about.
Basically your entire premise is not talking about alts that are 200 ilvl vs alts that are ~220, it’s comparing alts that are naturally going to have a mix of 213/220 to alts that might have full 220.
The more you weigh that to the 220’s from the GV as opposed to loot drops, the less anything is “altered”, so the less anything is being “affected”.
I have not raided much this expansion at all. How far will a 200 ilvl get in Mythic CN?
There really isn’t a limit for alts. Without bringing alts in for farm, bunches of gear will go to waste, the alts will help stack loot drops into the right hands in future tiers (especially if they have the same ilvl as mains to make the “trade” limitation go away), and they keep people from burning out.
Back in the day, I had alts that were full BiS, or were killing everything except the super end-boss of the tier, and we even occasionally had the odd alt accidentally be in for the first progression kill when we were using them to plug attendance gaps and almost ended up killing a boss we weren’t expecting to kill that night.
You bring a lot of good points. I guess with how much the items cost per upgrade and the rate of farm able valor, it wouldn’t be so off balance to un-cap it. As long as the upgrade cost and valor drop remains constant.
It’s better for those who can get high enough CR I guess. I’m curious to know what % of pvpers are able to get 220/226 versus M+ players. I’m sure not many will get to that high of a CR without a boost.
It’s relative to the user I guess. I’m 224 equipped from M+ drops and vault only. No raid or pvp gear.
You’ve already achieved KSM on your main. You’ve progressed through the gear tiers and have unlocked the ability to upgrade your gear to 220 for all characters. Does it matter if you can gear alts more quickly?
Also, “more quickly” is pretty loosely defined. As has been pointed out, upgrading a full set of gear from 187 to 220 requires an enormous amount of VP. The time gating is built right into the grind. It’s far slower than just running higher keys or doing PvP, so if quickly gearing an alt is what you’re after, this isn’t the route.
Removing the cap lets people choose how they spend their time and it means that they aren’t going to waste that effort by upgrading a sub-optimal piece and then not being able to upgrade the better drop that comes along.
I personally don’t care, but I’m speaking more in terms of balanced endgame gearing; mythics, raids, pvp. If someone is 2400 CR and makes an alt, they start over. If someone is 10/10 Mythic CN and makes an alt, they start over. The other two forms of gearing does not have the shortcut that M+ has. Thats all my points are directed at. Having the cap, in my opinion, keeps some of that balance.
I think there should be some consideration given to the fact that this players has already spent the same amount of time as other players to get where they are.
I don’t know how best to express this, but I feel that each toon you level beyond the first should be considerably easier. Perhaps as much as 20% easier for things like experience, rep and currency systems like Anima and Soul Ash.
It seems that when people discuss how easy it should be to prepare an alt for content they like to compare their experience leveling their main versus that player’s alt. They seem to completely discount the amount of time and effort that was put into leveling the main.
If I spend 100 hours grinding out covenant nonsense on my main, why should I have to spend the full 100 hours on a second alt.
Dear Blizzard, is it better that leveling alts be easy enough to encourage people to stick with the game longer, or that they be such a chore that people would rather just stop playing the game altogether?
PvP is really the only avenue where you don’t technically get the ability to shortcut, although being able to be carried by geared team mates is still a thing if you’re running in a tight friend group.
But that said, PvP in general has been alt-unfriendly for a while now. And that is actually a bit of problem in itself.
I guess with how much the items cost per upgrade and the rate of farm able valor, it wouldn’t be so off balance to un-cap it. As long as the upgrade cost and valor drop remains constant.
I kinda went into what caps are really about in my first post; caps aren’t going away.
But even if we bypassed all that, just removing a cap and leaving things as-is isn’t really going to change much for players. Basically every flaw of Valor would still remain. Talking about the Valor cap is just a distraction; if those flaws were addressed, the Valor cap would be fine.
Sidenote: The other silly aspect if we’re going to be working with a 750 weekly cap, and a 135/dungeon earning rate is that those 2 numbers don’t divide evently. If you do 5 runs, you’re at at 675 Valor for the week, and the 6th run will only give you 75 Valor, with 65 Valor disappearing into the ether. Even if you pool one week into the next, it doesn’t divide to whole numbers; I can’t be bothered working out the exact multiple.
Sure, there’s Callings, but those are supposed to be optional, and it’s a bit dumb that simply using factors/multiples is too complicated for Blizzard.
Often times it seems like they have to add their touch to a change in order to differentiate it from the basic fix that the players have requested. As if it would be admitting defeat to just make the simple obvious fix.
“We know it’s bad, and it needs to be addressed, but if we just implement their request it would be acknowledging our mistake. Instead we should implement some convoluted solution that’s actually adding hoops to jump through if you want the benefits.”
They just ensured that there’s a wrong way to do things. Ya, I’m losing my patience with these guys.
I think someone pointed this out already, but in raids when you have an alt, you can often go with your existing raid team and short-cut to gearing. Our main tank brought his arcane mage to a heroic clear the other night (because why not?) and got pretty much fully geared out in one evening.
I would consider PvP in a different realm in that it’s a game mode where you’re playing against other people. While I personally don’t really care who has what gear (it’s all matched by rating anyway, right?), I can see how it might not be as acceptable for someone to be able to easily jump to a new alt and gear up faster than someone else.
In PvE though… the internet pixels don’t really care about anything, nor do I care about your internet pixel slaying journey once you’ve already completed it on a main. To be honest, I don’t really care anyway… I’m only interested in my own experience. Having said that, gearing via VP is no short cut. Most folks seem to agree, it’s probably faster to just gear normally.
The purpose of VP seems to just mitigate bad luck. The cap defeats this a little bit since you can choose to upgrade a piece and ol’ RNJesus strikes with all his fury to give you the piece you were actually looking for.
That’s really nothing to do with the cap per se. It’ll feel bad to dump 5k Valor on a weapon and have an RNG drop happen the next day even if there was no cap. The real thing there would be a way to extract Valor back out of an upgraded item.
For people complaining about the valor cap, personally don’t see a need for it. If the threat was supposed to be that people will outgear the content their doing faster than intended, RBGs already did that awhile ago. The only disparity it might create is with currently broken trinkets and perhaps well statted dungeon gear pieces. Pretty sure the 3/200 chance in your vault already does that. All making it possible to valor upgrade to max does is restore parity there. It’s a situation of sure someone got lucky and won the lotto in their vault but at least those who didn’t can still loot the item potentially and upgrade it to also possess said item.
It has everything to do with the cap… that’s exactly why the cap is bad. Yea it’d be frustrating to dump 5k Valor on a weapon and have RNG give you something better the next day, but without a cap at least you could then upgrade other stuff. As the system currently stands though, that Valor is gone and you’re out that Valor for the season. It’s a massive waste of time.
This isn’t really much different than removing the cap, but something I would be fine with. I suggested this a month or two back. It still keeps a limited pool of Valor available for a season, in that you can’t acquire and upgrade 100 pieces of gear, but it respects player time and gives players agency over how they progress.
Doesn’t really matter to me what they do, they just need to stop with the current track they’re taking with Shadowlands.
When it’s at the cost of doing 25 runs, people won’t “at least then upgrade other stuff”. It’s losing the Valor that’s a waste of time, it’s kinda irrelevant whether or not you can spend even more time (which again might get wasted).
People will just log off the game for a month or whatever it takes to get over their frustration when weeks of time gets invalidated, not opt to farm another 30 dungeons.
I agree the cost is probably too high for weapons, but, just to respond to the thread title, it might be quicker to just run x number of a higher key level to get the higher base level weapon than it would be to farm to valor or wait for the cap to increase.
I honestly would advise against upgrading anything that isn’t 210 to start with. Use whatever gear level you’re at to join appropriate gear level keys that would provide upgrades and keep doing that until you have a nice heroic ilvl from end of dungeon and weekly chest rewards. That’s all you need for 15s, and then farm the 210s. Honestly, if you’ve been doing 12-14s for awhile on your way to 15s (and thus, 210s), you should probably have a decent ilvl from weekly chest rewards.
I just see zero point to farming valor, a limited resource, to spend on upgrading things that aren’t 210 to begin with when you could be farming the IO you need to access higher base level items to begin with. On top of that, you wouldn’t really need the better items anyway if you’re not doing content that requires it.
You should not be able to have a full set of max (whatever you deem ‘max’ to be) level gear by running content that’s not challenging over a longer or more frequent time period.