Bad news for solo and world players

Normal goes to 437, LFR goes to 424.

But can you get your normal gear above 424 from only doing normal? Or do you need to add in M+/heroic?

Yes. /char

Using that argument, LFR’s rewards also got buffed to 437 via crafting.

Those aren’t the same items though. They’re mats I’m using to make 437s but I can’t upgrade an LFR item to 437.

Or do you consider heroic items to require mythic to upgrade to 441?

Yes. 441 requires M raid or (more likely), M+.

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Im not “limiting”, its the way i play by many reasons. And there are many others like me, take the person who made this post to start with.
Also they could make a diferent approach on that matter, making the catalist open by the second week for example, that alone can get hardcore players in advantage of +1 set item, that wont make any diference in the pve ladder as ilvl is tied with the dificult of the content BUT that would allow everyone to experience and play with their class sets.

WoW devs obviously think that casual and open world content is not worth the investment. But when the leader is a shamelessly elitist raider who has openly admitted that “raiding gear needs to be the gear that everyone wants”, do you think that there might be some kind of bias there?

I would 100% agree that questing content produces fewer hours played per dollar spent, than raiding produces. Raiding is theoretically a cash cow—blow up a dozen enemy assets, add mechanics and tuning for four difficulties, and watch millions of players stand in front of them for hours every week, for months on end.

But ever since Cata, we have always gotten the version of WoW that prioritized competitive organized endgame PvE over solo or casual gameplay. We have never actually seen an alternate version of WoW that prioritized total number of players over return per dollar spent.

Why does each expansion draw in huge numbers of players, but then lose those players as the seasons progress? Simply put, there is a bigger marker for solo progression through questing than there is for raiding. That’s why this game blew up in the first place. Casual solo players could spend months doing quests, leveling up, picking talents, and earning the various gear rewards.

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That’s my point though. We will never see that because blizzard is in the business of making money so they will never design the game to attract the most possible players if doing so means spending so much money to develop the content that they would actually make less money than if they just spend what they spend now, attract fewer players but actually make more money.

Edit: and I suppose what you are getting at is that you feel blizzard isn’t trying hard enough to find ways to attract more players while keeping budget down. I don’t disagree on that.

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OK, point me to the Suffused gear vendor. I want to target and guarantee a full tier set on all toons.

No, Suffused gear in and of itself is fine as an alternate or additional source of gear. The issue is the Catalyst not taking gear from the season’s new zone and from higher item level rewards from doing the new dungeon weekly.

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A lot of people say a lot of things, yes. That includes you. The fact that you have nothing to support your claims doesn’t make them stronger than other people’s observations.

A lot of people think that the fact that they keep having promotions, and in fact this new old character gearing feature showing up on the PTR, suggests they’re trying way harder to get people to play than they would have been if there wasn’t a continuing problem. I can’t imagine them creating that new gearing for old characters system if the player population was growing without it.

Do you really think the player population is growing? If so, what do you base that on?

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I think the population is oscillating in the range between gradual growth, and gradual decline, in a way that keeps it roughly constant over time based on the claim that you provided that “retention is up”.

What I do not think is that the population is in freefall. I don’t necessarily need to know which answer is right to be pretty sure that one of them is wrong.

OR you could run M+ for very easy gear. Why do you need tier in solo and open world content? Pet battles dont require 4 set. Neither does a WQ boss.

But that requires either making friends/interacting positively with other players, or doing content that will actually potentially not be completable without a certain amount of skill.

One or both of theses seems to be the sticking points here.

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It could vary depending on the server, but over the last couple of months I have noticed a lot of normal sounding, normally spelled names becoming available for use on the realms that I play on. I mean every now and then you luck out, but to have so many good choices at once would have been unthinkable any time before now.

The new zone, Zaralek Cavern, is virtually empty and the only activity in the new Fyrrak Assaults is usually from the NPCs. This is in stark contrast to Korthia, Zereth Mortis, and even Tanaan Jungle—which stayed busy months after release.

I have actually been kicked out of PvP brawls and unrated battlegrounds in the last few weeks because there weren’t enough players. Not enough players are queueing to make up for people that didn’t accept the prompt or quit early.

My friends list and guild chats are emptier than ever. Trade chat is silent. Our AH runs out of non-commodity items like bags and shovels. So I make a good batch myself and post at decent prices to help out other players, but not all of my goods even sell.

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It takes 2 expansions of not logging into an account before names become available. If you’re seeing a lot of names becoming available, those are people who stopped logging in during BfA and haven’t logged in since.

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Can just post your own key up, take very high ilvl people and be carried lol.

I’m pretty sure it’s 2 full expansions, so they released names of players who haven’t had any sub time on their account since legion. Or, it could be that those players left a dead realm to move to a high pop one.

It very much does, as I have not seen any of these happening on my full server. AH is busy, there are players everywhere, trade chat (both of them) are pretty busy,

And how do you know that those players left, and aren’t just doing solo shuffle instead?

Some players move on to other things, but I can almost guarantee that this sample is too small to draw any real conclusions from.

but that requires more effort then pressing queue now.

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One expansion back would be leaving mid-Shadowlands. Two expansions would be leaving mid-BfA. Legion would be three expansions.

I know I’ve seen something about a pass only happening around the start of an expansion, not being a rolling, real time process.

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