Azerite was a system where you just had to re-grind the same exact powers every season at higher ilvls, with either no or worse BLP than tier currently has.
On top of that, you had to mindlessly grind world quests or islands to even use the armor.
You got azerite power directly from M+ bosses. It took like an hour to do the emissaries lol.
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You got half as much AP from M+ as you did from islands, and M+ took 3-4x as long.
There is no solo pillar in DF. The Explorer and Adventurer gear caps out at 398 or 411, which is catch-up for last season at best.
All the open world rewards worth earning are gated behind content that requires parties or groups. So that’s why players are still asking for a solo pillar. Game design has regressed.
Shadowlands Season 3 and Dragonflight Season 1 both allowed open world players to earn tier sets through vendors.
DF Season 2 is forcing us to rely on a single RNG-dependent source. You could easily go the whole season without earning a full set. This is, again, regressive design.
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You mentioned that you PvP, which is something that you keep ignoring in this thread.
Bloody coin gear/conquest gear is on a vendor. Both can be catalyzed.
World players do have access to convertible gear on vendors.
It is stupid that gear that you can get from Fyraak assaults and the 415 piece from the ‘do 5 heroic dungeons’ do not count for the catalyst.
Fyraak assaults gear, at least those from the chest and the event boss, are equivalent to LFR rewards while the weekly heroic dungeon quest is normal mode ilvl.
Explorer gear shouldn’t since it cannot meet the min ilvl of 402 (LFR, mythic 2+) for the catalyst but adventurer gear should be once you upgrade it to that minimum imo. Which I think is rank 5/8 for adventurer gear. Veteran gear (402-424) and above absolutely should count.
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There’s no vendor. Don’t complain you can’t turn in world quest gear in tier, complain there’s no vendor that lets you do it.
This feels like an oversight. You could catalyst easily-obtainable gear in S1 (e.g. the elemental assault ones), but you can’t do the same in S2? Makes no sense.
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It’s because the catalyst works on an itemID whitelist. Only approved item IDs work. The ItemID for the 5 heroics doesn’t work, since the itemIDs it pulls from are usually explorer track BoE greens.
There actually is a vendor, it just requires world PvP.
No, you can, it’s the suffused gear from the Fyrakk assault, or the world PvP bloody coin gear if you’re desperate for a vendor.
In terms of open world gear reward item levels in relation to maximum possible item level rewards from the highest current difficulty of raiding, ZM (at launch) was indeed the worst in terms of the numerical gap.
In the older expansions, Mythic (and at one point Heroic) raids didn’t even exist, so the gap was smaller back then even if the rewards themselves weren’t quite equivalent to Normal raids.
The reason ZM looks so good now is because it least granted players the option of completely soloing quests, treasures, and rares for a set of mostly Normal raid item level. The rewards from truly solo-tuned content in DF are consistently at LFR item level or below.
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I haven’t discussed PvP because that system is sufficient as is. (This thread was supposed to be about the majority of open world gear rewards and the weekly dungeon cache gear not being eligible for the Catalyst.)
PvP Conquest gear and upgraded warmode gear can always be catalyzed, following a consistent logic about stronger tracks of gear being eligible.
However, the warmode gear is lower in PvE iLvl, being a significant downgrade—and many players have a strong aversion to PvP, so it seems silly to have to ask players to do PvP so that they can use weaker tier gear in PvE content.
The fact that I personally am doing PvP is a testament to how lacking the open world rewards system is.
Then, by that logic, you have to acknowledge that the queue content this patch is in the most powerful state it’s ever been in the history of the game. (for most slots, it’s 10 ilvls below the absolute cap)
Also, remember ICC patch?
New raid, new dungeons, nothing in the patch notes about new world content. So world is still the 213s from last patch, with 25H ICC dropping 277. Your best gear through queues was 232.
That’s worse than the 252 world quest max to 285 in some slots from M Jailer.
That is also the patch where the game plateaued at it’s peak subscriber count, that didn’t fall off until cataclysm.
LFR gear can be upgraded all the way to 424, adding the most potential value to LFR we have seen in nearly a decade. However, you will need to do world content or Normal raids for the Drake Crests to actually upgrade (because LFR only drops Whelpling).
The weekly Heroic dungeon cache seemed good until it was confirmed that you can’t catalyze the gear.
If we are talking about the history of the game, though, there were patches where you could earn Valor from queued dungeons and LFR, and buy Normal raid item level gear from a vendor, at a mere 15 item levels below the max of Heroic (because there was no Mythic).
In short:
—The original Cata/MoP Valor system offered gear 15 iLvl below max from a vendor, but without tier bonuses. LFR gear was 30 iLvl below max with no need to upgrade.
—DF S2 Heroic dungeons offer gear that is more than 15 iLvl below max, under an inefficient RNG-based system where you still can’t get tier bonuses. This is objectively inferior to the original Valor system.
—DF S2 LFR offers gear that starts off 39 iLvl below max, with no vendor, and even after upgrading is still more than 15 iLvl below max.
I would still choose the Cata/MoP universal Valor system over the new DF upgrade system for queued content.
And I would still choose Legion, BfA, or SL style of open world content and rewards over DF Season 2.
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Remember that it was actually 20 in MoP, not 15. Even still, the current gap is 10 in most slots, 13 in a few others. Just in case you’ve forgotten, 10 and 13 are both smaller than 15.
Have you even looked at the items that Evantkis is selling? Try taking a look there before you post more lies about how “opressed” you are. The theoretical cap for solo/queue players went from 400 to 435 from 10.0.7 to 10.1, before any of the later patch additions.
That tells me that you got 35+ ilvls of progression from this point in 10.0 to 10.1, compared to the 26 that mythic raiders got. Where are the mythic raid progression buffs?
Warforging came about later in MoP, and was a rare bonus that didn’t automatically apply to all gear.
If you are going to bring up Warforging, then you also have to concede that any patch in Legion or BfA is going to blow DF rewards out of the water.
(No, I am not saying that Legion and BfA were good because of Titanforging, but you can’t apply Warforging as a baseline for one form of content but ignore Titanforging for others.)
Mythic raiding gear is 441-450.
LFR caps at 424, meaning a gap of 17 to 26.
Any number between 17 to 26 is going to be larger than 15.
Solo and queued players won’t be getting a full set of 435 before the season is over. Let’s be realistic.
If you are going to bring up the idea of solo players being privileged because they can work towards a few extra high iLvl slots, look no further than Legion legendaries, BfA neck and cape, and SL legendaries. DF refuses to even do that, capping out solo players on lower iLvls for even crafted gear.
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We’ve been over this. The vault is included with LFR. You can get an enchanted wyrms crest every week from vault. Enchanted Wyrms crests give you 437. Therefore, LFR gives you 437.
Ignoring this fact is just you willfully misrepresenting the state of the gear system to try and make a point, and makes all posts including this Disinformation.
LFR gives you 402-411.
Then you can upgrade that gear to 424 over the course of many weeks by earning currency from other content.
This is an often overlooked loophole, yes, but if are taking tokens from the Vault, you aren’t getting gear.
Are there even going to be enough weeks in the season to get a full set of 437 through LFR?
I agree that LFR gearing is the best it’s been in roughly a decade.
So can we make open world gearing just as good? Give us Vault tokens for doing world quests. Let all Veteran and Champion gear be catalyzed.
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Going off the length of season 1, there will be exactly enough weeks in the season to pull this off.
Also not strictly true, as it means you are choosing a crafted item instead of the LFR drop. You are still getting an item from that vault choice.
Getting one crafted 437 item per week would actually be better than an LFR piece (unless the LFR piece happens to be one of the super rare items with a special effect or it is a tier slot).
You brought up a valid point. The vault tokens can serve as pseudo Valor system to help make up for bad luck or to push for high iLvls, if you do M+, raiding, or rated PvP.
However, this still does nothing for Heroic dungeons or open world content, because they don’t generate Great Vault slots. (The original Valor system did include Heroic dungeons and daily quests.) Unrated PvP does not contribute to the Vault either.
But was the original valor system anywhere near as good, customizable, or powerful as crafting is now?
I get that it was faster. but was the end result anywhere near as good?