That’s kind of the problem though. You can gear for a “rounded out stat spread” but the current array of secondaries doesn’t really offer anything useful for doing that. Everything is easier when you kill it faster (especially when nothing in solo play does that much damage to begin with), and you’ll always have at least one secondary far better at that than anything else.
I can stack a ton of vers to reduce damage taken by a few more %. Or I can stack exactly what I do for sustained DPS, blow incarn, shred the rare in 15-20 seconds before it can do anything to significantly threaten me, and walk away having taken less damage than if I tried to gear for something more protracted.
If you wanted to construct theoretical gear that was good for solo above raid performance, my first guess is it’d have to have a lot of leech, and solo mobs couldn’t be the toothless autoattackable things that struggle to punch through your 30s azerite shield to begin with.
You mean that my different opinion doesn’t agree with your communist agenda. I get it. xd
Yes people did that, but doing a couple of LFR vs spending hours farming wqs? I’d still take that. Also that doesn’t mean that putting tier pieces in LFR wasn’t also a mistake.
All the communities have always complained. That,s how it goes, it doesn’t mean anything to say that.
So … what’s the problem again? Personally I could care less if someone’s benthic gear is better than mythic gear. Why? Because I focus on myself. What they have doesn’t mean jack for me. This is the problem with raid type loot. When a system like Benthic is introduced to give the non hard core players a shot at great stuff there’s always a group of people who whine and complain about it. Know what the difference is between Mythic gear and Benthic? Benthic is available through world quests and quest chains in general. Mythic is obtainable one way and one way only, and it’s not had through failure. So what if it rivals Mythic gear? Mythic gear is still Mythic. It’s a badge of honor that nobody can take away from you.
Oh wow. The decline thing. In WoD we went from what, 9 million to like 5 million (?) for that expansion before Blizzard stopped giving out subscriber numbers and replaced it with revenue. Revenue has its ups and downs, but WoW is still raking in the dough. Decline is the last thing I’m worried about.
Quality of the game, yeah. But then that’s really subjective. Like for example, I thought MoP was the best expansion ever so far. I basically liked almost everything done in that expansion, except for that long content draught and not allowing flight on Isle of Thunder. Some people will disagree or have a different favorite expansion. As long as there’s content (unlike WoD), I’ll be happy whether I like that content or not.
Sure seems better to have BFA that doesn’t release subs anymore and that had to sell about 5+ shop mounts to keep itself afloat. And have Classic to help it out.
Which is also interesting is that lot of people that don’t do hard content don’t care about gear but still wants it.
It’s like getting gear affects more people that do harder content? So why not design it around them?
Also I’m not saying that wod was perfect far from it, Yes there should have been way more content from that expansion.
For the most part, we don’t care about the Benthic gear itself. It’s slower than just spamming 10’s for 430’s, so if you wanna go that route, more power to ya I guess.
The problem is that the bonuses are absurdly powerful in raid. It creates a roadblock for everyone who wants to do the harder fights (most notably Ashvane, which is a HUGE wall for many guilds and probably will be until most people are 65 on their necks) because you’re always going to struggle to compete unless you’ve invested several hundred pearls into that specific character simply because getting gear from alternate sources, like M+ isn’t good enough. You can’t just have gear, you have to have that specific gear.
Really? I didn’t know the advantages were that noticeable. When someone says rival I think that something is on par with it. That’s pretty bad design if Benthic more or less makes or breaks a fight. Maybe that’s what they wanted though? Get people to play more by rolling the dice on RNG to try and get the BiS with a socket.
They certainly design content for MAUs since they do not release subs anymore they don’t design content to keep subs or making more of them. You can see the difference in communication already from the Classic team vs retail team. Classic teams knows that sub will be their main money maker.
What if, the benthic gear bonuses where intended to get MORE people out of lfr and into normal+ raiding,by giving em somthing that makes that jump into non lfr content abit less scary.
People don’t go into raiding because of having the gear. They’re more likely to not want to bother more if they didn’t want to before because there’s even less reasons to do so if they’re aldready out-gearing the content.
This is another thing that bothers me. Why does it matter if raiders are wearing better gear? I was a casual player for vanilla through Wrath – I didn’t join a raid guild till Cata on a completely different character. I didn’t care if other people were further along their upgrade path. I cared that I had one and could work toward it.
Going back to the alt I was funneling Benthic tokens from. I didn’t really play her last tier either. I did emissaries, invasions, the occasional weekly tortollan, and warfronts. Paragon cache gold, disenchant fuel, pretty much nothing else. I played her as essentially the most casual of casual characters. She did basically nothing of note except sit in on all of one boss of an alt run of Dazar my guildies roped me into when I happened to log in near the end of it. The raid log from that one boss shows I spent it facedown on the floor like an idiot because, surprise, rescuing turtles wasn’t especially conducive to teaching me how to actually play a lock.
It also shows that less than two months into the tier, that alt who did absolutely nothing of note, who I played maybe a couple hours a week, was nearly 400 – Heroic raid level – and barely below the bulk of the Mythic progression team we ran that same week. Her only upgrade paths at that point were Mythic +10 and high-end raids. She slammed into the upgrade wall after less than two months of rescuing turtles.
If I took that kind of gameplay and transplanted it onto what I was doing as a casual back in BC/Wrath, I wouldn’t have come back for Cata or BFA at all. That’s not chasing the carrot. That’s having carrots and sticks alike rammed through your skull.
As far as I can tell, the only time it really matters that someone’s wearing higher gear than you is PVP, and normalization has screwed that to hell so badly I’m not even sure how much of a difference it makes there anymore.
LOL now you’re just arguing for the sake of arguing. Not that I’m not enjoying it, mind you!
Store mounts and pets have been around ever since mounts and pets were removed from our bags and a separate tab created for them. Some people hate them, fine. Some people think it’s money grubbing of Blizzard. Fine. (I don’t agree but I don’t argue). But I don’t believe it’s propping up the game but even if it does, so what? If the people who buys the mounts are subsidizing my gaming experience, I’m eternally grateful to them.
Like it or not, one of the endgame progression is advancing your gear. In Vanilla, you had very few ways to advance your gear outside of raids. Blizzard noticed not everyone raided. So they started putting in more places where you can get gear and continue to improve it. This is where the “equal gear” argument comes in.
This is an old argument of mine, but gear for solo players is even more important than raiders. We don’t have a tank taking aggro from us and a healer propping us up. If we’re out in the world alone and aggro an errant mob, or even an elite, we have nobody but ourselves to survive that fight (at least this was true until shared tagging). Solo player’s gear requirements plateau earlier than raiders, but gear is intrinsic in the game design. This is the “we need epic but we will accept lower ilevel argument.”
And I’m not really sure what your second sentence there means. The game is already designed around raiders. It always was. We get your seconds. The minute we get something that the raiders think is theirs only, they jump down our throats, just like you’re doing now.
Think of it this way. The belt alone offers a flat 2% overall damage against Orgazoa or Za’qul.
The difference between a 425 raid belt and a 455 raid belt is about 1.2% in raw stats alone, so in terms of raw DPS, against an abberation boss, you’d need about 470 ilvl or higher for that belt to be an upgrade.
That’s before you even factor in the socket, and it’s far easier to get a 425 benthic belt with a socket than a 455 belt.
The latest Activision investor report and call only had MAU for their King division (Candy Crush), since MAU is like the holy grail of mobile games. WoW specifically only mentioned revenue, while Blizzard as a whole had time played and net bookings (selling stuff in the store). Which make sense, since only WoW is a subscription based model, so for every other blizzard games time played is an important indicator, especially when you consider the net bookings together, since they often (not always, though) go up or down in proportionate ratios.
So. MAU. Nothing to do with Blizzard, let alone WoW. Time played. Important to Blizzard, importance to WoW unknown, but it’s not a metric that Activision releases for WoW.
I don’t ascribe anyone’s opinion to anyone else but themselves.
Some people simply don’t understand exactly how powerful the bonuses are and think that many people have a problem with the actual 425 loot.
To which, some people probably do. I’m not going to argue that “raiders” are a monolithic entity and that everyone agrees with everything. But not everyone understands, like yourself, that the beef comes with the bonuses in raid, not the actual gear itself.
Maybe they were hoping to pigeonhole people into grinding for pearls to get the gear to down bosses? That’s the only other explanation I could think of.