Ignore the the issues with the benthiccc lottery, the gem slots, and the manapearl funneling for a moment. Those were execution errors that blizzard has acknowledged were unintentional.
Instead, imagine this.
What if item levels from patch to patch increased by only 5 max ilv and all items from raids had extremely powerful secondary effects that were only active within that specific raid. These effects would have additional effects for collecting multiple.
For example,
“Razor coral” effect, +5% crit dmg. Can appear on any armor class, in chest, leg, helm, gloves, and boots slot.
3 pieces of “razor coral” effect, critical strikes increase critical rating by 25, stacking up to 5 times.
5 pieces of “razor coral” effect, critical strikes have a chance to apply a bleed effect for X dmg over 4 seconds.
Only active in Eternal palace.
This would mean that drops from the raid with razor coral would have very high “effective item level” within the raid, but normal item level outside of it. Meaning, the cumulative effects of patch to patch ilv growth can be squished without reducing the sense of raid tier progression. This would make it so that returning or new players would start 120 with a very small ilv gap between them and the new raid tier, regardless of how deep we are into an expansion.
Imagine having a set of gear for the top two tiers of new content, because second best plus bonuses beats raw stats on the new stuff from non relevant sources.
But EP gear will be replaced by Ny’alotha gear. Under the current system you won’t need to hold onto older gear as it gets replaced by better gear.
Also, Void Storage strips enchants and gems. Not to mention the money cost to deposit stuff in there. It’s meant for long term storage, not weekly usage.
Yeah, you deposit your collectibles and then use your bank for the current expansion.
Nyalotha gear will probably not replace EP gear for EP for a while. The affixes are worth a lot.
Either way, the idea that power would grow so high than the EP affixes would be overtaken is like… part of the problem, yes? That power growth patch to patch is insane.
What you’re describing is what I think they SHOULD have done with expansions. Imagine applying this to a macro level where every expansion has its own stat. So rather than raising the level cap every expansion, you’re just in need of different stats.
Way too much gear dropped in BFA. Most of it uninspiring and most often useless. Just an entirely bad design which forced Benthic into existence. People had serious fatigue with getting gear only to destroy it for mats.
They have better ways to give both 15 minute impulse goals and 3-6 month goals. By making crafting matter again and really digging into gear upgrades that both tie components to the world and allow a highly deterministic path for players to build gear upgrades from.
That way you can hit both goals. Give the 15 minute player a goal for those 15 minutes without discouraging the people who are looking months ahead. It also slows down the content churn as gear comes slower, power creep is slower and people are still chewing on content.
And hey, there’s nothing wrong with just not meeting the numbers yet. Mechanically confusing design on encounters isn’t good for anything but E-sports. Everyone basically hates it. Go back to some basics on encounter design at least on the normal and heroic front and the lower M+ keys so the mainstream audience has something to look forward to other than World Quests.
I really didn’t have a problem with the system, but if I did it would be the gem slots. Needing to buy the same piece five or more times before it procs something better than upgrading an existing piece is/was kind of whack.
I mainly liked that benthic gear (outside of the sockets) got around a lot of RNG when it came to gearing other characters.
You could buy a piece (from earnable currency) for a specific slot, and the armor type was automatic.
Ways to increase the gears ilvl and effects are just bonuses. I never minded how powerful the benthic gear was - in fact I enjoyed not having to wait week to week to see if the RNG gods would finally get a specific item in raid to drop.
But that’s because my idea of progression has nothing to do with gear. Rather it’s more about achievements and performance (parses).
That’s what they need to go back to. Sorry for the people who explore the themepark and play all forms aggressively. It’s just not ideal for the rest of us who hate certain things the game offers.
Dungeon gear should be designed around dungeons.
Raid gear around raids.
Battlegrounds around battlegrounds.
Arena around arena.
World Questing around World Questing.
We have people who like all forms here. Some do some of them. Some do all. Some do one exclusively. So you need a way of rewarding each to their potential without forcing them into each form. The easiest way to do that is to bring either a badge system back or the component crafting approach I was referring to earlier. We want options in how we play the game and we also want 3-6 month goals in those forms of gameplay.
I realize there are budget constraints so the goal should be to reach as close to that goal as possible within the budget constraints. Obviously rep tabards fix the World Quest issue. Raid gear fixes the M+ grind issue for raiders and dungeon gear fixes the issue with dungeon grinders who hate raids.
Lots of things can be done and done cheaply here to broaden the appeal of the MMORPG.
Now imagine this happening with every single raid instead of just whenever they experiment with things. Imagine needing to hold onto Uldir, BoD, EP, and Ny’alotha gear. Or it would make people even less likely to want to do older content in an expansion.
Power progression is good. Too much rented power is a problem. We already have people complaining about artifact weapons and the heart of azeroth because they go away at the end of each expansion. With this suggestion we would be ending the expansion with nearly the same stats as we started with. Utterly boring.