For one thing, it would be nice to send alts out to Zereth Mortis to help them gear up more enjoyably, because who has the time and interest to do the Great Vault lottery grind multiple times?
For another thing, I personally know many players for whom the outdoor zones are going to be their main content, and they typically leave the game if the outdoor stuff seems pointless (such as in WoD).
Ironically, the gear gatekeepers should care most of all about WoW getting back to being a popular, busy, and active game, or else Microsoft is going to take one look at how gear gatekeeping has ruined the WoW franchise and pull the rug from the whole gear hierarchy.
Well, millions of players are potentially being excluded from getting a weapon upgrade and class set bonuses in the final patch of the expansion. This is a significant exclusion and it is intentional.
Microsoft has already said that they want everyone playing WoW, and that canât possibly happen when you exclude the typical gamer from endgame progression. And the typical gamer is absolutely not going to do the current three pillars of endgame Shadowlands.
Thatâs not entirely true because 1) the patches didnât totally invalidate the previous patch which meant there were clear paths of progression and raiders werenât stepping into the most current raids without doing the previous ones first 2) PvP was a viable alternative which it clearly hasnât been this expansion because there was at least an attempt to make it balanced 3) they offered fun alternate paths of progression such as The Isle of QuelâDanas or Argent Tournament where you could earn equivalent rewards without stepping foot in a raid if you were patient.
And this is the problem Iâve been pointing out to these people who absolutely refuse to think of it as anything other than âlazy casuals just want free lootâ. Blizzard caters to the extreme nicheâs at either end of the player spectrum and totally ignores the middle, and thatâs why they canât maintain a solid player base and have lost so many of itâs players to other games.
Other games realized itâs the middle you need to cater too, which was also a philosophy the OG devs for this game understood. The whole âTraditionalismâ excuse Ion Hazzikostas threw out in an interview is utter tripe because OG Blizzard was very much the anti-traditional development company. They saw what worked in other games and polished the heck out of it, then cut away the stuff that didnât like so much fat, and made it accessible to the average gamer. nuBlizz does the exact opposite of that.
You donât have to be competitive to do raiding below mythic. Thereâs already content for them to do. I donât feel sympathy for people who choose to limit their content and then demand more content.
A lot of dishonest remembering of how things actually played out.
Glad we have TBC classic going on write now so itâs not just nostalgia on how much solo players got nothing. Canât even get primal nethers right now without joining a premade dungeon group.
Content being obsoleted every patch started in earnest with patch 3.2 Trial of the Crusader. That patch let a new 5 man dungeon give equal gear to the previous raid tier and better than the first raid tier and it was a joke.
ICC patch further cemented this. And for 3.3, those 5 mans dropped 232 gear at a time when 277 gear was the top. A massive 45 item levels below. But I bet most people didnât even realize at that time how far behind they were. For reference, that would be 207 gear right now for the casual scrubs.
Then you got a few 251 valor (same as 226 now) and if you did the daily dungeon every single day you could buy 1 264 (239 item) every 2-3 months of some offset items.
And as Wrath classic will remind everyone, conquest gear then also had arena rating requirements for all armor (non accessories) and weapons.
That was 5 years into a game that is over 17 years old.
And nobody in the history of this game has ever agree at any time that PvE nor PvP had been balanced.
except I linked my source, so that was on WoWhead, not me. That said, youâve been invalidated in this thread WAY more than 1 time, so maybe donât throw stones in glass houses, eh?
It really isnât, Isle of QuelâDanis isnât the only example in TBC alone, itâs just the one which is coming up so it was a relevant example. That said, I donât disagree at all with your Wrath assessments, Wrath introduced a lot of really bad game designs which Iâve pointed out many times over the yearsâŠbut pointing these out is funny since your initial point was that entire focus of the game was on raiding then you go and list out all these things in Wrath which proves it wasnât at all.
It points out how raiding and premade group content has always been the driver of the best gear. The focus of the patches. The focus of the story. The driver of the game.
Lesser gear and catchup has been for everyone else.
SoâŠkinda the opposite?
And how people saying Blizzard is going away from rewarding solo players makes no sense, because Blizzard has been providing great gear for solo world content players since Legion that was unprecedented through most of WoWs life.
We have TBC classic right now Iâm actively playing. Donât have to rely on memory.
If you arenât doing pre-made group content your gear is trash.
I canât for the life of me think of why giving the majority of the player base more activities and things to work towards in their chosen playstyle is âpandering.â The word has a fairly strong negative connotation with it - an implication that it shouldnât be done.
You keep your player base by keeping them happy and giving them more things to do. This isnât pandering, itâs literally the correct choice given that most players arenât doing Mythic Raids or high end Mythic Dungeons. This has literally always been true - casuals are the bulk of players.
So this is speculation on numbers, and straight false on set bonuses.
How has gear been a gatekeeper for anyone in PvE? you getting declined from a pug because someone else has bigger number isnât gatekeeping, thatâs just getting the group that the lead thinks has the best chance of killing the boss. They tried to kill using gear as a metric to judge players in legion, and came up with titanforging. People realized that gear was no longer a good way to tell who would do well in your key, so we invented another system to try and predict who would do well in a key: Raider.io.
Your source was taken out of context and was probably released the first week of heroic because of bugs that sylvanus had.
Youâre either being dishonest or clueless if you think that source had any validity
I then linked you an actual source showing you were so far off from being correct that itâs not even funny. I stopped clicking next page at 300 guilds that had killed sylvanus on heroic which was 10 times what you claimed it was.
I havenât been invalidated once this entire thread.
Your argument about that is greatly weakened when you compared the number of aotc denathrius players at the end of the tier, to the number of guilds that killed Sylvanas week 1, which was partially attributed to the fact that the boss would sometimes bug out and instantly wipe the entire raid for no reason, by the source you linked. If you were to actually read the article instead of just the headline, you would see that itâs almost entirely about that being a result of how buggy the fight was on release. Shards of domination were also a thing, and it was probably tuned around the guilds having x number of 3sets that almost nobody had.
