I mean to start with Tier Set bonuses and Glyphs didn’t have me sell my soul just to acquire them.
You had to wait for the RNG gods to grant you the right Legendary in Legion
And you had to grind AP by doing boring monotonous content like World Quests just to get access to the abilities in your Artifact Weapon (far more forgivable because WQs were new at the time) and Azerite Armor.
And Corruption is essentially the game going auto pilot and killing things for you. So you don’t even get to dictate how well you’re playing and the game just takes the wheel.
With Glyphs you went to the AH, bought it and you had it forever.
With tier set bonuses you went into the raid, killed the boss and it dropped and huzzah you have it. Which could easily happen within the first few weeks of the raid. Especially if you’re playing with friends.
Funny thing with that last part is with Azerite Armor it was killing the boss it dropped and you had it but not really because your Neck level wasn’t high enough. What a joke…
Not to mention Tiers sets were upgraded EVERY tier and not each expansion. The power from them was built into the curve. Now with tier sets gone if removed all these annoying external systems of power and Blizz would just focus on the classes then we would truly just have a gear progression in game. Life would be better imo.
Pure RNG is always bad, that’s hardly unique to borrowed/expansion-based power progressions. A catch-up vendor is always the solution to that.
I agree that 30%+ from covenant choice is a bit much; tIme will tell if it stays that way. But even if it does, you can just get the transmog later on an alt if that’s the primary concern. We’re not getting #Pulltheripcord, at least not until some ways into the expansion.
I think it’s because of Maw of Soul that turned into Island Expeditions that turned into Visions only to have all of it stripped by a Tuesday maintenance…
… just like we’re about to have in 2 days! +125 corruption resistance, and countless Vision runs, just wiped out by a Server Shutdown.
I agree Legion legendaries were bad on release (until they added Vashreen.) But in SL, we have (a) crafted legendaries and (b) a vendor for conduits right from the beginning. In this way, we can still have something to work towards, without being wholly dependent on RNG.
That’s a fair point - tier set bonuses could be obtained for you in a friend/guild run, without any need to farm a certain neck level to apply or use them.
But the attunements to enter the raid in the first place were still a personal dependency on you.
Losing? Putting aside that I wouldn’t particularly care even if they did pull it, they’ve explicitly stated they’re not pulling the ripcord. I’m all for balance tuning, which is what they’re doing.
I haven’t heard any pushback against Legendaries but the issue with Conduits is Blizzards hellbent nature to tackle people who just want to change them whenever they want.
Which I don’t think anyone really wants them to return.
My biggest problem with “borrowed power” is when proc affects are the majority of your damage. Once it hits a certain point, I don’t feel like I’m playing a mage or a monk anymore, I feel like I’m playing my procs.
For this reason, I like how legion did artifacts and dislike how BfA did essences and corruptions (I also dislike Azerite gear but for completely separate reasons.)
I am hopeful for shadowlands in result because to me, it seems to be leaning closer to the legion side rather than the BfA side.
Fair, but I don’t have a thought on the conduit swapping one way or another. As I I don’t PvP I’m probably just going to find one setup that works reasonably well for both raids/M+ and leave it in that for the most part.
Whether attunements, rep/renown, AP, there will always be some form of personal progression we need to complete to access that expansion’s power progression.
I don’t think essences were ever as bad as corruptions in this regard but otherwise I agree.