One think I have noticed while playing Classic is…I like having BiS lists. There is pre-raid BiS, Molten Core BiS, etc.
I like collecting the best gear I can have given the content I am willing to do. This is imposible in current Wow though because of RNG. It doesn’t matter what item you have there is always going to be one better, because it has more Titanforging, a socket gem or tertiary stats.
Outside of Azerite pieces it’s imposible to collect BiS gear, maybe since Warlords of Draenor, maybe since the introduction of Thunderforging in MoP.
It is supposed to increase replayability? It’s not working. A lot of people won’t be more motivated to farm something if there is no tangible end to that farm.
People like to have ends, that is why they like to collect transmogs, mounts and achievements. BiS gear used to be one of the things that could be collected but that is not the case anymore.
BiS always existed, it just changes hands a lot quicker so you are left going for new things quicker instead of having an arcano crystal for all of an expansion.
Well. That is my issue. And I don’t mean just the best of the best. There is people in Classic fine on reaching pre-raid BiS. They are like reachable goals.
I tend to agree. Until we get back to reasonable gearing methods, and drop the lottery slot machine gearing, I find myself enjoying the collect-a-thon side of the game more.
RNG is fine, when used sparingly. You kill a boss, you have a chance for loot, you get it or you don’t, that’s the extent of where gear RNG should be.
But these? Gotta get your boss chance, gotta hope he drops the specific piece with the right abilities, then you have to hope it titanforges, but woops, wrong secondaries, go again.
As much as I think Titanforging oversteps a bit too far (+5, maybe even +10 Warforge was fine and doesn’t infringe on difficulty tiers of content) and as much as I think Gem Slots should be a more guaranteed thing (perhaps on Raid Gear as an incentive to run that in a world where Mythic+ is otherwise King for nearly everything)…
You can set your own “end”.
If you run Mythic 10s, your “end” can be 430 ilvl (or 440 if you’re willing to wait out the weekly chests). If you’re raiding Heroic Palace, your end can be 430 ilvl (or 445 for Mythic). You don’t have to grind the rare bonuses.
At the end of the day, Any of those numbers are respectable goals, and I feel that the sheer amount of freebie & catchup gear DURING a given season/patch/tier is far more detrimental to feeling okay about those goals than a bit of extra RNG on gear.
why are people still stuck on this “raid = best gear, and that’s just the way it is because that’s the way it is” mentality? i hated it back then, and i hate it now.
the thing about those classic “pre-raid BiS” gear lists is that they’re just that. pre-raid, and then done. you get your best available non-raid gear, all blues except for a specific one or two reputation epics, and then unless you raid, the game is pretty much done.
i love raiding, but you couldn’t pay me to play classic unless they upgraded dungeon loot to keep up with raid loot with every content patch, or added a mythic system to scale em up.
Why are people still stuck on the idea that it’s healthy to have entire tiers of top tier content that offer only a few upgrades because itemization is hosed?
It’s not just about whether you have the best gear, it’s also about whether you feel incrementally rewarded for what you do. It’s why I felt better in vanilla as a non-raider than I do now as a Mythic raider. If I outgear everything available in all but five slots by facerolling around in Nazjatar and praying for residuum tokens to not suck, I end up feeling less rewarded for downing Mythic Ashvane than I did for getting blues out of Stratholme.
We need good secondaries back. This universal upgrade/downgrade garbage is terrible.
Bit of a tangent, but frankly, for me, it’s because raids take a high degree of coordination that dungeons, even Mythic +10s, just do not take.
Even if we assume they were equally difficult (I’m of the opinion that +10s are significantly easier than most Heroic Fights during actual progression), wrangling 10-30 cats in mechanically complex environment is harder to pull off than wrangling 5 cats in a fairly simply environment.
If that didn’t count for something, Brawler’s Guild should have just rewarded Heroic Raid quality gear back in 8.1.5 or whenever it was updated. But it didn’t. Because that would be absurd.
Even if you don’t agree with that mindset, I feel like you have to entertain the idea that Mythic+ oversteps its bounds, at least. It’s ridiculously efficient. Someone with the time and desire to do so could go from 385 (starter catchup ilvl, roughly) to 430+ in a single week. And for most people, that’s that. They’ll either do like 1 dungeon weekly for the 440s after that, or they’ll play another alt or quit.
BiS is not good for stock holders so it will never be implemented again.
There must always be a carrot to chase
The hamster wheel must keep spinning.
That is why this game is so bad these days.
It’s not about designing a fun game. It’s all about player retention and profit
No. But that is exactly the problem. You beat the content. You got your achievements. Your mount. What is next? What is the point of keep playing? More power? How much more is enough? There is no BiS gear to collect because you will never realistically reach that goal.
this is an entirely separate issue than gear progression paths and raid vs non-raid gearing. itemization, stats, and gearing is utterly trashed for every single progression path at the moment, and that has little to with raid or non-raid content. it’s a difficult comparison to make because it’s so bad on every front.
i believe this notion that raids are automatically a higher “tier” that should automatically get higher loot is a fallacy. it’s something people need to recognize within themselves for what it is, and then let go of it. and i’m a raider myself. not mythic, at least not yet, but my choice to raid is not affected one bit by the fact that i could get better gear pushing keys right now.
people who want raids to have the best gear always simply want the exclusivity of having something rare and difficult to obtain as a self-validation of their status. i like that feeling too, but i got over myself. the normalization of loot rewards between different progression paths was inevitable. when you’re only making content, and thus rewards, for the top few percent of your playerbase, you’re leaving the vast majority of the people who fund your game just hanging in the wind.
irrellevant. sticking all the best gear in raids chooses one type of playstyle and says “this, here, is how you have to play.” what makes wow so successful(and make no mistake it’s still the king of MMOs, if you think otherwise you are delusional) isn’t the stellar writing and storytelling(lawl don’t even get me started on that topic). it’s the fact that wow is utterly accessible with options to progress for almost every imaginable type of player from the most laid back casual to the most hardcore of raider or pvp’er. gone are the days where one type of play rewarded the best gear, and it’s best just to get over it and accept it. the days of only a tiny percentage of the players getting the best gear is dead and gone. blizzard would miss that tiny fraction of subscriptions the least out of any demographic they could ever possibly alienate.
