The “improvements” in 9.0.5 have cemented an ugly truth about this game…
Up until now, there was at least some degree of plausible deniability that the endgame reward system was structured in such a way as to push players toward buying carries and therefore tokens.
But with the revelation that the new VP system isn’t going to help anyone GET gear, only upgrade it (and completely leaving raiders out in the cold at the same time), as well as massively reward players for timing +15s, they may as well have just said as much in a PR statement.
WoW is steering away from casual-friendly systems that allow for slow but reliable gearing and rewards in favor of pushing as many token sales as possible. With the incoming changes, tokens for carries are going to sell like crazy, while players trying to gear up the old fashioned way are still subject to the same stingy RNG-fueled system we have now. All of the reliable gearing methods of the past (tokens, true valor points, decent drop rates in raids) are dead and buried. Want gear progress? Be prepared to farm gold for hours or fork over the $$$ for those tokens if RNG doesn’t go your way (especially when the vault loves to give duplicates or items in your legendary slot).
I hope for their sake WoW can survive on the “whales” alone (aka. people who will dump tons of real-life money into games, usually with the F2P model) because that’s clearly their target audience moving forward…
Remember, if they truly wanted to fix the gearing issue, all they needed to do was revert the week one nerf to raid loot and most of the complaints would go away, but they instead chose to devise yet another system that not only maintains but outright fuels the need for carries.
Shadowlands doesn’t have a great gear progression but it seems to me if you’re going to put all that effort in to paying somebody to carry you through the content, you could just… run the content normally with a group.
and if that isn’t going to give enough gear, being carried probably isn’t either.
The people advertising in trade chat offer gear funnels, where you’re run with players with the same armor type and weapons as you, then you get all of the gear that drops.
And it’ll be even less of a concern in 9.0.5 since you’ll be able to pay to be carried through M15s and can upgrade the gear with valor.
The point is, you can pay for your 15s and it’s just done at that point. You can go back to running your +5s or whatever to upgrade via VP. It’ll happen exactly like it already happens in PvP, pay for 1600, 1800, 2100 in one bracket then casually farm Conquest in a different bracket weekly and honor to upgrade.
It’s just what the system is built for. I wouldn’t see a problem with it if the meta wasn’t being so strictly enforced by the community. The seller groups are going to make a killing on off-meta classes who can’t get into pugs buying 15s.
I don’t want to assume malice on Blizzard’s part. PvP gearing was received really well at the start of the expansion, I think they’re just making PvE in line with it in a kind of shortsighted way.
Kind of need to reserve judgement for what the changes to raid loot turn out to be, but we won’t see that until 9.1 most likely.
I’m hoping that one day these people will wake up and realize that they’re paying for imaginary prestige with real money, surrounded by people doing the same thing, rendering it meaningless anyway.
But that hasn’t happened thus far so I don’t see why it would anytime soon…
Is this not the sort of community the high end raiders wanted for World of Warcraft?
To just sell carries all day long for “WoW Tokens”-- the equivalent of real life money in literally the eyes of anyone not wrapped up in syntactic sugar.
I say that if this is the community they wanted, it’s the community they deserve.
If the aim is to just unlock the +15 Valor point upgrade then being funneled gear wont be of a ton of use anyway.
I was responding to the part where the OP said to be prepared to farm tons of gold or fork over the cash.
My comment was “if you’re going to farm all that gold, why not just run the content?”.
Obviously just buying the gold and paying for a carry is faster but if you’re going to throw real money at it, it seems to me it’d be more efficient to just buy a CN carry and have all the gear funneled to you.
Which we can argue is bad(and it is), but the valor point thing doesn’t change that.
Because people can just play the AH market while farming herbs and watching netflix. It’s much easier than running the content they don’t actually want to do. The end result is the same, they get the gear, and on raider io it looks like they are a player that is capable of doing high level content unless someone looks carefully.
Was going to reply but that sums it up: I enjoy raiding but not being stonewalled on gear progress because the game is trying to push me toward buying carries.
But there are plenty of whales out there who just want the gear, titles, mounts, etc. and don’t care one bit that they didn’t earn it.
