Creation Catalyst: Wow, who would've thought

Wow, who would’ve thought that the instant the Creation Catalyst was made available folks would suddenly have the motivation to play lots of alts again? Just today I managed to complete three different characters’ 4sets.

I still don’t see a good reason why this thing required a six-week delay, even after the community heavily criticized the fact that the Creation Catalyst was delayed by 6 weeks last tier as well.

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That power spike across the board. Congratulations!

Yep, my pathetic 414 Evoker now sims for nearly 90k and that’s with atrocious trinkets.

My Hunter just cracked 430 and that should be nearing 110k, and I don’t really play Havoc anymore but Vengeance’s 4pc is extremely powerful.

I’m back on my “I want to play alts” arc.

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That was potentially six more weeks of subscription

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My alts have 0 tiers so far so not see the benefit yet xD. Not feeling that motivated tbh.

Not quite working on a lot of toons. But was able to get 4pc through Catalyst and vault for this mage. And my PvP priest got a good tier piece in vault and is ready to catalyze her second to finish up. Only gonna rock 2pc for PvP disc. Everyone’s gonna feel p good to play this week.

Tier was originally raid only. It can now be looted from other sources, but the fasted is still raiding. And that is okay. Join a guild. Make friends. Zone into the raid. Kill bosses.

How did this game survive for the first 10 years?

I feel as though they can’t do anything right. It really seems like if there is an hurtle to acquire rewards, people will always be pissed with the devs and want it faster.

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Pretty much.

Every single change made to make the game easier and faster is always praised.

Logic should follow they should keep doing that right?

Except the game won’t even be a game anymore and people will wonder what happened.

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I’m well aware. I still think six weeks is too long, especially since raiders can complete their 4pc in one week (which I did, on this character) but nobody else can complete it within that reasonable of a time-frame.

The expectation ever since 9.2 is that you will have your 4set. That is how the game is designed now. I think releasing Catalyst in like 3-4 weeks is a more than reasonable expectation, considering you’ll still only get one charge per week it’s active. There are people who need the Catalyst to gear up, and something that necessary shouldn’t be locked behind a six-week wait.

Blizzard views the Catalyst as a form of catchup, but the fact of the matter is that this isn’t how the Catalyst is viewed for a lot of players. Unless they make tier as reasonable to obtain in M+ and PvP as it is in raid, the Catalyst will be an integral part of gearing one’s main more than anything else.

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How is 9.2 a magic time for expecting tier set as opposed to Legion or earlier expansions?

Because 9.2 was when Blizzard specifically adopted this whole Catalyst system. And more importantly, 9.2 was also when Blizzard brought tier back after removing it in BFA, with this new philosophy of being able to get it out of your Vault and having an eventual way to turn current gear into tier gear in mind.

I think tier was always kinda problematic when it was locked to raid only, and this is from the perspective of someone who does raid. I don’t think the Legion way of doing things really worked all that well, and it honestly worked even less so given that M+ existed and was supposed to be an endgame gearing path but required you to raid to get said set bonuses (some of which were VERY IMPACTFUL).

I’m alright with raiders needing strong M+ trinkets and vise-versa, but I think tier’s a fundamental issue on that front. Nevertheless, I’d rather tier exist than not; BFA and early-mid Shadowlands were some dark days for class fantasy.

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You are right. Since wrath, players have been trying to design the game. Sacraficing nearly everything that made the game popular in order for convienence.

So much so that many players complain that they don’t recognize the game anymore. And would rather go back and play dead content from 2004, before all the convenience was added. #no changes.

At what point do players realize, that all of the changes they claim would “save the game” have really just been slowly killing it?

It’s not a hivemind. Different players having different opinions.

They’ve already said the overlap in players between retail and classic is small (guess I’m part of that small minority).

It’s hard to say it keeping things the same would have kept the game going better or killed it faster from stagnation.

Look at mythic+. Some saying it killed the game and some saying it saved the game.

And this didn’t go as well as people thought; Classic’s popularity waned eventually, current classic era is only alive because of a community-made Hardcore challenge a-la Diablo/PoE, TBC wasn’t super well-liked on rerelease, and Wrath is showcasing that #NoChanges is not, in fact, the way the game should’ve been approached on rerelease.

Here’s the fact of the matter: those expansions are old. Design choices then were seen as convenient relative to other MMOs. But at the end of the day, convenience is still king. When Shadowlands tried making things inconvenient, well… you got Conduit Energy, you get the Covenant lock, you got Shards of Domination, you got Korthia’s atrocious rep grind (pre-9.1.5), you got a gearing process that was in such jeopardy that Blizzard had to emergency hotfix loot to drop more in Castle Nathria and M+ and even had to emergency implement Valor because dungeon loot was borderline unusable outside of your weekly 15, and you got an expansion that a lot of people really, really, really hated. I liked Shadowlands, but I’m apparently in the minority.

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To be fair if it’s been slowly dying since Wrath it’s doing a rather good job at surviving.

Rather if they had kept the exact same model I think the game would be long gone. Now people can have both, thankfully!

Between playing other games and my alts not getting lucky with tier. Honestly wish the catalyst had infinte charges with ways to get more from playing the game…
A week per charge is so slow for seasonal content.