Current gearing systems are not casual friendly

Are you saying that the game is dead and everyone is congregating on these forums? Because saying that the forums are dead and this is the thread that everyone is huddling in is incorrect since there are other threads that have far more posts in them.

No, that’s actually not what I said at all. :slightly_smiling_face:

pats Jalen on the head and tells him everything will be okay

the sad truth is that the player who logs on for 30 mins a day pays the same monthy fee you do. so to the company youre both worth the same. thats why the CM’s here always treat the hardcore players so flippantly (ignoring real criticisms and only arguing against easy posts)

Then I just don’t get it. Personally I don’t think these forums are dead at all. I do believe the WoW population overall has taken a nosedive though.

Random Battle Grounds rewarding scaling ilevel loot makes way more sense then boring WQ. At least random Battle grounds have the potential to be fun and are almost always fun if you que with a small group. Promoting community interaction is a good thing. Perfect casual content.

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Sure but when I was 370 my max crit bite was 20k with 389 I bite 36k.
SO tell me about the difference and scale.

If I was fully 415 I bet my bite could have reached 45k WITCH IS A BIG DEAL

Let’s say you have 370 ilevel and I have 406.
If you max crit me with bite, it may show 20k on YOUR screen.
But on MY screen it will be higher.
The scaling tries to take people with lower ilevel and the higher level and tries to create a “medium” so ilevel isn’t a huge thing.

I disagree. The customer’s value is more than the amount he is currently paying; you need to factor in the longevity of his membership. A “hardcore” player is more likely to maintain his membership for years, rather than cancel his sub every 6 months. Also, the hardcore player is more likely to spend his money on additional purchases.
I also don’t agree that the CM’s “always treat the hardcore players so flippantly (ignoring real criticisms and only arguing against easy posts).” I think they have to worry about getting into a heated debate and potentially losing their jobs.

No, I don’t think there are too many sources for rewards. The problem is the value of the rewards from each source. My alts gear extremely fast without any effort at all. I just do a few WQs/emissaries along with WF quests and world bosses and they are geared enough for heroic BoA in no time. In other words, if I actually enjoyed the content that my alts do, I would quickly stop feeling rewarded for it.

The casual/accessible parts of the game feel like they are only rewarding for two ends of the “player spectrum”: The extremely casual players who play so little that this gearing pace is fine, and the hardcore raiders who just want to gear up their alts as fast as possible.

I actually think systems like in Wrath or even TBC covered a much wider range of the player spectrum by mostly focusing on the middle (the average player). Players who logged on regularly to do daily/weekly content were rewarded for their efforts, but would never hit a gear wall.

In fact, the first time a lot of average players hit the “raid gear wall” was during the ToC and ICC patches. Before those patches average players would do the mini raids like VoA and Onyxia, but they didn’t feel compelled to do the latest raid content. But when 3.2 hit and the ToC dungeon was giving Ulduar level gear, players geared super quickly. Within a couple weeks, the only way to make steady progress was by doing the ToC raid.

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That isn’t false, but you also need to consider questions like “how many hardcore players are out there?” and “how do we encourage new players to stick around?” Because ultimately retaining new players (or bringing back old players) is the only way to maintain the game, and that often means rewarding people who play for 30 minutes a day.

So there’s 2 things to unpack here.

  1. We’re not talking about me specifically with these systems. As was previously established, I raid mythic and my progression at that level is not affected by 385 and 400 handouts aside from WF/TF and the first week of progress. We’re talking about norm/heroic raiders (the bulk of the raiding population fyi).

  2. We’re also not talking about competition between you and I or you and those raiders. That competition is non-existent no matter what they do with the system as you fundamentally want different things for your gameplay.

Now that those 2 points are stated, the competition I was talking about was between the players at that norm/heroic level. When you implement a system that gives you a net positive, but hurts their character progression due to it being concurrent with that competition
 That’s when problems arise.

So in other words. Agreed, this minimally affects me. It wasn’t me I was talking about. I don’t think the positive of you being able to kill a world mob in 7 seconds instead of 10, is worth negative of losing character progress for the bulk of the raiding population.

Why not do what I stated above? Create solo oriented content and solo oriented gear that is specifically tailored to augment outdoor content, WF, and islands. All content that is aimed at a casual play level? Understat them (so they would be useless for a raider), but use affixes to buff their power (and have the affixes not work in instanced content). You now could have cool gear to improve and change your own solo based casual content, that does not risk affecting group based/group progression based content.

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Hi Bornakk, thanks for engaging in the discussion.

I want to offer some points coming from my experience. I don’t consider myself to be a casual player, but I used to, and I play alts casually.

I find casual content gets chewed through too quickly because there are people out there who can just stomp it. Back in vanilla or TBC you would see this occasionally when high-level people would carry their friends through lower level dungeons, but that was all really a matter of choice, now it’s just par for the course. I would imagine a new player going through a leveling dungeon with 4 other people in full heirlooms is probably not getting the most engaging experience.

I remember being in some LFR groups when wings were fresh where we would actually have to communicate to defeat bosses, but it’s not necessarily the case when you have people coming in vastly out-gearing the content, and definitely not the case later in a tier. Surely it isn’t intended that people just faceroll LFR, but it is understandably impossible to gauge how it should be tuned based on the vast differences between the healing/damage throughput of players going into that content.

I’d like to bring up a side point on the philosophy on catch-up mechanics in this game. I understand why the devs want to have these catch-up mechanics in place (see the Black Temple rationale Lore brought up in one of the Q&As), but not everyone needs to catch up. The only people who need to catch up are players being recruited by progressed guilds. Why not have a solution to that like bind-on-guild crafted gear? That kind of thing could be easily controlled by the guild rep system. Global catch-up kills content for everyone. This is yet another among many examples of Blizzard over-solving problems.

It’s so easy to criticize this game because it’s a patchwork of systems with no consistent sense of progression or immersion. It just sucks to think about because there are other aspects of the game that are excellent but I keep playing knowing how much better the overall experience of this game used to be. When I play Mega Man 2, the game asks me what experience I want when I start the game, not at the beginning of each stage. I would love to see WoW get that treatment.

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Are you arguing in favour of pay to win? Or that a player who only does zone quests should get the same gear as mythic raiders?

I’m all for alternate gearing options, which is why I haven’t included high level M+ as a source of high level gear (though I do sorta question why we needed non-stop spammable ilvl 400 gear, when even specific heroics are on a daily lock out and mythics are on a weekly lock out). I’m just not ok with the level of the reward and it’s relation to the level of effort the content requires. I see world content, WFs, and LFR as all equal in terms of level of effort. Zero non-automated grouping required, zero coordination, barely any knowledge of your class required. Why shouldn’t they all be rewarding the same thing (currently 370)? Why do we need to tack on 385 and 400 loot with WF/TF on to WFs and WQs?

I’d rather they have separate progression systems within those systems themselves
 Have those progression systems augment your abilities within those systems! Say the WFs drop pants, that let you horde up to 300 iron/wood during a WF. Or let you jump twice as high. Or iunno, anything! Maybe they could increase your damage to mobs in a WF, or let you cap flags faster. Or let you stack your power buffs higher, or last longer. Or let you control 4 troops instead of 2. Or let you have new troops! Or
 Jeeze
 Anything that amounts to ANY progression. Make items that change your experience in the WF. I would think that someone who truly does WF, because that is solely what they do for their own progression would love that.

What if for WQs there were items that let you teleport between map points. Or reduce WQ requirements? Or methods to open up new world quests with better AP/resource/gold/etc rewards? Even actually lucrative rewards? No, not just fill the bar until you get a reputation reward, but ways to open up portals into different zones like the molten front. Again, all built on systems that you have to ascend through and work your way up through. The key being
 rewards that are not enticing for a raider
 rewards that are enticing for a solo player.

Instead no. The answer is simply
 here’s heroic quality loot that you’re excited to get because you could literally never get something like it before in the game. And now that you’ve gotten that, you now have every single person who dislikes that content and finds it boring playing with you because it drops such high ilvl loot that will be a benefit for their content.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that was the curve right now from S1 -> S2. 370 ilvl Heroic Uldir (or let’s say 380 assuming you have done some M+) -> 385 Norm BoD, Emissaries + 400 WF + 400 WB. In terms of effort, the only one of that second part that makes sense to me is 385 Norm BoD. Everything else on that line requires little to no effort, coordination, or communication.

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You didn’t read the thread at all
no, I don’t want that. I want the exact opposite. Try again.

OK, I get where you’re coming from now. I still don’t think it really affects those raiders though; Those guys are not doing the more casual content though, and are still progressing through their normal means. Unless you mean that it compels them to need to do casual content as well as their HC content in order to better compete in their “bracket” as they can get upgrades from those sources too. That’s a parallel argument really; its not mandatory to do so the compulsion would be self inflicted. True, lowering the ilvl of the prior content then dissuades it, but in the long run just punished the casual player.

I definitely think the whole thing is more complicated than I’m making it seem to be, but I don’t think it has zero effect on those players. People always make the “no one is forcing you to do this content” argument, but I really don’t think that make sense. Think about it logically from their perspective. Why not do those things? We’re trying to kill this boss that has a DPS check, we miss the check by 3 seconds repeatedly meaning we need more gear. Why wouldn’t I go do the WF that will net me a new 400 piece that may push us over that hump? After all it’s only 30 minutes worth of content and I spend more time grinding mats for potions. WQ are also part of the AP grind that I’m already doing to improve my neck to allow me to even use this high ilvl azerite. Why not hand in the emissary quests?

From a player perspective, choosing to actively handicap yourself to achieve the same state of character progression that we had for over a decade seems backwards to me and (I tenuously use this word) a titch selfish towards the team. Particularly if the team is doing their fare share of work to improve.

I don’t know. What would be so wrong about receiving ilvl 370 loot from such content? Is that gear not powerful enough? What if your gear came with some of the affixes I suggested above? Things that raiders wouldn’t have access to (unless they also delved further into these casual systems). Things that augment your power and abilities in WF, gear that improves and expands your WQ experience.

Which would you honestly rather have? Progression that is dedicated to improve and expand what you focus on in game? Or simply ilvl 400 gear that increases your average ilvl number and base stats, but in no way changes what you do each day aside from seeing things die slightly faster.

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Totally, and 100% fairly stated. Personally, I think the ilvl number focus is getting out of control. I forgot to mention that your system is great if it’s possible to do and works as you describe. I’m not sure they’d justify making “casual gear mechanics” rather than just bumping down the ilvl “power”.

So it’s a very complicated conundrum to fix


If you are a casual why do you need higher gear than what you have?

The point of gearing up is to allow you to access harder content, not the other way around. With mob scaling in world content gear doesn’t help there.

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I guess I actually dont know what you’re saying then because it seems to be another case of “I only play 30 mins of lfr a day, I deserve mythic gear” whining.

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