Yeah but those games either have story or have challenge or have both. It is why people enjoy PvP or higher end raiding for the sake of it. But casual content in WoW is rather mind numbing, there is not an achievement or a story that gives you fulfillment thus leaving only a physical reward to fill that spot.
It is why I heavily disagree with Ion and his belief that a mage tower like piece of content isn’t something that should exist every expansion, they took away any sort of challenging content for the casual player without much time on their hand.
That said, the cannot go all out with stuff like that given that they still need to make stuff for the less skilled players or those severely less dedicated. Thus we circle back to my point, how do you have such low engaging content that continues to feel rewarding?
Absolutely agree.
As to your last statement, my entire guild is in the same situation. We have just been progressing through normal BoD casually and wanted to finish it before starting on Heroic (more on that later) yet all of our raid is above 390 ilvl already. About half are between 395-397, the rest between 392-394, minus 2 exceptions one who only just started playing again in the past week (and only really for raids + maybe 1 M+) and another who simply only logs on for the raids and is still 388.
Now as to the reason we made a point of finishing normal first before heroic. It was simply that we had to make a decision to choose encounter progression over gearing.
During Uldir, by the time we had progressed to Zul in normal all of our raiders didn’t need a single piece of gear from normal Uldir. This was about 3 weeks in? 4 at most.
So the guild made the decision to progress Heroic where we could actually start progressing our gear again.
Needless to say the guild hit a road block when they reached Zul again, now normally before doing Heroic the strat would be down before the increased difficulty and the new mechanics. Pretty easy to progress from, but instead, because the guild didn’t want to “waste time” with unrewarding content we were now unable to progress, had even higher gear than before (making normal even more unrewarding) and basically hit a stalemate.
The guild didn’t then decide to push through and do unrewarding content to learn the fight and continue to progress, instead they decided that most people wanted to take a break and do other things. So most people stopped playing until the latest patch with only about half returning back to play (the rest haven’t even logged on since then)
Now, I’m not going to say for certain, however, I believe that had we not been previously over rewarded and passed the threshold of rewards for the normal content, the guild would have been happy to continue progressing normal first before moving onto heroic.
Then once we did heroic we would have been much more prepared for the later bosses and been willing to continue on instead of deciding that the game wasn’t worth playing.
I think the only good thing that comes from gearing people from low end content until they’re ready for highest difficulty content is the salt generated from people that want into some of that higher end content because they’re “ready for it”, but don’t meet the community requirements to determine if they’re actually ready.
Then again, I may just be a connoisseur of the finest io-score generated salts, and this may not be actually a benefit.
I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you are understand the intention of the thread. The OP wants LESS gear so that the content they are doing feels relevant and rewarded. They want to be 370 doing M+ 2 not 390+ doing M+2.
That’s the whole point. Ridiculous gearing devalues content.
You think how silly it is that a 420 WQ item can out gear a mythic raid item and make it redundant. Imagine the people who are supposed to be clearing normal BoD getting that same item. To ever replace that they are looking at needing another item to forge 40 levels again and potentially be better stated. If not, that piece of gear is stale for them until perhaps they can replace it next content patch.
Speaking for myself, my main problem with LFR and dungeons as sources of gear is how unpredictable they are. If I do something like a faction assault or an emissary with a gear reward, I know that I’m getting something. I don’t know exactly what, necessarily, but I know I’ll walk away with a piece of gear of some description, and I can gauge how likely it is that I’ll need that upgrade.
With raids or dungeons, I don’t know that. LFR in particular can take upwards of an hour per wing between queue times and actually running the instance, but most of the time all I have to show for it are a few augment runes and a paltry amount of gold and AP.
I imagine if I ran raids or dungeons more often that randomness would smooth out, but as it is, it’s annoying to commit my time and not get anything. Although sources like assaults, emissaries, and warfronts are fewer and further between, they reset often enough to keep me busy, and the guaranteed rewards are more appealing.
The other thing that draws me to different content is actually transmogs. In two, three, four years, if I’m still playing, I won’t care whether I was ilvl 385 or 400 in patch 8.1, but I will care about what I have at my disposal when I open up the transmog browser. I’ve definitely done content I otherwise have little interest in (yet another Darkshore warfront, ugh) for the sake of mogs.
What I’d like to see going forward is pretty simple: more reliable drops, and a more reliable way of getting the right drops. Getting my ninth pair of Aspirant’s pants but no gloves, for instance, is rather frustrating. Whether this is through e.g. an expanded Residuum or other currency system, loot tokens, some kind of whitelist/blacklist for slots, I don’t really care, as long as I feel like I’m not wasting my time getting nothing or endless repeats of items I already have.
I’m not sure I agree. The same logic can be used to say you get one piece of 1000 ilvl gear every year, does that mean it is ok?
The gear would be static for the entire expansion, it would never be replaced, if you got a bad one you would feel terrible not great about getting such a good piece, and what if someone’s forged to 1200?
All content would be irrelevant as it would inflate your ilvl to an amazing degree. Imagine if it was a ring with haste on it? Haste breakpoints already reached through one item.
Obviously it is a massive exaggeration of the situation but it is the situation. Time-gating is not difficulty.
Just because it’s available once in a blue moon does not mean its just “ok”.
I honestly don’t understand why players hate time-gating, but then are perfectly fine with it when it grants them boosts in gear rewards.
To be fair it doesn’t really help people getting back into content. They don’t require the gear and all it does is remove an item (or many) from their potential progression path.
You don’t need to have huge bonuses nor play the game 20 hours a week to not suffer during content.
If you don’t have bonuses the content you are doing will continue to be relevant as you will not have progressed your gear/character/skill when you next log back in and will be at the same place where you left it.
All that time and access would do is speed up or slow down your progression curve.
I think you’re misreading into what I was saying. The main point of the first quote was that the time it takes to get a piece matters when considering it. I think your iLvL 1000 response is hyperbole so I’ll ignore it.
As for the second quote… that directly goes back to something Ion said in the most recent Q&A. The gearing systems actually DO help people get back in without holding guilds back or permanently excluding them for the rest of the expac.
Please understand that I’m not saying the current system is perfect. It is by no means, and could use a lot of improvement but I don’t think cutting everybody off at the knees when there are already painful gearing holes is worth it.
The thing is time != effort, effort/skillful play should be what dictates what ilevel the gear is not time.
Time Gating != Skillful play.
Back in the day, I.E in Cata, I started out late on my DK, joined a guild that was newer and ran dungeons and heroics with a little bit of BoT/BRD till we were prepared for Firelands. From there we went on to clear up to heroic spine in Dragon Soul. We worked towards that gear then, so we could progress. That isn’t how the game is anymore, and I think it takes away some of it’s charm. That is how is progression game is supposed to be, you’re supposed to feel like you’re progressing your character not just doing non-challenging objectives and getting close to end game gear.
my only gripe with the system is that it’s not alt friendly.
IA m leveling an alt, but I need to play him and my main currently until I can switch over because I am tired of playing my main, but I like the competitive advantage I have with other players on the opposing faction. To switch over even with the easier to level neck, I would lose out on at least 5 or 6 lvls on my azerite neck compared to my main.
how many hours are you putting in though? Because I get to play a couple of hours a day and I like to complete all my WQ emissary on my main, IE and weekly quest as well as any WF if it is up before I jump on an alt. Raid Tues/Thurs so I need to be ready for that…plus working 12 hours a day and family at night before raiding and majorly gaming…
That’s the thing, though. Casuals have been complaining about not having a progression system that caters to them. Very, very, very few of us have wanted Heroic/Mythic raiding gear from our content.
We just want somewhere to go. That does mean having some system to progress with, but it doesn’t have to result in us having raid gear. That debate has almost twice as often been started by raiders who dislike the progression systems they’ve tried to make for us.
This aside, most of their gearing systems are designed to skip people over the casual content and directly into raiding. They’ve always had problems with players showing up halfway through an expansion and being less capable of getting into current content. Their answer was to make all of the catch-up mechanics that we see today.
Let’s not pretend they’re showering us with gear because casuals were asking for more gear. That might have been a nice side effect in their minds, but Blizzard has likely never understood the casual. In their minds, if you can just get the gear to do the harder content, they have no idea why you’d not go do it.
Time to get something and “isn’t available all the time” are too different things.
I would argue that having to do a menial task for 6 hours could be as challenging as a difficult task that only requires concentration for a brief 30s period.
But that isn’t the same. We are talking about warfront A taking x minutes and rewarding a 400 piece and warfront B taking x minutes and rewarding a 355 piece. It’s exactly the same content, exactly the same difficulty, and (within reason) exactly the same time to complete.
There is no reason A should reward more than B because “it’s the first time doing it this week/month/year”. It doesn’t change the content. It’s a reward system deliberately manifested to make people play the game.
It’s like those phone games people play and turn on for 5 minutes to get the “daily reward” without possibly even participating in the actual game.
They are incentivise us to perform a habit we might not normally choose to do. And honestly it’s a pretty negative design when referring to psychology.
For a start I wouldn’t trust everything from the Q & As, obviously they have a lot of interesting facts to put out, but we have to always remember that it is within their interest to be bias towards a certain point.
Very rarely will they be entitled to say “we messed up”, and when it does it will always be declared softly such as “maybe it was a bit high”. They certainly aren’t allowed to say “we designed weekly rewards caches and WF/TF gear so that players feel the need to constantly participate in the content or be left out.”
It’s just not something they are going to say.
And while I agree, it does provide benefit to some players who want to jump into content and skip difficulties it can be helpful. I don’t think that we can state that that is the majority.
And even while it does, does it not feel disappointing to not be able to upgrade those slots during your progression content?
If I use a 400 ilvl cloak to boost my character so I can do normal BoD with the rest of my gear around 365 I’m not exactly going to be happy when a boss from BoD drops another glorious 385 cloak that I can’t use am I?
And then I do a WQ embassy and get a 385 which I now potentially can’t replace etc.
Players shouldn’t be 390+ while progressing through normal with no rewards. But we are. And a lot of those players will be sporting 410+ items, some even 425.
One of our Paladins has 425 hands with crit/haste from warfront this week before stepping into Heroic. Never going to upgrade that piece until maybe…8.2? In like how many months? 3 at the least.
Another has a 420 ring, I personally have 3 items at 410 and a 400 with socket and good stats. We only just started Heroic last night with only time to kill Champions.
A lot of people are in the situation where they have been over rewarded and now they look at the loot tables and go “well if I get this one item in particular, and if it warforges, maybe it’s worth using a bonus roll on”
Some people may like the system, I’m not saying they are wrong for disliking it.
I’m just saying that there are multiple reasons that I personally think that the system isn’t great because of and I’m sure there are other people of the same opinion.
OP is a good example who feels the casual content they want to do it unrewarding because it offers less than WQ/warfront rewards.
A fair point Novax. I do have more time than many, admittedly. However in terms of being efficient with time, sometimes I let an emmissary stack up two days then complete on the alt. On days that I don’t raid on the main, I’ll catch the alt up. Now, if I were doing my Pally too 3, might be too much even for me. The neck power is a bit underwhelming, you notice it more in the early stages.of gearing but even @ neck 35, in 385 gear, you’d be ok, excepting for maybe high arena or mythics.
But what’s the point of gearing up for something they’re going to outgear? Why would anybody do normal when the gear you get from more effortless content is better?
Game was better when you had to gear step by step, little by little it was more fun and felt like real true character progression. When’s the last time you were really excited for a piece of loot? For me it’s been a long time.
Like I said, in Cata I went from fresh 85 Blood DK into heroics, then into BoT/BWD, from there into Firelands till we progressed into Dragon Soul eventually clearing up to Heroic Spine. It felt rewarding, and fun gave the game a real sense of progression.
I feel this is true. It’s a weird situation where the game is incredibly easier to gear up an alt today…if you have the time.
Without the time you are still going to find yourself left short.
But if you can do one M+ each week, do the warfront when it’s up, do the embassies daily, do invasions and so forth, then yes. With all the huge guaranteed rewards you will be ahead, or able to catch up an alt.
But ultimately not many people really have that time.
I personally can’t find the time to do more than 2-3 hours raiding twice a week and potentially a M+ after one of them for my weekly if I decide I don’t mind being tired and cranky the next day.
There is a veritable laundry list of free large rewards that I have to choose to miss out on for that reason.
I couldn’t imagine trying to find time to gear an alt as well without serious consequences to my main. Hence why this guy is still only 112.
If you listen to any devs talk about loot they generally tell “player stories” about someone returning from an absence and catching up to jump into the current raid, or someone gearing alts for the same reason. I’ve never ever heard a dev state the motivation for these loot changes is to just feed gear to casuals because they were asking for it.
![:+1:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/+1.png?v=6" ":+1:")