Deterministic Tier? Morgan Day Interview Response

[Letholas-veknilash]

I was watching this interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO3YKYAPxRI) from Jeath & Meeres with Morgan Day, and they touched on two interesting ideas relating to tier, and I’d like to open that conversation here and give my thoughts on why either of them would be a massive improvement.

#1) Omni-token from final boss
Essentially, Morgan mentioned the idea had been tossed around. In the last 2 raids with tier (Sepulcher & Vault) aside from a key weapon (Gavel & Neltharax) the loot from the final boss has been very underwhelming. An Omni-token, which can be turned into any piece of tier would be very helpful to completing tier sets.

#2) Deterministic Tier.
This upcoming raid has 9 bosses, presumably this will be 3 wings or something like that, or what I mean is, 3 achievements that you get for killing A,B,C bosses, as well as the achievement for killing all the bosses at the end. What if each of these achievements (earnable on every difficulty) gave a piece of tier loot, and then the final boss can drop the omni token for whoever wants to have a different 4th slot.

Well what would this do for each archetype of player?

The RWF Raider: One of the best players in the world won’t be locked out because they got unlucky in splits. Maybe less splits as well? (Good for the RWF viewer and lack of heroic week)
The HoF Raider: No major disadvantage on any player by not being given the loot early on or someone who swaps classes to fulfill a role
The Mythic Raider: Same as above, not left behind by the RNG gods waiting for Catalyst to come out to save their character
The LFR/Normal/AOTC raider: Equal distribution of tier for your whole group. No drama about who gets what piece or the guild group that brings some pugs along who “steal” a piece of loot, or on the opposite side, aren’t given a chance to receive it
The transmog collecter… good news! You can get ALL the appearances for the tier set by clearing the raid ONCE!

And finally, the M+ player. Make the catalyst available week 1-2. Don’t change the way M+ gear can be upgraded or turned into tier. Most raiders won’t need to use it to finish their sets, but could if they don’t get the omni-token to drop. Most high end M+er’s will be able to get their sets completed early and upgrade them later, but if they have to wait for week 10 of the tier to be able to upgrade a 4th piece, that feels bad.

But lastly, and maybe most importantly, it would open up drops on the tier bosses. In 9.3 and 10.0, tier bosses were guaranteed to drop 1 token per 10 players in the raid. In mythic, these bosses drop 2 tokens and 2 pieces from their remaining loot pool. Once everyone has their tier… it’s useless. Those drops are just going to be wasted every time you kill the boss, and some of these bosses (Lookin’ at you Diurna) have a BiS rare ring attached to them that people want to farm, but the chance for it to drop is just automatically 50% lower than the eranog ring because the tier tokens take up 2 of their drop slots.

Please consider this change. I don’t see how it is bad for anyone in an era where tier is the first step in any gearing journey right now.

[Níghtstalker-malganis]

They’ve spoken about it in the past: Tier acquisition should be a gradual progress and not the least possible steps away from getting it the same ID the raid opens. I’d rather increase token drop rates from 2 to 3 for 20 players (and scaled for other formats) as well as treating the super rare items as separate additional drops.

We had 3 tokens per boss and omni tokens for mythic raiding before. And in addition also bonus rolls. The catalyst should be the band-aid/alt catch-up it’s meant to be and can still function this way without looking like the sole solution to the result of reducing tier drops.

I suggested it in another thread already:

VOTI Loot Issues ("Very Rare" Items)

Regarding basic access to tier sets as a raider: I went through older discussions I had about that topic before. And the prime example for how far away we are from the basic tier progression pace without the catalyst active (and getting lucky with the vault) would be BRF in WoD. You had 5 bosses drop 3 tier tokens each for 20 players + an endboss also dropping another 3 universal tokens (starts turn-in quest for picking a slot). So nowadays it’s 10 tier tokens in one run compared to 18 back in…

Use superfluous tokens as a way to get regular loot drops OR use them to charge your catalyst to get other slots converted resp. non-set item conversions.

[Loganp-thrall]

I like the omni token.

I think they should have integrated the deterministic tier system with crafting rather than something like achievements or the catalyst. Crafting is evergreen, the catalyst is not. I don’t think they will continue to plop down these “catalysts” in every expansion.

Maybe Mythic bosses, or a subset of them, could drop a new material that works similarly to a spark but it can recraft items into tier pieces. The droprate of these can be tuned, but it at least gives the player something to work toward on a separate track that will give deterministic tier, rather than Blizzard deciding one week that you have it now.