If you have a system that you want players to like, and its good and makes sense it shouldn’t take 10 pages of text to explain it.
Watch this.
“You get badges from dungeon and raid bosses, then trade them in at a vendor to get the items you want.”
WOW I just explained badge gear in 1 sentence.
Note that it didn’t take 10 pages of text, a table, and a whole lot of unnecessary exposition.
Blizzard, it’s not that I don’t think your system stacking could possibly work.
But it’s more that we’ve been down this rabbithole before… and you really suck at it.
We still remember Shadowlands, and BFA, and Legion.
And endless grinds are NOT something you are good at.
As a fury warrior main who likes to play alts, as described, this system might be the best gearing system blizzard has ever had for wow. I’m super excited to use/try it.
This is very clearly one of major pain points for this new system. We’re going to have to farm high level keys for the proper items because if we get them on too low of a level, they’ll be on the wrong upgrade path to use them for the long term.
This system really seems like the intent to is to make it harder for players to obtain and progress their gear, while disguising it as a “simplification” of prior systems like Valor and Storm Sigils.
I just reread this for a third time…
You could take out steps 2, 3, and 4, simplify the currencys down to a single currency, get rid of the complicated structure of upgrades and caps, remove the completely unnecessary and arbitrary rankings of “adventurer” and “champion” and “veteran” etc… and just rename that currency to “badges” and remove the timegating of crests.
And it would just be your current Valor system of upgrades with badges as currency.
Why do you have to ruin it with extra BS that adds nothing?
I get that this was thrown together by a team of “system designers” who are paid to put out new systems with lots of steps… but that’s just stupid.
I’m basing this on the table they posted. It shows item level 428 as having upgrade level Hero 1/5. Ilvl 428 is equivalent to 402 this season, which is obtained from end of dungeon chests in a +17/18.
We don’t know what item level world drops will scale up to in season 2.
In season 1, I’ve seen claims that people have gotten up to 402 ilvl drops from “super elites”, though some sources claim 392 is a cap. Based on the new system, it seems that would have allowed you to get the item to heroic or possibly even low mythic raid level when fully upgraded.
You’re comparing the upgrade items/currency which are similar but the new system has a lot more limitations and complexity than the crafting system, which they even talk about as being separate.
The entire drop tier system and having different upgrade limitations based on that isn’t comparable to crafting at all. In fact, it seems like I’ll more than likely be able to upgrade my season 1 crafts to season 2 levels using the same items I already have + new season 2 crafting mats.
There are three categories of gear that are not part of this system. The first is crafted gear, which will be upgraded using recrafting, much the same as it’s done now.
They could have just had a simple system where every item dropping in season 2 was x/15 or 20 or whatever and upgradeable. They need items from a certain difficulty to upgrade, so it’s not as though you’d be able to take a +2 item and get to mythic raid level without ever doing difficult content. Having several separate base tiers made it so they had to write a giant blog post about it with example charts when a simple upgrade system would have taken a paragraph.
what the ???who the ?? huh?? there creating a whole new upgrade system, this was really unexpected …hmmm…I like where they going with this … its not complicated its neat and clean…very user friendly…good job…
You won’t need to raid, but to upgrade your gear you will need to use gear that started at a higher item level, you will need to do higher keys to earn currency to upgrade that gear, and you might need to do more total keys to upgrade your gear (that last part is unclear).
If your new system can’t be explained in 3 paragraphs or less, maybe its just time to stop. Stop trying to make stupid, convoluted systems for the sake of creating busy work for players. We get it, the system developers need something to do, but this isn’t the way to do it.
I have a few more questions in addition to my question above about what content will drop each type of Crest:
What incentive is there to spend crests as you’re collecting them? The way I read this, the best play seems to be to simply run the highest content possible to get into the right loot band necessary to minimize the need to spend more crests than necessary to upgrade items.
What impacts will this have when crafting new gear? Will this gear require a crest to move beyond 418 (the max of S1) into the higher item levels of S2 or can a crafter simply make a new item with a new spark without the need to spend any crests?
Trading gear seems to be a very risky proposition in this system. Let’s say I run a key and get a chest piece with a high item level but terrible stats for me. It would be in my best interest to keep that piece of gear instead of trading it to someone else who might benefit from those stats because equipping it would reduce the amount of currency I would need to spend on a lower ilvl piece of gear with better stats, right?
I’m still unclear on alts. If I get a “Mythic” piece of gear on my main, the article says my alt will get a discount on flightstones to upgrade its gear but will my alt be required to spend Crests to move up in loot bands if it hasn’t obtained an item of higher ilvl in the slot I want to upgrade?
Why do we need so many currencies? Isn’t there an achievement system to track raid progression? Or an m+ score that already controls valor upgrades?
Do we really need multiple additional currencies for this?
Lastly - these better go on the currency tab and not just more junk in my inventory. We have quite a few of those already - primal focus, concentrated primal focus and then to a lesser extent the fusions, primal chaos, sparks.
Meh … this already happens. It is just a matter of whether or not you need to clear each dungeon at least once to push the score, before you go back to just the easy dungeon going forward. Not sure there is any real work-around, short of something very rigid like forcing your vault to require distinct dungeons (so no SMB 8 times per week).
So can you clarify this? Are you saying if we run 3-5 M+ dungeons, we can upgrade up to 424, but if we run around 10 NORMAL dungeons we can upgrade it to 441?
So the new system is using 5 inventory spaces (assuming they truly stack as wells as explained) - this is better than the current inventory system. (I.e Storm marks only going up to twenty and many different types).
Is there any plan to allow them to transfer between characters?
Or if they are attached to a character with no way to transfer them, why not make them a currency instead? This would make them better than the training matrixes which basically become junk that just takes up space before you can use them in most cases.
I have no idea what I just read, my eyes are burning, and I don’t understand why gear, making gear, leveling gear needs to be so complex when it can be this simple:
Get gear
Do things (world quest, dungeons, mythics, etc etc)
Get valor for those things
Upgrade gear.
