I’m a relatively new player to WoW, but I was pretty disappointed that all the best items from previous expansions barely mean anything these days. Mounts that people used to show off belong to like 20% of the server now. All the gear is basically worthless.
Sure, release new equipment and make it better suited for the new zones, but why devalue everything people worked for in the past? It’d be great if I could just stay in the classic zones outside of chromie time, while also being able to switch over to new content whenever I feel like it. If I get an item from two expansions ago, I want it to still be viable, not just junk. Don’t let me solo the toughest boss from a previous expansion like it means nothing.
I know a bit too late for current retail because they’ll never reset people’s progress, but basically ruined the endgame for me (as I have little interest in current raids). When I started, I thought I’d get to experience all of WoW and I’d get to find groups/guilds interested in the same old content as me and do old raids, but nope, it’s actually just sitting around with an alt army.
I don’t really know what you expect. Not everything can be relevant all the time while there’s still any sort of progression or new content. If you want to progress through all of the old content as if it were current you should be playing Classic.
I’m afraid that gear has been getting devalued and made obsolete since the first time you equipped gear outside the starting zone. (or in it from a drop or quest)
Because that means that we’d end up in situations where we have 20+ years worth of content to do before we can get to the new content. If one were to make old content relevant.
Honestly… it sounds like WoW isn’t your game in that case. Most MMOs work on keeping the world alive by making time play a role in how the game plays and how content is developed. If you go and play a game like let’s say ESO where every type of content is evergreen, well… then the only reason you do anything in the game is for the story.
Which is why ESO plays more like a version of Skyrim but with different combat mechanics, no modding, and all of the NPCs are players instead. For some, that sounds awesome - the multiplayer Skyrim experience that mods couldn’t ever quite get right. But, Skyrim is a singleplayer RPG - not a MMO.
For MMOs to work, time has to exist as a component of the world. You don’t get to have Ash Ketchum being perpetually and permanently 12 years old whilst everyone else around him can experience character growth and aging. You are playing a living world, not a frozen world - so old stuff will be old and trivialized by the necessity that you get more powerful the more you play the game.
Play Classic: Season of Discovery and don’t buy all of the runes, turn off the experience boost, and just go and explore the world. The reason for me recommending SoD specifically is due to it being a version of WoW that the developers wished that they could’ve released Vanilla as. Not quite the same but in hindsight, that’s what they see that it is the thing that they wanted Vanilla originally to be.
There’s plenty of game balance reasons why old gear isn’t relevant.
We’ve had expansions that have legendary gear with huge bonuses. Why wouldn’t everyone just farm old content for the legendary items and use that for every expansion moving forward? Gear would stagnate and unless there was some new incredibly OP piece of gear, it would be useless.
Expansions are pretty compartmentalized so that you can skip one without having to slog through 20 years of content in order to prepare for current content.
Edit: I can understand wanting to experience some of the older content as it was when released, but there are some other avenues for that like classic servers and what not. You might be able to find a group of like minded people or guild to raid old content with level appropriate characters, but I don’t think many people are doing that content on retail for the challenge.
Legendaries and sets with bonuses aside, I do think it would be cool if some of the old gear came back in via delve versions of old dungeons and raids.
That also comes back in the form of TW dungeon loot, albeit at a lower ilvl. There is actually very little dungeon loot that is not consistently made to be relevant at the current level.
There’s also another sticking point here in that the old loot is no longer really the same loot it was, because the entire game works differently in a mechanical sense when it comes to stats and character building.
But other than that, the only thing they need to do to make “old” loot relevant is bump the ilvl up to the current level, and they do that pretty regularly.
I’m not going to claim I have an ideal solution to it, but I believe other games already do. There’s still low level content, but the max level content of an expansion remains max level content. I don’t see anything wrong with using the best WoTLK items in TWW as well.
I guess that eliminates the need for the gear treadmill, so maybe optimize the equipment in the current expansion for the current expansion’s raids. Old gear maybe won’t get you the best numbers, but it could still be viable.
EDIT: Not sure how seasonal stuff would be handled though.
Using ESO as an example…you end up with 350+ sets of max level gear that overwhelms new players despite the fact that only the current x-pack’s gear is competitive or relevant.
Its not worth the effort on Blizz’s or players part to deal with that when our current system produces the same effect
You are still missing the point. I’m saying they should make the super old content relevant by turning it into delves. A fair bit of it simply isn’t suitable for M+, but it would work as a delve, or a series of delves. Take Maraudon, for instance.
There are a few problems with that, the first one being that there isn’t really a point. You can transmog your gear into anything you want, so cosmetically you can already use all of the WotLK gear you want and have it be as relevant as ever.
One of the main reasons people play MMOs is because they like getting new gear and making their characters stronger, which is directly at odds with simply parking your character on a set from WotLK until the end of time. It’s just not something a whole lot of people are going to be clamoring for.
I don’t dislike it. At first I sort of did but with the addition of timewalking, I don’t miss it at all. The scaling is awful. And then if they fixed that then it would be too hard to steamroll through old places for collection items.
You are gravely underestimating the number of old heads still playing this game. They still make up the vast majority, and a lot of them would be perfectly happy getting endgame gear from WotLK, or even further back.
I agree that would be a cool idea and make soloing old content more engaging. I just thought we were talking primarily about the gear itself, which they can and do constantly bring back and make relevant as it is.
You might prefer Guild Wars 2, which never raises the level cap when new content comes out.
Though personally, I prefer being able to eventually outlevel old content, because it gradually shifts to soloable content. I wouldn’t want everything to remain relevant forever, in part because that would be lost, but I also wouldn’t want to have to commit dozens and dozens of dungeons to memory in perpetuity.
That got progressively more exhausting for me when I tried FF14, and new instances kept getting piled onto the dungeon finder as I leveled up. eventually I stopped looking forward to new content when it all started to blend together.
Again, what’s the point? I’m an old head and I don’t have any desire to bring end game WotLK gear into TWW, because why would I? Cosmetically I can already do that and past that it’s just numbers, and I want the numbers to go up.