DPS difference between fresh 120 and geared with full essences is too wide

Community General Discussion
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Returning player here.

Some background. Like a lot of folks, I’m coming back after a very long break. With the virus lockdown, I’ve been laid off and have a bunch of time on my hands, so I resubbed and have been going hard at the game for a couple weeks now. I’ve been a very hardcore player in the past, getting some top 150s in spec during Legion.

The DPS gap between fresh and geared is too wide. We’re not talking 25% between fresh and geared, we’re talking a fourfold or greater differential between fresh and geared players, which is nonsense. Over the last week, my simmed DPS has gone up over 10k. That 10k is entirely passive.

Part of the problem with this is that major sources of DPS are all passive, and time gated behind grinds. Essence ranks are dominantly passive (entirely if you run Visions of Perfection, like every class I play does), and every rank can be a passive 1-3k dps increase. A lot of these passive damage sources are outright time gated. So with no essences, you are about 15k-20 DPS behind somebody with full essences, FROM ENTIRELY PASSIVE DAMAGE, that you cannot catch up on without sitting through a time gated grind.

Corruptions are also absurdly unbalanced, and again, being behind on cloak locks you out of them. Coalescing Visions are effectively time gated. If you haven’t been farming them since week 1, you’re doing another 10-20k less DPS arbitrarily.

Both of these two systems are entirely passive damage as well, there’s no gameplay to the 20-40k DPS differential between fresh and Essenced/Corrupted players, so you can’t even outplay or outskill a player with these advantages. So much of the damage in 8.3 is passive that it hardly feels like my buttons do anything. I haven’t looked at my damage totals, but I’m going to assume that only 35% of my damage is active (active including fire and forget spells).

I’m just wondering how much of a differential is okay, because this feels like too much. We start the expansion in the 15k range, and we’re pushing 80k. Fresh 120s with catchup gear do maybe 25k dps, but max Essence/Corrupted players with moderate gear are going to do over 50k. Mythic or equivalent players are doing over 80k sustained.

The game is fun, generally speaking, there’s a lot I’m enjoying, but I can’t help but think the progression system is fairly broken right now. There’s very little I can do to interact with my character build, and just about every choice I have to make increases my damage in a totally passive way. I genuinely think that skill expression in WoW is at an all time low.

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While I have the usual gripes about gearing being too RNG dependent in BFA, I don’t think a fully loaded (for lack of a better word) essence player Doing tremendously more damage than one who is not is a bad thing.

They put in the effort they should reap the rewards.

This isn’t an elitist point of view because if you check, my gear is lack luster by comparison because as long as it can do what I need to do (solo old content) I don’t care.

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I only agree with this principle if the Essences are not time gated. I have been playing 6-8 hours every day for the last week and am not even half done collecting the Essences that I need to reach a competitive standard. Some Essences are gated behind 3+ week time gates. There’s nothing I can do to interact with that, even though I have the time and drive to do so.

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The difference between a fresh DPS in MoP and a fully SoO-geared DPS by the end of SoO was absolutely tremendous.

The difference between a fresh 100 and a 100 in full Mythic HFC gear with a 795 ring was absolutely hilarious. We’re talking 15k DPS versus, in some situations, several hundreds of thousands of DPS because the bosses would die so hilariously fast.

The difference between a fresh character in early Legion and a geared 110 with their BiS legendaries, their maxed-out Argus trinket, and the like was about 350k versus 3.5 million DPS.

These gaps have always existed. BFA powercreep isn’t even close to the most extreme we’ve ever seen.

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The major difference between those situations and this situations is that catchup wasn’t time gated. My major issues with this situation is timegating, and the damage differential being entirely passive.

If a player capped a fury warrior, in a heroic SoO guild, they could be powerfarmed into relevance in a few raid lockouts. They aren’t arbitrarily beind 50% of their DPS from a set of rewards systems that do entirely passive damage. In addition, the DPS differentials in prior expansions were active, you at least needed to participate.

There were no essences in MoP or Legion. There was no Cloak in MoP or Legion.

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Well put Dreadfurry. BfA’s desparity between fresh and final tiered raiders isn’t that horrible. Plus, your average player can get up to 430ish within a day or two, 445 within a week and 460 within a couple weeks.

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In MoP, not quite.

Umm… Yes there was? And the questline to get it took a bloody long time, but it wasn’t as timegated as the Essence system.

In WoD the maxed-out legendary ring was more time-gated than all of BFA combined, and nobody who played during that time period can deny it.

In Legion the gating wasn’t so much time as it was layers upon layers of RNG. It could take a couple hours or a couple MONTHS to get the only legendaries that would truly matter for your spec.

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When has there ever only been a 25% difference between a fresh or geared player?

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How are they gated? Like I said I haven’t chased this dragon because it is irrelevant to what I do in game. So I am not very familiar w/ the mechanics of it.

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That’s the issue imo. If you turbo nerd nolife it you should be able to catch up.

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Okay, and I recognize the ring and MoP cloak. I raided both tiers, SoO in Heroic, and HFC in Mythic. I don’t think those situations are remotely similar to what’s going on now.

Neither the ring or MoP cloak compose even half of what Corruptions and Essences are providing to players now. They were major upgrades, yes, but they were not backbreakingly powerful like the BfA systems are. I’d go so far as to say if you were to dig up a simcraft build for 6.2 or 5.4, you would find that the gap between having MoP cloak or WoD ring, and not having those, is a very very minor hit to throughput compared to the gap we have in 8.3.

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The Nazjatar follower EXP essence is a big one. Blood of the Enemy is another big one. Worldvein Resonance is also gated behind many many weeks of play. I have two weeks of lockouts before I can unlock rank 3 with no way to interact with that progression. There’s another from Eternal Palace with weekly locked drops, and while I’m not grinding that one out, if I were on Paladin, I would need to.

Blood, I can chip away at over time, but to get r3 in the Naz essence, you have to commit to 20 days of daily quests, as you can do 3 per day and need to complete 60.

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Thank you for the laugh. :joy:

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Rank 1 or 2 vs rank 3 of most essences is only going to be a 1-2k dps difference for most cases. You’ll live… Work on your ilvl in the mean time, it will have a much more drastic impact on your dps.

+2k dps, when you’re doing 20k is a lot. +2k dps, when you’re doing 70k is trivial unless you’re doing mythic n’zoth.

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You’re playing it off in a very reductionist manner. I’ve picked up 3 trait ranks this week and my DPS has gone up 5k in that time, with no gear upgrades to back it. At 20k dps, 2k is a 10% increase, and I frankly think it’s nonsensical to write off a 10% increase as minor.

You have 4 essence slots, and every slot is facing that scaling. If we follow your model and average every rank to 1.5k DPS, which is about right, the gap between full rank 1s and full rank 3s is around 12k, which is as important, if not moreso, than gear.

The reason I call it arguably more important than gear is because it’s entirely passive and non-interactive damage, which is always going to be superior than potential damage that needs skill to execute on.

I’m not looking for a personal solution I understand how to optimize the system. I’m just looking to discuses the systems.

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The difference is significant, but it’s not THAT significant. Your numbers are completely off and inflated.

In my guild’s log’s of our Mythic Skitra kill last week (a largely Patchwerk-style fight), our top dps did 71k dps, with the average being roughly 45-50k. A Mechagon 15 M+ run (the bare minimum to get max ilvl gear), similarly had our dps between 45-70k. Mind you, these are with full class/food buffs, bloodlust, flasks and consumables. Average ilvl is between 468-472. A lot of our damage also comes from Corruption rng; both in acquisition and how often they proc in a fight.

I do agree however that the gearing system now is rather daunting for new/returning players if you hadn’t played in 8.2. This likely isn’t going to be fixed for the rest of the BfA as there will no longer be any major patches, so what I recommend for you now is to ask yourself: what exactly are you aiming for? What content will you be doing the most?

With that in mind, you can then target specific essences. You only really need 2-3 at Rank 2-3 to be “viable”, and doing the appropriate dailies should get you a full set within a month or two. If you don’t plan on doing any Mythic+ 15s, Rated PvP or Heroic Nyalotha though, then it shouldn’t really matter what essences you have equipped.

There’s really not much else to discuss with this system, because we all know it’s a failure. We also already know it won’t carry on in any form into Shadowlands.

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This is the question that I don’t believe many posters in this thread quite understand.

I’ve never been interested in floating along the bottom. Since WoD I have always participated in the highest levels of content, 10/15 dungeons, mythic raids, etc. I am trialing in a 8/12m guild right now, and the throughput gap between me and the top players is staggering, and looking at damage compositions, a vast, vast amount of that gap is purely passive. I don’t play WoW casually, I either play hardcore or I don’t play the game.

I’m looking at these systems from a competitive standpoint, as a returning player who has not played 8.2.

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Let’s say you have a five man group that can kill a boss in 3 minutes. Let’s say that you’re making up 27% of the group’s dps(50k/50k/50k/25k/10k=185k). Doing 10% more dps means that you’d be doing 55k, bringing the group total up to 190k. If the boss died in 180 seconds at 185k total dps, then at 190k total, would mean it would die in a little over 175 seconds. You just shaved off five seconds… Pretty trivial when it’s only one person with a dps gain. Now if the whole party had gimp essences vs having rank 3s giving them a 10% dps increase, then a 180s fight turns into a 162s fight. In raids, your personal dps increase has even less of an impact if you’re in a 15-20 man group.

The only time things like a 10% dps increase make a difference is in progression content like mythic raiding or keys in the 17+ range.

Statistically speaking, you’re probably a blue parser. Just getting better at playing the game will likely have a stronger impact on your numbers.

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I am completely fine with people in a 8/12m raid guild blowing a fresh 120’s dps out of the water.

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If that’s the case, you should easily be able to get all your “BiS” essences in less than a month. That time frame is plenty doable if you complete all the necessary dailies/weeklies. Incidentally, just under a month is also the time frame all of us took for the BiS 8.3 essences (Breath of the Dying being a key example). So unless you’re suggesting they should nerf still relevant, current patch content grinds…

I also geared one of my alts in the first week of 8.3 from 410 ilvl to 445 ilvl in less than a week, purely from doing world quests and emissaries. I imagine if you’re in a 8/12 mythic guild, you should have no issue in doing so in a day or two from spamming M+ with them.