I am copying my comment from a Youtube video because I believe this needs to be a thing and it’s rarely discussed… and there will NEVER be a better expansion in the game outside of the rebuilding of the Dragonflights to include this wonderful concept that some other games already have. Because of this, I will link this ‘Dragonflight Interview with Ion Hazzikostas’ and will refer to just the first segment where he states that the earliest form of ‘borrowed power’ are gear and set bonuses. I apologize for the extra effort of this discussion and welcome comments to the thread regardless:
I think he makes a strange comparison I disagree with in the beginning… Gear IS borrowed power, but only because we now can’t CHOOSE to give up stats for effects, and that’s because THEY took that choice from us. We had it once, now it’s gone.
The answer in the next expansion would be simple: Bronze Dragonflight. Create permanent timewalking and let raids reacquire higher levels of old gear that lets us choose our own set bonuses. This would also give guilds endless new content between new raid releases so players don’t go offline for months at a time; we want functional and viable sets that work for unique specialization choices and not just a copy/paste from Icy-Veins, because the new gear is so limited that there are no other options to yield the same results. Choice of set bonus should be as much a part of our chosen play style as our class and talents.
And I get it, we should want to push forward rather than play past raids, but it’s easily remedied: only give us gear from past expansions equal to our average item level. Sure, we’ll sometimes get a slightly better piece if we are playing an alt and had most of a set ready for us when we hit level cap, but who cares? That’s our 2nd+ time through, and if we have time for that AND gearing a main character BRAVO! And why should they not re-use these past attributes in the future? It’s easy and brand new for every new player in the game, most of whom will never see it unless they are fashionistas or mount collectors (or the rare pet battle fiend, or NEED that one title for an RP realm, etc.) and that is nowhere near the REAL experience.
You’ve gotta admit, some of the past weapons, trinkets, and sets would absolutely SHAKE THE FOUNDATION of websites like Icy-Veins and DESTROY the notion of ‘one meta to rule them all’ in both PvE AND PvP, especially if we are allowed to use all effects in battlegrounds again!
I mean I can agree that having Raids playable to an extend with our current character would be a lot of fun, just like in FFXIV.
But I don’t actually want the gear from these raids if anything only the transmogs.
Imagine if each player in your raid group needed a gear set from a different raid… I know there are some ways this sounds really cool, but it would be a nightmare for groups that only raid 2-3 nights per week. xD
Old Warrior Soul and Edge of Night are still BIS and people don’t go back and farm Mythic SoD. Do people think anyone will actually go back and do old raids?
The current meta is the extend meta. People don’t raid enough based on the skill level of most raiders to clear content without extending and focusing only on the current raid.
Many of those set bonuses would have to be reworked. The abilities that they effected have all been changed and some removed.
Not that this is an issue, if Blizz was going to go and redo all old raid content and make it comparably difficult to live raids doing the slight extra work to change the set bonuses would be a small issue.
But you would have to realize that the set bonuses you remember could not be the same today.
I just like the idea of all old raids being redone so they are on level of the current raid. I think this would be awesome and give the game so much more endgame content.
However this would pretty much require those raids being entirely redone so that they worked with current abilities/classes and character level. I highly doubt blizz will ever spend the amount of time it would take to do this. Additionally, if they did do this, I imagine they would slow down Patch releases because the players would have so much more end game content and therefore wouldn’t need new raids as fast (Blizz likely thought process)
I also think there’s a huge difference between 2 items being “technically” BiS vs whole entire gear sets for every class being scattered all across expansions. Imagine if the current tier set bonuses were tied to gear in different raids for each class.
Ah, but see, it’s not REQUIRED for the experience, just an option for people who WANT these unique items. And it would allow people to PUG outside of their normal raids if they have time.
Slightly reworking gear is NOT the same effort as creating it AND the content that drops it from scratch. Many raids would not need to be redone because they already exist in timewalking, just aren’t available for very long and with very little point to run them again.
Just for forum etiquette, it is better to edit one post instead of creating multiple new ones. The forum should also said so after the 2nd reply.
I understand where you are coming from.
And with DF we will have a similar system in place for M+
The problem is, that older items sometimes have better effects than current items.
and even if they would not reach current top gear they could be still better.
Therefore imho TW raids shouldn’t give gear to that extend like actual Expansion content.
But I’m all for a challenge for Transmog.
Apologies, I’ve played this game since roughly BCs launch and rarely post, still trying to get used to the tools and etiquette here.
This, however, is the philosophy of a player who has been beaten down by one of the largest points of ‘WoW logic’. You are SETTLING for less than the game should be because it is still better than what it is NOW. I understand it is hard to balance gear across such a vast land; I myself have some coding experience and also am writing an expansion book for D&D 5e as a balanced yet powerful addition to the game that still feels like progression and helps players multiclass more successfully (because the base game feels it’s too strong, they made it artificially much weaker than it needs to be… excepts a few meta builds).
This is the suggestion that content is difficult enough in the higher item leveled raids and dungeons that having powerful gear ISN’T game breaking. Mythic difficulties SHOULD NOT be the ‘story mode’, normal should be; that’s why it’s ‘normal’, because it’s now we NORMALLY acquire the content and story. The higher difficulty raids should be a TRUE challenge that may not be conceived as beatable (as was once the case with raids at the end of vanilla). This is also not taking from the current and the new, because you would need to gear yourself in (mostly) the new highest gear available before the old content gear would scale up to a point that it would be a significant upgrade to spend time in old content for.
I wish to make one more point on this too, I don’t expect set bonuses to all be completely reworked. They might have an easy replacement effect, but it could also be that a set is reduced to a 2 set bonus or made transmog only. I still feel that a quick replacement spell is not so difficult that we couldn’t see old raids roll out with MOSTLY old set bonuses and equip effects. The idea that they haven’t is more astounding to me. They are the ones who let old content die when they NEEDED filler content for a patch that was going to take time or a prelaunch that got pushed back.
Scaling is already in effect in many of these instances, we can simply scale down to the raid in question as we do with timewalking.
The extend meta is guilds choosing to extend their raid lockout forever, based on the perception that “they have enough gear” and would rather spend all of their time trying to progress a boss. Many guilds with only intermediate skill level of players are doing content designed for more skilled players and it can take hundreds of pulls.
A previous guild I was in took more than 500 pulls to kill Painsmith. Big cringe, but that’s what happens when boomers insist on continuing to push raid content beyond their skill level. Regardless, what happens is the guild just does the same boss for multiple months at a time rather than killing previous bosses. The whole thing is a bit of a joke in my opinion, a result of some players not staying in their lane, but eh, it is what it is.
Extend Meta impacts the largest chunk of Mythic Raiders, those who are not CE but are beyond AOTC. Wanna-be Mythic Raiders get stuck in this cursed region, and wouldn’t have time to ever do anything like farm an older raid.
What I would like to see is old raid content made the same diffculty as current raid content, which would take reworking and balancing the raids. I haven’t done a Timewalking raid in a long time, but when I did it was pretty much just LFR level of difficulty, not challenging at all.
Has this changed? Are timewalking raids now challenging?
I think it would take a lot more than simply scaling the stats of players to match the raid. Content is made to work for the classes and abilities that existed when that content was made.
Simple example:
in past expansions there are some boss fights where interrupts are very important and at the time only a few classes had a short CD interrupts and those were melee range. It was important to plan out who wold interrupt when, in what order and all and that required positioning organization and all that. In current game most classes have interrupts and mechanics like that would now be much easier.
There are also many fights from past raids where falling damage has a significant impact of a fight, and DHs could just cheese that.
There have been a lot of class changes (and classes added) since many of the raids were made and because of this those raids would play very differently. Its not just a matter of simply scaling stats to make that content challenging, the raids would have to be significantly reworked.
And all of this is up to the individual. I am of the opposite faction to ‘extend meta’ in that to include more content is always better than to exclude it when the hardest part (creation and population, mechanics and drops) is already done. The only changes they would need to make is to adjust for timewalking (scale us down and items up) and ‘fix’ gear (whether this means simply scaling stats, eliminating an obsolete effect to create a smaller required set bonus, changing an effect slightly because a spell or stat no longer exists, or simply making an item a transmog until future update when they have time to change a piece).
I agree with you in that, especially if equivalent gear may be obtained, difficulty should rise to meet it. Sending beta testers in who are eager for more challenge would not be difficult for blizz to find. Having said this, I’m all for them completely modifying a fight rotation or the number of mobs to make it work with modern group compositions and abilities of most classes. This is, in some cases, just a matter of slightly faster cast times to increase the number of required interrupts and faster movement in a fight to dodge aoe, in some cases this could mean a few more adds in a fight to challenge an off-tank and press a group to switch targets, and in others it may mean using a scaling for heroic or mythic for the full scale of mechanics while scaling us to normal gear because of average damage done.
I don’t think this would be an ‘all raids released at launch’ thing, but I would like it to be a thing and a thing that scales like the announced mythics rotation. Unlike the announced mythics, I would like scaled raids to stick around since the equip effects would become a part of the new meta in creating viable builds at the top end. I do not think we would get nearly as bored running them (raids are once a week lockouts) and the gear could pose very interesting possibilities for classes that are under powered (there are always about 3 that take until the end of the expansion to get close to right and they always over tune a few in the process, starting the cycle over).
… Honestly, the only thing “cringe” is this sentence right here. Good lord, could you possibly be any more condescending? “Stay in their lane”? JFC, dude. Let other people have their fun however they want without your ridiculous judgment.
Are they actually having fun wiping 500 times? (They are not). Seeing people call Painsmith a “ boss” because they suck is stupid. Painsmith is awesome but people play content not meant for them and then get upset.
Honestly, I don’t care how people choose to raid, I just think more available top end content (especially at launch) is always better. Also, every class has had their time to shine and many expansions where they collected dust, and it is largely fixable if they had more equipped effects and set bonuses to let people be creative. Does that mean there may still be a crazy powerful build? Sure! There always will be, but there’s a reason so many people like games like ‘Path of Exile’ and ‘Dark Souls’ and the like, they have choices that allow them to discover these crazy niche builds because they have so many options for power-ups available to them.
Frankly, I don’t care what the current meta is; this changes everything anyways if they were to add it. I actually hope that them testing Mythic rotation is their way of ‘testing the waters’ in beta, to see how we react to reusing old content. If they came out with a couple old raids, available as ‘timewalking’ experiences and at launch, there would actually be good raid content to at least give us some starting set bonus items and things to do after leveling until the first patch!
Just to add into my point, I’ve seen people who suck call the Mage Tower when Legion Timewalking as a whole was the best feature added in the entire Shadowlands- people throw shade on content they can’t beat because they would rather hate than accept they’re bad.
boss” because they suck is stupid. Painsmith is awesome but people play content not meant for them and then get upset.