The point of playing an MMO is not just to have the bare minimum of power to be able to complete content, and repeat that content over and over again under the same conditions.
The goal is to experience power gains over time and complete the same content faster or more comfortably, or maybe even move on to more difficult content.
Hardcore group players live by the idea of progression, but for some reason can’t apply that same simple concept to solo or casual content.
9.2 and possibly Season 4 are probably too far out the gate to develop new content for casual and solo players, which is why I have suggested bumping up ZM rewards to the new Normal of 278+ in Season 4.
You have content that gives you better gear as you progress through it already. What we take offense to, is the idea that killing a raid boss gives you the same quality of item as clicking a button and having pocopoc solve a puzzle for you.
They’re likely are casual / solo players who think they should be sporting BiS, that’s unfortunate but true, equally though, no doubt there’s some raiders / mythic players who think casuals or solo players shouldn’t even be able to log in… hehe.
Hopefully the Devs can figure out a way to allow for casual progression but keep the best gear in the hardest content, so that they keep everyone happy.
After all, the more subscribers there are, the better it is for all of us.
Then how about a weekly quest to kill 5 rares, or 3 elite rares? how about a quest to reduce the number of elites of a certain mob type?
You take offense at the idea of people doing easy content for higher gear, yet you don’t think of how things cold be used to provide an increased challenge for the better rewards. Will it be as hard as killing a mythic boss? likely not, but will it provide that incremental increase some are looking for as far as progression? yeah
If 1 piece of 252 was the patterns reward, and world quests/individual dailies could only drop say 239 or 242, that would be like the great vault for M+. 15s are easier than most mythic raid bosses, yet you get the same ilvl from the weekly vault.
I don’t care who does what that I don’t interact with. What I don’t want is for world progression gear to be buffed to the point that I have to care about it as a raider (see eternal palace/benthic gear).
Thing is both the patterns and world quests/individual dailies award the same ilvl. Maybe the 252 is fine for the individual dailies/WQs but patterns should award 255?
The issues with Benthic gear was it should have been catch up and world quest gear, the bonuses should NOT have been active in EP. That would have still enabled the EP gear to be better, due to itemization, but allow the world content to feel easier over time for those that did not do EP.
And as a former raider myself, I would never expect raid gear to be matched by simple questing (or even complex questing).
There definitely needs to remain a hierarchy of gear, with the hardest content rewarding the best gear - I’d just do it by setting the lowest gear at a level that makes world questing etc have a reasonable gear progression, and then ensure that the harder the content the higher the gear.
Raiders / mythic runners should always be in the best gear, because that’s what takes the most effort to get.
The other half was that plus they could roll sockets. In those days, there were some specs and slots where a socket was worth more than 20 ilvls, so the 425 socketed benthic gear would actually be better than 445 base mythic raid gear, even before the effects.
Season 4 is a repeat of all content though. Literally recycled content for a new season. It’s not like those raids weren’t cleared a while back.
It’s basically an optional season if you don’t want to reclear the same old raid. And the next new raid won’t be until the new expansion… meaning any ilvl rewards from the last season will not go toward the next raid.
Season 4 is the season you have to not worry so much about item lvl upgrades as a raider since it’s all content you done before.
Ah, the RNG aspect, if people are worried about that, they really need to take a chill pill. Things like that should be a bonus, not the goal. But if this was an issue, I would have made an item that could be bought with the mana pearls that would add a socket to any EP gear that could roll a socket on Benthic.
Of course, downing a raid boss on Normal is more challenging than cracking nuts and capturing squirrels in Valsharah, jumping on jellies in Nazjatar, or flapping around in Bastion.
But many players enjoy world content and don’t demand that everything they do be threatening, so it doesn’t make sense to bind them to rules that other players have set about what rewards they can earn for what they do.
And I can’t stress enough that the real hardcore players walked into patch 9.2 already wearing 252+ gear and had access to 265 Heroic raid and 278 Great Vault options before the casuals had maxed out their Cypher consoles for 252 gear without set bonuses.
Raiding is not as accessible or popular as other forms of content. When everything in the entire game has to be balanced around raiding difficulty and rewards to protect raider egos, WoW itself becomes less accessible and popular.
That part of the game is still VERY much in tact. Vanilla had a lot more group quests than the live version of the game even has. Progression for solo players is better than it was in Vanilla. Every part of this game is more solo friendly compared to 16 years ago (Vanilla in its prime).
I think people confuse players like me that want the ability to outgear content after progression and go back and destroy things with people who want things on day 1
I agree in the basic premise of allowing for more single player quality content. Once Blizzard puts an entire team on single player minded content, the overall quality of the game should improve by a lot. They have to be careful and implement a different type of reward system for singleplayer content though that is a parallel circuit to the multiplayer rewards. Otherwise players will only play the content that has the best meta rewards.
Such as:
1.) Raiding rewards system, 2.) Dungeon rewards system 3.) PvP rewards system 4.) Single player rewards system
Each reward system must be weighted equally for this to work. That way you can use the rewards you gain from raiding to help in your single player or couple player content that may be too difficult.
I personally think it would be OK for solo content rewards to be slightly lower in item level than group content rewards, by a margin of 13 item levels for example, so that group content players don’t feel like they have to do the solo content to speed up their progression, while solo players will still have an incentive to try out group content to help maximize power.
The problem is when soloable content does not drop gear at all, such as Torghast, or when outdoor progression systems such as the Cypher gear intentionally excludes key equipment slots such as weapon’s or trinkets.
Although 9.1 Korthia was a small zone and Relic acquisition was very haphazard, the ability to progress all slots to Upper Normal 233 was fair. That is why 9.2 felt like a huge step backwards in game design. (Except, Cypher currency acquisition does feel very smooth.)
I agree that the leveling experience is much more solo friendly these days. There are just a few “WANTED” side quests for tougher monsters in SL zones, for example, and even those can be soloed in green or blue gear if you make the most of all your CDs and zone buffs.
Max-level solo gear progression got better with each expansion until it took a nosedive in WoD, then it got better in Legion and BfA, but then it took a nosedive again in Shadowlands.
Personally, I find that the game itself is already breaking due to record-low numbers of people playing World of Warcraft. Shadowlands has effectively annihilated all three of my social circles all of whom were independent of one another, and each were doing different things such as roleplaying, PvP, PvE (Raids).
The reason for it could easily be pointed to that Shadowlands’ horizontal progression is absent and all things feed into one another, where originally in Legion most things weren’t scaled with several conduits/legendaries in mind there’s been a precedent that everything in Shadowlands has been taking most factors into account. You’re gimping yourself if you don’t have a variety of conduits/covenant/legendaries and that means there’s also an artificially high barrier for entry that hasn’t been realized anywhere before in the game’s history.
You need your covenant to 80. You need to go into M+ and Raids to get your nominal ilevel up. You need to go grind Torghast for your legendaries. You need to go and do Zereth Mortis’ campaign for your secondary legendary. And more.
If you try PvP you’re engaged with people who’re boosting and going up against a higher skill cap that are benefited by having better ilevel than you because of how Shadowlands’ system works.
Even in solo play any kind of reward is pushing behind an elongated grind that has an RNG chance of a donkey, for achievement criteria, and time tossed in because of arbitrary gates and extremely high costs. For Zereth Mortis there’s time caps of five days or more, combined with a few hours. Which, an estimate is, giving around 15+ days just in waiting time.
For sanctums it’s also the same thing of waiting hours if not a day on end because of wanting to actually get an upgrade.
The competitive rung of any game requires casual and solo players to subsist on by recruiting or fighting them. With Retail achieving what I believe to be the lowest subscription numbers in the history of World of Warcraft I’m in full belief that the game has a problematic tendency to collapse inwards as queue times get longer, the imbalance between Horde and Alliance PvP get stronger, and the general population of the game dissipates or aggregates to 5-10 servers leaving the rest empty shells.