I can only agree on this one bit and that’s that high-skill PvP’ers should have access to the same ilvl as high-skill PvE’ers; and by high-skill I mean 2.6k+
When you play casual, you generally know your limits; I have done it off/on across expansions based upon my commitments to the real-world. Do I expect top gear? Negative, I didn’t participate in that content even though it’s fairly trivial to find a group for a normal / heroic raid at 450 ilvl.
Rather than complain that you deserve top-loot for doing nothing (and I mean nothing, because doing WQ’s and LFR isn’t much of a task) you should spend that energy pugging a normal raid or finding a guild.
The only real complaint I have perhaps is that the power-gap (not to be confused with ilvl) is too large. At 450 ilvl that’s about 45-55k dps, at 475 that’s about 85k-100k almost double the power for a marginal ilvl difference.
I don’t find the difficulty to be challenging enough for me to enjoy heroic, we cleared heroic the first week in two raid nights.
For example, this is our kill pull of Mythic Nzoth (5 months ago) after 168 pulls. You can hear we basically banter the entire fight - It’s a benefit of enjoying the group of people you play with.
I think the mythic raiding is full of angry people getting angry theme is a rumor that started on the forums and somehow has been prevalent. It’s really not like that for a large amount of guilds.
I’m not saying those guilds with a hostile environment don’t exist, but it’s also not the majority. It’s the same way there are bad eggs in the casual community who call for the removal of mythic raiding.
I mean, if you want the gear I can hook you up with boosts. Because if you don’t want to do anything for your gear then I’ll gladly accept the 100k gold to get it for you.
Why would I want to progress? I’ve already beaten the game with my iLvL 451 Nelf DK. All with about 2 weeks played at level cap.
Loremaster
Path Finder I and II
Rank 15 Cloak
Healed/DPS kills on all bosses in Ny’alotha. Tanked all bosses except Carapace and N’Zoth.
I even checked into Brawler’s late last night and got Bruce.
(Ok I admit I played a Shammy to ~450 and have about 2 weeks at level cap on her too.)
I even turned war mode on and went to Naz on my Paladin. With a lower iLvL. Wasn’t bad. Won a couple of fights. Surprised as heck.
I have done all I’m going to do for this expansion. If there was a path to iLvL 480 gear that required doubling or tripling my playtime… I’d skip it.
There is nothing in this game/expansion right now that higher level gear is going to buy me.
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My last LFR N’Zoth kill we wiped 3 times and the tanks left. A 5 stack came in from a Mythic 12/12 raid guild from Sargeras. They basically nuked it. Fastest N’Zoth kill eva… For me. I’d logged it so I looked up their characters. Geez whiz the time they spent this expansion to rack up the kills. No freaking way I’m gonna spend that kind of time in this game to get a few more iLvLs. Just not worth it.
Is the goal to give casuals Mythic gear at a pace slower than the Mythic raiders get it? Then you are gonna have to play 24/7 for a few months to get there. (Ok, maybe an exaggeration, but to be fair, if the argument is to give casuals a path to good gear that just takes longer… in order for that to be balanced, it’s gonna be a long time.)
My guild’s time with it was much swift. We switched from normal to heroic before we got normal cleared and spent the better part of 3 months hacking away at it, gearing up and finally pushing on mythic where progression came far slower; our guild became a revolving door of people who couldn’t handle Prog and we were still stuck with pugs to fill out our team with all momentum grinding to a halt after we downed shad.
Would I have wanted to go farther? Yes.
Was I disapointed that we went 4/12 M? No, Not at all. I was part of a group that pushed ourselves to our absolute limit, gave it our all and got farther then a lot of people have.
And like I said before: I respect the crap out of anyone who was able to get past that point and those people deserve everything they earned.
Power progression for its own sake is vital, most casuals often run out of things to do because they cant progress the power of their character, mmorpgs these days are all about power progression and if you dont give people a path for it there’s nothing else to do
No the reason we want powerful gear is to be powerful, not to beat content, it helps with beating content yes, but people want gear for the sake of gear progression, you want your character to be as powerful as they can be, beating content is a secondary reason
Something something me having almost double the health of people I find in warmode or battlegrounds and them having 0 chance against me simply because of that
Hey, if you truly believe that gear is all about beating content then why not disable raid gear outside of the raids ;^)
Yeah… I just simmed myself and reduced my gear down to 450 across the board. It went from 97.4k to 80k. Hardly the “double” numbers you’re talking about.
Are you truly just comparing ilvl or are you looking at parses in those ranges and assuming that the people in 450 gear are wearing their BiS items and corruptions at 450 or are they just throwing pieces together to get highest ilvl?
Can you show me the research you did?
I mean, I just took your gear and bumped it up 25 ilvls (outside of neck and cloak), gave you the exact same enchants and corruption. You went from 48.4k to 58.3k. That’s a 20% increase from 48 to 58. That, once again is hardly the double-dps you’re talking about.
Perhaps do some more research and look into the underlying causes why a 475 might be doing that much more than the 450?
There’s arguably more content than ever before for casuals to do, and constant gear progression wouldn’t work once they start getting much stronger gear than the content they do demands.
This is your opinion, not the opinion of everyone else.
Blizzard needs to fix this by making PvP gear the best gear for it and have a hard stop to scaling. The issue with 4 difficulties and such a large gap is why there’s a massive gap in gear discrepancy.
There are three paths for you: PVP, M+ and Raiding. All will give you more powerful gear. They will also require you to actually put in time and effort for it.
Then the gear serves no purpose if you aren’t going to progress in the content you engage in.
See now I’m confused, are you doing challenging content or not? Because the principle reason for a horde player to play with warmode on would be to do CTA’s which get you heroic tier PVP loot, but also comes with the implied risk that you are going to run afoul of some pack of dicks like ruin.
I believe that Higher tier gear is a reward for people who have the combination of time/skill/drive to get it and they should be able to use it as they see fit.
I suspect if you put as much effort into raiding as you do into bellyaching you could probably be pushing 470+ right now.
I am very curious about this as well. My Paladin is iLvL ~440. I recently wound up one on one -vs- a Horde mage in Stormwind. Neither one of us could make much of a dent in the other. Eventually I had to answer the door and then take a business phone call. Oops. I looked him up later. iLvL ~470 which I found surprising.
I was also surprised fighting in Naz. Got jumped and just kinda gave up. Was watching the combat log and it was like. Hmm this is taking longer to die than I thought. Maybe I should click Lay on Hands? Started to fight back and won. Did a few more and it left me wondering if something changed under the covers? Or maybe the level diff isn’t as big a deal as I thought?
Honestly don’t know.
I even popped into Random BS on my DK a couple weeks ago and it seemed… ok?
PvP is different. There’s some non-sensical template Blizzard has that doesn’t scale correctly so it’s hard to compare the PvE effect of ilvl vs PvP. I mean, Rextroy has shown over and over again how PvP template scaling and nonsense can be exploited to destroy when it shouldn’t.
wait, in pvp the less gear you have the more dmg you deal compared to higher geared players due to blizzard trying to equal people out in pvp. Honestly, the only issue outside of raids and dungeons for gear is world pvp and if youre struggling with that then that is a skill issue not a gear issue.
This is probably the most baffling part of it, Ralph is bellyaching about being hard done by but isn’t offering any real reason for why M raiders (who have legitimately earned their gear by combination of skill and effort) should look over and see some guy who thinks beastmaster is a high skill spec kitted out with identical gear despite the fact that they spend more time per week telling chuck norris jokes in trade chat then they do any sort of challenging content.
In my opinion Cata did a much better job at this. As a casual you could chain run random BGs and eventually get conquest geared. Yeah, you’d take a beating at the start while the Arena guys and Raiders worked you over, but the gearing was pretty deterministic on the PvP side and you knew you’d get close to parity eventually. The raiders still had some op trinkets and stuff, but it all seemed a lot more manageable.
I agree that the whole 4 levels of raiding in BfA seems kinda much, but I don’t know how to address that without causing some part of the player base heartburn.