External power rental systems need to go

Community General Discussion
1

Especially ones that instead of being the final 10% of your character’s power end up being 50% making them mandatory for all serious content.

-First it was azerite, then essences, now rng corrupted gear. AND NONE OF THEM WERE EASY TO AQUIRE.
Azerite gear were either RNG or grinded through timegated weekly m+ caches reward
-Essences were extremely grindy, forcing people to do content they hated and many times were also timegated for almost a month or more.
-Corrupted gear with no vendor are completely RNG YET CAN GIVE YOU UP TO 20K dps boost and more for some classes. They are locked behind a huge rng aka keep grinding until you get them lol.

Our characters main source of power is no longer gear and abilities, it locked behind rental systems that are forcing ridiculous grinds while many of the timegated to desperately keep players playing.

Meanwhile in Swtor you get your set pieces and most gear early on within a week, that is 90% of your character’s power, then the last 10% comes fro, bis gear parts and amplifiers which take some time to grind but not having them isn’t a big deal, and when you get them you get a great sense of accomplishment since they last for mot of the expansion and also you can gear a ton of fun alts.

And let’s check the math based on blood mallet for those that care about numbers, my dps when I was playing via sim was somewhere above 30k but that included 1 major essence and 3 minors(1 being from the major) and now there’s a 4th minor from the new slot.

So for frost dk we check the best for 8.3 and they are
8k from world vein major
4K from world vein minor
4K from memory of lucid dreams minor
4K from breath of the dying minor
3k fro, blood of the enemy minor

Then let’s check corrupted gear
30k from infinite stars, with 25% nerf it ll be 22k
14k from echoing void

So overall through the external sources(I am not even gonna bother with azerite) the total dps is 59k, .(with 2 corrupted items, hell even one leads to 45k dps boost. At the end of the expac it ll be more)
Obviously this is sim dps under best conditions but the fact that a character’s performance is MOSTLY locked behind external systems that are both time gates and extremely grindy and also often grindy from content you don’t enjoy

If these systems design continue to shadowlands then I am not even gonna bother, Swtor ftw where I can play alts and have fun in any content without being forced into ridiculous timegated grinds, I can just have fun.

54 Likes
2

I think this post pretty much nails the problem in the head. Unless they change this, I doubt we ll be seeing any good WoW expansions ever again.

15 Likes
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I like them. If you can’t keep up the grind, just means you’re a casual and that’s ok. Being the best takes effort
Edit: look I’m 75 neck and I’ve barely done anything but WQs to grind for AP (sub 20 Mythic IEs which only give .5% of a lvl)

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Normally I’d say something along the lines of “I don’t mind these kinds of parallel progression systems because they allow for progress to be made outside the confines of daily/weekly lockouts”.

But Mythic+ kind of screws with that by having zero lockout despite the 2 difficulties below it both having lockouts.

Seems kind of like Blizzard just had no idea what to do with it so they let it overtake everything in relevancy.

Anyway, yeah, tangent, but point being, it’s hard to justify these kinds of systems when we already aren’t locked out of meaningful content.

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M+ can’t easily outgear Mythic raiding. All raiders have to do is Warforge and that’s max IL. M+ has to titanforge multiple times. They also can’t get a max IL weapon unlike mythic raiders

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Extremely accurate, it isnt about skill, it is about effort, and when even the dumbest and most talentless person can spend time to get gear to roflstomp a good player in pvp (because pruned classes dont allow for much outplaying, plus the fact that it makes classes even easier to master making skill even less relevant even in pve).

Then we have this, a game where bad players can delude themselves they are “the best”.

Skilled matter a lot more in the past, now it is more about “effort” aka grinding.

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I’m 6/8M on a faction that struggles to get 100 final boss kills every raid before Horde gets 300 kills in. I’d say that’s pretty good. I have CE Dazalor

Edit: skill mattered more in the past? Ha nothing mattered in the past. Do you remember the first week of Classic launch ? A bunch of sub 60s killed Ragnaros. Imagine how much easier it was when they got gear and became lvl 60

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EXACTLY, in the past skill could carry you ahead, now the only way is to keep grinding your life away if you want to excel.

This is pretty much pandering to elitists and no lifers.

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Fights have never had as many mechanics as they do now. Method had 700+ pulls on the 2nd crucible boss before they killed her- are they not skilled ?

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I despise both Azerite and Corrupted gear for numerous reasons, but a large part of your post seems to revolve around how readily acquired Corrupted items are. On the PTR, Corruption on gear was quite common , in fact managing Corruption on our characters is what the 8.3 experience revolves around - it’s just that right now, most of the avenues of obtaining corrupted items are “turned off”/unavailable.

Right now, drops in Mythic/Mythic+ still Warforge and Titanforge. That switches to Corruption on the next weekly reset - and on the PTR, items rolling Corrupted appeared to occur much more frequently than Titanforging/Warforging. Also as of Tuesday, items in the weekly Mythic+ chest and weekly PvP rewards will always be Corrupted. The new raid also opens, and a number of items that drop there are Corrupted as a base drop. So much more is coming than what we’re seeing.

Truthfully, in practice, this delay is helpful as we have time to acquire the legendary cloak and get it upgraded to the max available rank so we have more resistance and can actually use Corrupted items without hitting the upper tiers of negative effects.

None of that changes the fact 8.3 systems are a terrible design though. Nothing illustrates this more than the need to “protect” us from the primary reward system in the game.

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11

Yeah it was one of the trashiest raids to date.

Also adding more and more mechanics to deal with doesnt make it skillful, it just takes more time, pve was never about skill, they are nothing more than a predictable algorithm that even idiots can beat if they spend enough time getting used to the patterns. The only reason people dont bother with mythic is because the rewards arent worth the effort, EFFORT, not skill.

PvP is the only place where true skill can exist, though clearly not in WoW anymore after they ruined the classes so bad players dont get out played.

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Ha pvp skill. Go play OW. WoW isn’t a PvP game

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Yeah we wouldnt want to talk about the part of the game that requires skill and shows you are a bad player who just grinds all day and fights predictable dumb computer opponents and thinks they are skilled and great lol.

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Yep. WoW PvP = skill. Fur shure

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15

I was kinda hoping you say something about Retail Vanilla and not Classic Vanilla when you said “the past” (assuming you meant back in Vanilla).

Yea, a sub of 60’s killed Ragnaros in Classic. I mean we had like 15 years of information and exposure to Private servers and people have been practicing by then. So? :man_shrugging:

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Truth hurts i guess.

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Why are you playing pvp in a pve game ?

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I know why you are a pver, because you delude yourself into thinking you are skilled and important when in reality you are just a bad player that grinds a lot to stay ahead of others because that is the only way you can beat anyone.

You are exactly the kind of player that whined in legion about scaling because he couldnt beat others with an unfair gear advantage and he wanted his unfair advantage back.

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Uh. Whining about scaling implies I pvp’d in Legion. Kek
Also you make it sound like I grind hard for my neck. I’ve just been doing my daily WQs. I’ve done less than 20 Mythic IEs and from my forum history, you could see those don’t give a lot (.5%)

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20

Dark Souls, Cuphead and about half of the NES games disagree. :smile:

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