As we enter the final week of 8.2 and the final week of Titanforging, I’d like to say good riddance and I hope it doesn’t return. At least in its current form.
Reward structures in a game like World of Warcraft should make sense. Do higher difficulty content, get higher level rewards. Simple.
There’s a number of reasons for this:
- As a player, I should understand what I need to do to get my next upgrade.
- Progressively higher rewards from progressively more difficult content leads to more enjoyable, fair and rewarding outcomes. Players operating in a system like this can aspire to do harder content to get better rewards which lead to win moments.
- It’s simple, makes sense and so, as players, we don’t feel let down by a system which is out of our control. We should have agency over the content we choose to do and therefore the level of rewards we receive.
At the moment these reward structures are shot.
The other day, I was on an alt helping a guildy through an 8 M+ and he got a 450 trinket with a socket out of it. wtf?
My main who has run many, many, many more mythic + keys of higher difficulty (16-18+) each week hasn’t got a 450 trinket. The best I’ve got is a 440 with no socket.
How does this make sense? All I can say is thank goodness this type of reward is gone. The changes to M+ loot going up to M+15 is also a nice change imo.
There are similar issues with the titan residuum vendor. Most DPS classes are chasing 1 specific trait and most of the time there is a BIS piece, a few middle-of-the-pack options and then some really garbage options.
As a player I need to sit there wondering:
- Do I pay 40000 (about 2 - 3 weeks of doing m+ content) and possibly get the worst possible piece?
- or do I save for the full 200000 (10 weeks) and buy the specific piece I need?
The outcome of this is that some players will be lucky and get the BIS or the next best pieces from gambling in as little as 9 weeks. Other players will receive the worst pieces gamble after gamble which will set them back for weeks. This then leads to distrust in the system, a likely decision to start saving the 200000 for 10 weeks and gimping their character while they do that.
Players doing higher-level content don’t have a higher chance of getting the better piece, it’s just pure luck. Yes, we get more titan residuum each week but it’s a negligible amount. If you do a 17 you get 5k more than someone who did a 10. It will take 8 weeks to get 40k more, enough to gamble one more time.
Why is this necessary?
You’ve created a system which leaves players anguishing over whether they should gamble or save.
I’m not at all an advocate for removing RNG from loot systems. Of course, there needs to be some level of chance otherwise content would dry up quickly, but there’s got to be a middle ground here.
These loot systems don’t reward effort, they have players aspiring to be lucky, not be good at the game.
And so it’s easy to feel helpless and unmotivated when the loot/reward systems don’t seem fair and don’t seem to operate in a way that makes sense.
I’m happy to see the back of Titanforging. Corruption appears to be a better system at rewarding players participating in difficult content. Having said that, there still remains loot systems in the game which don’t reward effort, they reward luck.
