- “They would probably have more fun because they could trade for pieces they actually need”
-Blizz removed master loot and legit doesn’t want people to be able to trade gear until the gear isn’t much relevant towards progression, it goes against what they want/how they want you to play the game. And im not disagreeing with you. Like I would want ML back but just saying why.
“I’m not saying it’s new, never did, not sure where you got the idea. I want to know why there is an arbitrary time gate. People say it is infinitely spammable / would invalidate raid gear - so what?”
-I get that idea because your asking why its locked when everyone knows its to allow blizz to tune the raid how they want, to keep people at a rough ilvl/power lvl going into a raid to make things exactly how hard/easy they want them to be. This is part of how they do that, sure you could give people the time to farm keys and what not and make the content harder but theyre aim for SL was to make things less grindy. And the time gate is literally not arbitrary for what your referring to. Normal/heroic release week: 3 ways for players to recieve gear in PVE. 10 keys, normal, heroic. Heroic–highest ilvl 239, Normal–second best 233 from last two bosses, 226 from most, Keys10±-next best and spammable 229. Do you not see how literally on a RAID RELEASE if you could spam keys for 15 loot (236ilvl) it would make the normal difficulty nearly obsolete…on its release week, and make heroic raid worth doing but most people would probably say the time would be better spent spamming 15s outside of learning fights/last two boss loot. It skews power levels super wide and makes half that weeks content worthless on the day it was released and makes you think “why would I do this raid…therefore why would they ever do that?”. Theyve done this exact release schedule for as long as most can remember in modern raiding for this reason because it gives the raid a bigger power creep as the raid is out longer, and less power creep the shorter it is out…making it harder to kill bosses earlier and easier later and is super logical. Lastly, they want the best gear by a good margin to always come from the hardest content. Lets be honest, 15s are hard. They do not want, even if its for 1 week, to make nearly the best gear in the game come from a 5 man repeatable, relootable dungeon that youve been doing for the past year.
“The gate should be in difficulty, or something a bit better designed vs an arbitrary week lockout on the loot you should be earning.”
-This is exactly how they tune difficulty man. Because the difference in power from the start of a tier varies so much compared to the end, they soft cap what you can start with to have a rough power level they want you to walk into bosses and tune difficulty based off of that. Its the same way they test, they either watch what gear ppl are testing with or put an item level aura on the group and see how it goes and tune based off that. Not every fight is going to be some hard dance or mechanic fight some fights are going to be pure numbers and thats why they do this. And the people who cant clear it in BIS gear, well you kinda answered your question. It’s designed for the better players because the people your talking about won’t get very far. Always been that way always will, thats why there are multiple difficulties and I feel most people are okay with that because they STILL get to prog the raid, just at a lower difficulty and get some kinda experience.
The reason my simple answer is “its always been this way” is because unless your trying to redesign most of theses systems doing what your suggesting goes against what most people would want, atleast top end raiders. They get that it would be unhealthy to be spamming 15s the week prior to mythic for heroic ilvl gear, and for the people that I get your kinda trying to speak for, who “it doesnt matter because it wont effect the raiding they do” I think most people, again, would have the opinion along the lines of "well then they can wait a week because agian it doesnt effect them anyway. You could make an argument that "blizz could just tune things harder numbers wise, tune it for a raid in full mythic /BIS gear during prog ( this would mean theyre tuning a raid for the full raid being BIS on the 7th-10th day of the raid being released), but imo that actaully ends up hurting the same people your kinda talking about. The people who dont get to see much of mythic but get to do some of it. Margins of error on bosses for those people would be even smaller or nonexistent and it would end up hurting them in the long run bc tbh, those are the people doing mythic months into a patch where theyre full BIS anyway and still struggling.
