Another week of opening the vault, another week of not finding the item you’re looking for. Stuck waiting for BiS pieces with almost nonexistent levels of control or influence of what shows up. The only way to marginally tweak the odds is changing your loot spec, but this is not always the case.
There’s been countless suggestions to improve player agency regarding the weekly RNG piñata, such as selecting a specific dungeon or item slot to skew the loot pool in favor of. However I’ll propose a solution that could help fill the gaps of bad luck regarding the vault:
adding an item to the Token of Merit vendor to upgrade an item in your bags to the next upgrade track.
Stuck with a Hero-track trinket you farmed from m+ months ago and never saw the Myth-track version in your vault? Grab the tokens of merit and upgrade it!
For the cost: I’d probably price it at 9-12 tokens, making it an investment of skipping 1.5-2 vaults that yielded the maximum of 6 Tokens of Merit.
I’m interested to hear feedback on this.
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I’ve run into this problem before, specifically with M+ drops. I remember farming for Forgestorm in S2 DF on my brewmaster. It took 26 runs, but eventually I got a heroic version. After that, I unlocked 3 dungeon changes for 6 weeks and slowed down to 2 after that, but I never saw a mythic track Forgestorm in my vault.
I would probably put your item at a 12 cost to make it more of an expense if you were trying to upgrade an item right away. Early vaults often have larger upgrades than towards the end of a season when you’re only looking for one or two minor things.
They are at least implementing something to deal with not getting item drops in raid. The new faction will get you two bullion type items that can be exchanged for any raid piece and they will go all the way up to the mythic track.
Maybe they could add something similar for M+? I’m not sure how they would implement a dungeon faction since you can farm them infinitely instead of having a weekly lockout, but maybe they could figure something out. That or it might have to be tied to rating on that character or timing all 10s or something.
The raid faction is globally capped (think covenant renown in SL), they could do the same for an M+ faction, so that’s not really an issue.
This should ONLY be the case if you have already cleared the equivalent difficulty and shouldn’t allow us to get an item from a difficulty/boss we haven’t killed.
6 Likes
I disagree. I’ll point to two different scenarios that will put my thinking into perspective
First, lets say you get a BiS trinket from heroic on week 2; lets use spymaster’s as an example here. The cost to upgrade that would be skipping your vault for both week 3 AND week 4 to acquire the currency to upgrade that one item +13 ilvl. I doubt it would be crazy impactful on RWF, if at all, as 2x 639ilvl tier pieces or items from +10 keys are FAR more valuable.
On the other end of the spectrum, lets say you’re a very-late tier CE guild that’s 6/8 Mythic and progging Silken Court. It’s week 19 of the raid: the RWF is over, the hall of fame is closed, you’re sitting at 639 ilvl, and we’re nearing the maximum bonus on the Finery/Severed Strands buff. There’s barely any upgrades you could find in your vault save for 1 or 2 specific items, and you’re just collecting tokens of merit anyway. Upgrading that Spymaster’s from 626 to 639 is far from game-breaking. At the end of the day, you’re still trading 2 disappointing vaults for the ability to upcycle your 6/6 Heroic track item into a 2/6 Myth track item.
To dispel this gatekeeping, let’s look to actual precedent for this in Warlords of Draenor:
The Cache of Highmaul Treasures is rewarded from level 100, item level 645 Garrison Missions. There are four missions at each difficulty tier, and there are four tiers total. Players will be offered a mission for their followers complete that is one tier higher than what they are currently running. That is, non-raiders and Raid Finder runners will win Normal (item level 655) loot, Normal mode raiders will win Heroic (item level 670) loot, Heroic mode raiders will win Mythic (item level 685) loot, and Mythic mode raiders will win Mythic loot and a 1000 gold bonus. These missions are unlocked once two Garrison followers reach item level 645. The missions have an eight-hour duration and a nearly week-long expiration timer.
These missions were repeated for the Blackrock Foundry raid tier as well:
The Blackrock Foundry Spoils is rewarded from level 100, item level 660 Garrison Missions. There are four missions at each difficulty tier, and there are four tiers total. Players will be offered a mission for their followers complete that is one tier higher than what they are currently running. That is, non-raiders and Raid Finder runners will win Normal (item level 670) loot, Normal mode raiders will win Heroic (item level 685) loot, Heroic mode raiders will win Mythic (item level 700) loot, and Mythic mode raiders will win Mythic loot and a 1000g bonus. These missions are unlocked once two Garrison followers reach item level 660. The missions have an eight-hour duration and a nearly week-long expiration timer.
RWF is completely irrelevant and should not be a concern when designing the game.
Which you haven’t earned. You didn’t kill the boss.
And they were changed to reward loot equivalent to “your” difficulty in Legion for a reason. If you want better gear, do harder content.
Guilds getting stuck because gear is capped and the bandaid for gear capping too fast (Strands) is capped and the other bandaid for gear capping too fast (Circlet) is capped isn’t solved by giving people access to the last little bit of gear that they didn’t earn. It’s solved by massively slowing down gear and tuning bosses to be a lot easier, so they’re more overgearable over time.
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Correct, but it goes to show on either end of the extreme, the game does not fundamentally break because you can convert an item to a higher upgrade track. Nobody “loses” with this other than the people who have weird egos about gatekeeping
This isn’t only about raiding. This is about all types of gear that have upgrade tracks. I’ve filled my vault with 10s every week, never saw a Gale of Shadows or Sacbrood in my vault. Done the work, can’t kill any higher level to get that gear. Myth track m+ loot is purely RNG under the current system. This adds player agency and is a bad-luck protection system as well.
Hell, even if you did kill Silken Court in that previous scenario, you STILL wouldn’t ever see the Spymaster’s in your vault because you’d be extending on Queen and wouldn’t hit the 2-boss minimum for raid vault slot.
Ah yes, the expansion that … Checks notes … added TITANFORGING to the game.
Except Legion & BFA were: “If you want better gear, do easier content and just get lucky.”
Let’s compare: Random chance to upgrade loot received by 15-60 ilvl
Versus: Deliberately skipping 2 vaults to save up currency to buy an item that allows you to continue spending Crests+Stones on an item you already earned, up to a maximum of +13 ilvl. All that effort, and it still totals to less than a single base-level titanforge.
Having high ilvl gear =/= having the right gear. I can max out a character with full 639 ilvl with the worst stats and it’s not half as good as a full 626 with perfect stats, 4 set, and BiS trinkets. It’s that combination of high item level on the right gear that we have no control over when it comes to the vault. That is the original point of this discussion: adding control and agency back to the player who does not have good vault luck.
I’d say this is a slower route to gearing, 2 skipped vaults for currency instead of 2 pieces of gear, to invest in a single piece of gear you already earned.
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People lose an incentive to do harder content, and it makes gear even worse at acting as a gradual nerf, because you’re lowering the value of unlocking new items as you kill more bosses.
Another flaw of gearing being too fast and the raid vault being criminally bad during progress, yeah. Extending lacks opportunity cost when everybody is geared to the teeth immediately. You’re meant to make a call between “more gear” and “more pulls”, which is a really easy decision when the former option is worthless.
I’m never going to claim Legion was a good expansion, don’t worry. It did however make some good changes, and changing the raid missions was one of them.
Legion and BfA were 2 of the 3 worst expansions, yes.
Everybody has 4set, that’s irrelevant. You’d have to try INCREDIBLY hard to get bad enough stats for the 639 items to be worse than the 626s, and there is no universe where you’re even close to the 626 setup being twice as good (even if we pretend that the 639 doesn’t have 4set somehow)
It’s speeding up gearing because it takes 2 worthless vaults and turns them into a BiS item. If they changed gearing overall to be slower and this was part of those changes, it’d be less offensive, but I’d still be against it on principle because the best gear should be a reward for doing the hardest content, and that’s just not the case if you can upgrade hero to myth.
EDIT: Also yes, gear should absolutely be ““gatekept”” behind doing appropriately difficult content. That’s a big part of what was wrong with titanforging, it short circuited the “do harder content → get better loot” loop.
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Imo, all this does is applying a bandage to an already bad problem. The lottery that is the vault shouldn’t exist to “give you a chance” at better gear to begin with. It should be capped at the same ilvl as the current you do, only offering a choice of a free item each week.
And personally, I don’t think the vault should exist at all. The game shouldn’t be based around a “play X amount each week to maximize your chances”. If you don’t play, you feel bad and if you play and get the wrong slot, you feel bad. That’s just poor game design, but it does create engagement which is most likely the main reason Blizzard implemented the system.
Locking the reward to “you get a chance at an item at the same level you already play”, you’re bringing it back to something closer to bonus rolls, which is a far better system.
There’s 0 loot incentive beyond ~2500 m+ score, and people still push for rating and titles. Mythic raiding has CE, titles, and mounts. Ranked PVP has titles, transmog, ratings, mounts.
Idk how that’s speeding up gearing. For example, let’s say you have a heroic raidloggerer clearing 8/8 each week. Today marks week 18 of Nerubar Palace I believe. If they skipped EVERY vault, they’d have 18 * 6=108 tokens of merit this season. 108/12 tokens of merit per upgrade item = 9 upgrade items.
16 item slots → 4 tier pieces, Cyrce’s ring, 2 crafted embellished items, and 9 upgraded hero → Myth track items. They’d be myth-track geared in just 18 weeks! Breakneck speed gearing! But wait, that player would only have 18 * 30 gilded crests (15 from court and 15 from queen) = 540 gilded. So they still wouldn’t even be maxed out ilvl-wise. They’d need 9(item slots) * 15(crests per upgrade level) * 6(upgrade ranks) = 810 gilded crests to upgrade each item from hero track 4/6 to myth track 6/6. PLUS that’s not counting the 2 embellished items costing 90 gilded each for an additional 180, totaling at 540 of the required 990 in this scenario.
It’s hyperbole, but it just takes a quick glance at a graph on any of the sim sites to show that 626ilvl of your best 3-5 trinkets outclass ~50-60% of 639ilvl trinkets, which was the original point of discussion, putting agency and bad-luck protection in the vault. I’ll keep steering back on track to that, because we can draw parallels between titanforging and the great vault. You can have 2 players doing the exact same quantity and difficulty of content and have one player strike gold each week in the vault, while the other player sees duplicates / worst-in-slot items every time.
Yeah, I’m just trying to figure a way to add a bad-luck protection that uses systems already in the game.
The problem is that there are basically 3 sub-games in wow with raid/m+/pvp. They each treat gearing and item level differently, and you aren’t limited to playing just 1, which has caused bleed-over effects in the past. Especially when the criteria for unlocking higher item levels / more vault slots is so vastly different.
EDIT: Added additional reply
You’d still have to complete appropriately difficult content to earn the crests to continue upgrading the newly upcycled gear.
I didn’t say it removes all incentives, but it absolutely removes one of the incentives.
Reducing the number of “wasted” vaults speeds up gearing.
Heroic raiders don’t deserve myth track items. If they want those, they should try stepping into mythic. Or do M+ which gives a myth item per week for doing key levels equivalent to mid tier heroic bosses.
No you wouldn’t, because heroic drops myth crests, delves drop myth crests and once you’re done with hero crests you can trade those up too (no idea if they’re keeping the cheaper conversion rate, not really relevant either way). And they shouldn’t have those items in the first place. Upgrading already lets items go to a higher ilevel than is reasonable (overlapping with the next higher track), getting actual higher track items would be silly.
What, you think that Mythic raiding will cease to exist because people can wait 2 weeks to upgrade 1 of their heroic pieces to myth track? Yeah I’m not buying into that. There will still absolutely be incentive to run the hardest content to acquire the highest gear the fastest.
No, it’s slow and steady gearing for people who didnt get 2 upgrades from 2 vaults.
This was originally about player agency regarding m+ loot. Glad we came full circle, so those players do their 8x M+10s to fill their vault and find no upgrades, cycle repeats. But then again, you also were against 6/8M raiders getting their hands on myth track loot.
We are so lucky to have Tradu here as the end-all be-all judge of who is truly deserving and worthy of loot. Very strong arguments that provide math, examples, and historical precedent. /s
Seems Blizzard has determined that those are appropriately difficult bosses to award those crests.
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