After a while I guess people were sick of just looking up “cookie cutter builds”, or Blizz thought they were, so they took a chainsaw to the talent trees and called it pruning. Now we have a much simpler talent panel, but much of that simplicity comes from “1 or 2 per tier are objectively bad, or none offer any boost whatsoever so who cares”. And it’s still advised to just use the cookie cutter builds, or at most swap some talents around on a per-fight basis if you really feel like it.
The end result for most players is that there is much less thought and time going into respeccing. The end result for min-maxers and theory crafters is that there is much less time and thought spent experimenting with what is optimal for most situations.
Less time and thought spent on something makes it less interesting.
As with talents, now with gear. Except armor now has about as many talent options as the characters themselves, with the caveat that a piece of armor will only ever have one spec-specific option per tier so there’s even less thought about choice. No trait will ever beat ten ilvls, and if it does then Blizz will nerf it to keep things simple.
At this point I feel like I’m rambling, so I’ma go bed now.
Yep, that says it all. I can remember my gear pieces names in Classic and TBC, but after that? They began to just fade. Only gear with names remembered were legendaries after that.
The way I look at BFA is as a precursor to WoW’s next expansion being ported to console and maybe even a phone version in a near future.
The game has been dumbed down so much to the point where it’s completely viable to be on phone and console, the game is only a few bad patches/ideas from paid loot boxes, and the casino loot system is just what I’d expect on a bad console/phone game.
For me it’s the rarity and frequency of which you get gear. You get handed loot nowadays, not like back in Vanilla when it could take a few raids to get an upgrade. That may not be fun or interesting to some but it was for me. It gave each piece of gear a weight behind it.
It also meant getting a piece of gear meant more. Nowadays it’s:
“ok great you got that piece of gear from LFR, now go get it from normal, now go get it from heroic, now go get it from mythic.”
That’s just not fun or rewarding to me, there’s four tiers per tier now.
I guess it boils down to today you get unrewarding gear handed to you that you’ll be upgrading soon anyways but back in Vanilla you received rewarding gear less frequently.
It made it more interesting. For instance back in BC I had a BiS wand for my shadow priest that was a green item because it was pure spell power (+31 shadow power if I remember correctly).
People would make fun of me in raids because I had a green wand equipped and could never seem to understand that the wand was better for me than any other wand outside of black temple.
I found that interesting.
This game has been min/maxxed to death by engineer thinking and it feels hollow these days.
Maybe in this xpac, but generally they streamlined everything and you would very rarely find such a disparity.
I mean yeah you might hold onto a trinket a little longer in the next tier, or not swap out a higher ilvl piece if it dopped a set bonus, but mostly the next tier replaced everything. Certainly you would not see a green item held until almost the end of the xpac.
With the azerite mess i dunno. maybe its that way again because that itemization system just looks like garbage without having ever touched it
In BfA it’s way more common to see people complaining that their items don’t last. 8.1 completely eradicated your previous progress week 1 regardless of you being a LFR raider or a mythic raider.
I’m a mythic raider and one of the highest item level mages on my sever. I still wore a piece of gear from the previous raid tier until I finally got an upgrade to replace it just 2 days ago. That’s almost 4 months after the current raid tier was released. (the item replaced was a 395 trinket).
I can see how certain trinkets or rings might stick around for a little bit longer but since mythic Uldir dropped 385 gear and you get that (or better) from world quests and war fronts it doesn’t take a genius to see that regardless of at what level you play the game all your old gear is almost worthless once a new patch comes out.
What’s the point in gearing up in the first place then? You can just go in, do all the new content once and then wait until the next patch. There’s no character progression anymore, it’s what used to keep us subscribed and playing week in and week out.
Having long term goals in order to make your character stronger to be able to overcome things you’re currently not able to is very important in MMORPGs or just RPGs in general.
Currently there is no point. The only progression left is gear and you don’t need it for the outside world since it’s piss easy and scales with your iLvl anyway, you don’t need it in PvP since everyone scales so that gear won’t matter. The only places gear progression is needed is within the instanced PVE content of the current patch if you want to do more difficult versions of the content you’ve already done.
Can’t say how it’s done in Oz, but every reference I found just now with Google says it depends on the initial sound of the following word. Whatever. Far more egregious stuff is done to our language these days.
The gear in general is uninteresting, final fantasy 14 gear system has been horrible since the game came out and wow is pretty much the same as it.
Instead of having to worry about players resisting your poisons or chain of ice having to get at least 1 spell penetration gem you have to just focus on primary stat gem mostly.
In classic you get weird stats like 10 spirit 6 stamina on a piece of gear, while in bfa its int 20 stam 20 mastery 60 haste 30 or something like that forgot what stats bfa 120 gear has on it but pretty much secondary stats are the only things that are different.
Blizzard should really remove primary stats from the game that way there won’t be a huge power gap and its kinda pointless to have 3 different stats that do the same thing int= power str=power agility=power.
In classic you have linkens boomerang in bfa you have trinkets that boost your ability power in someway chance on hit 500 primary ability power stat passive 200 mastery.