How do you upgrade gear tier/track?

If you get a piece of gear on the Champion track - how to you convert it to the heroic track? Do you just need to kill the boss that drops the heroic track item to “earn” the upgrade path?

I heard they got rid of having to refarm gear over and over again - Which is why I’m lost as to how we earn the higher upgrade tracks once we’ve gotten lucky and grinded through tons of dungeon/raid runs for the single item we needed.

A way to bridge the upgrade tracks makes the most sense through some kind of crest currency, but I can’t figure it out.

You don’t. You earn the next higher up piece and upgrade that.

It’s not any different than getting a piece of gear in a Normal raid and then having to get it again from the Heroic raid.

I’m not sure who told you that, but that wasn’t the purpose of the upgrade system. Some of the tracks do overlap, but each one has its own ceiling.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/235428992360906753/1103110857027768400/gearupgrades.jpg

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/906234294333218826/1128077179687796836/gearsystem.jpg

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What Sendryn said,

But the difference between a max Champion item and Max Hero item is 4 ilvl’s. Just means you need to get the item to drop on a higher difficulty.

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It was the change to M+. Raids already had this built in.

Otherwise players were just refarming all the same M+ gear each tier.

The fact that they are now swapping M+ dungeons each tier got away from having to refarm gear over and over.

But I guess they just moved that annoyance to another part of the game.

Sad to see a cool upgrade system with a lot of potential tainted like this.

If you love casinos and gambling - this works.

Otherwise these layers of RNG are just so toxic. Players already had to earn the item in the first place. Let them earn the upgrades, but keep RNG out of it. It’s bad enough RNG is in the way to begin with.

But it’s not? I mean, it’s literally like 4 ilevel difference. So it’s not really that big of a deal.

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Exactly why there shouldn’t be a way to allow players to earn those last 4 levels without having to deal with a dopamine driven engine.

Personally I think it IS A BIG DEAL to make sure that players still have to earn those last 4 ilvls.

Power should be earned. But there’s no reason to attach another round of luck to that last little bit.

This doesn’t make much sense to me. So you don’t want people to earn higher gear? You don’t want people to keep going into higher content?

Or are you saying that the gear shouldn’t have tracks at all? Because that I’m not sure I agree with.

No one should be getting a piece of gear from a quest and upgrading it to Mythic ilevel. The tracks for gear are meant for each type of gameplay and track up, just like the crests do. It’s to keep people having a way to rank up their gear, but reaching their ceiling. And it’s also to get people into different content and not just farming quest greens to upgrade through M+.

Why have separate tracks for the same piece of gear? Why not just put every item on the SAME track so you don’t have to refarm the same item 3 times?

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You don’t.

You need to get a higher ilev base piece.

Far better than titanforging, and my guild actually kept running normal for gear instead of abandoning it after 2 weeks because we normally just stick to heroic.

With trinkets being 4 ilvl difference between normal and heroic our entire raid was pretty much able to get BiS trinkets by week 4.

Something just feels wrong about having to “roll more dice” in order to have a geared raid team.

Like if the dice just roll bad for your team for 4 weeks, you’re less geared than another raid team that could have put in less effort, killed less bosses, all because they got lucky with their gear dice rolls?

That just makes me cringe about the system. Always has.

No I disagree.

Usually for all of us to get BiS trinkets it takes 10-12 weeks. We did that in 1/3 of the time.

Plus we were full clearing normal in an hour and a half before we did heroic (We raid 3 hours on Friday and Saturday). Also gave us some more practice when I think about it.

Overall we enjoyed the change and we no longer need to do normal now because everyone has their trinkets and we usually aren’t raiding on Saturdays or doing alt runs now aside from this past Saturday where we did our Glory of the Raider achievement run for Aberus.

With the new upgrade system it allowed us to treat normal as additional loot and by week 5 all of us but 2 had 4 set bonus (those 2 had 3 tier pieces).

Just because your team has become tolerant of something unnecessarily toxic, it doesn’t mean that the underlying thing still isn’t unnecessarily toxic.

A system that rewards players more proportionate to their success in the game can still have a raid team like yours feeling good once they’ve geared up without having to deal with a system based on chance, where the relationship between rewards and earning those rewards doesn’t have to be skewed.

Like why did we bother upgrading to a better transportation system, energy system, etc., etc., even though those prior systems may have worked? Because things can be BETTER and still meet our expectations.

I’m not saying it can’t be better. The current system is just by far alot better than last season.

Personally I think every raid boss should 100% drop a piece of gear for everyone via personal loot, and same with M+. It’s just that will probably never happen.

Yeah - the different currencies seem to be a good way of preventing “degenerate valor” farming, which was their whole purpose.

The additional layer of RNG just doesn’t seem to provide any actual purpose or benefit other than throwing players back in the RNG grinder.

Gear tracks can still exist without having the existing limits. So they’re on a single track, but they’re all aligned better. The crests serve to keep effort balanced with rewards. So you still have to go into higher content to upgrade gear to higher power levels.

See here:

Crests are what keep players pushing challenging content to get the appropriate rewards. So you get rid of adjacent tracks and replace them with aligned tracks.

I just explained this.

But you could get a quest piece and upgrade it to Mythic level. Which isn’t how things should work.

Yes, but the difference from N → H is now 4 ilvls instead of 13.

N → M it’s 10 instead of 26.

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You can’t.