First let’s start by defining what I mean, anything that increases your character power after cap such as gear/enchants/etc.
Frankly I feel it depends on the complexity of each system. If they are like enchanting, gems, etc I don’t mind those too much but they’re kind of boring and monotonous like reforging.
Ones like essences are fun in theory, but thier alt unfriendly nature makes it so anymore than 1 of them and even just the one is just plain annoying especially forcing you into game modes you don’t enjoy whether that’s pvp, dung,raids,etc. Forcing players to do parts of game they don’t like to be better at parts they do isn’t healthy for a game.
AP was terrible from start and just served as a carrot on a stick to keep “player engagement” up having infinite grind in mmo is terrible. Glad to see system like that go.
Ones like netherlight and corruption, these seemingly random nonsense drops are also terrible to have too many of, especially when they equal about 50% of your dmg, you can go up 10ilvl but don’t get right corruption and you’re only doing like 1k more dps.
Personally I feel like just having 1 or 2 systems like enchanting and gemming, and only 1 other big one like artifact weapon tree or even better version of essences, the amount were about to be swamped with in SL is crazy and I feel like theyre trying to keep 10 plates spinning with soulbinds, coven abilities, class coven abilities,
renown, anima, class sets once they come back, ontop of all the other normal systems when they could get away with only 4 and do a better job at it. We’ve seen them try to do tons of systems like this. There is a 0% success rate.
that was always best way. If anything just add more minor systems like badages. Honor etc again to buy gear. Adding middle men to get gear is better than a whole new power system
As long as they’re balanced and fun, then i don’t really care.
Final Fantasy does the more basic. You get gear and some gem stuff and uh… yah gear. And honestly it makes character progression feel really boring at cap. Your BIS comes from a 100% predictable source (badges) for every class. It’s not bad, necessarily, but it’s not super engaging.
I think that if we hadn’t had corruptions in 8.3, or if we’d always been able to acquire them easily, it would have been more fun. Azerite was annoying at the start, but then it was mostly fine. Essences, once acquired, were fun to play around with as well. But corruptions continue to be a source of frustration, either because of the balance (getting a bad corruption) or acquisition (getting no corruptions)
The first part has never happened though and because that they’ve never been fun. Even arrifact weapon tree arguably the best secondaty power system was just a hurdle for off specs and alts to get into end game.
Well it was a hurdle at the start of the Xpac, but even a month or so in it was fine (for alts).
But that’s what i mean. Systems that have been balanced have ended up being more fun and positively viewed. Legion weapons, once the AP income was sorted, were really fun. Once we could buy legendaries, and the power between them was sorted, they were pretty fun. It’s just that Blizzard ignores feedback, stubbornly, for ages until they finally relent and the system becomes better (usually too late)
im going to be honest. after gear, gems, enchants, i am ok with azerite and essences if:
azerite vendor sold specific pieces for 4750 and titan res comming in at the same rate
AND
essences were account bound, or way, less grindy and only 2 tiers of power.
im even ok with the idea of corrupted gear with a hard corruption cap, no negative effects, and a vendor from jump street. but as i sits right now, with the cloak and negative effects, nuts to it.
I have a friend who just got back into wow, so he’s been grinding everything out. From his POV, essences are mostly fine and Azerite is mostly fine. But corruption is just so stupid. You could get everything else “right” on your character and end up doing 30% of the damage because your corruptions are wrong, so enjoy months of grinding or RNG. Really dumb.
I really liked the old Valor system. Like you could scoop up a piece to plug a gap in your gear, even if only temporary. That’s perfect imo. When they went and made everything available it was maybe a bit too far.
Agreed 100%. There was the RNG from dungeons and raids, where you could score the bigger more meaningful stuff, but then there was the predictable, earnable stuff via currency.
When it comes to gearing I liked Wrath best. We had gems, enchants, reforging.
When it comes to large systems of progression…no game did it better than DAoC with it’s original Realm Rank system. A proper system such as that can sustain player progression for years on end without feeling like a grind (especially when paced correctly such that you feel each upgrade is meaningful yet far enough away that it’s untenable to grind day in and day out for).
Reforging wasn’t until cata, well prepatch technically. I always thought it was bit silly, just live with your non best stats till you replace the piece imo, was just gold sink. the real issue was that secondary stats became too powerful over primary dont need reforging if they were more reasonably weighted
Honestly Reforging ended up being boring anyways. It made bad pieces of gear marginally better but it was really only useful for getting your Hit/Exp caps anyways.
I liked the concept. However the concept is only really cool when it allows you to tweak your secondary stats. When 2 “best” secondary stats beats out any combination of reforged stats it just becomes fluff.
To me though that’s more of a problem with the whole way stats work and classes are designed. I personally miss the days where we had things like hit and expertise and certain classes only desired select secondary stats up to a certain point where there was some calculation involved in tuning your character. Now it’s just braindead.
and, if the system had launched, with the vendor, and not having to use the currency to level your cloak, i think it would ultimately be fine personally.
You want to act like this is a reoccurring trend for them. I’ve never really felt like this is the case. Personally.
I think most of us have come to a mutual agreement they started implementing systems in Legion.
Legion I never felt like the grind was that daunting. I guess they did keep releasing easy catch up mechanics for each patch. Still, the level of catch up was nothing compared to BFA.
BFA systems was so horrendous that it literally scared people off from playing not even two months in. The grind for those systems was just unbelievable.
They still never even fixed it properly. I have several characters that their heart level is probably less than 10. Which I can’t be bothered with and way too much work to get an alt on a level playing field. Maybe I wouldn’t be so active in the forums if I didn’t feel like it was not worth trying to play catch up on my alts. As they are asking too much of their customer base.
I humbly disagree with your statement all around. One) We have only been subjected to systems to grind for two expansions. “Borrowed power”. Two) Only one of them felt unbearable.
Legion was known for the obtainment of legendaries being completely annoying. Not a grind to unlock borrowed power… I mean the actual artifact abilities…
This should not be the new norm. It never was the norm. There has only been two expansions of this. People keep pleading about how previous expansions should be used as a proper example and to not keep implementing so many systems.
Now if we wanted to disregard systems and how they always tend to address issues at a later date. Yes, I guess that be a bit more common. I figured we were talking about systems tho as OP stated.
Speaking of daunting and systems… I think this will be the first time they have this many implemented. Not sure if that is going to work out favorably. They keep trying to tell us to at least give it a try.
