This is seriously the most convoluted iteration of gear upgrades I’ve ever seen in an MMO. When announced I was under the impression that the complexity would be justified by actually being able to go up between tiers, so once I get 7/7 from 1 tier, I’d be 3/7 of the next (for example), and then I’d be able to climb up after converting the item. Well, that turned out to be a cold shower, in the sense of cold being liquid nitrogen cold.
Horrible naming
What’s better? An Aspect’s Shadowflame Crest, or a Wyrm’s Shadowflame Crest?
Why is an Enchanted Wyrm’s Shadowflame Crest a crafting item variant with only “Enchanted” in front of it?
Why do I need a WeakAura to add item levels to the tooltips just so I can see for what gear it is?!
Why is this taking up SO MUCH BAG SPACE?! I know some things are going to be converted to a currency, but why do I have to convert fragments into a whole piece in the first place? Why can’t an upgrade just cost 15 pieces?
Why is there even a holding cap?
Item Levels
Why can’t I just keep upgrading an item? Valor hit the sweet spot. I got my item and I could upgrade it. Right now I feel like 90% of my loot is still wasted, especially on lower keys or normal/heroic raid. I don’t want to waste limit crests on upgrading something I’m going to replace anyway.
Not to mention there are item level overlaps, meaning I can potentially waste crests on the wrong item. Why does a Wyrm Crest upgrade “Higher level Champion” and “Lower level Hero” How do I know what Champion and Hero are? Do you expect me to remember 7 or 8 different item level ranges with names that make no sense in relation to the crests?
Why is Hero gear 428-441 (5 levels) and Champion 415-437 (8 levels)? Why is there overlap in the first place and why can’t I upgrade hero to champion?
I hate this system
It’s needlessly complex, I need to refer to external tools to even slightly make sense of it. Just please, please, let us have a plain upgrade path. Just give us 300-441 or something, and add the costs to those upgrades. We don’t need Champion, Adventurer, Hero, Veteran, Whatever ranks for gear, it just bloats the system.
Valor was nice. I just get an item, I get the entire upgrade path and I’m done. I feel like doing a +15 isn’t a complete waste of time because I’ll be able to upgrade the item. The only issue valor had was that you could farm lower keys. My proposal:
ditch the different gear ranks
increase flight stone cost the higher the level
transform crest fragments into a currency
ditch the crests
make upgrades cost the fragments for each level within the old ranges. Example: 428-441 could add a hero crest currency cost, while 415-437 adds a champion crest currency cost, meaning 428-437 would have an overlap of currencies
If that’s still too complex, back to valor.
low keys => low valor reward
increase reward based on keystone level
low ilvl => low valor upgrade cost
increase cost based on ilvl
use whatever maths formula makes it so that you cannot effectively farm +2 keys to upgrade your gear to +15 key rewards
I was extremely skeptical of this new upgrade system, but after actually playing with it a bit, it’s not as complicated as it seems at a glance.
Aspects are the leaders of their flights. It makes sense, in my mind at least, that their crests are better than the others.
Not sure what the problem is here. This one seems fine, too.
This one I do agree with. I’m finally starting to remember the corresponding ilvls and crests needed, but Blizz should do a better job explaining this in the UI, if they plan on keeping this system around.
Also agree. I wouldn’t mind these taking up bag space if we didn’t already have so much crap from everything else.
Valor caps have been a thing. Doesn’t seem too crazy that these would have caps as well.
I dunno, I thought I was going to hate it too, but it’s actually not that bad since playing around with it more. Not perfect, by any means, but I don’t think they should scrap the whole thing.
How many guides have you looked at? How many questions have you had answered before you came to this conclusion? Because someone who doesn’t go into guides will have a hard time understanding it most of the time.
Yeah doesn’t make sense to me, especially in relation to the gear levels being called veteran, explorer, hero, champion etc.
Fine in isolation, not fine as in “yet another item with a very similar name that is used for something similar”
For me it was the other way around, I thought I was going to like it, but it’s actually much worse and more complicated than they presented it to be, especially considering 90% of your gear is useless as you can’t go past the max upgrade rank. Meaning if you get champion drops, you’ll waste crests to max it, which you’d need for hero.
troll detected.
This post is because I put in a lot of time to understand it, and still have to look up all the information constantly because it’s too convoluted and hard to get a complete overview.
Get item that goes to 441, don’t need wyrms to get it to 437. Use one aspect up to 441. You never pay crests for the same ilvl on the same slot twice. You can save a tiny bit by waiting for a natural item of a higher ilvl to drop but realistically that’s unnecessary with the rate at which crests are acquired.
Bag space and taxonomy I agree with, but the skeleton concept of the system is fantastic. Great for multi speccing, correlations between ilvl and content, universally applicable, VERY generous / fast with caps.
Just need a way to get wyrms from higher content and to clear up the bags.
Just to prove my point that there’s hidden complexity and things “you just have to know” or read a guide for.
This can still be done without making an overly complicated system and wasting low ilvl gear that drops but you can’t upgrade all the way through.
Despite playing 10.1 every single day, having done M+ at +17~18, normal and heroic raid, I still don’t know what wyrm tokens are without looking up extra information. That again provides my point.
The game told you in the intro quest. The fact they didn’t explain that anywhere else doesn’t make the idea of it bad. Crests upgrade slots, stones upgrade items. That’s all you need to know and despite the intro quest telling me that it still felt pretty intuitive the moment I went to the upgrade NPC with a bag of items and started actually upgrading them.
There’s a difference between “This is poorly communicated” and “This is a bad idea”
1: those items aren’t wastes
2: it’s good that there’s at least a rough correlation between the level of content someone is doing and the ilvl that content rewards, even if it’s just 4 ilvl.
That’s a naming issue, something I already said I agreed with so not really getting how this proves any wider point about the system.
The naming is dumb, it takes up bag space, and it’s poorly communicated, but the actual mechanics of it are fantastic.
I dont mind it really , i understand the system is to keep high ilvl players from farming +2 and +3 the way they did in S1 with Valor . If they wanna do this system , thats fine , but i think they should at least increase the amount to gear that drops .
M+ loot acquisition definitely needs looking at, it’s better this season purely because the loot tables are shorter but fishing for 2/5 x 1//Y chance drops as the only way to acquire unique items like trinkets is thoroughly unsatisfying.
The whole “tiers” aspect of gearing is what gets me. It introduced more “time wasters” when the levels already have crests requirements and those crests only drop from their appropriate content difficulty.
Feels like ghetto automation to me. It’s a questionably better system overall but it created a weird dopamine feedback loop. I do and don’t like it at the same time. Think I’d honestly rather have the older systems back (Or even WotLK’s system).
The new system was designed for gatekeeping, as they see low level M+ farming as degenerate behavior. This is partly why it’s so complex.
The other issue is that they wanted to repurpose the currency as crafting material.
Which is why we have the “enchanted” versions of them.
The crests being fragmented is the main head scratcher.
They should have stuck to the fragments as the definitive “currency” instead of taking yet another precious bag space slot for the whole versions.
I just keep them as fragments until I need to use them, to save space.
The one thing I dislike is the lack of ways to move up the ilvl ranges.
Even if they are SO adamant about gatekeeping players from getting better gear from easier content, they could at least have enabled a weekly currency, something like the Shadowflame Sparks, to move a single piece of gear to the next ilvl range (e.g: 8/8 explorer → 8/8 adventurer), giving a bone/purpose to those not willing to ride the M+ treadmill.
You can downgrade crests in the Loamm inn, there is no issue there.
Agreed, which is why such a currency would be weekly, capped, applied to one slot only.
It’d be a “Vault Lite” for upgrading, and could even be tied to a quest, like the Catalyst.
It wouldn’t be healthy for the game if it you could get BiS from WQs.
This is an issue though because it’s quite likely you will / do also need them. Being in a situation where I need my aspect crests to upgrade items I’m yet to acquire, but out of wyrm crests because I’m running 17-20 keys to acquire those items, telling me to downgrade my aspect crests isn’t helping because I’m going to use them.
Same situation for those who need drakes but are running wyrms. Solution would be to let crests from lower tiers drop once you’re capped on the higher ones.
Yeah specific items with no alternative like trinkets have to drop twice, once on champion and then later again on hero, but for other slots it’s generally just a case of getting a new belt or pair of shoulders which come from multiple sources and are much more interchangable.
I think there’s probably a more elegant way to do this than yet another currency, I do like the idea though on specific items. Perhaps you pick a slot to which attune yourself and through the campaign you gradually break down the upgrade boundaries on it and get rewarded with a max ilvl item in that slot at the end? Idk.
At this point almost everyone. Even the casuals should be at about a 415 level Between the weekly heroics and everything else
Which is a Drake level, which means:
• Mythic dungeons (around 5-9)
•LFR
• Farming Treasures, Rares and Events in ZC
The new system levels with you. The only ones who should be going for Wyrm stuff right now are people at or around 420. Or those blessed to get 424+ gear. Just play it at the pace your gear lwvel is at. Pace it our. You have an entire week to get it done, it does not need to be done in 1 day. Take a few days to do the heroics, mythics, do the 2 lfr wings. Just enjoy it, before you know it you’d of hit the stone cap and you have like 15 drake crests ready to go