I think we can do a better job with Tier Armor sets

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
1

I’m posting this because I feel like we have all the pieces to make tier set acquisition feel good and meaningful instead of awkward and frustrating.

Tier is one of those things that’s a love/hate … it adds a little seasonal flavor to a class and the items feel powerful and rewarding to acquire, but the downside to tier is that you feel like you -have- to have 4/5 pieces to play your class the way it’s meant to be played for the season an that leads to frustration and weird things like running splits for loot trading.

The addition of the catalyst really helped tier acquisition feel a lot better, but the raid splits, loot trading, and just horrible RNG still make getting the items really annoying for many players in the first few weeks. Then after those first few weeks, you then end up with these curios and tier tokens that aren’t needed and no one cares about.

So, hear me out, I think tier should be eliminated from the loot table as tokens/curios.

Tier armor should be part of the lore and quests for a season. It’s fabulous and powerful armor bestowed to you by your allies to help you defeat the great foe you’re going to face. The most logical way of working this into the game in a fair and logical fashion is by making tier acquisition at a reasonable item level track, such as veteran, simply part of the quest line in the first week of a tier before the raid opens.

Week 1 you start a quest where someone says something like “We’ve discovered a way to empower armor to assist you in defeating X” and off you go to do various tasks and quests to provide them materials, tools, etc to be rewarded with your 5 pieces of Veteran track tier armor. It makes sense, it feels good, and everyone gets a starter set of important gear going into the season that’s powerful enough to be an upgrade over last tier, but will be replaced by achieving greater success during the season.

Week 2, the raid opens and you get another quest “Now that we can imbue armor, if you find powerful armor return to us and we can enhance these pieces for you” You get your first Catalyst charge, then every week after, or via achievements like KSM or AOTC you get additional charges.

  1. Getting tier from the intro campaign would make it feel a LOT more important and rewarding
  2. It makes more sense for your allies to give you powerful armor customized to your class abilities than random enemies just happening to have perfect magical armor for you.
  3. It gets rid of the RNG frustration and abuse of loot trading early season and allows everyone a fair, equal start in new content.
  4. It cleans up the annoying tokens in the loot table that are irrelevant after a few weeks for most players.
  5. It still allows for gear progression through normal dungeons and raids by starting the gear at an appropriately low level (LFR equivalent of current season) but allows it to be made reasonably powerful through upgrade paths.

Think about it blizzard, I personally feel this model would make early season feel immensely better than what we’ve been doing for the last few years.

2 Likes
2

Honestly tier doesn’t feel too bad atm and while more story driven questlines would be great personally I don’t think Blizzard has it in them to dedicate the resources to it.

I still remember why they removed tier in the first place and it wasn’t long before people realized how dumb their reasoning was and ultimately didn’t even pay off.

3

I could get on board with some of the suggestions the OP is making but there are other short-term fixes that could be implemented to make the current system better.

  1. Just drop curios from any boss that is a token boss. I NEVER understood the point of specific slots being on specific bosses other than to force you to finish/progress the raid; which you are going to do anyway. I’m fine with the curios only going to certain classes like the current tokens do now. That kinda enforces the behavior of progressing together.

  2. Revert the drop rate from raiding to what it was. The whole reduction in drop rate from raid bosses and making people HAVE to run mythic plus just seems dumb. If a boss is supposed to drop a token, it should drop a token.

  3. Fix the loot so that bosses always drop a certain amount of loot, regardless of your team size. More people = more loot seems like a backwards philosophy as it unfairly enriches pugs and punishes smaller dedicated teams.

2 Likes
4

I’m good on more time killer quest stuff.

5

I just wish prot paladins could get a decent tier set bonus all the ones we had in df have been trash but the one from sepulcher in SL felt so good to use

6

I just wish tier sets didnt force you to a certain play style. I wish it had other reasons to equip it like a proc but you can play anyway you want.

7

Things I still don’t like about tier:

  1. Even with the much more generous catalysts this season my main I focused on for the first 2 weeks will full clear raids and ksm still had zero luck getting rolls in raid and vault for tier so I was far behind other luckier people because my tier was op. It felt like crap.

  2. Tier pigeonholing people into talents you literally have to take or else lose way too much effectiveness. Some tier sets were very well designed in terms of allowing talent freedom and also created a fun rotation. Like s2 shadow priest. It still wanted one minor talent, but it wasn’t forcing whole capstones like this season tier is.

  3. Tier being op leads to blizzard constantly nerfing the base spec which is infuriating and they will have to bandaid fix them in the future with flat % increases. But they water the spec down by nerfing specific parts of the spec that are fun or unique and only slap a dmg buff on later leading to watered down specs eventually.

  4. Zero choice, zero customization. There is only one tier. I don’t get to choose from any existing tier sets to create my own build and playstyle. And while people will say, “there is no real choice there’s only meta” that is not true. I push to the top 0.5-1% m+ with my own builds and playstyle and I have a blast doing so. I want the ability to choose more options even if they the “wrong choice”. Wows population is extremely non-innovative even at the highest levels. It takes investment to choose your stats and embellishments so it makes sense a ton of people will go with what sounds like the best according to basic sims.

I want to be able to get tier at a closer rate to other players. I want to be able to choose my tier sets OR have tier sets not be too pigeonholy. And I want blizzard to nerf tier when it’s op and not the class. Mistweaver and Havoc this season are good examples, both have absurdly overpowered tier but have only gotten nerfs to their specs.

1 Like
8

I feel this would have the opposite effect. It will reward smaller groups but punish those with a larger size. As those with a smaller raid size will be able to gear up faster in comparison.

9

I think as a tank, I’d like it if bigger groups weren’t so incentivized. That’s kinda also what my bias is. You only ever need 2 tanks…so it can be tough to pug a raid unless you’re right on the second reset happens.