Yeah, but some people do care, like Einerus. I’m not saying we should get 237 ilevel in the open world from doing bgs. But there must be a better/more creative solution out there.
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Or when Gearscore came back in Wrath Classic and is still being used the exact same way.
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Yes, but… Blizzard only works in extremes. So they will make this game too simple instead of just the right amount. So no changes tbh.
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I agree 100%. Let me hit 1 maybe 2 buttons and let my GEAR do the WORK. Let my TIME do the work. I dont want to do 20 buttons rotations when i get home from work. My brain is fried.
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hey imagine if they removed ilvl and all the gear has is just stats
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Then people will create a new Gearscore system to quantify gear based on their stats, because that’s how it worked in Wrath (okay, technically item level DID exist in Wrath; it just wasn’t visible in-game).
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Very, very - VERY accurate.
They should bring back gear-tuning – where if there’s a majority of the players in the BG waaaaay higher, they should at least buff you up to be semi-competent so you’re not just a free-insta-kill on sight. lol
Only people who generally hate this idea are those that love to creampie the fresh pvp players in BGs with ease, using little to no effort.
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You could go play Classic?
No I don’t think so. This is an mmo and the focus is challenging group content.
Honestly, I think most people feel this way… at least about buttons.
What’s crazy is this thread is the same recycled conversation since BFA.
It’s good to talk about it because things haven’t changed much for us since then. I sometimes wonder if anyone capable of helping actually cares for how long it’s been going on (e.g., max GV rewards have slid from +10 to +20 between Legion and today, worsening our concern).
I share the pain of @Einerus, and I think a lot of what is mentioned points to the same problem of hitting a glass ceiling. There’s a solid argument in “skill issue”, but that’s not the heart of my pain.
Great Vault
I see this mountain of pulling the slot machine lever of Great Vault each and every week through the mandatory chore of a timed key, and only being met with items that are, at best, lateral upgrades.
For example, if I get bracers two or three weeks in a row? I quit WoW for at least a month. It’s wretched to be hit with Great Vault as a tax to character growth. For that reason alone, I strongly believe Great Vault, or our pseudo weekly login bonus, should be removed from the game.
I do not believe the game begins to heal until the Vault is removed outright.
Justice Points and Flightstones
What’s peculiar to me is that Justice Points have returned to the game in an obfuscated manner. “Flightstones”, as the currency is called today, achieves virtually the same goal. Further, it seems like this was a huge improvement on the gearing cycle—easily the best it’s felt since BFA. But why did we go through this giant loop just to get Justice again without using actual Justice, unless it was for internal politics?
The sigils are a treatment of checkpoints. In the mid-season, however, parallel systems, like Conquest, become uncapped and the players are freed to achieve at their own pace. It follows, again in my naive experience, that we should have a system to upgrade sigils (at an increasing cost) this late in the season, without the “Veteran” → “Champion” → “Hero” breakpoints gatekeeping the player’s feelings of “character success” before the end of a season.
While Conquest allows the acquisition of comparable PvP gear, it does not allow the free upgrade of PvE ilvl. In that sense, to me, M+ should allow the acquisition of comparable PvE gear without the allowance of titles, mounts, and other rewards (dungeon portals) that come with KSM. To further increase the value of KSM, Justice and Valor could be implemented with in-instance vendors. The obligation is then that players need to travel across Azeroth to spend their points freely (a chore) but players who have already achieved can quickly hop around on an alt to make the desired purchases. And again, this is only in the mid-season. Keeping up guardrails during the early season is wholly justified!
PvP ilvl
PvP gearing has somewhat invalidated the core game progression loop of gearing for a few reason. In focus is AFK bottling for currencies though. Why should players have access to 437 ilvl in PvP just for showing up? Further, showing up in 343 blues automatically increases the floor to ilvl 385. It seems too much like sharpening the pencil from both ends.
It’s a fact that some classes scale better than others. A spec at the bottom end may perform better relative to peers than at the top end. I believe a philosophy shift MUST occur if WoW is to improve balance problems. That is, almost all PvE focus is on balancing at the top end—if a spec is doing well, they get dropped down a peg, or if a spec is struggling, they may get some baseline tuning to hold them afloat. My proposal is that PvP balance should be focused on the bottom end and ilvls in instanced PvP should be capped.
What I mean by this is that rather than increasing minimum item level in battlegrounds and arenas, the maximum item level should be brought down significantly toward the same strength as a Normal dungeon. Players should NOT be in a fully decked out Mythic raid slugfest in WSG midfield but a chintzy “newbie dungeon gear” brawl. This would radically improve how the game feels and further allow PvP balance to be clearly delineated from PvE balance. Further, this allows the removal of PvP ilvl outright. There’s no need to artificially spike players up if everyone is brought down to an equal playing field for battlegrounds and arenas.
War Mode Problem
Having 450 PvP ilvl in arenas and doing well, to having your ego checked by a PvE hero in the open world is a fairly jarring experience. The difference in blue PvP gear is even worse…
Assuming that PvP ilvl is removed and the top end of ilvl is capped for instanced PvP to that of a Normal dungeon, what then of War Mode? How does that ecosystem improve without the problems we already have today?
My first gut check was something like: “PvP gearing invalidates core gearing progression loops” → “remove PvP gear entirely”. But I feel that’s also wrong or short-sighted because of the War Mode problem. A casual PvPer should be able to obtain gear parity to a casual PvEer in War Mode. Perhaps controversially, a hardcore PvPer should not be able to obtain gear parity to a hardcore PvEer (except for War Mode, it wouldn’t be needed, and in the arena, a skill difference should maintain equilibrium), although it should probably be somewhat close.
PvP gear should exist as a “below Normal dungeon” option with upgrade tracks to bring it up to M0 quality, and Conquest with rating lockouts should persist to upgrade that gear further to Heroic raid quality.
LFG, Difficulty Bloat, and ilvl Squish
Heroic dungeons and Normal raids are fairly redundant. Heroic dungeons could be removed outright with LFD into M0, and nobody would notice their disappearance. Normal raid can likewise be merged with LFR and the difference wouldn’t be terribly noticeable. There is one jarring issue though with the current queue systems: instantaneous travel to the dungeon.
Any dungeon queue system should require at least two of the players to travel to the dungeon entrance, exactly how Mythic works now. Most players are being summoned anyways almost intuitively today. The biggest difference though is this requires an orientation and acclimation period where players are automatically placed in a pseudo-social space while they travel to the dungeon entrance. It is a first-step relationship builder which is sorely missing from the “queue and go-go-go” mentality ingrained in current LFD and LFR systems.
Meeting stones should be shrunk down a bit and placed inside the instance entrances. From there, a “host” player should set the LFG tool settings with a new “automatic invite” option. Players may use the LFD or LFG tool to search and apply for these groups. The LFD tool should list the current number of hosted dungeons in process for the player’s active role, the current number of hosted dungeons queued (accepting automatic invites) for the player’s active role, and an average queue time. This data should be available to the player for specific dungeons and for random (“first available”) queues.
The “random” reward bags should be removed entirely, and this goes for PvP as well (there, the win is simply all that’s required from whichever Bg you like). The bonus of getting fast and convenient access to groups should be all the benefit players need. As time goes on and difficulty increases, more group leaders will opt out of automatic invites but this is scalable and helpful for both leaders and members across all M+ levels.
The lost tiers of Heroic dungeon and Normal raid would then be able to reduce the scale of ilvl that’s added across a tier. To be clear on this, it is much better today than it was during Shadowlands, but the removal of redundant tiers allows even further closing the gap between the bottom and top end in character progression. The gameplay should be the first reward, and unfortunately, the gear is still coming first.
I’ll continue adding to this post as I have more thoughts on the topic.
Read through this. Most are playing tetris, solitaire and pubg mobile. All brief games.
M+ is about offering players end game content that is different from Arena, RBG or Raiding and it succeeds at this magnificently; You get a comparatively fast gameplay expierience that scales to your skill level and rewards you appropriatley. Quite frankly, after coming off of a multiple expansion break between late Wrath and later Legion this was probably the most brilliant addition to the game.
Turning this into a “challenge mode” (which it basically is past 20) would fundamentally ruin an incredibly popular mode of play for a large portion of the player base for no real reason.
Also to be clear earlier versions of WoW weren’t “simpler”, they were laden with a whole whack of crappy mechanics that people don’t remember; things like a third of your attacks not working because missed/parried/dodged/blocked/resisted, every enemy running for the hills when they got to low health, enemies being packed together like sardines in a can, everyone needing to stop and eat/drink after every 2nd pull, dungeons that went on forever… people have rose tinted goggles about how it was “back in the day”.
People have rose tinted glasses about today too though. Problems existing in the past doesn’t invalidate proposals or solve problems of today.
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Sorry, but a lot of people liked these “crappy mechanics” this is a biased view that is common among people that like retail WoW. Also, these “crappy mechanics” contributed to the immersion of the game. These days, retail WoW feels like a boring arcade game, all streamlined to get players running on that gear treadmill.
Retail WoW feels incredibly formulaic to me. The game feels like it was designed to just pad metrics, and to get players into those repeatable content loops as fast as possible, like M+.
People love M+ mostly because it gets them access to raid level gear. Yes I know, gear is always the incentive, but the ease of forming a M+ vs raiding, M+ will win out every time for players because it is the path of least resistance.
I think many of us that don’t like M+ would like to see the mode reigned in a little bit. Namely, put some dang lockouts on it each week. The fact that you can spam it nonstop just creates a lot of FOMO for many players, thus why this sole system is causing a ton of burn out in the game.
I’d argue, as well, that the popularity of M+ is allowing the developers to sit on their butts when it comes to creating new content for the end game. They basically are just recycling a handful of dungeons now, and have been for years.
Wow is getting a reputation among MMO players now of just being too focused on competitive content. It is hard to gauge this on these forums, since the majority of the players here are okay with the current state of the end game, but I think a lot of players are just leaving for the other big MMOs because they’re offering something different that isn’t just timed dungeons, raids and ranked PVP.
Blizzard hasn’t even bothered to create a new BG in years, probably one of the most popular end game activities for casual pvp players.
Well said. This is often the go-to rebuttal for anyone offering suggestions to change how modern WoW plays today. I get so tired of people comparing things to how the game played a decade ago, using this as an excuse for the lack of new ideas today.
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i wonder who said this, ion perhaps? bc this game rides on M+ and no one else. its sweats game and nothing else. this is another and prolly main reason retail is whack and boring to tears bc thats all they care abt. M+ 20 trash gameplay when most of the players are casuals.
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1st off is this entire post from ChatGPT cause it reads a little weird to me? Secondly, if this is saying requiring everyone to go to the dungeon and removing auto-queues would somehow magically improve the social experience in WoW, then yeah I have a bridge on the moon to sell you. Most people only care about those ‘good players’ that can help them clear content faster and that is it. Very very very rarely do I see any actual real social behavior going on because you have to travel to the dungeon.
It is cool finding a dugeon tho inside the level design of the area and wherever the entrance is hidden. Classic WoW made finding a dungeon more about exploration but these days everyone wants to find everything and be able to do anything now now now.
Also I agree that they could make normal queueable as I think Fated raids showed people willing to step up and try harder raids. And the fact normal and heroic dungeons are usually pretty pointless sucks as well.
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No, just wrote hurriedly and didn’t proof. Autocorrect got me in some areas and I’ll try to reword. Thanks for the callout.
I know the social problems won’t be fixed, ever. But there is a pacing problem that impairs social interaction from the very onset. One of these is fixable.
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The issue is that he hasn’t really proposed anything that solves a problem or even clarified that there is a problem in the first place.
Strictly speaking all reviews are biased.
You were doing the same gear treadmill in 2005 kid, it’s just that the motor didn’t work so you had to tear you’re quad pushing the belt with your feet.
People love it because it offers Gear and a unique gameplay mode that encourages you to challenge yourself.
The thing is: you don’t have to do M+. It’s a good idea since it can help you gear up in a hurry and also ensure more rewards in the vault but it isn’t mandatory for most players.
In previous expansions you might very well have had a point but DF has been exploding with content for players outside of instanced content. Further every time that blizzard tries to implement new gameplay modes like torghast or visions it gets a huge backlash from swathes of players for being too hard or not rewarding enough or how mommy doesn’t love them enough.
Again: there is plenty of stuff to do and when the devs gave players side content that wasn’t competetive it was generally denounced and/or ignored.
This isn’t to say that having more side content like player housing would be bad though.
There’s some truth here; the last shot at new PVP content would have been island expeditions, though given the themes of reconcilliation in this expansion it wouldn’t make sense for them to release a new BG at this time.
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