The new epic crafted items attached to the BRD raid all require an existing crafted item and a “Shard of the Void” to create.
This is just picture perfect modern Blizzard system, where new raid tier crafting requires you kill TierBoss and get TierReagent and create ItemYourSpec.
You don’t need to forage for rare eggshells of freshly hatched penguins or establish a bear breeding program until you can harvest the most pristine formed noses - no, just TierReagent from TierBoss.
They can’t even be arsed to do a ZG-style system where each profession has new mats from the raid that still have to be gathered and combined as if you were, I dunno, crafting something.
If this isn’t just a placeholder set-up, but actually how they are going to implement it, and more like it in the future, my excitement for Classic+ has been shot in the foot. Not because I’m madly in love with rare and difficult crafted items (although really good epics should feel like they’re epic to make) but because the entire philosophy here is not vanilla. It is retail through and through. Why would this be the only place that holds true?
The idea of rogue tanks held the prospect that breastplate of bloodthirst might actually be worth crafting at early tiers. Not if this sort of thing is any indication though. This isn’t re-discovering or re-invigorating vanilla wow. It is reanimating it’s corpse and puppeting it around.
The idea of “upgrading” an existing crafted item is fine; the implementation of doing it with generic TierReagent is gross.
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The design does seem pretty lazy and uninspired.
There are so many items already in the game that are barely used for anything, some for a single crafting pattern, some for one available to only one faction.
I’d love to see some more effort put into the crafting, especially for new epics. Have a Druid one that looks all feathery and require a certain number of all the different feathers in the game (there’s quite a few).
There is just so much they could do, that would be immersive and engaging, and that would promote people interacting with the world at large - isn’t that what Blizzard want after all: “the World is the main character”.
Have this TierReagent from the raid is counterintuitive to their own stated design philosophy. It could so very easily be done differently, but I get the distinct impression that this current team, and really Blizzard in general, don’t understand crafting and professions at the most fundamental level.
So many worse games did crafting so much better. Blizzard has never been averse to nicking something from another game, but they won’t when it comes to crafting. Just weird.
There are indeed many essentially “orphaned” crafting materials already in the game. (Poor Lucky Charms need a second chance.) If part of the concept of Classic+ is to explore what got cut out, it seems like a good fit.
Many of their attempts at tier crafting mats in vanilla were similarly orphaned, like dreamscales and AQ obsidian chunks.
Strangely they did it wonderfully right off the bat with the onyxia scale cloak requiring gathering, crafting AND being useful. Then after that point they progressively scaled down all three elements until Naxx when they made scrap gathering and recycled old mats.
Surely they know the new crafting style is painfully out of place in classic, because it is all about ease and efficiency for the developer and players. Feels wrong.
disagree; i think the bigger problem is forced professions.
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Profession are not forced, unless you mean in the same way getting every world buff before every raid was forced.
you’re right, people can just not use the insanely powerful items that require professions, just like they can not equip gear!
I’d actually like to understand what you mean by this. Do you feel that an individual is forced to partake of professions, or that the game design is too focused on professions, or just that in this specific instance in SoD with these new epics from BFD that they are crafted instead of just a drop?
Pre-MC and when all items were bad, the Cap of the Scarlet Savant was the BiS caster helm.
Did every caster take tailoring and skinning, determined to craft it?
No, almost no-one made it, and nothing of value was lost.
If they went full BC blacksmithing I’d agree, but remember in phase 1 this epic gear lets you… clear the raid you had to clear to get the epic in the first place. As soon as a new phase is out with new levels, they will be outdated fast. Until top level, epics are just shinies.
Professions that have benefits so powerful that not using them is akin to not equipping a piece of gear. The whole point of this post is worrying trends, so bop items that are crafted and that don’t have a power spike corollary via other means are worrying.
If they add alchemy trinkets with throughput stats that double the effectiveness of elixirs, for example, and do it for every profession, then this is much less of a worry. They can also just make the items boe.
Even the lvl 25 version of the cloth tailor boots would likely be bis into at least BWL, if not AQ40 or Naxx
The items are obscenely powerful.
Based off what?
We have no idea what new gear is being added to the game.
Based off the fact that blizzard is a largely lazy and talentless company…
Do you really think they want to rebalance literally every item in the game, as well as all content?
Start handing people BWL+ quality gear at level 25 in bulk… in addition to all the crazy runic powers and the result would be that player power so far above and beyond normal that they’d have to redesign the entire game on what is likely a skeleton crew rather than attempting to do something productive, like e-guillotine every RMTer/GDKPer.
This as well, the power scale suggested by these items means the old content is invalid which, again, is not a vanilla wow experience.
Wasn’t the whole reason they took hard %s off gear and changed to ratings because gear would start having to get stupidly powerful in order to keep being upgrades ie 10% crit on a single piece of gear. That’s kind of where this looks to be headed.
Not only the raids but also the old pvp equipment and even the world content becomes trivial then, and long before you can even equip it. Feels so, so retail.
Only reasonable answer in here. “Not forced” until push comes to shove.