Instead of item level creep

Community General Discussion
1

What if we dug into the DnD formula for some items frameworks. Yes, I have just eclipsed 200 hours of BG3 when I say this, but I was considering the fact that my Druid may have literally 3M HP next season, and I was like… there’s gotta be a better way. Then I was like “oh yeah: DND solved this issue, maybe blizzard can copy that and put that ol’ blizzard polish on it.”

This could lessen the impact of new tiers. Coming up with more and more imaginative combos throughout the years would eventually lead them to a seasonal thing like a TCG for any “rated” content, where only the “modern” items worked, but you could also have game modes where they all worked and you could go super nuts with infinite combos and such.

Old stuff stays relevant basically forever, in some cases. Raid Bosses don’t get eclipsed by player power. I think it actually solves quite a few things.

Edit: adding examples because people wanna skip the thread and keep hitting the same hangups.

  1. Being similar to another game is not being that game. I’m not asking for WoW to become DND or Guild Wars (I’ve never actually played guild wars, but this… accusation came up a few times).

  2. This is an attempt to solve 3 problems with one change.
    a. Power Level Creep. Power gains in WoW are exponential, not linear. This leads to the necessity of a “reset” periodically.
    b. What I view as a “boring” gearing system. Next season, I will farm a set of Haste/Vers leather gear with one on use trinket and one proc trinket. Like I have for the last 9 seasons. It’s just leveling but slower. You end up with the same stats every time.
    c. Content invalidation. Anything that came out before this season is pointless. There’s no use for it. This condenses the player base, but also leaves huge content droughts once that limited content is finished.

  3. Yes, I understand what WoW is, this is a suggestion to enact a change.

The short version, replace all gear with on-use and proc effects. You could build combos, give new utility, open up new spell ranks for specialists, etc. Sky is the limit. Like a staff that lets you cast mass dispel. Or a trinket that gives you blood lust. We could use a lot of generics too for stuff like secondary stats.

Every new content patch, some stuff gets added to the pool. Say you want to build the tankiest bear, you grab weapons and trinkets with armor on them from classic and TBC, add in the extra armor crafted set, etc.

Anyone that’s played MTG will quickly see the first hurdle we’ll hit. In a few expansions, someone will link up some items they work well on their own but are crazy OP together. How does MTG fix this? Well, anything tanked is limited to recent patches. There’s always more stuff to get. Nobody who plays gets mad when they get a Mox, even if they can’t use it in ranked. It goes into the box to be used in Wild or whatever.

Maybe some items get reused and you can dust off your original one for table clout, because it still works. Endless experimentation.

The point is to have some in-universe way to explain why we can’t kill a random world mob right after we just took down a literal God.

2

D&D campaigns end. MMOs don’t.

8 Likes
3

Won’t work because WoW players have been conditioned to only like vertical progression. If something only merely offers horizontal progression there’s no point in doing it.

7 Likes
4

i say we go 3.5 style. bring the next level of power creep.
include epic level monsters. from epic level handbook.
YOU THINK YOU PLAYED DND WELL TAKE THIS!
10 infernal abominations.
each cr lvl 26.

2 Likes
5

Yep.

Its the wow way. New shiny gear must be had. even if lore breaking. Like df gear. Who knew the weapons to kill the jailor much easier were on azeroth the whole time? Actually…the dragons knew. they just didn’t tell us.

Other games have this like eve. there you get gear and use it for years. the catch is to not die using it to have to pay for it all again.

1 Like
6

Sounds like someone missed legion :wink:

1 Like
7

This is why I was going sure…squish will fix all this! when this came up bfa to sl change.

hahahaha, no.

I come back to my retail 70 for bg’s once in a while. I am not up to speed on optimal rotation, basically facerolling it.

Millions of damage! For face roll. In sl I was working it to break millions.

Somewhere between OP’s idea…and yet another squish (it will come as I see it) is the answer to resolve this better I am thinking.

8

Already failed here…

9

there is nothing wrong with dnd. this is a hill im willing to die on.

4 Likes
10

There’s nothing wrong with it at all, no. However it is different to an mmorpg and there are things it does that work better for it as a 3-7 person tabletop experience that don’t work as well for an mmorpg.

3 Likes
11

idk dragon makes it seem like dnd sucks period.

12

Let’s get this straight. Everything scales to “remain relevant” but ranked content - arena, RBGs, mythic+, raiding, ??? all have better gear for the current challenge. Other gear is not usable in that content – ??? – but that content’s gear is usable in other content.

Nothing changes? Except you can only get gear usable in the current season from the current season… So everyone would be naked at the start of every season? Thus making old content EVEN LESS RELEVANT?

Vertical progression isn’t perfect, but at least it’s mostly honest and functional. Horizontal progression is a lie. There’s still a best option for any given thing, it’s just far more difficult to look at an item and be like “that’s good”. WoW, on the other hand, for the most part you can just look at ilvl. Is it a higher piece? Yes? It’s probably better. Horizontal progression, however, it’s more like “Well it’s the same ilvl. Same stats. Only difference is this special effect. And it’s just some silly tooltip “You gain bonus damage” which I cannot understand the value of by simply looking. How much damage? How frequently? How is it dealing that damage?”

1 Like
13

i’d fix ilevel creep by removing ilevels, and just have stats that you can feel.

tracking just one number is boring and feels unrpg-ish to me. gimmie a reason to care about my warrior’s strength stat, or my rogue’s agility stat. make me feel the actual stat increase instead of it all just equaling damage. make it so my rogue is hitting enemies at a lightning-speed, while my warrior is slow but hits like a truck! would love to see a warrior player debating using a slow yet powerful axe, versus a faster hitting sword.

…i might just be tired right now, so… not sure if this sounds like a great idea, but it sounds interesting to me atleast…

14

BG scaling is pretty insane to the point where if your character is built somewhat correctly, Act 1 is the hardest because Act 2 and 3 are trivial due to feats and item scaling.

Like at level 2 as a Warlock in BG3, I had Eldritch Blast doing 4-13 damage.

1-10 baseline + 3 from Charisma modifier due to Agonizing Blast.

At level 12 my build was 9 Warlock/3 Fighter, so I had:

3 Actions (due to getting Hasted by Shadowheart or Gale, depending on who was first in priority) which meant I could do three Eldritch Blasts per turn.

My modifiers were:

+6 from Agonizing Blast (I had 22 Charisma for a +6 modifier).
+6 from the Epic Robe I picked up which added my Charisma
+1-8 from some gloves I found that added a 1d8 to my cantrips.

Oh, and because cantrips scale with level, I was getting three beams per Eldritch Blast.

So my Eldritch Blast went from doing 4-13 per blast to 42-63 per blast, and I could Eldritch Blast THREE times per turn with minimal set up (even more once you got a certain upgrade that I’m not going to mention cause spoilers) for a total of 126-189 damage.

Like if you don’t think gear in BG3 is strong, you just don’t understand how stats actually work in that game. The only reason I didn’t kill the final boss in one round is because I didn’t know he interrupts concentration at hp breakpoints, which stunned my hasted barbarian and warlock.

2 Likes
15

Then ts would be a DnD game not an MMO lol

16

I didn’t mean to take the whole kit and caboodle.

Sorry, I was deliriously tired when I made the OP, I could have explained it better.

So what would this system look like in a wow setting? So, right off the bat, gear just doesn’t have main stat or stamina on it; and almost all items have an on hit or on use effect, ir give you an ability that goes in your spellbook. We already have precedence here for these types on items (Gavel, Djaruun, Silent cloak, etc). But expand the abilities. Like how about a ring that lets you cast Cure Disease, so warriors/rogues/hunter can pick that up for afflicted weeks. A mind soothe staff so everyone that can equip staves can do mind soothe skips. A trinket that gives you battle Rez or lust could be perfect. A ring that adds a stacking bleed to your attacks.

Then, when the expansion ends, the effects can either be turned off (say we moved too far from some ethereal thingamajig that was powering them), or dimished. Or not, it might take several expansions before someone accidentally creates a Dark Ritual + Entomb + Exhume level combo. Then we can re-address there.

The thing with infinite J-Curve scaling is that we’re already getting the effect. We’re getting reset every expansion and the only real progress is in raw stats. This would have the same effect, but the numbers would be similar expansion to expansion. I don’t see any functional difference between farming this expansion’s time warp
Puzzle box vs this season’s Haste/Mastery great sword.

17

That’s basically Corruptions, where the effects of Corruptions far outstripped the value of literally any other stat on the item.

If you took in a literal sense where you’re getting rings that grant Dispel Curse and so on, then you’re going to get a comp that revolves around stacking ungodly amount of buffs, or have an ungodly amount of Curse effects floating around because otherwise those rings will be useless 99% of the time.

1 Like
18

This is explicitly something that you don’t want in a long running game. You end up with far too many items being “required” across various situations, and players would get dilluted across decades worth of content targetting them. And at a certain point the sought after key items just become a slog to get because the only people running the content that drops it are there for said item, so competition is very high. See items like Drakefang Talisman, or Dragonspine Trophy for a rough idea of how painful these items can become for players.

Unless every raid was scaled, just obtaining loot from one raid would set you notably above the requirement for any other raid since they all have to be “entry level.” And then that would heavily dimish loot beyond trinkets, and minor min/maxing. And if the loot didn’t accomplish that, then people wouldn’t care to run the content much beyond first kills.

2 Likes
19

So the staff you can get in Act 1 that gives 2 lightning charges when you do damage with a cantrip seems bugged. At 2 stacks it does 1 lightning dmg and at 5 it does 1d8. The bug is, the lightning damage is also double dipping hex and the charisma modifier bonus damage. So with 5 stacks your eldritch blast does 1d10 + 3 + 1d6 for hex, then 1 + 3 + 1d6 and then 1d8+ 3 + 1d6.

It’s gross.

20

Yeah, that staff is nuts.

Basically carries any char caster until the legendary staff in Act 3 that gives you a free Rank 6 spell on short rest.