Is it really that hard to have unified item levels and unified difficulty?

In order to tackle higher-level dungeons, I need to farm gear with higher stats. How meaningless.

The current dungeon system is an infinitely escalating mechanism. To reach higher levels, I need to farm better gear, creating an endless cycle.

We all know that having item level 610+ for a level 10 Mythic+ dungeon versus item level 630+ for the same level 10 Mythic+ dungeon makes them completely different in difficulty.

Is it really that hard to have unified item levels and unified difficulty?

If you’re worried about lower-level dungeons becoming unpopular, you can always design some reward mechanisms.

Shouldn’t we be striving to master the mechanics and paths to achieve the best results, rather than endlessly farming gear?

1 Like

Magic Tower

1 Like

Already been tried, players on the lower end of the spectrum revolted against it viciously.

My motivation comes from the fact that in order to maintain one character, it’s almost impossible for me to try out the specs of other classes.

In DF s1 we were chilling and farming valor in 2s, bringing everyones alts along and hanging out. Then they took it away. Was the closest feeling ive had in wow in ages to the good ol days.

2 Likes

i assume you mean flightstones, not valor, which is a pvp currency.

what’s preventing you from bringing your friends and alts to farm valorstones in 2s in TWW lol?

Farming harder difficulties for better gear is a stable in just about any RPG. If not item level/power, loot drop frequency.

Regardless of increasing player power and the feeling that gives the players, it would not retain players enough for blizzard to justify that system. Blizzard, a for profit company, wants us to spend as much time as we can on their games. Gearing up constantly is how we stay interested.

1 Like

Gearing up is also how we overcome challenges we were not previously capable of. Queen Ansurek mythic died at 625~ ilvl. But most guilds who see it are going to be 630+ by the time they get there.

If you try to do something, but can’t, and have no recourse you’re not gonna feel great. Gear progression is how a game like this provides a challenging yet relatively approachable experience for a broader number of players. Obviously it’s not trying to push everyone over the hurdles and the challenges still end up challenging in their own right, but it feels way better to get stronger and overcome something than sit and wait for it to be brought to you (If it ever is).

I agree. My point was focusing on the idea that gear and difficulty would be unified.

I considered mentioning that players can cheese more mechanics but doing more damage and having higher health in harder content, but in the OPs proposal, there wouldn’t be harder content. You would either master what we have, or get faster through planning and cutting apexs in hallways.

I also like the idea that more geared players can help other players clear “easier” content because of gear, but again, in the OPs proposition, there would be no “easier” content.

Flightstones were introduced in a subsequent patch in Dragonflight. I forget if it was 10.0.7, or 10.1, or whatever. Dragonflight Season 1 launched with Valor, the same upgrade currency used at the end of Shadowlands.

Valor has never been a PvP currency to my knowledge. It seems like you’re confusing it with Honor.

2 Likes

Bruh people dont even want to learn how to play their class, why would they want to learn how to do mechanics?

Okay, so the short answer of your ask is “no, it isn’t hard”. A normalized and/or linear curve as a baseline would absolutely be great for WoW for a variety of reasons, even paired together

For example, with linear gear power, and gear normalized around normal difficulty as the baseline, you have a content cycle where doing normal in normal nerfs the content and gets you ready for heroic, which is still beneficial for helping players learn. Heroic then drops gear that does the same, for heroic and normal. But since we are linear rather than exponential, the raid tuning can be made much tighter AND normal still gets nerfed, but not necessarily overgeared into a face roll

And then, mythic raiding offers the same items as heroic. The difficulty can be tuned around that fully kitted heroic gear as the normalized baseline, the content itself never gets nerfed due to gear BUT the tuning can be made much tighter and more accurate. The content becomes a prestige, where the reward is visually distinct and optional.

So why DONT we do that?

As it turns out, players have consistently voiced issues with normalization of gear every time they’ve even touched it in the history of the game!

Psychologically, it doesn’t provide them enough of a jump to feel stronger, and that game feel is very important for the majority of players in MMOs

But beyond that, gear also serves as a gap closer, and an exponential gap closer allows for easier content to become MUCH easier, which also translates into a more clear distinction between farmable content versus progression content, which has helped keep raiding from dying out entirely!

They DID try to include a mechanism for working around this via a normalization strategy a la titanforging, but the RNG nature of it made older content not only mandatory, but unlikely to matter and thus busy work

They could fix that by making something like an upgrade track for the expansion, but then that comes with many of the same issues, and removes new carrots for those who enjoy the chase…which is the majority of those who pay the bills

From a TECHNICAL standpoint, we absolutely COULD make such a swap EASILY. From a REALISTIC standpoint, it’s just something that turns off those paying the bills every time it’s happened, and the consumer is voicing their opinion loudly each time and the business adapted accordingly

Unfortunately, it’s very likely WoW will EVER have something like this without it being tacked on, like a new raid difficulty that explicitly scales everyone down to the same downscale AND also tunes around that. But that’s also a system that flies in the face of why we don’t have dynamic mythic raiding anymore (ignoring actual reasons, this is the line fed)

In essence, there IS a lot of upside to what you propose from a MECHANICAL perspective, it just comes with downsides in the form of baggage in the PSYCHOLOGICAL perspective, and adds more overhead for the DESIGN perspective without any real payoff over the current model (at this time)

I enjoy my hamster wheel though.

There’s an argument to be made that people would find more enjoyment learning the nuances of fight mechanics than class stuff, because class stuff hardly changes through an instance the way boss to boss mechanics do.

Por que no los dos?

Flightstones did not exist yet…

The mouthbreathers who play this game and are unable to do mechanics unless a space ship weakaura tells them the exact vector to stand relative to another person thus needing 20 ilvls over geared to do a +10 think otherwise.

Go play tournament servers if you dont care about gear differences.

Your idea of overcoming challenges through gearing is only a small factor maybe 20% of progression. The other aspects are repetition and retuning(read nerfing the content).
Yes the first 5 queen kills this tier were around 625 ilvl, but lets not forget these are some of the top 100 players in the world and they were also around ilvl 625 when they first pull the boss, so why did they not one shot the fight? The answer is simple they had hundreds of pulls to train themselves on timings and mechanics, and because blizzard designed and tuned the fight to take the world’s best players hundreds of pulls to kill it at 625 ilvl. The OP would argue that gear progression would be the reason it is tuned this way, but I would argue that only 10 guilds will kill the same mythic queen that was killed at the beginning. There have already been nerfs patched in and there will be more and more until the release of the 11.1 patch.
I both disagree and agree with the OP. Gearing should change to feel like our personal progression/playing the game should help us over come challenges overtime. I dont think this has anything to do with gearing itself, but it has everything to do with how the game is originally designed to be for the best of the best players. Design the game to overcome by the middle of your player’s skills. Ignore the fringes of your best players and your worst. The best will figure out another way to entertain themselves and the worst will find the easiers things to do.
I didn’t spend a lot of time on M+. It is an infinity scaling system that is not meant to be progressed through gearing. My solution there is cap the level at where ever rewards stop improving and make a daily high score leaderboard for best times or maybe fringe high scores for best time 100% trash cleared etc.
TLDR: I feel the game should be designed and tuned to be overcome through gearing for most players.

Lol no. You need to find more efficient ways of going about the dungeon. The only thing gear should be looked at for is surviving mechanics and making it less likely for you to get one shot by increasing your health pool. The damage helps, sure, but a +10 could be timed at 605 or 620. The thing the people timing them at 605 are doing is planning out pulls better, more consistent with interrupts and defenses, and more accountability on each individual player.

Gear does have a cap. The highest pushers reach that cap and are still able to keep pushing. You and 90% of the general M+ population are looking at it wrong.