Issues with gear after the item level revamp of Dragonflight pre patch

Community General Discussion
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The item-level revamp that came as Dragonflight pre patch added Shadowlands to the Chromie time leveling system has brought some game breaking flaws.

What does the issues affect?

  • Leveling
  • Timewalking content
  • Twinking

What are the issues?

In terms of leveling, the item level rewards have become completely unpredictable. There are several screenshots flowing around of level 10 players receiving 194 item level gear. This is obviously a major balancing mistake. Just look at this armory: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/us/blackrock/warem

Several dungeons, raids and world content rewards have not properly scaled in proportion to what seems to have been the intent. These include the following:

  • Gear that was already acquired has not scaled up (Items acquired from Old Raids, Vendors, Crafted Items, Legion Dungeon items & Azerite). This has an bad effect on levelers that have unscaled gear, but face scaled enemies
  • Azerite gear from Dungeons (Mythic) are missing 1 outer trait (Total of 4 now instead of 5 what it was before) after Phase 2 of Dragonflight Pre-Patch went live.
  • Old enchants like Crusader and Dancing Steel with item level ceilings have not been updated and are now essentially unusable since only bugged items drop at their item
    level range.
  • Items sold by vendors have not been scaled. This includes PvP gear and raid items
  • Crafted items have not been scaled and relics of the past need to be adjusted
  • Several Trinkets that spawn pets/allies (Including the heirloom one that spawns void tentacles) do single digit DPS, and are actually unusable. This is particularly a problem for leveling, since the void tentacle trinket is near universal among people leveling alts.
  • (old) gems are not rescaled

In general there seems to be no logic behind the rescaling. Some items are scaled, some not.

  • Hellfire Citadel has 4 scaled bosses and rest still have the old item level.
  • Siege of Orgrimmar was forgotten while most of the old raids were scaled.
  • World Bosses are not scaled
  • BoE items need to be scaled properly
  • Consumables need to be scaled (Flasks, Elixirs, Potions, Food, Sharpening / Weighstones, Weapon Oils & Augment Runes
  • Some azerite items are not scaled - fx emissaries’ Azerite Cache still give item level 100
  • Some old items have negative stats now
  • Some gear tooltips are incorrect - example being the trinket “Mr. Munchykins” giving 167 haste instead of the 244 that the tooltip says.

In terms of timewalking content, the patch’s item level changes have currently killed the majority of gear-optimization opportunities that existed. The general appeal of optimizing for timewalking content has been to acquire a ton of cool and fun gear and push your characters strength to the limit in this casual avenue of end game content. Getting this gear in the first place takes a lot of effort, and seeing the new scaling leave what has been earned in the dust as unusable low item level gear is not good. This also includes any old legendary items – them staying at item level 30-44 makes them useless in the new scaling that goes beyond 100 item level. Furthermore, the issue with gear drops being incorrect like Azerite items not providing every ring of power they previously did prevents much of the future gearing options unless they are fixed.

Why bother with these issues?

First of all, the leveling system’s rewards being a mess is a problem.

Second, these issues that are related to all Timewalking content matters to a lot of players. I can with certainty confirm that about 8.000 people from EU and NA are invested in this content since they’re a part of the Timewalking Discord – the number of people interested is of course far greater since not everybody is a part of a specific Discord community, and there are people outside those regions that play this content. Furthermore the server and community as a whole has continued to grow at a fast and steady pace in the recent year which indicates a growing interest in this form of end game content as blizzard also adds more events and raids to it. It will also affect people that already farmed gear to complete the mage tower challenges; even if it is disabled for now. In addition to this, everyone that did spend time preparing for “Herald of the Titans” is facing a char that has basically useless gear as all of the stuff they acquired did not scale up at all and is still at item level 35 (new item level for the achievement is 107).
To put it bluntly, the recent scaling changes to Timewalking and gear rewards has killed this avenue of end game content since thousands of players’ hard work to obtain rare and niche gear is wasted, and future gearing options, unless addressed, will also be undermined. It will simply lead to a loss of subscribers and the loss of a huge community that has built itself up around this alternative form of end game content.

Suggestions to fixing the problems mentioned above:

  • Gear needs to drop at the appropriate item level for your character’s current level.
  • Azerite gear needs to provide the same amount of options as it did prior to the patch, this means the following places should reward 5 power selections: Raid-azerite from Battle of Dazar’alor normal and upwards to Ny’alotha mythic, Emissary Azerite Caches, Warfront world boss and weekly quest azerite and mythic dungeon azerite should provide 5 powers.
  • Increase the item level ceiling of old and cool enchants that were previously capped at item level 50 to 150 or higher so that they are usable in the same way as before the patch and don’t become completely unusable.
  • Increase the item level of old legendaries so they are usable. With the way current scaling works, a level 17 would rather use a green quest reward than Shadowmourne.
  • It might be difficult to scale up all gear that has already been acquired (You were able to scale it down?), so the easiest fix to prevent timewalking content from dying is to keep its scaling point at item level 35-50 like before instead of 100+. It would be a further improvement to keep all timewalking events at the same scaling point since that would eliminate extra balancing requirements.
78 Likes
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Me thinks they made a big bowl of spaghetti with scaling.

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Posted in the other thread but it’s all screwed up and dungeons are a pure slog. Leveling some characters and tanks are just getting obliterated and no one can actually use the gear that drops.

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Hopefully the changes are on the way. Mage Tower was put to bed for a month and it also seems like Timewalking is delayed in place of other events. I would assume it’s all related to the all over the place scaling. I think we should just report anomalies and outliers as being wrong to help speed along the process of getting it fixed.

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I just ran a couple classic dungeons. I had one where a level 10 brewmaster just spinning crane kicked the whole dungeon in under 3 minutes with no help from anyone else. The next I had a level 10 blood dk who said my heals were hitting him for 1 hp. Something is really messed up.

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My favorite is getting “Heroic thunderforged heroic thunderforged” drops from throne of thunder lol. Literally has the quality twice on the tooltip. Definitely a mess that needs to be cleaned up

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I noticed my lvl 50 pally alt’s ilvl shot up big time since the change. Ilvl 50-ish quest greens from Chromie Time are now 120. I guess I’ll just vendor the Nyalotha assault tokens I was going to use on him, since they’re almost half the ilvl lol.

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Great post. I think what sticks with me is how sloppy everything appears, especially with raids like HFC changing ilvl halfway through, looks as if someone was working on it and 5 o’clock hit so they called it done and moved on. I wasnt stressed about it early on in the beta, but to see none of this get fixed despite being heavily reported on is pretty shocking. I too am mostly concerned from a timewalking perspective - the idea that shadowmourne should be significantly worse than a random grey in WOTLK timewalking seems antithetical to any possible design intent - but really these issues are both wide reaching to many facets of the game, and they reflect poorly on the level of care we might expect coming into the new expansion.

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This is a serious issue. Messing around in Timewalking and finding fun new gear combinations was one of the things I enjoyed the most.

I’m seriously regretting my recent 12-month subscription purchase - if you’d asked me last week, I would’ve said I’ll definitely be playing the game for the next year. With them destroying item scaling, making Timewalking gear sets a thing of the past and this nonsense with the World Boss mounts I’m genuinely going to try and refund my 12-month sub and just subscribe on a per month basis.

I will legitimately unsub if this isn’t at least treated like a serious issue and worked on. I understand they might have more urgent matters with the expac release 2 weeks away but if there’s no comment on this by 10.1 then I’m outties.

For the record, Timewalking should be an awesome excuse to use older items, test fun combinations and enjoy yourself. No one is negatively affected by a few people stacking high-powered legacy items for some fun in TW. It SHOULD be a playground where we can mess around.

PLEASE give us a blue post about the future of item scaling and how this will be addressed.

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This is deeply disappointing news and I hope they get this all straightened out.

After the SL prepatch level squish from level 120 to 50, I was speculating how they would handle things going forward for future expansions, would we do 10 new levels for every expansion, or would the newest expansion be rescaled to 1-50 at the end, allowing the next expansion be level 50-60 again. I figured this was the most logical way to prevent have to rework all the past expansion scaling stuff everytime a new expanion was released, and figured that was the whole point to the addition of Chromie Time, etc.

Alas, it seems they decided to do it the hard way and bungled all the old content up again. I really hope this gets fixed because timewalking weeks and timewalking gear is one of the most fun things about the game. It is different from Chromie Time, as you get to use your current characters to revisit past content in a unique way that differs from the experience new characters get leveling with Chromie Time (regardless of whether Chromie Time is selected for the areas they happen to be in, or if they are in a different area from their Chromie Time selection.

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Well said, I can only agree with your comments about timewalking being generally awesome. i love going out and farming up gear for timewalking. i was really hoping to see timewalking EXPAND and be consistently available - why NOT continually have old content casually relevant for people that love it? instead we are faced with its demise, big sad.

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I hope this gets fixed soon; a number of my characters have been negatively affected in different ways.

This character (Burx) is wearing a mix of heirlooms, levelling gear from chromie-time dungeons, and levelling gear from timewalking dungeons. The timewarped gear didn’t change ilvl with the patch, so he went from being appropriately geared to suddenly having some slots with very poor stats because they’re still ilvl 57. Also note the ilvl 30 boots. They weren’t good before but now are comical. It’s fortunate he has the heirlooms in many slots.

Next up, my level 45 level-locked ‘twink’ character that I use for when I want to do chromie time content. He was wearing an ilvl 57 green quality belt, sourced from the AH. I think it’s a BFA BoE. Logging in now, the ilvl was increased but the belt now requires level 46 so is ‘red’ in the UI and presumably no longer provides stats. It seems unintended for my existing gesr to become unequipable.

Then there’s timewalking. I love doing timewalking content as an opportunity to get to play with the special items that I have collected over my time playing wow. It means a lot to me. Things like my paladin main’s Pandaria cloak being a useless ilvl 44 still are heartbreaking. It would be very disappointing to have to go and collect these special items (weapons and trinkets) again at the new item level, but for things like the legendary cloak and other one-time quest rewards it’s kind of permanently taking something away from the character.

I can only assume this is not intended and I sincerely hope communication about it comes soon.

Going back to the days of sadly looking at now-worthless ‘trophies’ in the bank is demoralising.

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Before yesterday, I was leveling in Threads of Fate in SL WQ gear, and everything was just fine. Now, I’m getting totally destroyed by normal quest mobs. I barely do any damage to them, while they hit me like a Mack truck. Scaling is definitely messed up.

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This is why they need to fix their freaking item level bloat over patches and expansion.

Why do we need over 110 item levels of difference between the pinnacle gear from one expansion to the next? Power can still grow meaningfully without this gigantic bloat that requires these weird scaling systems and item level revamps and stat squishes and so on.

Are you BiS ilvl in every slot? That should about fully Normal geared the next tier. Is it an expansion with 10 levels in there? Add 10 item level and make that equal to LFR.

A mythic 311 player right now would mean 321 for LFR at level 70. Every player still gets progression, keeps previous tiers relevant but sub-optimal.

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My crafted gear with Relic of the Past IV and V reagents did not scale.
Crafted gear.
With the extra reagent purchased that makes crafted gear scale.
Did not scale.
Please be transparent about what’s going on.

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I was really looking forward to the return of Mage Tower, preparing Timewalking gear sets for all 12 classes to hopefully go for the Tower Overwhelming achievement. This was honestly some of the most fun I’ve had in WoW in a long time putting together these gear sets and going all over Azeroth to acquire various things.

This is a genuine form of aspirational content for a lot of players that doesn’t negatively impact or exploit the game in any fashion, please consider reverting/amending these changes.

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howdy! just jumping into post:

my hunter is level 52. currently leveling threads of fate through shadowlands.

everything is level 60 and both me and pets are being annihilated. i might not be able to level this character now.

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When the Mage Tower comes back, I have a suspicion that our characters won’t be scaled to level 50 and/or our gear won’t be capped at iLvl 50 again.

It seems like too big of an advantage for level 70 toons to have 20 extra talents, and I doubt it is technically possible for the current talent tree to temporarily disable your 20 most recently chosen talents (without a good deal of coding).

There might be a whole new meta for which expansion’s legacy gear or enchants are the best, or maybe we will get stat templates and none of that will matter.

Just speculating here, but we really can’t go back to the Mage Tower exactly as it was before the DF prepatch.

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update: i left shadowlands and went to stormwind, then back to shadowlands.

all enemies are now scaled properly to my level (52) instead of level 60.

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The problem is that World of Warcraft is a programming nightmare that takes a literal savant at coding to manage, but the game is now being ran by people who are better suited at drawing concept art of pretty fairies in their notebook; or at cultivating a “you mad bro?” culture in progression Raiding and Arena.

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