Lack of gear for casual playstyles in Shadowlands

Community General Discussion
225

Unrated pvp used to be my endgame, and I used to be able to farm a full Conquest set not based on rating that would make me equal to pretty much any opponent I would face in unrated pvp. That is the definition of getting the gear you need from content to succeed in that content.

Blizzard has lost hundreds of dollars from me in BfA since they moved away from this philosophy and decided to treat unrated pvp players like the training dummies of other players. I can no longer get the gear I need for unrated pvp solely through unrated pvp, and SL does not look to be fixing the problem.

Do I need Mythic gear from unrated pvp? Only if I’m forced to face Mythic geared players in unrated pvp. I’ll accept either an ilvl cap that brings Mythic gear down to what is available from unrated pvp, or rewards that get me to an equal playing field at a slower but reasonable pace. Anything less is lost sub money.

So long as Blizzard allows high-end gear to destroy players with no access to that gear, Blizzard will continue to lose money from me. And I’m hardly the only one.

3 Likes
226

The concern would be money. It’s always money. You framed this as those players losing out, but ActiBlizz is the one who would lose money if those players didn’t play.

227

Yeah, take WQ gear into battlegrounds and see how that goes for you.

228

How does an incrementally scaling system like M+ and 4 (FOUR) different difficulties for a raid isn’t casual friendly?

Game is literally fragmented this way to make sure EVERYONE can do something they’re comfortable with.

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229

If you’re doing battlegrounds, you’ll eventually get the appropriate gear for that content.

It’s not like you’re going to stay in WQ gear.

You will always get gear relevant to the content that you’re doing. That has never been an issue and it won’t be an issue going forward.

I think the biggest underlying issue here is that people have varying definition of what a “casual” player is. But regardless of what you’re doing, you should be able to eventually outgear it by doing it. And you will be able to.

What the OP seems concerned with is being able to eventually outgear content that they aren’t even doing, with the content that they’re doing. This has never been healthy for the game when they allowed such avenues to exist.

230

Hey man
 take it easy with all that logic. You’re in the general discussion forum don’t you know.

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232

I’m casual and I’m gearing up just fine in SL. Heck they haven’t even released the Torghast epics yet, I have a bag brimming FULL of place holder tokens, I’d be so well geared by now if I could get my hands on it.

I’ve gotten to ilvl 160 just on WQ gear.

PvP vendor has been fixed to offer more PvP orientated gear also, or stats got fixed I should say, so I’d not worry too much at this piont.

I have not got my Renown up high enough yet, still only 14, at 18 WQ rewards go up in ilvl and then again when you get even higher up.

I have not tried any PvP yet so can’t speak for bg’s etc.

233

casuals want everything to be ez mode and for the devs to make the game for them. this is why casuals are the biggest cancer around in every game.

234

The irony is deafening.

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235

I’d be happy to stick to open-world content, if only open-world content stayed tuned to open-world rewards.

It’s been my experience that new open-world content is tuned to the assumption that all players are doing at least dungeons (if not LFR), so I’ve often gone into new content and been faced with challenges that are tuned above my iLvl.

I don’t know how smooth BfA was (I came in during July, after all the catchup mechanics were put in place), but I hope SL won’t be as bad as late MoP was, where you had to be an open-world tank to be able to risk leaving the shores of the three Isles. (WoD was ridiculous to the other extreme
)

236

But that isn’t changing in SL. A 3ilvl decrease to M+ end of dungeon loot isn’t going to suddenly make it undoable.

I don’t know too much about this, I don’t have sub-numbers so I can’t realistically say this is or is not correct.

If you see my fourth post in the thread you can see that I am not against progression for casuals. I have spent the majority of my time in WoW as a casual player and during most of that time I actually played a lot more than I do now.

Up until at least MoP casual progression was actually really good and had you actually work towards things constantly, you didn’t just get handed everything off the bat. It gave you a reason to play even if you weren’t raiding or being serious about the game.

The current game seems to want to rush you to be fully geared, then stick your progression to raising the level of arbitrary systems like AP, whilst relying on one piece of weekly higher ilvl gear which you then have to rely on RNG for it to be for a slot you need etc.

Correct, your subscription is to give access to the game, just like everyone else’s.

I’m sorry to hear about your medical issue. Although I must enquire as to what kind of people you were playing with back in the day?
Over multiple expansions and multiple guilds I’ve never had the misfortune to be a part of any remotely toxic guilds.

It’s all about who you play with in general as opposed to the actual community as a whole, I simply choose to be part of groups that do the content but are a bit more casual about it, we play to get AotC but we don’t put a timer on it, we don’t need it by week 3 or anything and any time extra before the next patch we either continue to do alts runs or occasionally a bit of mythic.
We take all manner of players regardless of skill as long as they are there to a good time, a bit of a laugh, and don’t cause drama.

Negative in the terms of the progression becomes easier ie lesser, ie negative. Not a negative or unfun experience lol.

Yet isn’t that exactly what you are doing by requesting better and better gear rewards for the exact same content with no real reasoning behind it?
I’ve already explained multiple times how the slower, and yes slightly weak gear advancement of earlier expansions was much superior to the current casual system of “lets give them raid pieces, but only ever so often”.

The highest piece you receive ultimately sets up your progression, if that piece a once a fortnight RNG drop from warfronts then that is what you are doing, waiting for the next warfront then praying to whatever you believe in that it isn’t just a repeat of a piece you already have. If that’s a piece from an embassy quest then you have to wait for one to be available, then hope it’s for one of the right slots, then do the quest, then hppe that again it’s not a repeat, then you do the same thing again, sit back and wait for the next piece of over itemised loot for you to get.

You can not say with genuine integrity that the system described above which completely disregards dungeons, lfr, pvp, and any other content of the time-gated higher rewards is better than the older system where everything on the lfg menu was relevant to a player after hitting max level and you could consistently make progress towards improving your character either through gear drops or currency acquisition.

237

As long as you’re not in warmode. You’ll just get eaten alive with that kind of gear.

238

I see no indication that this will be the case. It sounds like you’re making the whole thing up.

You’re just fulfilling the desperate need you have to claim everybody’s lazy but you.

239

I looked at that post. In it you said that being a casual means you’re not doing elite content progression so you don’t deserve any sort of gear upgrades.

240

Well, if high end loot stops getting given out like candy, there will be less people in that gear. So, sure, in BfA if you try to go out in warmode in M0 gear, it is going to suck because everybody is in ilvl 445 gear, minimum. Many are in 460 gear, even if they don’t raid or do high keys. But if the loot philosophy gets changed, and high end gear stops getting given out like candy, that won’t hold true.

Sure, if you come across somebody decked out in full raid gear, then they’ll definitely have the advantage. But I honestly don’t see the problem with that. If people want the gear progression, then they can do the work of running keys or raiding. People act as though you can’t do progression content without going full no-life mode. I was mythic raiding one night per week. Sure, I likely won’t get all the way to N’zoth before the end of the expansion, but I was able to get great gear nonetheless. People can play casually while still getting high end gear, as long as they do high end content.

241

I do. It’s not fun getting farmed and griefed constantly in the open world simply because your gear isn’t as good as the other guy. I support decent casual gearing options for that reason alone.

They could implement resilience gear or PvP templates again though and I’d be just as happy with that.

242

Sure, I can get that. But the problem is that gear progression has always been central to this game. Doing harder and harder content provides better and better gear. This game has a competitive element to it, and it always has. I push high end content to get better gear, so that I can remain competitive in both PvE and PvP content. On top of needing the gear to remain competitive in increasingly difficult content, the gear also functions as a reward. Do harder content, get better gear. If somebody is incapable of doing that harder content, there are other gear options.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there should be some other options to get good gear out there, but I think they should be more limited than they are now. Professions are and always have been a great place to implement good gear. Allowing crafters to work towards crafting a couple pieces of very good gear is something that I think works great.

I just find it bonkers that people can currently get heroic raid level loot for AFKing in a Warfront for a half an hour. The fact that you have a constant stream of normal-level raid gear from things such as world quests and horrific visions is absurd. It trivializes the raid so much. I know so many people, myself included, who almost completely skipped Normal Ny’alotha to go straight into Heroic because of how quickly we outgeared normal. LFR became virtually useless. If blizzard insists on having raid gear available in the open world, then they need to slow things down way, way, way further. A piece of normal raid gear should be an amazing reward, not chump change.

243

YoU DOnT NeeD GeaR BEcaUSE yoU doNt rUN my ConTEnT

2 Likes
244

Yup OP, the end game looks like a big pile of poo to me.

I always enjoy leveling but will probably unsubscribe after

245

With any luck OP the masses will get ahold of SLs and shoot down the devs dumb changes.

It will just take time regrettably as Blizzard often doesn’t move very fast even when they get things from a design point of view wrong.