If you want to probe this deeper, that’s not really relevant. We’ve had world first players who lacked game knowledge before - just being at the top of a ladder doesn’t mean zilch. And even now +20 is no longer the bleeding edge, so nothing like that would be applicable. Just to be clear, that wasn’t a comment on the skill level of that player, it’s pointing out that you can’t just use “They cleared X” to make a claim about skill/viability or anything like that when there are several other factors involved.
Can we though? Did anyone guess that we’d get valor back when the expansion launched? To my knowledge no one brought up valor until the blue post said they liked pvp and were looking at m+.
If they were adding valor to raids, (raids used to drop the same badges as dungeons) I’m confident they would have just said it. I don’t think we’re getting a recycle for raiding. Maybe tokens? It doesn’t solve drop rates, but you can choose stats or something.
I don’t know if you bothered reading the rest of the paragraphs after you quoted, because I do go into things in a bit more detail. There’s a reason I put some sort of upgrade system (e.g. Valor) as the very last bullet point, because it’s the least likely. FWIW, asking if anyone guessed we’d get Valor back is a weird question, given that people have been asking for a similar system back for years now. The real question is did anyone guess Blizzard would acknowledge an issue?
No disrespect, but these guesses don’t point back to anything they’ve actively said. They haven’t compared raid gearing to anything that would suggest the system will be familiar at all.
I literally don’t know what you’re talking about here. You seem to be responding to something the sentence you quoted isn’t talking about.
I think you’re thinking too many steps ahead. They want the runs to feel less bad when you don’t get an item. That was the stated goal, as well as prolonging to point at which mythic focused players reach gear stagnation. This system accomplishes both. A player stuck in the +4 bracket won’t be if they are able to get full 200s and a few 207s from the vault. They reach 5s and the rest will be 207 and the drops from the dungeon will be essentially tokens or better stats.
Too many steps ahead? We’re literally talking about the ramifications of one change, in isolation.
Does it actually accomplish the goals? Valor is a weekly cap, so how much is a player at the +4 bracket going to upgrade at all? 1 item a week? 2? Note that it’s not just “reaching” 5s to open up the 207 upgrades, but completing every single dungeon at +5. Even for a player that pugs, they could realistically be into +8/+9s before that happens.
The point being illustrated was that the connection between “This is the level you are” and “This is the loot you will be rewarded” with is incoherent. You get drops at a lower level, can upgrade to an arbitrary level that scales differently from the loot drop scaling or dungeon difficulty scaling, and a GV that scales even more differently (it doesn’t even follow loot drop scaling since the thresholds are different). That’s because there’s competing interests at play.
Great Vault is a simple highlight of this. It’s not just a guaranteed source of gear “of your level”, they’ve pushed it to being “a primary progression” so that way it more easily mimics a weekly limiter on upgrades ( to slow down farming upgrades from the dungeons themselves). Valor Points is trying to straddle both of those as well.
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