Dude it’s not precision balancing. DH is far and away stronger than every other tank by a massive amount.
seems like a good idea with bad implementation. Not being able to upgrade the items we got prior to 9.0.5 makes it seem like we shouldnt be doing much m+ before then, and not much after as we have to refarm our items (lol) and the time to upgrade would take months and by that time 9.1 would be arriving.
You don’t have to do this. If you’re one of the 200 or so people completing +20 in time, you’re indisputably the top of the game for the content. It’s not like judging a 13 that anyone could make or break, the only way to time it (a 20) is everyone playing well.
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.
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 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.
Let me rephrase, the lowest represented tank in top end m+ will never be >15%. Or even 10%. That isn’t how top end players play.
This is false. They are suited to current strategies. Monks, bears and paladins are right behind them on key levels. The outliers of DK and Warrior could probably use some mechanics tweaks to cover kiting and burst damage, which is all tanks are doing in keys this season.
Reduce the cds of DRW/Avatar and DnD/HL.
That’s fine. Again, nobody has asked for perfect parity.
The worst tank being under 10%, sure, that’s just called “having a meta”. It’s not just that DH are seven times as popular as the #2 spec; that’s a little more extreme than what we’ve seen before, but not radically so. But prot warrior is under 1% representation at the +20 level, which - from going through past seasons on the RIO leaderboards - is unprecedented for any tank spec in any previous season. Even the worst specs have been in the 2-5% range in the past, not 0.9%.
There’s a lot of room to improve on the least-balanced tank meta in the history of M+ without needing to aim for perfect parity. Right now +20s are just for funsies, so whatever, who cares. But if +20s start giving 226 gear, that should become a little more of a balance priority.
This would be a big step in the right direction, although between Leap, Spear, and Intervene, I’m not sure mobility is the main issue holding Warriors back. The fact that Blood and Prot do substantially less damage than other tank specs should probably also be looked at.
An update on raiding. Apparently Ion posted on twitter that they don’t think a currency system will fit well into the current tier, but they’re working on solutions. They want to put the dungeon stuff out earlier since it’s more well developed as a concept and a solution for raiding will come later.
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.
Edit:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/raid-loot-droprates-tuning-february-16/868343
This is why I don’t think Blizzard will ever add titles/achievements/cosmetic rewards (let alone gear) for key levels above 15 despite the idea being extremely popular in the M+ community. Adding support for those higher level keys would imply that they’re balancing classes at those levels, and they aren’t.
I mean, that implies they’re balancing classes at any level. They really aren’t though.
Not for M+ anyway.
If raid balance was as far off as M+ balance was it would have been emergency hotfixed months ago.
What matters the most on a 16 or higher is the average item level of the entire group. Not one player. See what happens on a 17 or 18 if the average item level of the group is 210. It’s fine to have one guy sitting at 210. It really won’t go that well if everyone is. It’s timeble in the best of groups, but it will be much, much more challenging than if the group is closer to 220 item level average.
the valor system isn’t that great without a vendor otherwise you still need to spam mythic plus for drops at a 20-30% drop rate of a single item for yourself per dungeon
they might as well just get rid of any drops and change it all to a vendor since they are timegating it with the valor system
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Do you think timing 16s makes you “competitive in PvE”?
People were timing 16s in week 2 of the expansion.
And the only reason they were able to do that was because of PvP gear and BOEs.
Doing keys 9 levels below what top players are doing isn’t anyone’s definition of competitive.
Very few people were doing this.
I think there’s really two levels of play in this game… top tier and the rest of us. You definitely do not need PvP gear to play normally and enjoy the game, but if you wanna keep pace with the top end, you certainly do!
Worth pointing out that with the current ilvl cap at KSM, which is where most people want to get to anyway, most folks are probably gonna still feel compelled to PvP to push their characters over the edge. Is this what Blizzard intends?
Blizzard is currently putting KSM at the same level as 1800 rating… which is kind of laughable. I find KSM much more difficult and time consuming to get than 1800 rating, I usually get that within the first month of an expansion. The only reason I haven’t is because I’m actively boycotting PvP in Shadowlands because I dislike that Blizzard turned up the “burst” knob to 11.
Gearing is always lopsided… in BfA it was skewed towards PvE. In Shadowlands it’s skewed towards PvP. I really wish Blizzard would balance it out and just let players do the thing they want to do.
*Edit: For the record, I think their stance of “you shouldn’t be able to get the best gear in the game from just one part of it” is really inappropriate and disrespectful of player time. Sure, if you’re a mythic raider, a 20+ M+ player, or a 2400 rated pvp player, I get having to do both to min/max. But for the rest of us?
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Agreed. But he said to be competitive, and that’s very different.
Every single top level player will tell you that you absolutely needed to be reaching 2100 in PvP in order to be competitive in PvE this expansion.
Are the majority of top players in the world rolling in full pvp gear? I am not just talking about me.
Probably not now, but when the world first race was alive, very much yes.
Gear hasnt changed. If you needed pvp gear or it was superior, people would still be wearing it. Pvp was not required to be competitive.
Are you being serious right now?
No, gear has not changed. But people have now had 12 weeks of 226 gear from the great vault to catch up to the people who had that gear in the first couple of weeks from PvP.
For the record, the person you quoted wasn’t me. I was just responding to what you wrote 
*Edit – I see you edited. Never mind 
For the most part, I’m agreeing with you. Just pointing out that there’s always really been two levels of “competitiveness” in WoW. The top 1% of the top 1% doing their thing, pushing content absurdly quickly, and then the normal distribution of players after that.
The folks you were referring to, timing 16’s in the first couple weeks… they don’t really apply to the normal distribution of players.