220 should be 226, the other two caps are ok
So why are upgrades capped at heroic CN itemlevel? I mean, any item you get from the vault from a 10 or higher is already beyond that upgrade cap. The upgrades are basically only relevant for lower keys.
The cap should be 226, not 220.
Also, I think requiring KSM to even open up the cap to the highest level is excessive. Completing any dungeon at +15 should open up this cap, leaving KSM as the final bit of progression to achieve in the system. The same goes for the +5 and +10 caps. In connection with ^ above, I wouldn’t feel terrible about aligning the thresholds to the affix tiers (e.g. 207 at +4, 213 at +7, 220 at +10, 226 at +15) to make it more granular, and actually reflective of difficulty jumps - in theory, I’m ignoring the +9 and Prideful awkwardness for now.
At no point should Great Vault outpace the Valor upgrade system. Like with Raiding and PvP, the Great Vault shouldn’t be a standalone progression system that offers you greater loot than what you’re naturally getting; it should simply offer you one guaranteed piece at the level you’re already doing.
Edit: Thinking about this further, if KSM (or any of the all at +x level) has any role to play in this system, it could unlock one Unique item that can upgrade one item to 232 (or the equivalent tier jump for the lower ones). Only one 232 would be equippable in this way.
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Also, the other elephant in the room is weekly cap for earning Valor. I cannot stress just how bad that is.
I guess I’m just trying to understand why you would be opposed to that. I’m not necessarily saying it should, but I’m entertaining the idea. If your answer is “because that’s how it’s always worked” then there isn’t really much left to explore on this topic between you and I 
I’m starting to think it should. The whole point of WoW in PvE is to progress your character’s power and overcome a series of challenges. I’m coming to the conclusion that it doesn’t make sense to prevent anybody from being able to do this, eventually. It’s absolutely nothing to me if someone who isn’t very good at the game eventually gets KSM because they chipped away and ground out enough gear to overcome their lack of skill. I’ll get the achievement when it’s appropriate for me to do so, and they’ll get it when it’s appropriate to them.
Having a meaningful and consistent progression path through the content is appealing. This is how things have worked, traditionally, for both raiding and M+. I’ve liked that in the past, but it’s gotten more and more behind an RNG wall. Gear matters much more in recent expansions than it has in the past, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but Shadowlands has made it increasingly scarce. I don’t like being at the whim of RNJesus, but I do like having a list of tasks I can work towards. Having the achievement isn’t really all that important to me, but having something to work towards is.
If I’m effectively walled off of progression at 213, that’s maybe not as appealing to me. I could certainly always get better, but perhaps that’s not an option for me at this current stage of my life. Should my only other option be to quit the game entirely?
These are the thoughts this conversation is provoking in me
I dunno, it’s really hard to say for sure. The reason I feel like it’s not is because right now, at about 214 ilvl, 15’s are an attainable challenge. It feels right. However, a lot of my friends who play this game who I would consider of average skill level, would not be able to do it at the same item level. They can dodge stuff, but maybe miss the odd one. Success in +15 right now means you execute the mechanics 100% perfectly, or you fail. There is no room for mistakes and your only option is to try again, but you may not get that key again for a while.
So to me, it does seem reasonable that while people should absolutely be able to clear KSM at 213, you should be able to progress a bit past that, so that maybe your gear is strong enough that you don’t get 1-shot by a mechanic.
You’re totally right, but that weekly chest is a random item across the entire loot table. Your odds of a meaningful upgrade, even if you do 10 M+ for all tiers, are appreciably low.
The valor system is all about giving players some control over their progression. It’s odd to cap it well below a point where it feels meaningful.
That’s not true at all. Raids in particular have had progressive nerfs or power creep applied to them since at least WotLK. Heck, in a number of raid tiers, it was explicit, where there was simply a stacking buff or debuff that scaled over a few months, progressively making the instance easier and easier. ICC was one of the more noteworthy examples of that.
Blizzard has for many years operated on the model that initial progression should be difficult, and that it should then become gradually easier (both naturally with gearing and systemically) to permit more people/less hardcore people to clear it.
Having a weekly gated currency to upgrade your gear falls into that realm. It provides time-gated easing of the content difficulty.
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I had forgotten about that! Great points though, and very true. I knew there was a reason I had this niggling feeling that content should be accessible.
To be fair though, they’ve jumped around a bit on that. It does feel like currently they’re leaning more heavily towards the classic style of content exclusivity. I am hoping that this valor system alleviates that. Not necessarily for myself, but for the game as a whole.
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I think the proposed Valor system is 100% an upgrade from what we have now, and I was really excited when I heard about it this morning. That said, what Blizzard is proposing is still a significant downgrade from the PvP system.
The biggest problem is that in order to upgrade something, it has to actually drop. Drop rates being what they are, this is an enormous hurdle if you’re targeting a specific piece of gear. Now that I think about it, I wonder if we’ll have people chain running lower keys just to get the base drop. PvP players have an entire currency devoted to gating their gear progression, but it’s deterministic and they can pick whatever piece they want from the (admittedly limited) options.
Another big difference between the two systems is that Blizzard has said Valor will have a weekly cap. Honor, the currency used to upgrade PvP gear, is uncapped. If you own the base piece, and have earned the rating, you can upgrade your gear just by PvPing. It’s going to feel a lot worse if, under the proposed M+ system, you still have to wait weeks after earning Keystone Master to be able to upgrade all your gear.
I see where you’re coming from, but from the “average player’s” perspective, 10s/15s have been reasonably accessible to them since M+ was introduced in Legion. Suddenly being told “No! Nice things are not for you!” is kind of a bitter pill to swallow.
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Again, I’m not opposed to it. I’m not trying to take up the opposite position here. I’m just saying that, even if KSM isn’t reasonable for the average player to complete, that’s only a problem if Blizzard thinks it should be reasonable for the average player to complete. Based on past tiers, I see little reason to think they do.
At ilvl 216, I feel similarly: I’ve done some +13s and completed-but-untimed +14s, without trying especially hard, running with a comp of whatever five people in my guild are on at the time. I feel like KSM would be firmly within reach if I was actually trying for it, rather than just running 1-4 keys a week for funsies and vault gear.
I don’t think it’s true that +15s demand perfection. The people doing them back in December for world firsts, sure, they needed to be damn near perfect, but that’s because they had much worse gear than we do now. And whenever I look up advice about pushing M+, the people with experience say that nobody is actually perfect and that a 30-minute run will always contain many mistakes. Improvement comes from reducing and mitigating those mistakes, rather than being literally perfect for 1200 GCDs in a row.
Did this result in an actual majority of the playerbase getting Light of Dawn before Cata release? I don’t know the statistics on that one specifically, but from my link above, you can see that from MoP through Legion, only about 10-40% of players got Ahead of the Curve in any given tier, and about 2-8% got Cutting Edge.
I’m not contesting the idea that things do and should get more accessible over time, just the specific claim that “the average player” is generally able to get the very highest tier of available rewards.
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You can easily do 10s with 190-200 ilvl and they award items high enough to complete a 15 using. I really don’t see the issue here.
Because a 10 is considered to be the equivalent of doing a heroic raid.
I say 10s/15s because each has at various times been the “maximum” key level in terms of rewards. Currently it’s 15, which is definitely not accessible to someone with 190-200 ilvl.
I would beg to differ. So far I’ve timed one 15, a handful in the 12-14 range, and the rest 10’s. Anything at 12 or above, if you get hit by a mechanic, you’re effectively dead. Sometimes you can recover with a brez, sometimes you can’t.
My point is, getting hit by a mechanic and instantly dying is part of the game. It’s ideal when you can develop your player skill to the point where you can execute those mechanics flawlessly so that you don’t cost your run time, but over gearing content has always been the “other” route to success. Having enough HP to take a hit without dying helps, or having enough damage to offset losing a player during a fight.
There’s been a lot of nerfs to M+ lately, and we’ll have to see how these play out, but I do feel like this expansion demands a lot more perfection than previous ones.
You know, I wonder if part of the contention here is that we’re so focused on the achievement. It’s not so much that I think everybody should get the achievement as I think that the achievement itself shouldn’t be a gateway to player progression.
Getting KSM shouldn’t be a requirement for upgrading your gear past 213.
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“Average” in this context is extremely subjective. I think a more relevant argument is simply statistics. Players operating at a similar level of commitment and effort should receive similar rewards. I think you’d be hard pressed to argue that KSM and heroic CN require similar levels of effort at any given gear level. Ideally, a similar percentage of players should be eligible to upgrade to a given itemlevel as are killing bosses that drop that itemlevel.
Currently, 14592 guilds (41.37% of the ones on record) have killed heroic Generals, according to wowprogress.com. 8817 (25.00%) have killed Sire. It’s difficult to say exactly how many characters (or players) that is, but it gives a range of approximately 150-450k characters that have access to 220 loot, and 90-270k that have earned AotC.
Now, I don’t have a clean source for KSM, but WoWhead lists only 2% of profiles as having achieved it thus far.
There’s a lot of flex in both of those statistics and what they apply to, but they are far enough apart that I think it’s a reasonable statement that KSM is quite a bit rarer currently than access to 220 gear from CN.
And yet to upgrade to 220, you have to not just complete but time all 8 M+ at 15. And you don’t see an issue with that?
Which is how it should be. There should never be a point, in competitive end game, where you can just stand in swirls and hit what ever buttons you feel like to win. Judging by some recent anecdotes, that’s the average player. Completely unencumbered by the reality that staying alive is a dps increase.
I watch people’s defensives throughout all my dungeon runs, some people never hit them even if they are dying. I don’t think that you should continue playing like that and just wait until your ilvl allows you to.
Yes, but a single death generally does not result in failing the keystone, especially not when everyone is in 213+ gear.
Just for reference here, the world first Keystone Master included a Plaguefall +15 with four deaths, including a totally avoidable death to a Stradama tentacle. Just by watching the first few seconds of the video, you can see that the tank had ilvl 198, and 3/5 of the players had under 30k hit points. They still finished with over five minutes to spare. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrix6MmcAgM
Even with sub-par gear, you can fatally screw up multiple times and still nearly 2-chest it. It should not take anything close to perfection to time it in 213+ gear.
Sure, and to be clear, if there’s still only a low single-digit percentage of players that have earned KSM by the release of patch 9.1, then I would absolutely agree that it’s a failed system. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same - if 40% of players get AotC and only 20% get KSM, that would seem within reason - but if it’s 40% and 2%, then M+ just isn’t a viable gearing path like it’s supposed to be.
Actually, I would argue that’s a failure, given that KSM is the minimum threshold for upgrading to 220, while AotC is the second boss that drops 220 (and Generals is arguable a decent bit easier than Sire, and for good reason).
At 40/20 there certainly could still be a problem, I’m just saying something like that ratio is beyond the point where you can look at just the ratio, without any context, and conclude that something is definitely wrong. Maybe raids are just more popular than M+. Maybe AotC vs KSM just isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, since you start getting 220s from M+ on your first +10 clear; KSM is when you can equip yourself entirely in 220s, more analogous to having Denathrius on farm for months and being a few bosses into Mythic.
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I don’t think you can really go by that. I mean yea those players are super skilled, and using a ton of consumables on every run. They have strategies in place to mitigate the impact of those mistakes as well. This is why they’re the best, and they deserve those early clears, because of the caliber of play they bring to the table.
We’re not talking about them though… we’re talking about your average player. Much less well prepared, much slower to react. I’m not talking about baddies, just your every day normal person. Heck lets be generous and say every single person in a group is going to make one mistake… well, at 213, those mistakes result in death. There’s not enough battle rez’s to cover that (you get about 3 per M+ run, plus one for every shaman). This is all assuming that those deaths are recoverable… which isn’t always true.
Now don’t get me wrong, mistakes should be something that has an impact on your run. And at 213, those mistakes resulting in failure isn’t a bad thing. I’m not proposing that this be changed. I am saying that players who struggle to improve their play enough to overcome the cost of those mistakes with skillful play should, eventually, be able to overcome them with gear.
Also, currently, they can do this. It just takes time… a lot of time. Capping out at 213, which I do think puts KSM in the “significantly challenging” realm, means that you’ll have nowhere to go except to run your 4 keys per week and hope the Great Vault graces you with an upgrade, and hope that it happens enough to get you to the point where you over gear the content and can be unblocked.
I’m saying this is kind of a crappy place to be. Progression should feel reasonably smooth. Should you out-gear that hurdle in a week? No, definitely not… but should a couple weeks of grinding let you see at least a few ilvls of upgrade that aren’t solely dependent on RNG luck? Absolutely!
I don’t think it has to be so black and white.
I got ksm at 214 on my bear.
You gotta realize that with the vault and legendary you are constantly adding 1-2 ilvl a week.
So yes, 213 is entirely possible to do ksm.
However the “average” player won’t be pushing ksm. If they were there would be many more people with it