Modern gearing issues

[Zoumz-zuljin (Zoumz)]

I personally appreciate gear being a significant aspect of the game, as I believe gear progression in WoW has been one of the most satisfying systems. Although it has also likely caused the most drama, it’s something I would never want to see gone. In short, I’m a simple man that likes to defeat dragons and get loot.

1. Gear progression and story

Gear tells a story for me, it reveals what you did and where you went. It’s not simply a tool for power but a representation of your character’s efforts. I think because of that it’s important for gear from different content to look distinct; simply having recolors doesn’t feel great. Wondering where that recolor comes from seems underwhelming. PvP gear should look more savage, like you went through a battlefield, and the catalyst gear should be a more neutral transmog if it didn’t come from the raid. The journey is really important to me and I think your gear should be able to reflect it better.

In the past, WoW had different items for varying difficulties of the same content. I believe this made gear more interesting as you didn’t get the same stuff just at higher ilvl. We don’t necessarily need entirely new loot tables, but having some loot unique to difficulties can make gear more recognizable, unique, interesting, and diverse. We also used to have last bosses dropping more distinctive and higher item level gear, which captured a lot more my attention and made me care more about them. Having harder last bosses drop gear that you might not even need is really underwhelming given the effort required.

2. Gear longevity and purpose

Completely resetting gear like the last two patches of Dragonflight makes my character’s time investment and progression totally irrelevant. Completely replacing gear you acquired in the first two weeks of a new patch, after spending months grinding for that gear and progressing your character, feels very underwhelming.

It’s fair and sensible to not want players to have to do previous raids/content to access new raids/content. However, with M+ existing, you can still easily gear up and catch up to the new raid/content. I personally would find it much more fun, interesting, and worthwhile not to have to spam much easier content each patch just to get into mythic raiding each tier, something that has been referred to before as the “mythic tax”.

I think it would be interesting and remove a lot of uninteresting progression to have the previous raid gear overlap at one raid difficulty lower, so previous mythic gear would be comparable to the new heroic raid gear. This would remove much of the rush and grind that new seasons bring for characters that have completed a lot of the previous content. But what if some piece of gear from a previous raid is still strong for the new one? I would suggest simply buffing loot drops from previous raids by a meaningful amount so people have the option to go back and acquire that loot much more easily if they want to.

3. Gearing speed

For me, it’s obvious that a video game is more fun when you have something to do daily that can progress your character, and I think many people would agree. But how much of this is sustainable in the long term? With M+ and crafting being as strong as they are, you can gear a character to near-max ilvl very quickly.

In season 3 I mostly focused on M+ and crafting early and you can get near max ilvl gear in 4-5 weeks. Then, over multiple months of a patch I slowly got the last 4-5 ilvls I was missing from the cap, depending on my Great Vault rng. I don’t find that experience very fun or fulfilling, as after the first few weeks, there isn’t much motivation to continue unless, like me, you have the goal of joining a mythic raid team later in the season (as I was busy in the early season and couldn’t raid during that time) or have your own goal to pursue.

I don’t know what the best solution is for this, as any nerf to content rewards will understandably be met with player frustration. Maybe we’re too far to turn back, but I still feel it’s worth mentioning. I think borrowed power scratched that itch of being able to get stronger during a patch when gear became less important, but many people no longer want as much borrowed power. I personally liked to get some borrowed powers but the grinds or locks associated to them didn’t feel great and I will enjoy getting new powers with hero talents even if they are not the same.

There’s also the question of whether nerfing gearing speed will necessitate more catch-up mechanics. I think it would make sense for the gear acquisition/upgrade process to become faster for everyone once a .5 patch is released.

4. Upgrade system: Crests/Flightstones

I enjoy harder content so when the most efficient way to acquire something is to do lower-level content, it doesn’t feel great or fun. Crests dropping in the same quantity from m+6 or m+15 doesn’t make sense to me. Similarly, I would expect later raid bosses to drop more crests as they become harder. In many ways, the change from valor to the new upgrade system was great as it incentive harder content, but some fine-tuning could be made to make it more enjoyable for me.

5. Tank and Healer gear (in premade raid content)

As someone that plays a tank often, I think it’s logical to prioritize dps players, but this isn’t really fun. If my role scales less with gear or doesn’t have specific gear targeted at my role it won’t get much gear from raiding. It’s not as enjoyable to progress slower than most people doing the same content and to have to rely mainly on the Great Vault for gear. I think having more role-specific gear could benefit those roles like having more trinkets locked to tanks or healers, or even cantrip items specifically locked for tanks or healers.

6. Gearing alts, a repetitive task

I think gearing and playing alts is something fun to do. But like many things, doing the same grind at the same speed is not really fun. Gearing alts should be faster.

6.1 Gearing alts, crests

We’ve had a similar suggestions before like this post: [Retail] [Feedback] - The amount of Crest/Flightstones you gain should increase on alts

and many other threads being made also about this.

I think a really good way would be once your main has reached certain point that you unlock a crest discount on your alts. For instance, once your character has outgrown the need for a crest type, your alts could get a discount on the amount of that crest needed to upgrade gear.

6.2 Gearing alts, the great vault

The great vault is really intimidating to unlock on many alts, it takes a lot of time to do 8m+ weekly, and even more for each alt. As someone who likes to play many alts, this is just too much time to invest weekly just to keep my alts up to date. I can play a lot and still feel somewhat hard-capped to only be able to maintain 3 characters. This could be much faster if the great vault had a feature that would help alts fill it faster. It could be something like if your main did 8m+10 then your alt would only need 4 to get the same amount of great vault slots.

7. Legendary gear, the orange gear

I enjoy unique loot and legendary gear. I think they can spice up gameplay and add to the longevity of gearing a lot. But a legendary item is more than just an orange piece of gear. I enjoy the story a lot and I think legendary items should be used to add more of it to the game. I think it’s way more fun and relevant when a legendary item has a rich backstory. It’s not just because the big evil guy got an item that it becomes legendary. Was it forged in a volcano by elves, or imbued with spirits or elemental kings? How did that item become so great that it became a legendary item? It’s not something that should feel like you sprinkled some orange dust on it and it became legendary.

This also means that the journey and acquisition process need to be meaningful. I felt the level of rng with legendary items in Dragonflights was not a fun or a meaningful journey, as were crafted legendary in Shadowlands or Legion ones. I think legendary items feeling like a lottery is not a great design as then the feeling of earning it is meaningless “you just got lucky”. The same as was titanforging, getting lucky didn’t mean much and getting unlucky weeks after weeks is not a great feeling.

P.S. Feel free to add your own takes on gearing and feelings about it. Gearing is not a simple subject and I believe diverse point of views can be helpful. I’m also grateful to anyone that spent time to read this.

[Tradu-laughing-skull]

I think it makes the most sense for me to basically post my own manifesto instead of quoting a bunch of small bits from your post, so here goes:

The Gearing Puzzle:

In the past, when the number of competitive-ilevel items was very limited, you had to figure out how best to combine what was available. My spec really likes haste/mastery, but the chest options this tier are crit/mastery and vers/haste? Which is the less bad option? How do I end up with a balanced stat setup given the constraints of the current loot pool? Sure, most people ended up just copying from guides/good players, but it still created variety each season.

With M+ gear added, that puzzle got diluted massively because you could much more easily hit a “perfect” stat balance, instead of having to find the “least bad” one. Is it a season where hitting my haste breakpoint is difficult? Or do I have to somehow find a way to lose haste because it’s too abundant? That disappeared. It was particularly bad because until Shadowlands S4, M+ dungeons didn’t rotate, so you had those items available for the entire expansion. It didn’t matter that raid gear actually did change from tier to tier, opening up new puzzles, because you could always just pull an item from the M+ pool to plug any hole that might exist.

Then Dragonflight added crafted gear, which took the M+ loot dilution and turned it up to 11. Now you aren’t even limited to the items in the M+ and raid pool anymore, which might have a stat combination or 2 that were unavailable. You just get to guarantee perfect stats to a degree that rivals or even surpasses what reforging enabled.

I think this is a massive problem that needs to be addressed. Gearing is not interesting when you can achieve perfection every season. Constraints and friction are necessary.

Item uniqueness:

This ties into the previous point a bit, but mostly applies to trinkets and cantrip items. Items have become incredibly “general purpose”. Casters all want basically the same trinkets, melees want the same ones etc. There’s some minor variation depending on whether you’re a 2 minute spec or a 3 minute spec (the few that still remain), but other than that everybody just uses the trinkets with the biggest numbers, because as a general rule trinkets are not allowed to interact with spec mechanics as of Battle for Azeroth.

Damage amps within specs are nearly universally whitelisted, with the exceptions being oversights or bugs that don’t fit into the post-Legion philosophy of “oh no it’s scary if specs get to amp up certain trinkets”. Trinkets have restrictive ICDs that prevent specs from truly leveraging them. Stat procs are too weak to be worth significantly changing your gameplay around them. This is boring.

Some of the best, most memorable trinkets in the game’s history are the ones that you had to actively play around by altering your rotational priorities. Some examples:

Soul Capacitor:

Possibly the single coolest trinket ever created. The proc itself was strong enough that you’d actively try to dump resources while the proc was active even if it would’ve normally been an inefficient point in your rotation to do so. It allowed any spec to turn AoE damage into a massive funnel nuke. It was satisfying to see that big explosion pop off. It allowed you to cancel it early if you had to go off target, adding another level of skill expression to proper usage of this trinket. Of course it was also incredibly RNG heavy, particularly when combined with the legendary ring, so it certainly had flaws.

Prophecy of Fear:

A trinket that primarily got used by Arcane, but a few other casters used it as well and had to change their button presses during procs. Most specs didn’t use it, because they couldn’t properly leverage the proc. That’s cool. Having to think about how a trinket fits into what your class can or can’t do, and then making the most use out of it. For those unaware, as Arcane you’d very aggressively hold Arcane Missiles for Prophecy of Fear procs and then send them into the target with the debuff, because each individual Missile triggered the explosion. This trinket got reprinted as Psyche Shredder in Ny’alotha, but had an ICD on the damage events and was tuned so low that you just ignored it and kept playing as you usually would.

Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen:

An incredibly powerful trinket that required you to snapshot the effect with your DoTs to gain the most value. There’s other big stat trinkets (Black Blood of Y’shaarj, Ticking Ebon Detonator etc) that could go in this spot as well. The point is really just that these trinkets had such powerful stat procs that you’d actively change your play around them. Whether that’s snapshotting DoTs or pooling Chaos Bolts to dump during the big stat buff. The lack of this trinket archetype isn’t entirely the fault of the trinkets, modern specs also rarely have room to actually change their play to accomodate big stat procs because they just generate so many resources.

Rune of Re-Origination:

We see something somewhat similar to this effect in items like Voice of the Silent Star and Mirror of Fractured Tomorrows. Basically the idea is that it fundamentally changes how you want to allocate your stats in order to leverage the proc. You wanted your best stat to be highest, but only by a tiny bit.

Spectral Thurible:

Maybe a slightly random one, but it’s just a standin for a general type of trinket, which is the specific “elemental” damage type. This trinket was not very good for most specs, but for Shadow Priests it was, because the spec had effects that amplified shadow damage specifically. Many specs had masteries that amplified a certain damage type, or passives/talents that did the same.

We still get some unique trinkets now, but they’re generally low on interaction with the spec you’re playing. They tend to be long descriptions of “press trinket to do damage” (like Grieftorch, Beacon and Suncaller which are more or less the same item) or at best a self-contained minigame (Macabre Sheet Music, Incandescent Sliver)

Gear Progression:

It’s too fast. As Zoumz mentions, we’re practically gear capped within the first few weeks to a month of the season at most, which is awful for a variety of reasons.

What causes this fast progression?

The primary culprit here is M+. The ability to farm a full set of (up to) Hero track gear week 1 of the season skips a massive amount of gear progression steps, and leaves us with very little power growth remaining for the rest of the season. It doesn’t actually matter that seasons go up by 39 ilevels instead of 26, because M+ still puts us the same distance from “max gear” as before. M+ does this because it’s both infinitely farmable and has a feedback loop where you get gear which then lets you do higher keys for even better gear.

To give an example, my guild’s first kill of Kazzara mythic had us at 429 ilevel, 12 less than what she drops. The next tier with a 39 ilevel jump instead of the 26 going into Kazzara, we killed Gnarlroot with 466 ilevel or 14 less than what he drops. The difference between 12 and 14 is significantly less than the 13 extra ilevel jump between seasons.

The other big one here is crafted gear, which allows us to fill gaps with stats of our choosing at near-max ilevel. This ability to target specific slots (and stats) is incredibly powerful.

Why is it bad?

There’s 3 main aspects to this: outgearing content, social dynamics and carrot-on-a-stick.

Outgearing content:

This is fairly easy to explain. Content is tuned to require a certain amount of DPS, HPS etc. The better your players, the less gear you need in order to achieve these numbers. For content to be tuned well, these numbers need to be set up to match the sum of gear + skill for guilds as they get to the boss. RWF guilds have less gear (in theory anyway) but incredibly good players, and then as you go down the world ranks the players get worse but (in theory) gear gets better to compensate, as they’ve had more time to gear up. This is important in order for people to not get overwhelmed or feel like they don’t stand a chance.

It also means that, assuming both the tuning and the gearing curve are done right, guilds won’t get ambushed by massive nerfs to bosses that they’re currently progressing, which is one of the most frustrating things that can happen. You’re at 10% on the boss, next week you’re going to kill it with a bit more practice, and suddenly the boss just has 5% less health and does 10% less damage, and you kill it on your second pull of the next week. Instead, you gradually get stronger each week, which when combined with more practice will get you past the finish line.

Social dynamics:

If your gear constantly gets a little better, that lets you push slightly harder content. Doesn’t matter if that’s another key level or the next phase of a boss (or even an entire boss). You don’t get stuck, and everybody is happy. Now, if you don’t get stronger and instead get stuck, people will inevitably start looking for reasons why they’re stuck, and it’s almost always going to be other people who are the problem rather than themselves. That leads to toxicity, drama, whatever you want to call it. Constantly progressing a little bit is vital for keeping people from ripping each other apart.

Another aspect to the social side of gearing is that if gearing is quick, it segregates players more. People who get a head start will stay ahead, because why would you invite the less geared person to your keys/raids? This leaves the players in lower keys without people who can show them the ropes or even carry them a bit, which means fewer players make it to the higher keys.

Carrot-on-a-stick:

People like to claim they only do content for the challenge, but reality is that “people like purps” as Werdup likes to say. It might not be the sole motivating factor, but it certainly helps to know that you can get some gear out of doing the dungeon/raid you’ve been asked to join. Rewards are also a great way of “tricking” players into improving just by playing more. Continuing to log in and play the game to get purps will almost inevitably cause you to improve as a player. That again helps you not get stuck, because you’re now gaining power from 2 places (gear and skill).

The Upgrade System:

Generally, the upgrade system is a good idea, but it has some pretty significant flaws. Maybe the most obvious one is that Flightstones are just a frustrating currency. Either you do random side content anyway and it’s a non-currency that you never run out of, or you don’t and it’s an absolute pain to get enough Flighstones to upgrade your items. I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that the currency could be removed and it’d strictly be an improvement.

Crests are fine as a concept, but the way they’re awarded is a mess. It is impossible to cap on the Crest type of your progress difficulty from raid. It can’t be done. Even if your guild didn’t extend after Tindral, that’s 7x10 and 1x15 Crests, leaving you 5 short of the S3 cap. There’s not much to say here other than that being unacceptable. M+ is able to cap any and all Crest types including the one from your “progress key bracket” because you can just… do more keys. In (mythic) raid you’re limited both by the number of bosses that you have on farm/are able to kill and the reality that not every player will be in for every boss. The number of Crests dropped per boss is way too low and should probably be at least tripled.

On the M+ side of Crests, the key levels required for each Crest tier is frankly a joke. It’s way too easy to get higher tier Crests. Maybe something that could help would be if you could only get Crests from each key level once per week, and if you run the same level multiple times it’ll give you Crests from the next lower level that’s still unclaimed. For example if you run a +4 you get Aspect Crests, then the next time you run a +4 you instead get Wyrm Crests because that’s what a +3 would give. Then you run either a +4 or +3 and get Drakes, because that’s what a +2 would give and so on. Key level numbers are obviously just picked for simplicity, the actual key level for getting any Aspects at all should probably be at least +10.

The upgrade tracks are another problem. I don’t think an item from heroic raids should ever be able to be upgraded to even match the ilevel of a base mythic item. I also don’t think you should be able to upgrade items with the Crest type that drops from their difficulty, it should require Crests from the difficulty above. That way a heroic item could be upgraded with Aspect Crests, giving it some more longevity into mythic progress until you reach a boss that drops a mythic replacement item.

Another issue with uppgrade tracks is that they push heroic raid ilevels way too close to mythic raid ilevels. The base difference between the 2 is 13, but with upgrades that drops down to only 6. Mythic raiding is already not particularly rewarding for the effort it takes, so maintaining that 13 ilevel gap doesn’t seem like a particularly big ask.

The final issue with the upgrade tracks that I’d like to mention is that it really hurts another thing that Zoumz mentioned, which is the idea that the last bosses drop higher ilevel gear. They do actually still drop higher ilevel gear, but it just doesn’t matter because outside of the Very Rare items all gear is the same once you factor in the upgrade system. The cloth belts from (mythic) Council of Dreams and Fyrakk are both 528 ilevel, one just needs a few upgrades to get there.

The Weekly Vault:

This is another place where M+ is a problem, both for itself and for raiding. This is the only way for M+ to get Myth track items, and the loot pool is gigantic. That’s both a blessing and a curse, because it means you immediately have access to all the BiS items… if you’re lucky. M+ is able to fill out all 3 slots with max ilevel and the full loot pool available from week 1, this is a massive advantage compared to the raid vault.

EDIT: To clarify why it’s bad for M+ players as well: You have a gigantic loot pool, which is cool cos all the BiS items are available. It’s bad because it means chances of seeing any specific item are incredibly low. There’s no consistency/targeting of any kind. See the post linked at the bottom for an idea on how to resolve that.

The raid vault requires you to unlock each boss for the items to appear, meaning that on progress you will never see some of the best items. On progress you also won’t be able to fill out all 3 vault slots, because the requirements are way too high and when raiding you won’t be in for every boss. The number of kills required really needs to be lowered, but the requirement of unlocking boss loot tables is fine.

Alts:

I really don’t think alts need help. There’s no extra systems to farm, no AP or covenants or essences. The only thing alts need is gear, and you get gear by playing the alt. That’s how it should be. Alts do suffer from toxic expectations that have been built up by how easy and fast gearing already is, but that’s not really an alt issue and more of a gearing as a whole issue. If you can’t get 515 ilevel in a week, the expectation that alts should be 515 immediately won’t make sense anymore.

All of the above is a very longwinded way of saying “please for the love of god rework M+ gearing”.

Another post I wrote a while ago that’s also relevant to this topic: Mythic+ Dungeon Improvements Coming in Dragonflight Season 4 - #38 by Tradu-laughing-skull

[Tradu-laughing-skull]

One positive example of outgearing content is actually right now. Dragonflight S4 shows how it should work. Week 1 of the season, Liquid went in and killed everything with just whatever dropped in the raid. That’s around 490-495 ilevel or so. Most other guilds that cleared Vault later that week were around 500-505 or so, compensating for worse/sloppier play.

This means there’s almost 40 ilevels worth of power growth left on the table after Liquid, allowing for a ton of guilds to clear the raid despite weaker players. That’s how it should work, and Aberrus continued that trend with a lot more kills than Vault, because more guilds had time to get geared.

[Akkudk-thrall]

Blizzard had mentioned respecting players time for TWW and I think raid difficulty and scaling needs to be a part of it. It feels like the lock out window has moved up continually for raiding. I saw a lot of logs last season for example of guilds going back and reclearing heroic to get Augrys and Catalysts just so their team could kill Smolderon. While I don’t think current tuning is the sweet spot, its a lot closer than S3 release was and probably should shoot for somewhere in between.

I think tuning it down a little when it comes to dps checks would make the upgrades feel meaningful again, rather that what appears to be tuned around an Echo/Liquid heroic ilvl which equals out to about 10 ilvls above cap for your average raider for performance.

I could go on with issues on the raiding stuff, but in summation gear feels great as reward and not so much as a requirement for the players. Which leads me to a question often asked, and heard it at least a few times in my guild discord. What if they added a Bullion type system in the latter half of a season?

I suggest this for two scenarios that I have witnessed, one the person that been just unlucky. They come to every alt raid after reclears to get the trinket of awesome just to never even see it drop. The other is raid loses a buff class and someone rerolls a class they should be rewarded for it not sentenced to reclear prison. Aside from that its just fun and really last half of season should be more about fun and less about competition.

[Tradu-laughing-skull]

@Akkudk-thrall

I think tuning it down a little when it comes to dps checks would make the upgrades feel meaningful again, rather that what appears to be tuned around an Echo/Liquid heroic ilvl which equals out to about 10 ilvls above cap for your average raider for performance.

Tuning down the DPS checks and the amount of gear available early on yeah. That way Echo/Liquid get their tight DPS check with low gear, and then gear gets to compensate for lower skill as you go down the world ranks.

@Akkudk-thrall

What if they added a Bullion type system in the latter half of a season?

I’m firmly against dinar systems. The single best moment in terms of loot is finally getting that big item. Going to a vendor and buying it short circuits that entirely (even the ability to buy it does that, even if you don’t end up using it). It also, at least in its SL/DF implementations, allows people to buy gear that’s much better than the content they’re doing warrants. M+ already rewards way too good gear for the difficulty done, we need less of that not more.

Bonus rolls or some sort of targeting that still requires actually killing the boss? Sure, but not buying items from a vendor.

[Akkudk-thrall]

In regards to the OP there are a few things I want to endorse or extrapolate on, first off I am usually a tank.

The tank trinket problem is real, and best idea I can come up with is make the shield trinkets rely on reflected damage (think a beefed up ret shield of vengeance) . This would mean in 99% of the time the trinket is borderline worthless to dps but can still be strong in a tanks hands. Survival trinkets are fine week 1 of a season, but we outgrow them and then they collect dust or are at best an m+ niche for pushing. Plus dps then loves it when they are rolling against tanks, especially on the odd situation tanks do more damage with it.

The flight stones just don’t make much sense. Let’s do some math, it takes somewhere around 45 Myth track upgrades to top off a character, thats 675 crests and at 12 crests a dungeon that’s a little over 56 dungeons… if you don’t deplete, if you don’t commit to a no leaver, you just play like a machine and no one screws up thats about 28 hours of play at minimum and could see double that number for waiting on groups, depletions, etc…

The crest issue on alts is also real, at minimum think it would help to have a system for the lower crests upto Wyrm at the very least. Aspects at least come with normal activities. The issue I see a lot is folks get their alt to heroic gear and then feel suffocated by having to rerun +5s or pugging into heroic raids for quests.

[Akkudk-thrall]

@Tradu-laughing-skull

I’m firmly against dinar systems. The single best moment in terms of loot is finally getting that big item. Going to a vendor and buying it short circuits that entirely (even the ability to buy it does that, even if you don’t end up using it). It also, at least in its SL/DF implementations, allows people to buy gear that’s much better than the content they’re doing warrants. M+ already rewards way too good gear for the difficulty done, we need less of that not more.

Bonus rolls or some sort of targeting that still requires actually killing the boss? Sure, but not buying items from a vendor.

Assuming status quo, I don’t see an issue late season for gear, most guilds I know of are either extending or on break at that point anyhow. I do agree it should not be beyond their kill level in a regular season.

The reroll tokens would be awesome but Blizz has said no repeatedly. That said rerolls were pretty deterministic too, you just had to fail two rolls and hold the roll for the boss you needed.

Good to see a different perspective, for me it’s a lot to do with the shorter seasons I think, everything on my character will be gone inside of 6 months, it’s just a tool to achieve boss kills and do keys. Whatever I have including the legendry axe will be chucked into the void as soon as TWW goes live, and that gear will be gone 6-7 months later after that.

That again goes to Zoumz’s post, gear doesn’t show our progress anymore. Gear is transactional and the achievements are what lasts on your character. Think the best answer they had were the artifact weapons, however their early implementation wasn’t great.