I think you nailed it. Casuals, or we, or us people don’t want the 220 gear RIGHT NOW, which seems to be what people are implying. We want to see a route to upgrade our gear to that 220 level by the end of the raid tier doing something other than raiding or mythic plus. You can all have your hard earned epic gear for a few months and then right as the next tier of stuff rolls out we’ll be able to catch up.
Since you are all clearly so awesome you will quickly outgear us scrubs again by doing your new raids.
Well arena is obviously competitive, but m+ and raiding don’t have to be. A lot of people do those things with chill groups and do just fine.
Instanced content has always offered the best rewards in this game in the end.
I wasn’t playing when benthic was current, so I won’t speak to that. Visions though did offer upgrades but you had to be doing the hard ones, which could be seen as not very casual. (I never got past 3 masks myself!) TR, if you were getting it from WQs took approximately forever to get the higher level upgrades. I’d be surprised if you could actually have gotten the 3 best ones at all before the patch ended.
Arena World Championship and Mythic Dungeon Invitational and the World First race for mythic raid clears are e-sports - there’s a clear set of teams competing against each other for first place. It’s a mis-categorization to say running keys or raids is an esport as the only competition built in the game is whether or not you defeat a built-in encounter against the game. Arena, maayyybe you could call it that since there’s obvious and purposeful competition against other players, but even that’s kinda iffy, imo.
You couldn’t before the first patch was released, people seem to forget that bit. I am sure catch up gear will come again, but man oh man wait for the first patch to come like it always does.
I did not say MMO means mandatory for all content. But the core of this game is to group up and kill bosses or the other faction. It always has been and that never will change.
And you keep trying to allude to progression being shut down only for solo players. Everybody reaches that point in the content they play and then they wait for the next patch.
Because then my mentality turns from “why should I try in this content?” to “meh, I can just get the best gear from doing WQs. Trying or putting effort into the game is pointless, I’ll just be lazy.”
It happened in BfA when I kept getting Titanforged upgrades from WQs instead of gear from raiding or M+. I burned out faster, hated the game faster, and it soured my opinion further on an already awful expansion. I enjoy doing the content, but part of the enjoyment of the content is getting better gear than what I can get helping turtles run to the water. For me, I feel rewarded for doing harder content. But when I can get the same item level of stuff from just killing ten mobs or tagging a 5% HP elite because I just got there in time, then the motivation to run harder content is lower, especially when we’re on the final boss of a tier and up to 50 wipes already.
I don’t care what gear other players have. I care that the better gear is obtained through more effort out into the game. The better gear should come from the higher end content that requires that gear to push into the next layer of content, not for being at the top of your game already (which you seek to indicate WQ are for this level of player). And it’s not at all a bad thing for that to be where players want to stop, but that also means they’re choosing to no longer pursue harder difficulty so their gearing should also come to a stop. Getting better and better gear for doing the same content you’ve been doing for four months is a bad reward scheme.
That said, this expansion does have something that scales WQ ilvl. It’s definitely helped my alts, and I imagine it’ll eventually cap at 200 which is more than enough for casual players sticking to WQs imo as that’s the same level as Normal raids.
At the end of the day, though, it’s 100% I don’t care what other players have, I just want the game to have a good reward system. And back when I could get max level Titanforged gear from sleeping on my computer through a WQ (which I always did because I wanted the gold and caches) I did not feel rewarded whatsoever, and I hated that way of gearing.
First, it depends on the speed at which the gear comes. The same level of gear can come from different sources at different rates. Time investment, or skill/epeen investment. Player choice.
Second, as I said above, raids can drop stuff that mere mortals cannot just go out and get; they have been for years now, with the mythic-only final-boss mounts. Raiding ain’t dying as long as stuff like that is around. I doubt most hardcore raiders are doing it for the gear.
Perhaps, and I only have this paladin to go by since I have no motivation to level any alts past 51 (putting in time to make them weaker? No thanks!)
But the power progression just doesn’t add up. I should be destroying those world mobs by now, but they all scaled up with me and so I still have to tediously whittle them down while they inexplicably take big chunks off my health bar.
Sheesh, you must be the luckiest person on the planet! Titanforges were pretty rare (and fun) for most other people.
So did BfA. It’s just that this time, they’ve gated it behind Renown as well.
It caps at 194. And by the time you have access to that, you already have a full 197 set from your covenant. So it’s (probably deliberately designed to be) pointless.
If you never get there what was the point? If your going into the next patch you’ll hit the catch-up.
Ok, so what’s the solution your proposing? Just TR 2.0? I don’t think many people would fight you on that if it worked the same way but it’s not much of an actual improvement for anyone not doing m+.
I recall this being an issue in BFA. I’ll never forget leveling this pally, feeling invincible at 119, hitting 120 and getting absolutely slaughtered by non-elite mobs in Drustvar. That was so frustrating. Imo, bad game design.
To a point I was wearing more Titanforged WQ gear than raiding gear. Felt pretty bad, and our group stopped raiding sooner than any other expansion.
It didn’t seem fun for “most” other people, either, given how reviled is was/is. But I can’t speak for anyone but myself and my group in that it is one of the most loathed system added to the game.
And a 194 of the bell trinket from Bastion is still sought after by Balance Druids, so it’s still not bad.
I prefer the current system over BfA’s travesty of gearing, however I stand by the belief that VP should be a General PvE currency that just upgrades gear to a certain point, i.e. WQ/LFR to Normal level, Normal level to Heroic, Heroic to Mythic, and M+ gear up to 223 or so.
Players will always try to make content easier. That was never in question. We are talking about rewarding efforts. If I did 40 hours of work and you did 10 but we got paid the same it would cheapen the extra effort I put in. We don’t have to agree but that’s what it comes down to.
Never ever ever use that as a reason, since lemme tell you something. All my server first titles? All my raid progression that had me top 40 US? That took a whopping 2 hours a night, 3 days a week. 3 hours on Saturday.
Imo, bad game design.