meh, whatever man.
ive just been doing mythics// they r pretty easy and give gear fairly fast. i think i will be 332 ilvl by tuesday cuz ill have enough residuum to get 2 new pieces, maybe ill get lucky with boxes also.
its not as good as wods loot system, but i dont think its horrible.
To blizzard it is. I 100% agree with you that I played way more with WOD. However in blizzards eyes this RNG bull increases play time.
It definitely has increased the number of pvprs participating in pve. Which is something pve devs are completely fine with. What they don’t realise is that a lot of pvpers don’t like pve and will burn out and unsub.
Blizzard has been working on a way to make items just “items” for a long time. They don’t want it to be an arguement of semantics. If you get an item it should be an item, nothing more, nothing less. We have had PvP Power", War Game / Tournament Gear, PvP ilvl, Templates, etc and we all ended up at this point where everything is completely gone and I can only assume that its because none of those were seen as successful.
The only difference between an item given as a quest reward, a battleground victory box, or a raid boss should be a power level appropriate to how hard it was to obtain that item and I’m sure everyone is aware that unfortunately that isn’t the case. Its a lot easier to kill a heroic boss than it is to push rating on a ladder and a lot less time consuming (only takes about an hour for my guild to clear heroic).
I’m not sure it’ll ever “feel good” until there is a better way to control player power.
The systems being implemented are not inherently bad its just the overall design of classes and the way things are tuned that is bringing everything down.
Arguments like this are just negative posts that people can pile on to without ever really needing to say anything. When I can bring up multiple characters with 20+ weeks of boss kills in Normal/Heroic/Mythic for Highmaul, Blackrock Foundry, Hellfire Citadel and then a # of arena games in a single expansion that might amount to more time played than most people will have across multiple expansions you can’t honestly expect me to take these arguments at anything more than face value.
In WoD, the last time we had vendors, I had geared and actively played;
throughout the expansion, in both PvE and PvP, and grabbed gear for my off specs on most of them by the end of the seasons.
My conquest caps were pretty high so I think somewhere around mid season I’d start spending conquest on the elite gear. As much as I loved PvP all I would do is queue arenas in my off time and never really get anything for all the time I was spending in game outside of some cosmetic transmog.
On my Monk and whatever alts I was raiding on that tier, life was good because the gear was up to date, but on all my other characters all I did was mindlessly grind back and forth wins and losses because the conquest cap was so high on them (from carrying over each week, not even related to rating).
Meanwhile every week in raid I would get something that I was usually looking for and a lot of times it was pretty useless in Arena where I was spending all of my free time outside of raid.
I put so many hours into this game and a lot of the gear upgrades I get I couldn’t really use where I wanted to.
Fury Warrior burst was irrelevant in PvE, Arms was the superior spec, Mistweaver trinkets like Unstable Felshadow Emulsion was useless in PvP. The list goes on.
Playing my Balance Druid in PvE at the end of the expansion with the class trinket was extremely fun but Balance in PvP was the opposite for me. I ended up dropping it because I didn’t care much for dropping 3 charges into someone for a kill.
Current WoW allows people to play less it doesn’t trick you into playing more.
The pvp ilvl in wod may have been seen as a failure in their eyes, but I think it’s one of the only thing the pvp player based liked about wod pvp.
If I remember correctly at the end of WoD conquest gear would jump 40 item levels in power when you were doing Arenas or Battlegrounds. In PvP you probably felt felt good having whatever the desired stat spread was but outside of that you were 40 item levels weaker. 25% crit was only 18%. Mastery, Versatility, Main stat was all a set % lower. Not only was damage lower but everything else was lower too.
It meant that you spent all this time gearing up, capping conquest, pushing rating, and buying gear only to have someone kick you from a raid you might have wanted to pug, or get declined from challenge mode runs because BiS at your ilvl isn’t what BiS at dungeon ilvl was. You put all this time into the game but you were treated like a lesser player and basically performed like one out of no fault of yours anywhere that wasn’t a battleground or arena.
Item budget at these item levels was way off iirc, individual item strength when you compared the honor version, last seasons item, and the next seasons item was way off and then player strength was also scaling through the roof with the secondary attunement passives, insane ilvl trinket procs, disproportionate gear upgrades etc.
There were a lot of problems that I can think back too and remember in hindsight even though I personally enjoyed the system. I don’t view it as failure but I acknowledge improvements could have been made.
End of season base ilvl was 710 for conquest gear, iirc hfc heroic was 715 in the second half. Then it would jump up to 740 and iirc again second half of hfc mythic was 745 when they upgraded with valor. The pvp trinket set bonus would usually account for that 5ilvl difference. Yes your equally heroic geared counter part would perform better than you, but you would still have the ability to pull your weight just fine enough. I myself ran normal until I got pve set bonus and maybe some decent pve trinkets. And was able to jump into heroic and mythic just fine.
My perspective here is likely different from others but in my opinion pulling your weight is being within a % of the group average otherwise its a carry.
I had a rank 1 parse for Killrogg for a few months until the legendary ring got insane and everything became RNG but being equal item level didn’t mean you were doing equal numbers or anything close to it.
In a 2 minute time span you could have a trinket like Soul Capacitor doing 30-40% of your damage paired with the legendary ring on Single Target. Without that you were not really pulling your weight. Maybe meeting minimum DPS requirements with good play but certainly nothing close to another Windwalker, for example.
Class trinket was the same way. Xhul’horacs healing trinket. Ishkars DPS trinket for casters.
The power gap was so much more than item level when you compared output from someone in PvE gear to PvP gear.
From reading your experience the fact that you had to farm what would now be considered side grades, but back then then upgrades, for heroic/mythic is not ideal and in part what I was referencing when I said gear upgrades were disproportionate. Going from any item level peice to a higher one should be a certain increase in power and it wasn’t. It doesn’t sound like you were overly affected by it but there were still players out there that struggled to essentially gear up twice.
It wasn’t made any easier with the stigma’s floating around when players would gear fresh alts in PvP gear for ilvl and then try to sneak into pugs.
I forgot about valor and the different item levels that dropped in the tier. It’s been so long all I remember is having like 6 sets of gear in my bags. 
Pulling weight is at least pulling required dps, but you shouldnt be able to jump into top lvl pve with just pvp gear and expect to being doing as well as the pure pvers and vice versa. There absolutely should be some kind of time investment in PVE to do PVE and once again vice versa.
And talking about multiple sets, I have more sets now than anytime. And I am counting when I healed in times when you had to have multiple sets of healing gear (mp5 set or pure throughput etc)
A lot of good points in this post. Is it fair to assume you believe PvP players are currently being rewarded less then they should be for time spent? It seems to me if you get on average 1-2 ilvl 430 pieces for a full heroic raid clear for what you said take your guild an hour, maybe the drop rate and reward structure for PvP is currently flawed.
If we had currency and a vendor it would be a totally different story. The ability to directly choose an appropriate upgrade far outweighs the extra time spent running arenas. The biggest distinction would then need to be multiple ilvl tiers of gear unlocked at set rating from the vendor, to ensure we were being awarded appropriately for time spent and current CR difficulty.
1800-2100 CR might be viewed as lower CR by a lot of long time PvP veterans, but the reality is that is usually the top 10% of PvPers. Those ratings would be equivalent to being a heroic raider, and while the weekly chest may reward ilvl 435 the actual drops are much much lower.
I would like to see Vendors personally, but if that is just not achievable PvP gear needs to randomly drop with a much higher frequency. If PvP pieces dropped with a 10% chance per 3v3 win, assuming most games last 5-10 minutes, you would expect to see a piece of gear every 1-2 hours of time spent queuing. This is assuming you won every match. We need more incentive to actually queue if they are going to keep our PvP gear a loot pinanta
My favorite is getting the same pos ring 4 times in a row
I think the current reward structure for PvP is still non existent for the most part.
You are given base item level vendor trash at every opportunity and a relatively decent item in terms of ilvl way too infrequently. Gearing overall has gotten a lot of QoL improvements through Legion / BFA but you really only see the benefits in PvE.
From a PvP perspective It is hardly an improvement over MoP or WoD gearing, not anywhere near enough to justify the removal of vendors, and the amount of effort that has gone into the normalization of items and ilvl as a power metric has not been worth the time spent. In many areas it is either the same as the previous system and in a few areas worse.
A change like this effects a lot of players and I don’t know enough about the metrics across the entire game and it’s players to really give a good opinion on this. Most of my dungeons are 1 chest, I know there are people out there that 3 chest all their 10s, and there are people out there that just go for completion and I don’t know how long it takes other people to clear the raid, what kind of loot council their raid might do, how far they’re clearing each week, etc.
Whatever the happy medium is for time played and gear acquired for Raids, PvP, M+ is what the drop rate should be based around, imo, but it might just be wishful thinking to believe that.
What I said is NOT an opinion. It is 100% a fact we do this in real world marketing and sales. This type of strategy gets easier as the US population gets dumber. Sorry to be harsh but its the truth.
This depends strictly on what type of content you play. Do you PvP and pve? Then yes this current system is extremely beneficial. You get even more gear than either side.
If you’re only a pver it’s probably also faster with the mythic + system now.
For pvpers only though? This system is in no way less play time than previous systems. It takes way more wins to reach cap than before. It’s RNG loot so you need to play games and hope for RNG to fill your holes. Then you should be doing other crap content still to grind up your AP or essences. For pvpers only, this system is not less work.
Id be happy if the substats on pvp gear were worth having… you have to run mythics and raids for bis. Pvp gear without the ability to reroll the substats or pick the combo you want is a slap in the face. Why grind it out for irrelevant stats.
Honestly, that’s just not a realistic approach to any sensible marketing strategy. I do not want to play the game more now that I have to grind content I am uninterested in, in order to compete.
I’ve told multiple friends, inquiring about coming back to retail before classic, to not waste their time. The essence system and PvE gear would put them so far behind, it is not worth it.
While most are gaining their epic PvP and Mythic+ essences, any new player will just be starting their 4 week journey. While it is an MMORPG, this goes against any catch up system they want for new players.
The level system, gearing system, learning a character, along with a Gated essence system has to be the worst its ever been and will discourage any new players from starting or returning.
That’s a horrible marketing decision if I’ve ever seen one.
Additionally, if it truly is just 1200 rated Mythic raiding DHs who want to see big flashy numbers on their tablets, the system would be better off designed as rewarding players for amount of games played, and not on rating.
Yes, PvE gear will push a 1200 rated DH to 1400, but it will not give them a glad mount or what have you. Again, it’s bad marketing for those casual players, because it does not address a rating to reward system.
None of this makes sense in a realistic manor.
I loved playing alts in WoD and MoP when I could be competitive throughout the season. WoW PvP had huge participation numbers when it was a 10-win conquest cap system. Even if it was just to get an item, the amount of players who PvP skyrocketed.
Now, I spend less and less time on WoW because I don’t want to repeat content I do not enjoy in order to PvP. The less time I spend on WoW alts, means the less time I spend on WoW all together and then less likely I will sign in at all.
So, you’re left with this:
1) Two negative effects produced:
a) You resent a game for forcing you to do content you do not want to do
b) You resent a game for making your character feel weak (not having an essence cause you don’t want to do the content)
2) Your alts are so far behind your skill curve that you are “stuck” at 2000 rating because gear is putting the other players so far ahead (Obviously professional players/streamers are an exception, I do not invest 12 hours a day into wow to be god tier)
a) Because of this, my interest in playing alts dimensions and I stick to 1 character, reducing my over all play time and any incentive I had to play with friends
b) I now sign on for my 10 games and sign off completely, quickly diminishing the amount I want to sign on at all.
Like I said, compare the systems in a realistic manor:
Option 1= Game stays the same as it is on live, nothing changes.
Option 2 = Vendors, a BoA essence system, and some freaking class changes.
Which option are you more excited about? Which option will make you want to play more? Which option would you be more inclined to hype up to returning or brand new players?
The only marketing system that you could sell me on with these horrible decisions and systems is a “we saved the town” 8.2.5 to bring players back from Classic.
Two months from now, players will be getting bored of Classic and 8.2.5 is the ‘savior patch’ that shows Blizzard cares. Vendors are added, PMR is nerf, PvP gets new trinkets, etc
it is pretty amazing seeing the impact of a new person in the boss chair for the game
while pvp seems to be dead under Ion’s reign, there is hope that the next director may have a different vision
What you’re missing here is that this type of strategy outlined by Boomer will produce good short-term results for the quarterly shareholder reports, which is what the higher-ups in Activision really care about. Obviously its a failed long-term strategy for the game, but the increased playtime numbers right now make them look good in Q3.
But that wouldn’t accomplish “short term results” in any reasonable sense.
It would be more profitable, more logical, and a better marketing term to do a little as possible, but more often.
Again, imagine a state of the game where you have quarterly changes to increase participation.
Q3 - New Expansion, new season/Afflix (9.0)
Q4 - New 3-4 Boss raid, new season/Afflix (9.0.5)
Q1 - New 6-7 Boss raid, New season/ Afflix (9.1)
Q2 - New 3-4 Boss raid, new season/afflix (9.1.5)
Q3 - New 6-7 Boss raid, new season/afflix (9.2)
Q4 - New 3-4 Boss raid, new season/afflix (9.2.5)
Q1 - New 6-7 Boss raid, new season /afflix (9.3)
Q2 - Pre Expansion patch/class changes/new class (9.3.5)
Q3 - New Expansion
This would have the highest amount of spikes, it would reduce the amount of bosses in each raid, but make them more frequent and make pushing off classes changes to a 4 month cycle. This would make people come back for a limited time, get bored, but be like oh, a new patch is coming with changes, maybe that’ll be better.
Or you’ll have people “stick around” until the next cycle because it’s in quicker phases.
What they are doing now, make zero sense, what so ever. It’s more likly that they are grossly understaffed or the company is a complete shltshow behind the scenes due to the mess of “Blizzard” games.
In my mind, how I approach my own work/job, is that I have some pride in the work I produce. I cannot nor want to go to a client with designs I am unhappy with. I’m more inclined to understand the thought process of the developers, what they think of the game and why it appears to be in such a terrible state.
I agree. I’ve said it a lot before but the “PvP only” crowd is negatively impacted the most by the most recent design changes.
Battlegrounds are considered trivial content. You are given vendor trash for rewards that (at least as far as I can tell) don’t scale close to heroics/mythic+0.
Inefficient use of time trying to gear your characters or gain artifact power.
The Warfront has an ilvl restricted entry ( Despite having a 40% damage and healing buff inside the instance ), ilvl locked weekly quest reward, drop rewards dont seem to scale even equivalent to world quests.
With gear having a more consistent value across all content there is no more need for the “PvP world / instance bosses” and that aspect of gameplay is now gated to keep the rewards consistent with the rest of the game.
Gearing was part of the gameplay. Now if you want sockets they’re random on gear. Secondary stat attunements were removed, tertiary nerfed, etc.
Everything we’ve already talked about above.
To get anything close to what you had before there is a lot of extra work you need to put in. Even still the game is lacking quite a bit.
I had to keep it brief. Typing on the phone and I have a lot of work to get done today. Sorry lol.