I mean, this is probably obvious, but I’ve just gotten the quest To Dornogal, and I got a 408 necklace. From random trash on the beach, I’ve received a 408 mace and 408 belt.
My copied character from live is currently 491, so this feels… ridiculously unrewarding.
I mean, I know the quest rewards have to scale to players who leveled through Dragonflight or whatever they choose in Chromie time, but this feels excessive.
Even questing from levels 75-80 or so, nothing has given me anything past about 541 or so. It doesn’t feel great.
this is normal since not everyone starts at the same ilvl going into an expansion
Leveling in T-Dubs can be done with low 400s. If you start at 491, you’ll probably make it through half of the leveling process without needing to upgrade anything. This isn’t a bad thing.
this char is 491 ilvl and I’m smashing thru everything… rofl…
I was going to go back to ilvling to ilvl some more but I’m scare if I get too high… then tww will be a cake walk and I dont want that. because then there is going to be so much gear to just throw away…
It feels like they’re trying to condense the ilevel down a bit so to not inflate it greatly for the expansion. So by starting us out at 408 and then increasing to 610ish in S1 they don’t end up increasing it to 700ish instead if it was closer to 500ish.
This is fine imo as those with 520ish from Season 4 will benefit anyway from faster content clear and zoom to endgame quicker. This ilevel normalizes out at 77-80ish and they’ll replace gear there as they fill the gap in remaining xp to 80.
Free enchanting mats. When I can DE stuff…
This is a good point and it’s something that I didn’t initially think about when I saw this thread. If the ‘end tier’ of ilvl’s at 80 is in the low 600s, then it makes sense that through the next seasons, that they don’t want to have to rebalance and rework all the item stats.
I do feel, still, that it’s not a super rewarding ‘feeling’ when you complete a quest and you get something that you’ll just vendor or stick in your Warband until you wanna pass it to an Alt.
Unfortunately, I don’t know or can’t think of a way to mitigate or reset that expectation of getting decent loot from something.
They’re probably trying to get ahead of ilvl numbers going whacko boingo by Midnight by not dramatically giving a huge boost just to overcome DF’s endgame power level just for the sake of it.
Can’t say I care too much either way, from what I’ve tested, it feels mostly the same 60-70 regardless of where your ilvl starts.
My copied over character is ilvl 514. I didn’t start to get anything that was an actual upgrade until lvl 78. But once I hit 80 I started getting crushed by how the scaling works and needed to toss on every quest green and dungeon blue I could get my hands on.
So basically, while leveling almost everything was just MoG and that felt okay. Especially with how smooth the leveling process can actually be going into TWW having decent gear from DF.
On your first run through the ilvl you get depends both on your level and the zone you are in. In isle of dorn it starts at 408 for lvl 70 and caps at about 480 at lvl 73+. To get higher you need to go to the next zone. In ringing deeps it caps at 515 at lvl 75+. In Hallowfall it caps in the low 540s at level 78 or 79 (not sure). At level 80 it caps at 551 in azj-kahet. Once you unlock adventure mode by finishing chapter 3 of the campaign quest chain, for alts now ilvl just scales to your level wherever you are.
If you do all the side quests you can get close to 80 by the end of ringing deeps then hit hallowfall in 515 gear and suddenly find pulling large numbers of mobs may not end well.
Im going to use those levels as a guide when I level on live… don’t go to ringing deeps until 74, hallowfall until 76 and azj-kahet until 79 (Finishing chapter 3 of the campaign quest chain is not long in azj-kahet but it returns to azj-kahet in chapter 5 - unlocking adventure mode, world quests etc. happens at the end of chapter 3).