Raid Rewards Experiments in Season 4

Cause Raiders are the special children who deserve the best rewards always! /s

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Why did you guys even remove valor/justice points? This just sounds like a worse version. Sure you get better gear but it’s time gated and you can’t finish a set.

Because it functions alongside the current gearing system as bad luck protection. With the coming way to upgrade your gear, if your BiS piece never drops out of raid, you can get it now, and upgrade it just by doing what you were already doing. It isn’t a 100% deterministic gearing system, its an extra layer of bad luck protection, and imo a very welcome one.

It is straight up a positive with no downsides to the current system. You’re not giving up anything for this system, you aren’t having to do extra to interact with it.

Just because it isn’t your personal perfect ideal gearing method, doesn’t mean its not important as a way to improve upon what we already have in a meaningful way.

Because they turned dungeons into actual alternate progression instead of raider scraps and trash after farming 100 insomnia inducing dungeons to buy a few crap (relative to raiding) rewards?

I have two questions for this:

  1. How is this system going to work for alts? Is the expectation that alts will go through the 30/20/10 questline character-by-character? I feel like that’d make sense, gear is a character-specific progression. What about the currency? We’ve seen the ability to transfer some currency like unused soul ash from a main to an alt, for instance. Is it possible that I could send unused Heroic shards from my main to an alt?

  2. Is this system going to have any interaction with the Great Vault? In particular, I like the idea that the Great Vault can give players Normal/Heroic/Mythic shards for upgrading gear in kind of the same way that I can get the S3 gemslot item.

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I’d love to see these answered, very good questions.

You only get 3 tokens ever, I get another vault next week. I earn more valor next week. My tokens are gone forever once I use them. That’s fundamentally the issue here.

If you’re somebody that only plays one role, or shares weapons/trinkets/etc. across your specs, and/or you have some items that are disproportionately powerful for you, this system is awesome for you. Rogues can get Sylvanas daggers! Veinrippers for Havoc and Shamans! Gavels for Ret, Arms, Fury, Blood, and Unholy!

But then why do Demon Hunters and Shamans have to spend 2 of their 3 tokens on Veinrippers? Tanks are probably losing 2 tokens to KT & Fatescribe trinkets.

It’s a system that is very good for a small handful of specs and might as well not exist for most of everyone else. It does nothing to alleviate the feeling of “I have repeatedly killed a boss and gotten absolutely nothing for it” because if you don’t have a standout item you’re chasing, it’s not worth permanently sacrificing your token on an item you’ll probably have drop for you in the process of upgrading that normal piece to a mythic piece.

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What we have is a loot system that ables you to clear the full raid of Sepulcher in normal, which takes up to 4 to 6 hours in PUGs with people leaving, trolling, and rejoining, without dropping a single piece and 3 pieces of normal grinded tirelessly over 6 weeks is “good”?
I think this is the right direction, but the whole looting process needs to be less random.
Boy, this is all in one character.

Dropping in to clarify a few common trends of questions I’ve seen around, then will get back to combing. I want to keep my responses to things related to the Raid rewards as outlined in the post:

What about Tier Sets?

  • Your 9.2 Tier Sets are still active in Season 4, and the Creation Catalyst will remain on with all of its accumulated charges. Tier Tokens won’t be added to Castle Nathria and Sanctum of Domination, as you’ll be able to upgrade any item you get to a higher ilvl piece of Tier just like you can on live right now.

Domination Sockets

  • Shards and Domination bonuses will be disabled entirely for Season 4. We didn’t want to place extra pressure on the tuning of specifically Fated Sanctum to require it, and there was enough of a class/armor type disparity at which specs/classes could potentially wear a 3-set Domination Bonus and their 4-piece vs others that it would create a weird imbalance on those weeks. We’ve also heard from player feedback that it would feel unfair for players who didn’t hold onto Domination Gear to be at such a disadvantage.

LFR/Outdoor

  • Looking for Raid will have a Season 4/Fated Difficulty, and all wings will be available at the start. This is to say if the rotation begins with Castle Nathria being the Fated raid on rotation, all of LFR Nathria will be replaced with Fated LFR Nathria, at higher item levels. LFR also counts for quest progress, so players who don’t full clear a raid for the week can collect what leftover bosses they need from there.

Additionally, the World Boss related to whichever raid is currently Fated will also be scaled up - more difficult, and dropping ilvl 285 Fated gear.

Why only Weapons/Trinkets?

  • As others in this thread have mentioned, neither of these systems are intended to replace the primary method by which players acquire gear - having all of an expansion’s raids be at current item level is something entirely new to WoW, and will create both a lot of powerful combinations of items, as well as a lot of frustration at not receiving them. We wanted the Vendors to be targeted at the pieces of loot we’d already seen are most impactful to a player such as to create an intense negative reaction when situations arise like the post mentions. Many players feel if they can’t get an Edge of Night, they can’t play Rogue in 9.1/9.2. Rarely do players feel they can’t play because they are missing boots or bracers. Focusing in on these higher-tier items keeps these vendors special, and the system focused on that protection, rather than being an alternative/replacement gearing method (which it is not).

Great Vault integration?

  • A common idea so far is if the Great Vault tokens could integrate some of these. While we’re not interested so far in extending the amount of Dinars a player can get in the season, offering some of the heroic or mythic upgrade shards in some form could absolutely be possible, though we’d still want to make certain you can only purchase Heroic or Mythic upgrade shards if you’re actually raiding some amount on those difficulties. Not a guarantee, but not an impossibility.

Oh, I forgot one -

Heroic & Mythic Upgrade shards

  • these don’t upgrade in a linear fashion. this is to say, if you have a Heroic upgrade item, it will take an LFR or Normal item, and make it into Heroic. Similarly, if you have a Mythic Upgrade Item, you can target LFR, Normal OR Heroic, and it’ll transform into Mythic. They don’t have to be in sequence - so primary Mythic raiders can choose to ignore Heroic if they desire.
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Guild.

No, it isn’t good, which is why the iteration here is important instead of some of the thread complaining that it shouldn’t exist at all in a season they’ve dedicated to feeling out better ways to do things, just because it isn’t perfect or “is half-baked.” Constructive feedback is one thing, whining aimlessly is another.

On this you and I are in complete agreeance and I’m happy to see them feeling out ways before the season drops to address it.

I would be plenty happy with this. It would make Heroic raiding fun. The only issue I see is that the M+ community might not be happy. As I understand it, people pushing high keys don’t want to be forced into mythic raids to get the gear they need.

Agree, but I’m not sure this is an issue that this system causes. I think we already have that problem as it stands now, made only slightly better by the creation catalyst I suppose. It’d be neat to have some kind of gear trader, or alternate way to obtain these coins for sure to help out the m+ pushers.

Agreed, suggestions to make it better is always welcome and whining takes us nowhere.

Its hard to find a guild where people respect each other and don’t throw away homophobic and racist jokes around like it was all good. And all LGBTQ+ guilds (on my server at least) are either dead or with 2 or 3 ppl loging in tops, so yeah, silent PUGs has been the only choice for me lately, and I believe a lots of people goes through the same thing.

But they just did mythics and people have to run them over 100 times the entire expansion. Also now we are doing the SAME raids over and over for this currency.

We literally do the same crap no matter what you like doing in this game so how is running a 10 minute dungeon any worse?

If I’m a player who’s doing 15s week one of a season, what would it break if I could get 10 shards of a mythic upgrade item from my vault to upgrade a raid item to max level? Why can’t m+ players get the fun raid items that have unique effects?

So basically, they are returning an idea from the days when they had subs that has already been tested and approved. Then they are calling it a new “test”.

If they would have listened to the public more, it would have never been removed to begin with. But then again half of the new features are them bring back stuff they should have never messed with to begin with.

Old saying: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

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In complete seriousness I’m sorry to hear that and I hope you can find one that fits your style soon. I know it took me a while to find the same thing, and required I server transfer, which is not something everyone is able to do. Good luck out there.

Because 15s aren’t even as hard as mid level heroic bosses much less mythic bosses.

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Where is the great vault experiment? Excluding certain slots of our choosing, or just not giving maxed legendary slot items if they are lower lvl than what we have.

Can your vault detect that my Mage got the caster offhand LITERALLY 11 TIMES in Shadowlands? And I selected it zero times? Maybe I don’t want that item!!!

I have seen zero tier drop from the vault since 9.2 released as well. There has to be room to test some things out on the vault too.

Raid loot table items have never been on a vendor before besides Tier.

Old vendors had unique (trash) items instead.