Outside of a few overpowered items (OWS, Edge of Night, Sylvanas bow) yes. 99% of us are not doing it for gear. That’s not our end goal.
You’ve just proved you have no clue about what goes on in this content.
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Sadly the art asset/zone building team and the tuning team are completely different people and skill sets so I doubt this would happen.
My suggestions on things to fix:
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It should be more than 3 items total to accommodate for those with off specs, dual-wielding, and lock pet weapons.
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Instead of just weapons and trinkets, the vendors should sell every raid item. Most specs’ BiS trinkets in SL are from M+ (Even though I wish they weren’t) so it’s kind of a waste. Also, if this is meant to serve as a bad luck protection, then it doesn’t help people having bad luck on other items.
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The 3 part objective should not be to kill a specific number of bosses of any difficulty. This forces mythic raiders to push aside mythic progression time to run normal and guarantee max objective kills a week for everyone, or to spend extra time in the week to also clear normal. That is asking for an unhealthy amount of play time from competitive players just like having to run splits for tier in S3.
Honestly though, this is a pretty complex system that’s bad for alts and new players. A simple system that gives us LFR, Normal, Heroic, and Mythic currency from each boss kill to buy any raid gear from bosses we’ve killed at least once at the same difficulty would be better.
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How do you intend to balance 2Hs versus 1H with the shard system? If I read right, you get one shard per boss, and 20 shards combine to upgrade one item, so upgrading a Gavel/Jaithys/Jotun requires 20 shards, but upgrading 2 Edge of Nights or Ryg dagger/Jailer OH would require 40 shards! Especially considering that when you get into a mythic level, people aren’t going to get to do every boss every week, getting 40 shards is MONTHS of effort.
Yeah. I will acknowledge that my idea is major copium. But that copium leads back to Blizzard’s deranged priorities.
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Perhaps a better way to put this is that gear is not the end goal of most mythic raiders. The true end goal is either CE or HoF depending on your guild.
Gear is simply a means to an end.
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The wrath/badge system where you got inferior trash items?
I appreciate it. My phrasing is a little vague. I’ll fix that.
What’s going to happen to items like the Mechagon punch cards or special items from Kara (like the healing cape for example.) Are those getting scaled to season 4 item level too?
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This all feels like various steps in the right direction, and I completely get what you guys are trying to do. I think having bad luck protection of some kind and a way to guarantee that you get loot would be fantastic to overcome the existing problems with Personal Loot. I sincerely appreciate you guys looking into this stuff.
However, I also think this doesn’t go far enough. I think the overall problem is Personal Loot itself, which I won’t get into as much here, but if we’re going to be going by Personal Loot for now, then I feel that there needs to be a better method if the goal is to prevent bad luck and provide a more guaranteed way of seeing loot.
1. 3 coins maximum, minimum of 6 weeks
The idea of killing bosses to progress toward a guaranteed loot piece would be great! I have a few problems with this however:
a. We only get 3 coins for the entire season as I understand. If the goal is to eliminate streaks of bad luck, why make the vendors go away after a limited number of purchases? Bad luck streaks have the risk of happening still even with these coins, so why make them limited? The idea is nice by itself, but it sounds like we’re given this small pittance to make loot feel better, only to have it taken away after we spend our 3 coins. People should have to put in some commitment to see loot, but taking this away after a bit of time and returning to without it would feel really bad in my opinion.
b. Assuming the Coin 1 and Coin 3 minimum times are based on killing every possible boss in the Fated raid every week, I feel like this amount of time is not very friendly for more casual players that won’t full-clear the raids for several weeks (or longer, since they’re only seeing each raid once every 3 weeks), and also returning players who are potentially less familiar with the raids of the expansion.
2. Heroic and Mythic upgrades
Overall I really like this idea. You can use it on both the vendors and the loot you get from boss drops through Personal Loot, even if the latter entirely depends on random luck. It makes loot more accessible and even guaranteed if you get a lower version of what you want! That’s great!
My only problem is that I feel like 1 shard per boss kill (20 kills in total) for one gear upgrade is a bit much. Many casual players won’t see their first one for over a month or more I feel. Maybe I overestimate, and maybe the frequency of these will increase over time as people get gear and clear more and more bosses the further they go in the tier. Having it start at 20 feels really slow, especially when we only get 10-11 bosses per week at maximum (and again, for casual players I doubt they’ll see that much week to week).
Suggestions
Not to say it has to be this exactly, but back in the day, Justice and Valor points I think did a decent job of balancing guaranteed loot to progress your character, while also expecting players to kill bosses for greater pieces and unique loot from the raid itself. This also guaranteed that you had to commit to the raid to earn the gear from it, since it was that much cooler and stronger in many cases.
FF 14, for instance, does this well I feel with its two tomestone types. You get a good set of gear from the average currency, and a great set from the limited currency where you earn only 540 per week, and various pieces cost more than that (just like current valor points in SLands Mythic+ and how some gear piece upgrades cost more than your weekly cap). You can’t just spam raids/dungeons and acquire the best out-of-raid gear in week 1 from a vendor in FF14.
Beyond this, better loot can be acquired from the 24 person raid, which has boss loot lockouts similar to WoW as I understand, along with random drops, and even the 8 person raids have the boss loot lockouts along with tokens that you gather and eventually spend on high-end gear. It takes time (around 5 weeks max? if you play actively, though the raids are considerably shorter), but overall it feels fair because you’re gradually working toward your goal, all while having gear upgrade options available to you along the way you can earn. Even if you don’t need the gear, there’s crafting materials and other stuff you can buy as well.
With Personal Loot by itself, it expects you to be lucky while still working at the -chance- that loot will drop for you, and having no other alternatives outside of limited crafting gear (which isn’t always the most accessible for everyone either). Having alternatives would be amazing while progressing toward your goals, or at the very least, having a fair system to progress toward great gear, while leaving the best stuff in the raid itself.
Conclusion
If a big point about this season is supposed to be about all the raids being relevant, all the loot being relevant, and doing these Fated raids every week, putting a hard cap or somewhat harsh (imo) limiting factors on these things that are supposed to make getting loot easier and more guaranteed doesn’t feel right.
I don’t think that people should just be able to get free loot for doing minimal play (as you say, getting a BiS piece in week 1, that shouldn’t be possible), but I also feel that there should be more accessibility when it comes to bad luck protection, such as a way to work toward acquiring the loot piece you want without any limiting factors, or ways that you can progress your character toward that goal of better loot, rather than relying on the randomness of boss drops for most of everything.
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Kill bosses, get upgrade shards and tokens, use upgrade shards and tokens. Not exactly rocket science.
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I think you are 2 years behind mate, thats BFA, we are in Shadowlands now.
Mechagon and Kara will be m+ dungeons in season 4.
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Mechagon is returning as an M+ dungeon in S4, but punch cards did not drop in M+ IIRC.
Idk dude now you get to trade your guildie a sick jailer mace and that’s really cool and rewarding in its own way.
They are doing this, as they said clearly, to test the systems going forward. If it makes for a better game in Dragonflight, isn’t that a good idea?
Im curious about the use of “Season 4’s shorter runtime”.
Poor Blizzard.
It doesn’t matter what they do, it will never be enough.
They could mail out raid level gear just for logging in and folks would want to know why they didn’t put it on the character for them 
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It seems to be a theme with you guys.
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exactly! this is the first iteration of the idea, and beyond that, the first time we’re hearing details about the first iteration of the idea. there’s tons of time for this to change and tons of ways this system could be implemented differently, but the skeleton of the idea is fantastic. gear vendors for raid as bad luck protection rules and it’s great to see.
How does this affect me in any way since I won’t be raiding or gearing because it’s the most boring part of this game? Oh well.