The Dinar thing sounds good, but it still doesn’t sound as good as valor and justice vendors. Maybe raid and dungeon gear vendors “without a catch”—like in TBC, Wrath, and Cataclysm?
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Ok, let me give this disclaimer upfront - the contents of my post are not dressed with any ill intent towards the dev team, and purely my thoughts/feedback/opinions/suggestions, so it’s a take it or leave it type of deal.
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With the limit on the “dinar” gear being 3, why are they so spaced apart? You’ve essentially applied the same gating logic as creation catalyst behind it, except this time around those items are not as powerful as tier set pieces, so even when you do receive them after 6-7 weeks (as an average raider), it will feel quite underwhelming and definitely not worth the wait. I can say this from experience, from the last 3 expansions.
The limit of 3 is bad, at least double it so people can purchase stat options in jewelry slots/trinkets, if they so choose to and not feel regret on “picking the wrong items”. -
What is the goal for season 4? Is it for players to have fun with the content and the affixes? Or to grind the content out so they can earn the required currency and wait for the gating to be over to purchase gear that “might” make their lives slightly easier, which might also not be the case if they feel the content is not fun enough to stick around and endure the grind.
In my honest opinion, if the focus on season 4 is not entirely on making the actual content be the highlight, while making gearing an afterthought and a less stressful, dissatified experience, then you have not learned any of the important lessons from the past 2 expansions (especially SL) and why players do not engage with your content. -
Have you considered the possiblity that most guilds and raid groups won’t be able to do a perfect 10/10 clear every week? Guilds and groups like those are the vast majority in your game and a loot system like this only handicaps them for no reason. If they miss the weekly kill count threshold, they keep falling behind - and the gear from the vendors which is supposed to be their crutch to help them, will only come to them when it’s too late.
I honestly think the loot acquistion system is not well thought out at all for Season 4. What you should be doing, is increasing the number of raid loot drops per boss kill by 50% or more and let your players actually make meaningful progresson in a fun period of time, the way it used to be in wrath and cata (also mop, pre-thunderforge).
A player should ideally be decked in loot to tackle the hardest content in the game within 4-5 weeks of playtime. Anything more than that and the content you do just starts to feel bad, like a chore, or a job. Wrath and Cata loot systems were what made so many guilds and raid groups thrive. You knew you would be geared to the teeth no matter what in 4-5 weeks max, and all you had to do was tackle the content by using that power gain. And once you were done with that, you could play a different char, or try your hand at other forms of content.
If you keep the current loot acquistion as is laid out in the blue post, all you’re asking your players to do is more of the same they’ve been experiencing the last 5-6 years. Stop making people work a 2nd job in WoW just to get through content.
More than anything else, this blue post just fills me with dread for what’s to come in dragonflight. The team needs to understand that they need to return to the roots of WoW gearing and focus more on making the content pillars a fun experience. All you’re doing right now is catering to the few who are so deep down the hole, they will keep running in that hamster wheel till they physically and mentally drain and drop out. The rest of your (previously) raiding playerbase no longer cares because of how unwelcome the game is. You can easily come to this conclusion by looking at raid participation numbers since mid-BFA. It’s only been a downhill trend (Nathria was an exception because the raid was easy and friendly, hence the number of AOTC’s and CE’s). The gear didn’t matter as much while clearing it.
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Their “catch” was the gear they had was trash compared to the actual raid gear.
Nobody cares or uses badge gear in TBC classic.
ooh well then yeah of course it will.
What’s funny is the SL raid drop amount is the same as Wrath with 20%.
Wrath had 2 drops in 10 man and 5 drops in 25 man which is the same 20%.
And it didn’t have mythic+ vomiting raid quality gear constantly at anyone with a pulse.
CN participation was high because it was the first raid of the expansion when population is the highest. CN was the hardest launch raid they’ve ever done.
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- Could the game developers’ give their thoughts on how this system, as currently proposed, affects both hybrid classes and dual-wielding specializations as compared to non-hybrids and single-weapon users?
- What, if anything, would happen should a player receive duplicate loot after having already spent a Puzzling Cartel Dinar on the hypothetical item in question? Just part of the risk?
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I hope you consider adding Rae’Shalare to the vendor for hunters. It is disappointing that rogues, warriors and others get to keep using their special weapons and we don’t.
The pseudo legendary status was always a huge headache for us with the weapon being untradeable and unobtainable in the vault. And on top of that, it wasn’t even anywhere close to being as good as said weapons.
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I find it interesting that you find nothing wrong with putting in a huge grind just to get gear that you will probably already have. 
But… hey, if you find getting 278 gear worth putting in a huge and gated grind in a new season, playing old stale content, more power to you. 
So… setting aside that this all sounds overly complicated.
We’ve seen what will happen with this already with the valor upgrades.
This might be good to get an early tier set if they are OP again and you push for RWF or something like it. For the rest of us though, given you only get 3 for the entire season, you are better off just sitting on your Dinar until you can see how the RNG plays out.
If you buy a weapon the moment it’s available and then loot one the following week, it is going to suck. Royally. Now this is an inherent risk with what players have been asking for (loot vendors w/ currency), but at least we weren’t proposing making the currency finite per season.
In the old days, buying the wrong item with the JP/Valor vendors (i.e. something that dropped the following week), might set you back a few weeks (reacquiring currency), but that decision wouldn’t haunt you for the entire season (you wasted 1 of your 3 dinar tokens for the season).
I mean I guess this isn’t that bad. 20 seems a little steep, but I guess if you can full clear a raid, it is only 2 weeks? Is this really that big of an issue though? Are normal raiders saying they want/need heroic gear? Or is it all raiders saying that there is too much rng in their respective tiers?
I think the overall objective should be bringing in some determinism to loot acquisition. Certainly it is what most players are asking for.
- The upgrade is nice, but doesn’t really achieve more determinism.
- The Dinar does address rng directly, but at 3 items per season, it means the “smart play” would be to sit on the currency for quite a few weeks to see how rng drops play out, since making the wrong choice will feel really really bad.
I do like the idea of iterating between seasons. Having to wait 2-3 years between xpacs to address things that are clearly wrong is way too long. If anything, this is the best takeaway from what you are proposing.
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So how about something like this for the bulk of players who don’t raid and do M+?
You meant to quote Felplagued right
Drop one loot token for each boss killed. I’m actually serious.
Moving into Dragonflight, which seems to be alt-friendly, a max of three tokens after a shi*ton of boss kills seems extraordinarily stingy and grind-intensive.
Each spec is almost its own class. Many classes’ specs share little loot; are these three tokens unlocked as three per spec? What about extras people want to collect, like 'mog items? or silly fun things like non-INT 2H weapons I give to my Felguard? (I’ve been DYING to get some raid weapons this tier for my Felguard!)
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Raiding has needed this kind of incentive for players that aren’t mythic raiders to get interested in doing it.
Being able to get the best gear in the game from a heroic raid is a step in the right direction blizzard
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Tokens to buy ZM gear?
Looks like good stuff.
Hoping M+—specifically the high end—will get a little love too.
Most of the highest keys involve characters decked out in raid gear rather than M+ gear. Feels like people doing keys in the top 1,5, or even 10 percent should have a path to optimal gear from those high keys. And that path should be a little wider than 3 personal chances (i.e. no loot trading over time like in raid) from a loot pool of 100+ items.
M+ is spammable so it doesn’t necessarily need high drop rates or a deterministic vendor. But it really needs a path to ilvl parity beyond the vault that pvp and raid both have anyway.
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I can fix this: Every boss kill grants 100 legacy points. Raid vendors sell gear from all 3 raids for legacy points. With weapons being like 1500 points, tier set pieces being 1200, and others being 800. To prevent farming different difficulties to just gear as fast as possible you have something like Legacy (LFR) points, Legacy (N) points, Legacy (H) points, and Legacy (M) points. With this system you could even say bring master loot back in some way shape or form because anyone who volunteers is gonna get points anyways. Not that I like master loot and it should be thrown into the pits of tatarus but thats just me.
I honestly don’t think we need more than 3. (Or 1 per raid). Most people will use it on an end boss for weapon or a trinket.
They could just have it scale past 15s. For current tier have +18s drop 268 and +21s drop 272. Make those pieces upgradable to 278. Have great vault drop 285 at 21s. Similar to raid gearing.
Yes we do…this is a bonus season with no new patch content. Let people gear up faster and let us have fun.
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Err… I misspoke. Not tokens. I’ll edit that. I meant when we could buy tier with valor/justice points/currency . Also, my memory isn’t great. BC-WoD just blends together at this point. Idk if it was Wrath or some other expac with that system. I just remember loving the simple design which gave me reassurance that, no matter what kind of bad loot rng I had, I would always eventually be able to purchase the raid gear with currency I farmed from the same raid lvl difficulty. Or was that all just a wishful dream I had? I wouldn’t doubt it lol.
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