Probably enough to take you right up to the next patch lol
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IMO the great vault shouldn’t even exist, and some other solution created for mythic+ that prevents unlimited mythic level gear.
But I feel now that mythic+ exists as a real gearing path at the same item level as mythic raids and covers every slot (neither of which used to happen with valor) it’s always going to make raids feel worse just due to how much easier everything about mythic+ from the actual tuning where the rewards stop, to logistics, capability to carry, etc.
There doesn’t seem to be a way both raids and mythic+ existing together that doesn’t cause some sort of resentment from players who enjoy one or the other. I guess maybe it’s a non-problem and just let it be, who knows.
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I personally think the GV is a great system. I just think that the raiding slot for it isn’t very well designed for how raiding actually works.
Reworking it to be closer like the PvP vault where your progress determines the upper limit while there is another metric that determines the way you unlock slots in it would actually do a pretty solid amount to fix the divide between raid and M+ gearing.
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Sounds like a boosters dream. Selling 1 time “progression” so players can get 252 gear in their vault every other week.
Basically how PvP was in s1 where you buy “progression” in one bracket then farm low rated in another bracket the rest of the season. Only lessened a small amount in s2 because you have to win a game every week for it to count.
It’s tough to have a system that works.
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This has been a design philosophy problem with Shadowlands as a whole. I think the devs greatly overestimate players’ patience, and that’s why we see them being stingy with gear drops, having long unsatisfying grinds, and zones that are nothing but giant puzzles. Then they wonder why sub numbers drop.
Annoyance does not equal challenge.
12 Likes
The Great Vault is insurance. It was created to offer M+ players choices so it wasn’t just a roll of the dice on that ONE item in their weekly chest.
Raiding’s Great Vault needs to be similar insurance, but that requires a different approach.
I think the raid GV should be fundamentally different. You kill bosses, you get “Vault Points”. You pay Vault Points to unlock boxes in the Great Vault. (Again, this is for RAIDING ONLY.) And the boxes have exponentially increasing unlock prices, so you get a lot more out of unlocked 1 or 2 boxes for 10 weeks than spending the same points to unlock 3 (or even 4, if that’s a thing) in 1 week.
The point of this is that, while you’re extending, you spend those Great Vault points you’ve been accumulating all tier, to keep the loot flow coming in when you’re on extend and aren’t getting points anymore.
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If you never get loot you value the loot you do get more right :]
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Designing the game to be boost-proof shouldn’t take precedence over designing the game to be better.
Though considering the current price on raid clears it’d probably be more economical just to buy a +15 each week.
But in any case, it is a rough suggestion.
3 Likes
Raiding should just be redesigned. The “extend” meta is not how raids were played back in the day.
So far many guilds I’ve seen do 2-3 raid days and then 1 “fun” day of heroic. That fun day could just as easily be early Mythic bosses… except Blizzard use a bizarre lock-out system that doesn’t allow you to kill early bosses in a raid if you progged bosses early in the week.
Just change how raid lock-outs work in Mythic Let people farm earlier bosses without setting back their progression on prog nights.
This is actually one of my biggest gripes with the system and is really disheartening for players who are pushing higher content. When I got CE last tier, I literally had one piece of the nathria set unlocked in my mog window.
It really sucks that some people get lucky during prog and get the pieces that they want and the others are just screwed because now you’re extending. The mythic lockout restrictions also have a role to play here.
The other gripe is having to share one vault between PvP and PvE. The separate caches in BfA were actually much better because these 2 modes of play require completely different gearing philosophies for most specs, whereas raiding/m+ have synergy.
This is what happens when they crank raid difficulty to 1000000.
It’s also only a “problem” on mythic.
Oh you mean rng heh heh
This has happened because they removed titan forge and wanted to balance the drop rates without it
The extend meta is inevitably purely because raiding by design has to be strictly scheduled. You have your 7-12 hours and eventually you’ll hit the point where using those hours on anything but progression is a waste of time.
Changing lockouts would make Mythic raiding a bit more accessible, but it wouldn’t remove the need for extending.
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You don’t just have “X” hours. You have X hours with your sweaty main raid, and then you have Y hours “hanging out with the boys”. At least from the guilds I’ve seen, that’s how it goes. Those Y hours “hanging with the boys” could be cleaning up earlier bosses for loot, much in the same way that back in the day you’d go and do Kara or ZA, or clearing alternate wings of a raid, etc.
But because we have this one monolothic raid that is extremely linear with this jank lock-out system, you don’t have any options on spending those Y hours on acquiring usable gear from a “Mythic” setting. It’s in fact arguably part of the reason Blizzard forced themselves to do this Dom Socket and Stygian Ember nonsense - in the context of the current state of the game, Heroic Raiding does continue to have value for Mythic Raiders because it is still a good source of Stygian Embers.
Blizzard has basically cornered themselves with their design by insisting on only having one raid per raid tier. If we had one easier raid and one harder raid, I would bet money many of these “extend” complaints would go away, if they could go farm the easier raid on off-nights and then main nights progging the harder raid.
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I guess should bosses be so hard that 20 good players, optimized, in voice, still take hundreds of pulls?
And if so, it’s kinda a stuck point on trying to gear and spend time on the bosses.
It would be interesting the things we could do if we could lock 2 gear slots out of dropping.
Hmm could garentee a loot table to drop what you needed only with some good pre-planning.
As it stands only the lego slot gets locked out. Hmm if I made a lego for every slot and put the right lego in before the fight in theory I could control most of my incoming loot. But by the time I got that all together it probably wouldn’t matter at all 
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Tokens for each drop, get 10 token get a piece of gear NOT random
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The extend meta is because we have more raid tiers than we used to have, and they’re much shorter as a result.
Please, nobody forget that. Black Temple was a 9-boss tier that lasted 10 months before Sunwell came out, and nobody complained that it was “too long”.
Their fixation with limiting gear progression is insane. Why cap a players ability to progress with arbitrary limits on gear drops or rarity… only for next patch to have to replace all of that gear anyway?
The drop rate of loot in the first patch ruined all of my ambition to raid, run dungeons and so on. In fact I’ve unsubbed again.
Absolutely.
Raiding would be boring if simply being decent at the game and in voice chat let you blow through the raid like a guild like Limit could.
I think we should be clear. I’m not complaining raid extending exists.
I simply think that the raid GV should have been better designed around how raiding actually works.
3 Likes