Please consider capping the amount of wearable crafting gear in Season 2 to 5 or 6 pieces at once.
The current META where people are farming sparks all day long for 418 gear is going to be tarnished by the increase in ilvl next season.
I have no concerns with crafting gear being the same equivalent to +20 vault. However as it stands, people who farm world bosses for sparks are going to have higher ilvl than people who have bad vault rng while clearing 20s.
There needs to be a balance between sparks/crafting and the payoff from vault/raid and I think there should be a limit to the amount of crafting gear you can wear.
Some background:
Example A: I was one of the top tanks on my server early season. When additional sparks were released, I was finding people on the server around me wearing 7 or 8 pieces of crafting gear due to spark farming. After doing some world content and over 100+ timed +20 runs, I finally got my 1st additional spark when it didn’t matter at all.
Example B: Somebody recently posted, I just got another spark - now I can finally craft a weapon and do some 20s hopefully.
There needs to be a balance between people making mistakes crafting and/or changing specs/builds and diminishing the value of people who only do M+.
I think the balance is in the amount of crafting gear you can wear at any time, not just embellishments.
Disagree OP.
The new crafting system is the best thing to happen for gearing in a long, long time.
Farming up BIS gear in seasons this short can be an impossible hill to climb so being able to make an acceptable alternative to your BIS is amazing.
No longer do you need to fear of being benched late in the season because RNG hates you and won’t drop a weapon or that monster upgrade you desperately need.
Disagree. Crafting gear should be same as max ilevel vault.
I want to spend 3-4 weeks gearing up, get to max ilevel, and raid log.
Until blizzard actually makes content outside mythic raids challenging and enjoyable, then lets just get it over with in the first week weeks while its novel and fun.
Anything open world and grinding +20 keys is nothing but a chore after a few weeks. Blizzard insists so much of their content should have zero chance of failure, so its never going to be enjoyable.
Imagine the seige on dragon keep world event. What if it started by dropping 20 or so people into an instance, it scaled with ilevel, and actually required coordination to complete or you failed it and didn’t get the epic reward? You could maybe even choose a difficulty to get instanced into, with a harder one scaling up to 421 reward. The fact that the best Blizzard can do here is something where you get a reward for just standing around afk is a joke.
But I also wanna say this. Why not just make it so that there’s a fixed amount of sparks that everyone gets and it doesn’t need to be farmed. Its like the catalyst gear quests. You do a certain amount of world quests a week and get a spark. Instead of making it unlimited farming, where people can get as much as they want; everyone can get a fixed amount. And also reuse it to reclaim a spark if they wanna craft something else instead.
Time-gating, oh that’s so much more fun. Not like we don’t already have ten thousand layers of time-gates…
Let sparks remain a fun boost of power that upgrades over Valor and feel exciting without making them a mandatory farm. Leave M+ Vault and high-end Mythic Raiding items as the best items and you can keep Sparks as a fun “extra” reward.
They’re not BIS currently so it’s not really that worth it. I mean yeah you can grind those sparks but it isn’t like you aren’t going to replace those items later.
With the new patch, your actual best gear is going to come from looting piles of dirt or whatever other nonsense is involved in acquiring bottles of shadowflame. It’s really bad and dumb and dangerous to the health of the game.
Looking at the responses on this I realize a couple things:
People that don’t realize that sparks are now the equiv to +20 vault gear.
People complaining about RNG and wanting to feel power, yet sparks are RNG.
People who just want to raid log, but spend the time to log in and comment on forums.
People who want max gear doing the easiest content possible, which is fine - I support this, but make it so you can’t do the easiest content and be higher ilvl than people who don’t have rng doing easy content.
Let me recap.
If you have 8 hours of week to play:
Do 8 mythic keys and get a chance at +20 BIS item.
or
Farm world bosses for 8 hours and have a chance to get 2x craftable items equiv to same ilvl as +20 vault.
There is the argument that they still need to do +16s for crests, sure… but +16s are literally a joke of content when you are geared.
Somebody else mentioned I don’t want to be benched from RNG by missing a drop in raid… yeah… you’re going to get benched from people who farm world bosses all day and have better gear now? Is that any better?
According to the FAQ, you will only be able to get the lowest quality of shadowflame from dirt piles which won’t allow you to craft the highest-level gear. This is equivalent to LFR and low-level keys.
