It’s just a slower pace at gearing than what you would normally see. You could see the writing on the wall that loot drops were going to be few and far between. It might pick up with the next patch but as a casual you’re going to be behind unless you get out there and take on some hard content.
In the meantime there are ways to get your item level up from say 140’ish. It’s very important to get your renown up!!! Once your renowned is up you can upgrade the gear you get from doing campaign stuff. You can also farm up some honor for pvp stuff (weapon and a trinket ) and upgrade that stuff with honor too. Run looking for raid, I think it will net you something in the Vault. Get a legendary item. Do an epic battleground (cross fingers) you get a win for the trickle of conquest to go towards the total.
As a casual player you can do things to get you item level up. Oh yeah and kill the world boss, I think there is a .000001% chance at getting an item, besides a memory.
it’ll be full of bad players because good players don’t want to be mixed in with randoms. the forums will be nothing but endless demands for nerfs to m+ just like they were with Torghast.
I know right? It reminds me how I tried to join my states football team and they suggested I start by signing up locally. I want to earn as much money as they do, who cares if I don’t have experience?
At least then their 5% variance could mask it. But as it stands right now, the spread is almost 20% in the 95th percentile, and upwards of 40% near the median.
I mean… this is exactly what needs to happen. Actually consider individual performance and try to measure/rank those performances. It becomes difficult when you have DPS popping Bursting, for example, because they continue to AoE and pad instead of FF.
Even just allowing a end-of-match “card and congrats” system, like Overwatch, that summarizes each player and lets players congratulate. Then aggregate the congrats for prioritization efforts. The issue is that then all congrats usually go to the Tank or Healer. So allowing each player to give up to 2 Congrats may be necessary to balance.
A quick mock up of Congrats:
Tank -> Damage = 1.5x points
Healer -> Damage = 1.5x points
Damage -> Damage = 2x points
Tank -> Healer = 1x points
Healer -> Tank = 1x points
Damage -> Tank = 1.25x points
Damage -> Healer = 1.25x points
For each “premade” player you queue with, you lose the chance to vote 1 time, and you cannot vote for players in the same premade. No need to even think about performance metrics then…
but that’s what people here don’t want. they want a system that makes it impossible for people to reject their join request or drop group at any point.
I mean, there is literally nothing stopping you from making your own group.
To expand: Although gear is not a huge concern for me atm in terms of getting in groups (~209 atm), I still make my own groups. Just last night we did an +11 TOP and it went really well, so I asked the tank if they would like to do the +12 we now had. They agreed and we did that one too. Now I have a new friend and a tank I can ask if they want to do keys.
Is this an example of every encounter? Obviously not, but if youre relying on being selected as a dps when there are literally 100+ applicants to any key I have ever listed for dps, ya, of course the 180 isnt going to be picked when there are 200s available. Just make it yourself and make sure you have reasonable expectations.
the whole point of wow is gear progreession and the fact is that there is 0 way for casual players to upgrade their item level outside of competing in toxic sweaty content like mythics and arenas.
No what they want is a system that doesn’t let another player do the sorting for them. That’s what they want. Players want the game to match them with other players and then if you like how that player played then you group up more frequently.
This system here is literally in almost every new game out right now. It’s a quality of life item and truth be told the fear isn’t about nerfing it’s that more players will go to the matchmaking over LFG because its a button click.
Again that’s a speculation but there’s no reason to not implement it. I believe similar arguments were made with LFD LFR and yet now they’re staples in the game. Might as well go full force and allow for more matchmaking. You said you won’t use it. Great, don’t be a stick in the mud.
I’m actually advocating against using individual combat metrics.
Further, the mock-up is not a measure for blanket acceptance/rejection, only for prioritization (wait time) and the possibility of queuing into content the player has/hasn’t done. Breakpoints still need to be determined for what the points mean (otherwise the points don’t matter…), and there is where coding/thought for how priority queues are designed to work still needs to happen.
Lastly, I think you’re conflating what’s being asked and what you want to be asked.