SL Season 4 must have gearing for casual/solo players

Community General Discussion
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It has been announced that Shadowlands will have a Season 4, with added power levels of gear for PvP, M+, and raiding. This could be a great way to revamp old content and keep hardcore players interested in the game while the next expansion is being developed, but the failed experiment of Shadowlands has proven beyond a “shadow” of a doubt that an MMO’s playerbase will dwindle rapidly if developers refuse to offer power progression to casual and solo players.

If Season 4 is to be a success in terms of sub numbers (not just a few praises from hardcore players on Twitter), it will need to offer significant power progression (up to item level 278 / 285 to accommodate for the jump in power with the new gearing season) for casual, unrated, queueable, solo, and open world gameplay to keep the more typical and average MMO players invested in the content.


Here are some suggestions that would greatly improve the success of Season 4 for a wider audience, while also making use of pre-existing assets to avoid exorbitant development costs:

(1) PvP

—Do away with rating requirements to upgrade Conquest gear, and the Honor grind to upgrade Honor gear. The new Honor and Conquest gear would both be earned through unrated PvP. Rated PvP would offer faster gains in Honor and Conquest, but would mainly be for the challenge, prestige, and cosmetic unlocks rather than the gear.

(2) Dungeons

—Make the new M+0 and lower level M+ dungeons queueable.

—Add a Valor bonus to random daily Heroic dungeon queues, and add a Valor vendor for Normal (278/285 item level) gear.

—Make every week timewalking event week to rotate through each expansion’s timewalking dungeons, and let the weekly caches provide Normal (278/285 item level) gear.

(3) Raids

—Make the Normal (278/285 item level) rescaled versions of the CN, SoD, and SoFO raids queueable (but also realistically tuned).

—Make the currently developed timewalking raids available every week for Normal (278/285 item level) gear, and make them queueable.

(4) Open World

—Allow upgrades of Zereth Mortis gear up to 278/285 item level using Cosmic Flux.

—Allow covenant callings to count for an M+2 completion or a Normal boss kill in the Great Vault for Normal (278/285 item level) gear.

(5) Torghast

—Add a weekly 278 item level gear drop to the boss of each currently available Torghast wing, and a weekly 285 item level gear drop to the Adamant Vaults boss of each currently available wing. (Layer 16 could be 278/285, with lower layers offering progressively lower rewards.)

If developers continue their Shadowlands gear elitism philosophy of leaving the majority of their playerbase in the dust with low item level gear sets from LFR, unrated PvP, and Zereth Mortis, it would not only spell doom for Season 4, but also the game as a whole.

In order for WoW to be as big as it was in the past, it is going to need to provide accessible gearing progression again. The developers need to move on from the Shadowlands elitist gearing mentality and show us that they can develop an actual MMO, not a lobby for niche gameplay instances!

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They said they don’t need solo / casual players anymore.

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This would be awesome, hopefully they won’t forget. Also free renown 80 tokens for alts!

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That IS basically what they have been indirectly saying this whole expansion.

Ion once mentioned open world content players in an interview alluding to the 9.1 Korthia gear upgrade system, but now in 9.2 we got seriously downgraded with the Cypher system.

As frightening as it sounds for the viability of WoW, it is possible that Season 4 will offer nothing at all in terms of gear outside the sweaty content, given the current track record of Shadowlands developers.

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Didn’t know that mythic 0 is super hard content. :upside_down_face:

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Yes, please, I am overloaded on Cosmic Flux. This is such a downgrade compared to how useful Echoes of Ny’alotha was in 8.3.

That would be great. It really does take a couple of weeks to get to 80 from 40, unless you spam content like Torghast. I would even pay for the tokens with anima, Cosmic Flux, or grateful offerings.

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What’s funny is Blizzard has added so much power to solo players in the last few expansions it’s crazy yet the cries of getting nothing keep coming.

SL gives our normal level gear for doing dailies. Devoted an entire system to power progression in the world. Had an entire upgradable gear set from questing that had set bonuses unique to world content.

Yet…the forums say casuals get nothing.

Maybe they should play TBC classic so they can go back to the days where Blizzard didn’t hate casuals or something?

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It’s not. That’s why it should be queueable.

I tend to see fewer wipes in M+0s than I do the current LFR tier.

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If casuals are complaining about gear, just get the honor set and uprgarde it to max rank.
It’s honestly pretty strong stat wise.
If you can’t even be bothered to fo that. Then just don’t play the game.
That’s literally the simplest of simple.

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Are they raising the item levels in s4?

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I believe they are for PvP, Mythic + and at least Normal raiding and above, based on the announcement today.

It is currently unknown if that would apply to LFR, or if there would any additional content and/or raised ilvls for any activity that is outside of the Big Three.

At the rate I’m going, I would just be happy with slightly higher tier piece drop rates tbh.

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They definitely are raising iLvls of rewards from the new harder content, based on the wording of the announcement.

It could just be content scaled an extra difficulty higher for +13 iLvls higher than what we have now, but since they are referred to it as a “Season”, for the purposes of my suggestions in the original post I am assuming that the new content will offer a full +26 iLvl boost to the highest rewards, since there will not just be rescaled raids but a new PvP and M+ season. (Devs know that competitive players probably wouldn’t grind rescaled old content just for the same iLvls as 9.2.)

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9.0 covenant sets were great for the time invested (covenant campaign plus anima upgrades for 8 slots).

9.1.5 Korthia was a reasonable grind for a full set of 233 gear.

9.2 Zereth Mortis gearing is somewhere between the two of the above.

But are we getting any updates or additional gearing options in Season 4? Casuals may in fact be getting “nothing”.

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How so?

The gear is much easier to get with the Cypher system, and the Cypher grind is much less than the research grind was.

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Zereth Mortis feels like a downgrade compared to Korthia, because the Cypher system doesn’t cover all slots like Korthia did, and Cypher gear only goes up to lower Normal, whereas Korthia went up to upper Normal.

The Korthia weekly was also much quicker to complete (treasures awarded 3% completion as opposed to 1% in Zereth Mortis) for easy gearing on alts, and if you wanted to push further you had the rift caches in Korthia for considerable relic gains. You could additionally earn sockets and conduit upgrades up to 252 (the max in 9.1) through outdoor content.

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I’m confused, don’t they always do this when power is increased? When season 2 ended the max vault gear for mythic+ was 252 and in the current season 252 gear can be gained through WQs. Do you expect them to leave solo content and WQ gear the same while boosting mythic+/raid gear? When have they ever done this?

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Season 4 is an obvious fail on planning and a last ditch effort to extend content so they can buy time for an already behind expansion. This is honestly the worst managed expansion since WoD and at least they had the foresight to cut development and work on the next thing. We’re looking at Q1 release at best at this rate.

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The announcement makes Season 4 seem like a Season of Mastery for SL competitive content, as only rated PvP, M+, and raids were mentioned.

World content and solo content rewards should be updated as always, but without a new zone and without gear drops added to Torghast, I don’t see why they would just bump up the item levels from pre-existing outdoor zones. (Keep in mind that 9.0 world quests have been stuck at 213 max item level since 9.1.)

Datamining about Tirisfal Glades may hint at a revamped zone with an updated gearing system, but it seems like something that big would be included in the announcement as it could be exciting news for the general fanbase.

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I haven’t played that long so my question wasn’t rhetorical, I just can’t imagine them ever raising the power level of mythic+ and raid without offering a way for solo players a way to also boost their ilvl.

I’m genuinely asking since there are many people who have played for over a decade, is there a single example of an ilvl increase in mythic+/pvp/raid after a new patch but they left solo gear the exact same level without any route to improvement? I can’t imagine they would ever do this.

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I can’t imagine that either, but Shadowlands has gone to new lows by widening the gap between casual and hardcore gear rewards further than it has ever been in past expansions.

Also, the announcement should really, really have mentioned something other than PvP, M+, and raids if they have some kind of update, system, or revamped content planned for non-hardcore players.

In contrast, in MoP there was patch 5.3 where a new raid tier was not added, but Heroic scenarios were added and an outdoor zone campaign was added, both of which allowed non raiders to obtain higher item levels of gear than they had in 5.2.

In WoD, there were two raid tiers released in a row without any updates to non-raider gear, but the final patch 6.2 allowed casual players to go wild gearing up in an outdoor zone through the Apexis Crystal currency, so I give WoD a pass.

Ever since Legion, each new Season has seen Heroic dungeon and world quest gear rewards scale up, in addition to new gearing systems being added, but Shadowlands is different in that devs have stopped updating world quest rewards from base 9.0 zones, and it would seem really odd to update 9.1 and 9.2 gearing systems as they are strongly tied to their respective zones.

So to make a long answer short, any full content patch or season would traditionally see solo/casual rewards increased, but SL Season 4 seems to be more about competitive gameplay modes rather than a comprehensive update for an MMO.

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