Honestly it’s a really good START of a system. It ensures you get currency appropriate to the level of content you’re completing so you can’t just skip straight from trash tier to near-BiS by spamming entry level content like you more or less could in, say, Cataclysm, and still do in games like FFXIV.
It just needs to be expanded. Make it a global currency, not just M+. Make the vendor have those RNG gear tokens they’ve used a couple times in the last couple expansions (nethershards and such) – for all slots. It’s either that or have single or extremely limited options like they’ve done in the past. Both methods effectively prevent obtaining “perfection” from a vendor. That’s fine.
Part of making it a global currency probably means getting rid of the weekly nature of it. Which means using a dynamic cap based on the highest level of any form of content you’ve done, as opposed to it scaling theoretically infinitely like it -technically- does with the current M+ system. That might annoy some people, but expanding it would be worth it.
Kill 3 bosses in Heroic Raids of the current tier – cap is raised to x.
Complete 3 M+15 dungeons – cap is raised to y
Win 3 1600+ rated battlegrounds (or idk, 5 arenas?) – cap is raised to z.
At which point you can use any form of content to fill your way to that cap. Resets weekly of course so you can’t just buy a carry and grind easy stuff forever.
Anyway, TL;DR: The current system is too limited in scope because it was thought up to solve a very specific problem (“the sources of azerite gear are too limited”), but the ideas its brought to the table would be wonderful if applied to the kind of vendors we used to have back in the day.
The whole anti-TF movement over the past few years was the privileged minority who were willing to give up their bigger benefits since it would remove gear upgrades to those who deserve no gear in their eyes, while expecting guaranteed upgrades for yourselves in the form of sockets, bonus stats, and higher ilvl cap.
The azerite vendor is extremely limited in scope because they wanted to say they were putting in a gear vendor, but they didn’t actually want to put in gear vendors. They don’t like gear vendors, because actual gear vendors that all players could access give players agency.
Don’t forget they also removed vendor value from azerite gear that was not eligible to be turned into titan residuum. This was a nerf to casual earnings.
People always ask for gear vendors. They probably had this planned at the beginning of the expansion so they could get to say, “See, we listened and gave you a gear vendor!”
No one was skipping to near BiS end game ilevel with Valor gear, though. The current iteration of this Residuum is completely and utterly worthless to casuals. You don’t get enough to do anything. There is no “appropriate amount for current level of content” when there’s barely an amount at all.
A targeted system like we had in Mists worked well, imo. Casual had something to reach for, it wasn’t BiS and it wasn’t highest raid level ilevel. It also didn’t rely on people being forced to scrap stuff instead of DE it.
Cata Valor got you Normal (today’s Heroic) raid ilvl, including the 2-set for the current tier for most of the expansion. That was effectively BiS for the VAST majority of players who wouldn’t be taking part in Heroic (today’s Mythic) raiding, which would be the only source of gear that goes higher than what the vendor offered.
Excuse you, what?
“Appropriate for current level of content” essentially means you can get gear equal to what drops from the content you’re running at a pretty fast rate, or save for awhile to get something “up a pay grade”.
It sounds like you’re saying residuum is worthless to casuals because they can’t buy the 440 stuff by spamming +3s.
Which is why I said Mists Valor system worked well.
Then you missed pretty much everything I said. The amount of Residuum it takes to get anything is ridiculous for even a casual. It’s the number of Residuum, not the ilevel of the gear.
People are forced to choose between DEing/selling stuff or scrapping if they want to try for an RNG piece that costs a ton, and it’s not even a specific piece.
Valor in Mists wasn’t highest ilevel you could get, wasn’t set pieces, they were targeted pieces (not RNG), it wasn’t completely out of reach for anyone and, to me, felt a lot better to get the currency as rewards and drop rather than being forced to destroy things I get and then hope for a decent RNG piece.
How long did that take? How many hours of play and how many weeks did it take for them to get that full set of gear doing the maximum amount of content possible?
It’s worthless because they don’t get residuum for the gear they used to vend out but may as well throw on the ground now, and the cost for gear is intended to prevent anyone except an elite player from buying anything.
Basically a tax on casuals while you get more and better free gear.
Residuum is earned at a rate such that you can get a piece of equivalent gear with a week’s worth of currency (which is pretty comparable to older currency vendors), or you can save it for ~3 weeks and buy a piece a “tier” up from the content you’re running.
Seems reasonable to me.
I don’t remember Mists’ system well enough. What I -do- remember is that 5.0 was more about rep grinding than currency (each rep vendor giving very limited raid-quality loot, but just sold for gold IIRC), and that 5.1 was currency, but the vendors were mostly a catchup mechanic more than another form of progression.
It’s the Shado-Pan Offensive vendors I can’t quite remember. Is that the one you liked the function of?
Regardless, I don’t see how vendor gear scaling to the content you do (with the option of saving to go higher) is worse than what we’ve had before. Take away the whole scrapping system, I don’t care about that. It was never fun, even for professions before the M+ vendor was added.
No you can’t. I never have been able to do that on any of my 120s with how I play.
Which is the point of vendors to me. They’re a catch up mechanic. They shouldn’t be RNG “progression” that forces you to destroy items in order to pay for random pieces that may very well suck.
I think when people ask for gear vendors they generally aren’t asking for catchup mechanics, they’re asking for a means of reducing RNG (even if the stats are RNG, being able to choose to fill a slot with a certain ilvl goes a long way).
We’ve been talking mostly about Valor Points, so I’ll just point out that in my mind, Justice Points (in Cata and MoP, but more plainly in Cata) provided the easy spammable catchup mechanic for alts / main swaps / latecomers / uber casuals / whatever, while valor points were a form of parallel progression (or maybe supplement?) to raiding (I say raiding specifically because that’s basically what endgame was back then).
I feel like we were effectively talking about different things while using the same terms.
It’s how it works at the +10 level. I was trying to look up info for residuum rates for lower levels, but apparrently literally every fansite decided no one cares about anything under +10 and don’t even include such data on charts specifically for showing how much residuum you can get. But it goes up to +25, as if that’s useful for anyone.
If the rates aren’t consistent, then yeah I would agree it should be adjusted. 1 equiv. piece per week / 1 “higher tier” piece per 3 weeks is reasonable to me. Do what needs to be done to make that happen at all levels.
I totally get that having big jumps is necessary to make the different “tiers” clear, and that’s totally fine. But that shouldn’t cause things to not work the same within each “tier”.
Anyway, there are obviously oddities that would need to be worked out, but my point with all of this was just that I like the idea of a currency vendor where the level of content you participate in directly affects what you’re going to be able to afford at the vendor and that I’d like to see it expanded to not just be a Mythic+ / Azerite Gear thing.
It’s fine if there is catchup outside of that to bring people up to the new “floor”. It’s fine if they scrap the “scrapping” mechanic, because yes, that’s garbage.
No it’s 470 M+ to 475 Mythic raiding. That’s not a big gap at all.
Many of you are forgetting about the weekly chest + the Azerite gear you can buy. The gear from +10’s should really be nurfed and they should then offer better rewards for doing +15 keys to make up for it. A +10 is a joke, you don’t even need to time it. You should not get Heroic raid tier gear from the end up dungeon reward and then 440+ from the weekly chest on top of that.
I finally started raiding in BFA and honestly M+ made it feel pointless from a reward perspective. Benthic gear did not help with this too.
I just raided for fun as the rewards from heroics suck and I don’t really want to get into Mythics. M+ 10 on the other hand is pretty easy and it quickly get’s to the point where you are just fishing for titanforges + sockets.
It does not matter if you can other finish a 20 rather than a 21 with the way M+ is currently set up. No one is going to quit over that all that will happen is the bar will be moved a little. As for rewards you don’t really get anything different.
Than do Mythic raids, or something much better better. Ask Blizzard to change the way rewards are given from M+. As it is right now it’s dumb. Loot from +10’s is too good for what it is and the people pushing the limits get nothing better.
Asking for Mythic raid quality loot from something easy as a +10 is just sad and makes raiding pointless, a little less so for Mythic now that TF is getting removed.
You might be thinking about the small number of people pushing keys here but the majority of people are doing them for the easy loot and the easy loot has really made raiding in BFA feel unrewarding because there is no teir sets, Trinkets are good at least.
Raid loot needs to be changed too. The hard bosses should have better items (for every class) compared to the easy ones.