I just get the best purples I can get from soloing. I upgrade those purples, during the expansion, as the next “best epics” from soloing come out. In BFA I went from whatever purple stuff to Naz purple junk, which you then upgrade with those pearl things, then when I had those about as maxed as I could get it was solo “Visions of N’zoth” time.
I am pretty “casual”, but I still like to get upgrades as I can. But I’m not grouping so I feel no need to get raiding/key gear or junk.
Maybe those other people do it because they casually want to raid/do key stuff? The way the game is now you could probably casually do LFR/Mythic stuff.
Did you know if you hit a brick wall with a hammer, it will probably chip? It then goes that if you can get a chip, you can get another and another until you dig through the wall.
The circumstances would have to be extreme to make that seem like a viable path. Like most discussions that get single paragraph responses, the answer to this question is extremely nuanced, and like half of everyone reading this already looking for the TL;DR.
Suffice to say, world content capping out under heroic is fine and should be attainable by anyone who plays. Just let world quests scale off of your character so they are always an upgrade up until heroic -6 item levels.
This lets people who don’t play often enough to join group a guild or community an attainable end goal (or just raid log). A point where they can say “I’m done with this” and move on to a new character, or another game until the next content drops. Trust me, this is good for the game.
For people who play all the time, a grindable currency to boost gear up till your skill level (in pvp, keys) is the ideal. Fishing for a drop (within reason) is a great thing for these guys. They’re gonna play every day anyway.
This is hard to design for, for sure. How does the raid logger keep up with the giga chad who plays 8 hours a day? Not my circus, not my monkeys. I think micro optimizations, like grinding for sockets or perfectly statted pieces. Noticeable difference, but nothing that would keep a boss from going down. Over the course of a few weeks.
TL;DR: people who don’t play a lot need a way to get to the end so they don’t feel like their being jerked around. People who play a lot need to feel like their time spent is giving them a meaningful advantage.
Very good post and probably something people like me tend to not think about at all. I’m totally against free gear but at the end of the day, something for people to work towards and enjoy like in your situation is warranted. Your post has forever changed my opinion.
I want to know why they didn’t fashion Torgast like they did visions. This was the best of both worlds. The gear reward from them was exactly where it needed to be to cater equally to casuals and hardcore players. With the right mods, some of the gear out of there could get a player pretty far even into mythic raids, but was accessible to a casual with enough skill.
That they didn’t take the winning recipe of visions and apply it 1:1 to Torgast is probably the biggest mechanical failing of this expansion. The others can be excused as an experiment gone wrong or boring storyline. Torgast is fun for what it is, but the lack of a tangible reward for more difficult runs made it a chore not a challenge.
That wasn’t your argument at all. Talk about moving goalposts.
Casuals want gear beyond their content level
M+ group wants gear to push the highest level of challenge (which is infinite) that they can.
Casuals want to trivialize their content 3x over
M+ crowd is unable to do that, even with the best gear in game
They are nothing alike.
No one is barring casuals from getting gear. We’re against free handouts. Want the gear? Do the content. It’s that simple. No one is stopping them from obtaining the gear in the game through the games design.
That’s not hate keeping and that’s not barring anyone. That’s just them simply refusing to do the work but still asking for the reward.
I mean, why don’t you see the m+ crowd asking for better than mythic level gear? It’s because they’re putting in the work to get the good gear already. They’re not doing world quests and asking for heroic raid gear for doing it.
The content in game rewards you with gear that is above the content you’re doing.
World quests/LFR give you gear to complete normal raids
Normal raids give you gear to complete Heroic raids
Heroic raids give you gear to complete Mythic raids. And mythic raids give you gear to trivialize Mythic raids.
The gear you get, is already above the content you do. So technically, casuals are getting better gear than they need for the content they do
M+ (And arguably PvP) is the only place where gear stops, but the difficulty keeps increasing.
Visions are neat, but the specific reward structure only works during a “welfare patch” era of the expansion where Blizzard is desperate to get anyone and everyone to play. You can’t do that for an entire expansion, ESPECIALLY at the start of one.
You understand this isn’t a good thing, right?
If the rewards are important for Mythic progression, then they become part of the Mythic progression path, and many Mythic raiders do not want to engage in these activities.
Blizzard has already largely solved this problem - content like Korthia upgrade gear or Zereth Mortis Sandworn gear is made purely for bad open-world players, while the main progression path remains pure for players who want to play the real World of Warcraft.
The only “missing link” in my opinion is the ability to get “Open World Gear” from Torghast. If you could get Korthia gear and Archivist Research from torghast, that would have been the perfect compromise. Or if next patch you could get Sandworn Relics from Torghast.
“Oh hai, I just wanted to ask an absurd, reductive, and inflammatory question that’s been discussed and answered thousands of times and always results in a litany of people dumping on whatever they think a casual is.”
Gold has very little value in WoW as you can buy it. Gear is a metric of success and wealth, which means people will want it. If everyone on your street has a nice car, you might feel a bit bad that you’re driving a rust bucket, even if that’s what you deserve to be driving.
Realistically, even a little effort and time will get you reasonable levels of gear in WoW. Throw together a pug once or twice a week and you’ll get gear handed to you… but that won’t stop people from complaining about how they’re being left out by nefarious Blizzard.
According to Josh Strife Hayes, the definition of “casual” includes…
Difficulty of content played
How much group content is played
Attitude about the game, how they go about setting goals and choosing what to do
Time played
Attitude about other people who play the game.
He thinks this last one is the most important. True casuals are “live and let live” people who don’t care if other people are playing the game differently, as long as they’re having fun.
Being judgmental of other people who play the game differently is more important than the other factors. I agree with him. With your attitude you’re definitely not a “casual”.
Problem is, in essence you have players who refuse to do anything in a group conflating that with being casual. You can get AOTC playing fairly casually and clearing normal is properly casual in terms of weekly time commitment necessary. Heck, you can to one +10 a week in M+ and get heroic Ilvl gear from your vault. WoW isn’t a single player game and they want it to be.
