I’m starting to think a lot of the people here are trying to bring real life philosophies into the game.
Is it lack of achievements/Gratification IRL? Do casuals getting gear really trample over the fragile ego they have built due to this game?
I cannot understand why people would want to control something other people have that doesn’t affect them. Is it the sense of superiority people get from having a higher ilvl ?
I don’t. I’m just fine with my crap from Korthia or whatever the hell that zone is called.
Perhaps for the same reason people who climb up the corporate PvP ranks feel they deserve the heraldry of achievement with office size, one off perks and stuff like that. This is human nature and as you have inferred, not many of us are capable of quiet, self-validating excellence. For a lot of folks, what is the point of being good if no one recognizes it?
THIS!!! it should have been an option from the beginning, part of the fun (for some people) of leveling (with heirlooms) and getting high end gear (Dungeon-Raid) is to out level the zone and feel powerful. To get that sense of achievement, progress and accomplishment.
I’m largely fine with the most “hardcore” of players having the game tell them in a million ways that they’re the only players that matter, who get the shiniest gold stars and the pretty mounts and the gear with seething smoky bits and the fun titles and when they hit a thing their numbers are the biggest. Yay them!
I, and the other eighty-ish percent of the people who play the game, though, would like to do the things that we do in an expedient fashion, despite the modern game design tactic of putting RNG on top of grinds to make extra sure that we stick around paying our monthly account fees for an indefinite period rather than getting our shiny things and doing a kickflip out of the game until the next major content patch like most raiders. I want to work up in increments to being able to mow down mobs faster and have my daily “chores” of world content go quicker. The game designers obviously want me and people like me here, paying them my money to work out my general sense of aggravation on the creatures of Azeroth and/or the Shadowlands and be rewarded by the dopamine of working towards something that will make that process slightly faster and more convenient, you know, the core feedback loop of all MMOs ever, so it would stand to reason that they would offer us progression on a more minor scale than people whose preference is to be “challenged” by high-end content.
I am completely fine with the rewards that I can scrape out of the game with the sweat of my own brow being lowly, as befitting of my status as a player who isn’t interested in formal group content to get the shiniest of things. But given that WoW has set itself apart from other MMOs from literally day one as being one that you can solo at your own speed and make your own progress using the kind of content that you enjoy, I don’t think that pitching that core feedback loop into the trash to force people into content that they don’t enjoy is the move.
So, if I must be punished with my gear being of low enough arbitrary numbers so as to label myself not worthy so that the Mythic raiders and high key-runners can feel extra super special, that’s fine.
Turn off iLvl scaling for open world content, then. Or set the scaling curve lower. Raiders aren’t out here doing their dailies anyway, one-hitting elite rares with their massive numbers.
Casuals are the golden goose, squatting out eggs of consistent monthly fees, subscribing through content lulls and buying pretty things in the store. They keep hitting us with sticks, trying to keep the eggs coming, not caring that in the long run it’s going to burn us out and drive us off while they chase short-term gains and “tradition”.
If you’d been actioned by mods for the trivial comments I’ve made that don’t harass anyone you would absolutely treat your comments as bait, because that’s exactly what they are now. Just baiting people like me to get banned.
It is many faceted and mostly not related to the hand wave reasons that would make you make a statement like that. High end gear in WoW context is a seasonal stat grind. It is meaningless and disposable and not designed with good intent. There’s no good reason to make the primary reward of high end content to be inflated stats. It is extremely difficult to design a game around that and it causes many extreme chronic and debilitating problems. It makes balance impossible, and it forces the developers to create balance deficits for carry services to exploit.
Blizzard is doing mountains of work to try and mitigate and mask problems caused by the hard stat brackets and endless stat inflation. The only reason to do this is to play on people’s psychology to feel obligated to obtain these arbitrarily higher numbers. It takes away from development they could be doing in other areas because the work to make hard bracketed seasonal stat inflation function is effectively all they can manage, and poorly at that.
A main way people currently achieve these arbitrarily higher numbers is by paying for a spot in a group designed to trivialize the content. The reason there’s such a huge industry for selling these arbitrarily higher numbers is because to make the arbitrarily higher number model work as end game, the highest tier content can’t reward anything meaningful besides those arbitrarily higher numbers. Once you clear the raids or max out your personal pvp kit, the only way to have a post game is to charge to carry people. So this arbitrary system creates a huge class of people who can’t make the progress they want without carries, and a huge class of people who have to pick between carrying people for money or not playing.
Nearly every problem in WoW is caused by the seasonal stat inflation, often directly and indirectly by multiple avenues. We can’t have real end game integrated into the game because of it. Even if your argument was the entire core of the issue, people largely don’t want the inflated stats for the raid itself, they want it for doing the chill content faster so they can do more. People don’t like these miserable bullet sponge bosses in high keys and mythic raid, or sweaty ultra minmaxed FOTM comps in pvp. That’s not what 99.9999% of players are here for, but most items people want are permanently hard locked behind it. Your surface level argument is so wrong headed, and it isn’t even really a part of why the stat inflation is strangling us.
In games where your character stat grind and your personal journey through content difficulty tiers are separated, all the problems we suffer from here vanish. Paid carrying stops being an issue. The developers can balance the game in a meaningful way. Content can be balanced to not be trivialized by arbitrarily inflated stats. Developers have a reason to make repeatable end game within the actual game systems, AKA no more “nothing to do in WoW” and raid logger problems.
I could write a few more paragraphs about why the loot in WoW is crap, but I’m tired.
You get stronger in this game by obtaining gear.
Throwing all that gear behind high end sweaty content does not make for a good gameplay experience.
Not everything needs to be like Dark Souls, it isn’t necessarily like that at all levels but if you want gear? You almost would be better off playing Dark Souls from scratch.
The age old question.
I stand by the idea that casuals should have access to upgrades for the world content. Items with bonuses to outdoor content. Korthia gear giving you extra damage or something for the zone. Something akin to the box of many things or vision empowerments. Other xpacs had minor things like this. They DO get unique models/assets such as the Korthia covenant armor. All the mounts that drop from there. I do overall believe there needs to be more for other types of players than just raiders and pvpbros. 100%
Do they need mythic raid gear? Handed 252/259s just because? No. They can work for it just like everyone else - or like everyone else, they can come back later to farm it when it gets easier. I’m personally waiting for next xpac to go back to Ny’alotha to farm pieces I missed out on. Would a vendor to trade farmed currency/tokens be neat for bad luck protection? Yeah. Absolutely. I’m tired of running SoO. Maybe items to teleport you faster around old raids in addition to some of the ones put in, that can be unlocked. But NEEDing shinies just for the sake of entitlement is lame.
That argument is like preordering a game with the collector’s edition and all, and then it turns out to be a bad game and getting mad about it, when you could’ve waited for reviews and sale prices. It’s just not necessary, and in reality, kind of silly to be mad about.
That’s like asking why anyone wants to progress forward. It’s normal to want that
Being unwilling to do what is required to progress forward? That’s what you should really be asking
Not character progression, power progression.
And the highest level of power progression is high end gear.
So, yes, it is about high end gear.
If players were happy with medium level gear, which is presently readily available thru just playing causally (as in not seriously and/or competitively), they wouldn’t be on the forums crying for more power progression.
Because it isn’t actually about having an equitable power progression path, it’s about wanting high end rewards without having to do high effort/difficulty content.
They want to be able to flex 
without bothering to hit the gym.
(I blame a participation trophy mindset.)
i.e needing a communicating group… having friends or paying for a boost.
Potato, potato. 
If what they want doesn’t effect you. Why would anyone care? Here is a simple question for you and any others who think like you. What happens if casual players don’t get what they want?
Getting very good gear, comparable to raid gear, out of open world content does effect raiders. If you put raid relevant rewards in open world content now raiders have to do it. Raiders aren’t overly fond of that sort of thing. There’s reason that a lot of raid only people actually enjoyed WoD. WoD went too far for the game as a whole but farming 6 ranks of archivist codex just to get a chance at upgrading conduits and getting gem sockets is also pretty annoying.
Agreed. For those who solo play, it is especially disheartening because whenever we get gear upgrades, we can’t feel it. From a realistic standpoint, it makes as much sense as a fish becoming more elusive just because I swapped out to a better bait. It’s just plain stupid. If I put new armor on, I’m the one that should benefit, not the mobs.
I think the people who absolutely despise any and all group content, or challenging content in any way are probably better off playing another game rather than constantly railing against a game that doesn’t want to be that way hoping eventually it’ll change to suit their desires. 233 gear is more than enough to steamroll through any outdoor content, and even if it isn’t theres still the option to group up with players and road roller through it even fasterer.
Doesn’t the scaling stop at a certain point though?
My main reason for wanting welfare gear.
Alts.
I have recently focused on one char and it took me about 2 months to gear first with full honor then conquest and im now working on getting to 1950 rating.
When it comes to gearing 1 character the game is almost perfect in matter of time and effort. Which seems to be the direction blizzard wants us to be playing the game. And i havent even touched m+ or heroic raids.
So the game is made to play 1 toon in all 3 end-game paths at maximum level.
But I think the game should instead be targeted at having 5-6 mains and a few alts. With the current progression it makes it really time consuming to have multiple mains.
By the time I gear the 4th alt , the patch is already over and I need to start over.
Yes, I know what kind of casual I am. I might play just as much as a hardcore raider but im stuck at 220 ilvl on 12 alts. I wish I had time to raid and PVP on all of them. But instead Im still gearing them slowly.
By the time theyre raid ready and rated pvp ready, the next patch is out.
I hope one day we have a true Alt expansion. But blizzard prefers to give 8 months of content for 1 main.
I do like the catch-up in the current patch, it is a good direction
Main feed conquest/Valor gear to alt 1.
Alt 1 can then feed alt 2… and on and on…
Needs inside of a video game are non-sensical. It’s a virtual world, without hunger, and poverty. The need argument is silly. There is no actual need in Azeroth. Treating it like the real world demonstrates a child’s mentality on hard-to-grasp concepts. It’s just like when knuckleheads compare the Government’s budget with their own household budget. Ya real smart there.
The desire is quite simple really; WoW keeps talking about adding these features in for solo and casual players. Then when they implement the change they forget to mention that in order to complete the challenge you need X ilvl . This is the problem. Why do I need X iLvl for a solo challenge? It’s like you can’t keep raiding/M+ out of my life, you gotta force it in all the content, everywhere, all the time? Like why?
WoW is so sorely lacking in any content other than: Farming for Mogs (Which the vast majority of the game you don’t need BiS) or chasing BiS. That’s WoW. That’s the game, either you like it, or you go somewhere else.
This whole casual vs hardcore debate is silly. It’s silly because people can’t divorce themselves from the idea that inside the digital world there isn’t an actual “need”. You character doesn’t get hungry, cold, or even feels shame. The whole reason solo/casual players want BiS is because when WoW makes new content in a patch they either assume you’re Mythic geared, or you do some small catch-up. This entire philosophy is so severely dated and draconian I’m shocked the US Constitution Party hasn’t endorsed it yet.