Like, we are now getting 483 gear from Celestial Dungeons, round one. Wrath and Cata had three tiers of difficulty for this concept. Timeless Isle’s base gear is 496, upgraded to 535 with the highly sought after and rare Burden of Eternity. (I will gamble all of my coins in that cave even in 2026.)
Following this trend the entire island will basically be invalidated with ToT, before the patch that Timeless Isle even would drop: Gear dropped from Raid Finder was 502, requiring 480 to enter. And then in SoO the gear dropped was 528, and required a minimum ilevel entry of 496.
Why even do Timeless Isle in this system except for the questline, some vanity items and mounts, and a brief window grinding Burdens?
MoP already has a catch up mechanic built into the base game and does not need more of this Celestial stuff. The Timeless Isle is one of the single most beloved pieces of this expansion for so many people, and you cannot disagree with this: Blizzard literally took the Timeless Isle as the inspiration for nearly the entirety of open world content in WoD because of its popularity.
Timeless Isle was a catch up system for fresh characters that included some pieces barely above LFR SoO.
The Celestial Bosses and Ordos offered gear on par with normal SoO
Isle of Thunder offered gear from its rares and systems on par with LFR MSV gear, with rep items being equal to normal ToT aswell as Nalak/Oondasta being Normal ToT.
Celestial Dungeons offer LFR level items, which were always there and available to players.
I understand this point about LFR always being available. The difference here however is that
A new system pulls people from other systems
The speed of this system is insane; You can spend an intense day and be fully maxed out in Celestial gear. You could not do that in these old systems. This affects the pacing of everything else in the game and what content players will actually be able to do - I mean look at heroic scenarios. Dead.
As the expansion go on it will be harder to get into H+/celestial as they will scale. We have had H+ for now 2 expansions and it’s been pretty successful even if they also had catchup. World content like timeless for fresher alts will still be useful and there are tons of stuff to get from it like falling flame which launch you as a meteor in the sky. The main reason personally I like the timeless isle and that I am waiting for it is the tournament for pet battles so I guess it also depends what you like.
It’s good to know that they will scale, but I still fear that the path for most people will be to skip the island entirely even on fresh alts because Timeless Isle is not as fast as running some intense few days of Celestials.
I think I’ll wait for Timeless on most of my alts to get free 500+ gear so I can hop into ToT with my guildies. The thought of running celestial pugs stresses me out, too many bad actors in those.