Likely so, because ya know blizz, they feed their locust hearders better loot % chance and better character RNG values to bait the locusts into following them around. Blizz thinks that the way forward are the locusts because they want so badly to be rock stars again, but this isn’t possible under the present management or development team because they fully lack actual game designers and appear to lack comprehension of what the RPG audience demographic actually really looks like and truly enjoys.
This is why SoD is such a mess and why its paunfully obvious that they learned nothing from Vanilla and leaned on Retail design philosophy when re-designing Wrath and SoD and Cata and ruined all 3 with their lack of understanding and greed.
Blizz if you’re reading, but I doubt you are or do, but just in the off chance you do…
- Vanilla is perfect even if its slightly busted in some areas.
- Convenience is the enemy of an RPG of any kind.
- Quality game code and lack of bugs and errors is massively important.
- High APM and massive output values sound great on paper but are terrible because you then need to nerf the game later and everyone hates that deep down.
- Quality of life isn’t always quality design.
- Equality in Output archetype (Holy trinity Tank, DPS Healer)* where we try to make everything equal in every fight is bad.
- Focusing balance on Raid is disaterous every time its been the focal point because Raid PvE design with “Big boss fights” as the standard is really bad due to the fact that its focus is narrow and class variety suffers as a result of bad PVE designs.
- World PvE leveling and PvP should always be the focus for class design and Balance because this is the bulk of the game play for the bulk% of your players.
Some may say “I love raids”, and I do also, but it is not and should not be the focus of class design, the same can be said for M+ in retail; attempting to balance around that is bad because you cannot have variety in class design and unique experiences when speed clear dungeon is the key focus; the same is so in the versions of wow where raid was the focus or Arena was the focus… When your focus of design is purely aimed at a competitive environment you cannot have a quality game that also has variety of classes and mechanics; its factually impossible and worse makes for boring game play when attempted.
Long winded, but the moral of the story is the reason Vanilla is so good is because it was not intended from day 1 to be a PvE Raid lobby game. Certainly raid loggers do this, but the design instead caters to Leveling characters, casual dungeon groups and PvP. If you look at the game meta for Vanilla pre-AQ loot, this should in practice be your target, tho a word of caution; DPS on demand output trinkets such as ZHC, BWL class trinkets, Talesman of Ephemeral power are actually bad for play and should be avoided even if PVE zugs think its awesome.