It depends, I guess.
So, lets take two extremes: I get carried through a M+ enough times in a week to unlock stuff on the Great Vault; and I do a long (multi-week) solo quest chain – maybe even instanced so I can’t even group it – that shows I know how to play my class.
Which should get me the better reward? The 100% grouping crowd thinks I should get the best loot from the M+, even though my contributions were “go team go!” I’d argue I should get a better reward from the long quest chain since there was more effort in that.
The problem with “where does it stop” is similar to another RL discussion I have. I try and lead a minimalist lifestyle, which ends up with a discussion about how many shirts a minimalist should have.
But, I think it’s that the reward should be better than what I have now, but well under the high-end raid loot that has the best challenge, but is indicative of the effort required to obtain the item.
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This is where cosmetics and more avenues for customization can come in.
I can’t speak for everyone but when I play solo on alts (my main gets raid gear), I want the following:
- To eventually feel powerful enough to completely mess up most of the mobs in the world that are in my way.
- A feeling that my play session made legitimate progress toward a reward that doesn’t feel so completely out of reach.
Ilvl is arbitrary. It’s the “feeling” of everything that truly matters. The power thing could be fixed by just capping the scaling of mobs earlier.
In fact, I’m far more concerned with collections than I am with gear, most of the time. Gear just makes getting those collectables easier.
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You’d be pretty close just having your legendary maxed, sone boes, and covenant/honor/conq gear as it is.
Another question is, how close to the patch end would you have a full set upgraded to heroic raid level? Can’t be too close to the end or it’s a waste of time because you’ll just run into catch up for the next patch. Too early and you’ve eclipsed actually doing heroic raid.
I’d have no problem if it was actual difficult content that you had to do solo. Maybe really high TC gives a vault choice. That seems equitable.
Take a step back here. Nobody wants better gear for what is CURRENTLY in the game. The problem is that the content people want ISN’T in the game.
The beauty of options is that you don’t HAVE to do all of them. But they’re options. I don’t feel the need to do rated PVP just because it exists. Just because solo existed and offered reasonable gear doesn’t mean anyone should feel it was mandatory. (and, honestly, it probably should be a small step below m+ in terms of max gear level. But just a small step. Also, it should probably be slower, realistically. Although I feel like m+ and raiding are a bit too slow in terms of gear growth right now… gbut that’s a different discussion)
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That’s understandable, but you don’t feel this way with the max available solo gear level? I can’t remember the last time I died in the open world that wasn’t a result of fall damage, even on my lock that I’m not particularly good at playing thats 198.
I understand that you don’t want that. But it is a much more common request than yours is.
And we know how it works out. This is a reason they specifically called out not putting gear in TC so that it wouldn’t become effectively mandatory.
Gear is hard to come by, it’d absolutely be mandatory for anyone doing group content.
Max as in end of dungeon at +15 or max as in vault from +15?
Yeah I’m not too sure the details. I don’t think running into the next catch-up is a concern to avoid for solo players. It should be accepted as this is the cycle you’ll be running as a solo player. Want to jump the line? Start getting involved.
I think letting them go into the next patch with gear equivalent to last patch’s heroic gear gives them the option to start looking at guilds and raiding and PvP a little better, and might encourage more player interaction.
Maybe. I’m not really married to any of this. Just theorizing out loud.
I mean, the content itself should mirror what you get from the dungeons, just a few ilvls lower.
Then go discuss that in threads asking for that. Nobody in this thread is asking for just random better gear.
People in this thread are primarily lamenting lack of content - particularly lack of meaningful content. The gear discussion is just a peripheral to the ‘we want better content… and in order to have the type of content we want, gear has to be a part of it or else it would really work’
(This next part is not directed entirely at you Sarama, I just don’t want to do a separate reply)
One thing that is really annoying is that people expect US to figure out the details. No matter what details we figure out or how granular we get, Blizzard isn’t going to take our idea whole. They just don’t do that. Almost ever.
We shouldn’t really be expected to litigate all the exact details… the point is to provide Blizzard with the basic concept and hope they do the best they can with it and make it a reality in a way that makes sense.
The summary of the feedback is simple:
- Solo players are content starved in a big way. This is not up for debate. This is the worst expansion ever for solo CONTENT. (not solo gear, solo content)
- Some players would appreciate a means to feel as though they have a progression path to follow solo that is not trivialized if you do both solo and group content.
- More than anything, people want their time spent soloing in this game to feel meaningful.
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You’re not wrong, but given that all we can do is talk here about it there’s just not really much to discuss without suggestions.
Speaking for myself, I enjoy the discourse even though I know Blizz isn’t doing anything about it either way.
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I do enjoy the discourse about possible implementations of the details… what I don’t like is that certain people seem to be judging the idea by taking tiny details of specific systems that get discussed out of context and using that to dismiss the entire idea lol
It’s a frustrating tendency I’ve seen through this thread. People push for granularity on a concept and then take small details of that granularity to dismiss the idea.
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Then just don’t do it. I mean none of the suggestions that I’ve seen made have been to make solo or low number content be more effective than mythic raiding or high level keys. I mean hell, people would probably care less even if that solo gear was unusable in mythic raids.
I definitely appreciate that concern though, because there is already a lot of chores. I just think there’s easy solutions to that.
I think that there is an overall gearing philosophy that all gear should be usable in all content, but honestly, after this expansion I’m not convinced that’s the right approach.
I honestly think the solution is to add too many options. Once there are a certain number of options, people no longer think about doing them all… they instead focus on ‘which ones do I enjoy the most’. And, if you REALLY wanna hammer it home, you can limit things… like adding a cap to how many tasks you can get rewarded for in a given time period, for one example.
I personally lean towards that being the right approach… because doing anything else just makes people feel like they should only ever do one type of content since their other actions don’t help them. Which i’m not sure I like the idea of.
There’s a lot of people who’s progression is normal and heroic raid and low to mid keys. Normal raid has already been eclipsed by solo gear for the most part.
Solo gear is 197 at the absolute max currently. Normal raid is 200.
There is no gear available solo except for raid boes sold on the AH that is better than normal raid gear currently. (well that and your legendary, but legendary is one slot max)
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Well it’s not that I think the gear should be “unusable” but I honestly loved resilience. Just a personal preference, but gathering that separate set was a ton of fun for me. I realize for hybrid classes that having that separate gear set was bit more tedious, but I think it would also give the developers a lot more freedom to just make the separate play styles more rewarding within their own domains, including “solo gear”, without having to worry about the cross-interference effects of ilvl.
No the idea of an open world RPG is to have a large open world with plenty of things to do in it. The idea of an MMORPG is to have a large open world with plenty of challenges for groups of people to come together and overcome. These are two very different genres.
Scroll back up a little.
And no, absolutely no REAL solo player is asking for Mythic Raid gear. Neither are the casuals.
In the, I don’t know how many years I have seen this discussion have I EVER heard any non-troll make this a thing.
I’ve been on these forums for longer than you want to know.
I am including conq there, which you can get from the unrated queued bgs. (So not 100% solo, but generally queueable content is considered in that basket)
But yes, boes definitely count IMO. Grinding gold (or buying tokens) you can do on your own.
At this point, this conversation point is completely non interesting. There’s is more than one type of interaction you can have with players besides for just grouping into 5 man groups. What you’re describing is not the idea of mmo’s and it’s stupid to confine the game within such small constraints. Mmos are not just about going into 5 man instanced scenarios, that’s just asinine. Further, there’s a large contingency of mmo players that look down on wow simply because the game is hyper focused on 5 man instances content.
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I don’t agree. To me, when I think of MMO I think of an open world RPG that has real people around. The key to an MMO are the impromptu interactions for me. You know, I’m questing and mobs repop and I’m dying and a random person sees and helps. Then I group with them for a half hour questing as we do stuff. Interactions like THAT are what make an MMO for me. The simple reality of ‘other people being around doing their own thing which may or may not interact with my objectives’.
That general feeling of other people just BEING there.
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