First let me say, I do like that there is a system to try and maximize your gear and traits, by allowing players to purchase specific pieces. However, going from 1725 residuum for a random 415 piece to 7150 for a specific piece seems like a pretty ridiculous jump. Since azerite armor doesn’t drop in m+ runs (which makes no sense whatsoever) if you were to only get pieces from doing world quests, it would take you almost 600 world quests. Some days there are 3 or 4 offering AA, but most of the time there’s only one or two. If there are two up every day, with 370 ilvl gear resulting in 12 TR, you would need to do 300 days worth of armor quests. Even with the 700+ residuum you get from doing a +15 every week, that’s over 10 weeks before you can buy a specific armor piece. I just don’t understand how someone looked at this and said “oh yeah, this is a really good, well thought out system that players will love!” Either significantly up the amount of TR you receive from AA, or significantly lower the cost of the specific pieces. Or, allow TR to be scrapped from all BFA armor, or maybe even have it drop from the chest at the end of each m+ run.
Note: I did not include raid AA here because as Blizzard said, they wanted the m+ system to be and alternate route for players to gear, and progress through BFA, who didn’t want to raid, or couldn’t get their alts into non LFR raids.
Buy the random stat gear. That’s what everyone else does.
It’s still 415 and probably better than whatever you have if you don’t already have a 415.
If you absolutely must have a specific piece of gear, then yes, you have the option to purchase a specific gear. But the price for doing so is so high as to make that not a realistic option for most players.
I think this is intentional. Loot in WoW has always had a certain amount of randomness to it. If you want to remove the randomness, Blizz will make you PAY!
In cases where there are 4 options of a piece of gear you’re statistically better off buying the random token 4 times (6900 residuum). 5+ and the odds swing the other way.
Also not to mention you get a partial refund if you scrap the gear.
But just because everyone is doing it shouldn’t excuse the fact it’s a bad system. So even if you buy the random piece, and you get the absolute worst piece for your spec, you can scrap it and get 600 TR back. So you’re still out 2 more weeks roughly to have a chance to roll a better piece. This is not a good system. Some traits are far too powerful to say “well it’s an item level upgrade so I guess that’s good.”
It’s fairly evident they don’t want to give us a vendor like those we had in the past, though. I don’t expect this to change with current development team leadership.
Agreed, I’m not sure how Blizzard looked at all of the complaints about excessive RNG and then decided it made sense to have a specific piece cost >4 times the amount of a random piece.
That said, a simple fix would be to have the system not drop a replica of anything that you have in your bags. This would mean you could use the “random” option with the assurance that you’d get the piece you want eventually (and after about the same amount of residuum spent on the upper end). This would remove the frequent instance where the player feels like they just completely wasted their residuum.
Can we recognize for a minute that at least there’s a vendor and most of what’s on it is affordable? You can buy a 415 piece once every other week, probably more often.
That’s mythic raiding gear. That you can buy 1 piece of twice a month without ever doing mythic. “But I can’t get the specific PIECE I wanted without going to mythic”. Really? When is it enough?
The low ilvl of mythic raiding gear compared to easily-attainable war/titanforged Mythic + and world quest gear is a separate problem (and a much more serious one for the long term health of WoW, IMO).
Though your point stands that having a vendor at all is an improvement over the pure-mindless RNG that was there before.
I’m not exactly sure how to read this? Are you saying that we should be happy there’s a vendor that sells mythic level gear without doing mythic raids? So then are you saying that you shouldn’t be rewarded for doing exactly what Blizzard intended with the “you can gear up through m+ without ever needing to raid”? Why don’t they just allow AA to drop from m+ runs? That would make the most sense and I guess satisfy “only mythic raiders should have mythic gear” mentality.
Not to mention it’s a pretty poor system for rewarding the actual mythic raiders, when most of the trinkets from m+ are still better than the raid ones, as is some azerite armor. Crucible finally offers some trinkets. However, Galecallers Boon and Harlin’s Loaded Dice are still top 5 for most agi melee dps.
I’m saying that I think that it sells mythic gear at all is kinda crazy. M+ has invalidated all raid content up to and including heroic, and we’ve got this now. But it’s here so whatever. But complaining about not being to hand pick the free gear for content a lot of people aren’t going to do seems like going too far.
I agree with you that the quality of most of the gear no matter where its from is bad, and the new raid isn’t any better from a lock perspective. But at some point I don’t think it would hurt anyone to actually have to do relevant content to get the gear they want.
![:sweat_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/sweat_smile.png?v=6" ":sweat_smile:")