There's a serious level 70-80 gearing problem with the gear in this game

Community General Discussion
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The leveling experience in this game from 70 - 80 is awful. I’ve leveled quite a few characters up, but I have a tonne of alts to go and it’s really up to RNG. Hunter, Paladin, Death Knight, Warlock… not a problem yet. Either I got lucky with RNG gear or it’s a class that wasn’t mangled with class changes.

I have a level 79 shadow priest and she is sooooo fragile. The biggest issue is her gear. Going through the campaign she still has gear that’s under 500. Quest rewards aren’t fixing this. Gear drops off of mobs are almost non-existant compared to how it used to be. Crafting gear isn’t possible because everything requires level 80. Even the chests in 20 Anniversary require level 80.

So I’m looking at questing and a Hail Mary from the RNG Gods as my only options till 80. I’ll get to 80 and then I can do something about it. It’s just that 70 - 80 experience is so off-putting. The idea of doing this over and over again is just depressing to me. I’m leaning towards parking this game when my subscription ends and just waiting for Midnight to drop.

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World content has never been less dangerous and leveling is trivial. Do the WQs that reward gear, buy a couple greens off the AH, kill rares. Don’t just download a M+ or raid talent build off Wowhead.

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Try the classic timewalking dungeons while the anniversary is still active. Leveling that way is very quick, and your gear hardly matters (since you’re not the only one there trying to kill stuff).

This is not true for someone playing a character that didn’t come out of DF with a 520+ character. Like… at all. Especially not a cloth wearer.

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I’ve leveled many toons this xpac already. I come out of dungeons in the low to mid 300’s. Then hit DF world content at 70 for catch up gear.

You can breeze through tww content at 450 easily (450 stuff is the DF world content gear). I know because I’ve done it on at least 7 toons now.

Actually here is my lastest one.
All this is from doing DF wq, dreamsurges and 1 superbloom. (You’ll note DF S4 on every piece of gear)

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I remember leveling my mage when Ny’alotha was out, and feeling the same way.

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I honestly haven’t noticed a problem because everyone I leveled so far has been geared with either the pre event gear or the Remix conversions.

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It’s insanely easy. No, you can’t just aoe pull the entire zone while high as a kite watching the kardashians and twitch at the same time. So many of the quests don’t even require killing stuff. Buy a few green items, sheesh.

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The thing is… this shouldn’t be a thing. No one should have to do a previous expansion’s end game content to start the new expansion.

And it wasn’t an issue until all of the ilevel 500+ people went “questing is too easy” and Blizz forgot they tuned it for ilevel 300ish for fresh 70s and shouldn’t be tuning it for season 4 geared 70s.

I’ve been leveling in Timewalking, so it doesn’t affect me. And I’ve got some of the prelaunch gear left for alts. But for some of these people coming from faceroll DF in ilevel 300ish+ gear into War Within? That ain’t workin’ out so well now.

And telling them, “oh, go back and do some of the DF end game content before you can move forward” just doesn’t seem like it makes much sense. It should be seamless with what they get from questing in one and into the next.

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Questing is not end-game content lol.

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quite the opposite, expansions should expand, not replace.

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Max level zones and events are part of open world end game content, sir and/or madam.

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I have no idea what you’re talking about.

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70-80 is like a day and then you can craft, buy delve gear with undercoins, just jump into T8 delves, do the world quest thing, etc.

Gearing is almost too easy in TWW and leveling is so quick that I don’t know how you can spend enough time between 70 and 80 to care about gear.

At 79 you’re literally a handful of dungeons from being over this “hump” of gearing issues.

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Going off subjective experience rather than hard numbers, it feels like there’s a lot more dynamic scaling to our gear happening during levelling in this expansion than in the past. For the most part this has made things much more forgiving to being undergeared, but different content seems to be to be doing it slightly different and I’ve run into a few quirks where a character finds themselves suddenly out of their depth for no obvious reason (on top of a few places where there are mobs not scaling down from 80 at all). Simply doing something else has always solved it for me.

It wouldn’t shock me if there a few class-specific quirks but I don’t have a shadow priest, so have no anecdotes good or ill to report.

I feel like the “Soul Sigil I” should have allowed downgraded versions of the basic L80 crafted year, but it seems to only enable upgrading the L71 crafted gear to L74 550ish versions.

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And to add insult to injury, there’s an AH bug that improperly filters “usable” gear for characters in the 70s. Letting them select gear presented as usable, but once it’s in your mailbox says “Requires level 80”.

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You could just solve this by getting to ,80 and gearing with all the rep stuff you should have unlocked from your mains.

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This summarises the issue :100:

They need to tune it towards around late 300’s early 400s.

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You don’t have to do this. It just makes it easier.
Especially if you are jumping right into tww dungeons (but who is doing that with how readily available tw dungeons are right now?)

But if you actually quested/dungeoned your way to 70, you’ll be around 330-350. Then you’ll gear up from tww intro quests.

If you want to give yourself a leveling edge during non anniversary/tw times, hitting previous xpacs have always been the way to go.

I did this at the start of df, Id go to zm in sl content for super easy lvl 60 gear.
When sl was new, my fresh toons would be doing bfa world content.
Its not required by any means. It just makes the leveling process easier.

If you look at my rogue I linked. I over did it and got her 2 piece tier and my favorite df trinket set, drogbar rock/stones lol. Not necessary, but makes it more fun if you want to put in that extra effort.

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I tend to level up through delves. You get a guaranteed drop at the end of every one and they scale with your level up to 554 at level 80.

Also there are five pieces of 515 crafted gear (3 armor, ring and neck) usable at 71, that can later be recrafted to 558 at level 74, then 590 at 80.

I also keep an eye out for WQs that give gear.

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I just leveled a demon hunter to 80 who was in heirlooms at 70. I mostly did timewalking but those don’t rain loot for me most of the time. I bought upgrades I could from the anniversary vendors (tw + old av loot that require marks of honor and tw badges) in the beginning. I also looked up tww leatherworking guides and saw they could make 3 pieces of armor I could wear by level 76 at least and bought the cheapest ones I could find.

By about level 76 I still didn’t really have a lot of decent gear and felt bad about being carried in timewalking so I went out for world quests that gave gear and got quite a few slots filled with 515-525ish gear. I also spent badges at the vendor re-buying higher scaled items since my levels increased for slots that were still severely low ilvl.

I wound up right at 525 right as I hit 80, still wearing an heirloom trinket and 480 neck from prepatch event currency (the last I had of it). Wish I had thought about jewelcrafting as well for rings & neck. Will have to keep that one in mind for the next gear-challenged alt I dust off.