Note: Nothing has been said by Blizzard and we need to give them feedback or suggestions both with 8.3 Corrupted gear, these are merely just random thoughts I had so we can hopefully make Shadowlands an enjoyable experience for most of us on the gearing level. I figure I’d like to throw these out incase some people like them and put them out elsewhere so we can address gearing before Blizzard sets a system in place. i maintain if we knew about how Azerite was going to function before they settled on “IT WILL BE LIKE THIS, WE ARE TOO FAR ALONG TO CHANGE NOW” then it wouldn’t have been as awful of a system.
Titanforging and Proc roll stats: Remove it outright. This isn’t fun. It does feel nice when you get a piece of gear that rolls really high, yes. However the only people this ever benefits are the people who dump countless hours into the game, but never actually advance past normal in raiding and have no desire to. This was initially sold to us on the idea of “Well a casual player who plays a few hours a week can get a really good item and feel good about it.” This has been achieved but the negatives it brought with it were much more disastrous. Namely item level bloat. So they have a high rolled piece, but everyone and their dog has an inflated ilvl so it isn’t going to do them much good wiggling into higher levels of raiding. So groups demanded even higher item levels as if the issue of demanding higher ilvl to do content than the content would ever give you wasn’t bad enough.
Reintroduce MoP Valor: Back in MoP you earned valor and could use it to upgrade gear, much like prismatic manapearls or whatever in Nazjatar. Bring it back to offset the feeling you tried to achieve with Warforging in 5.1 of there coming a point where you can no longer get upgrades on gear from the raid, so why bother showing up anymore. Give it the Conquest treatment where you can either hit your weekly cap each time, or bang it all out in a single longwinded session if you’re on an alt or missed a few weeks. Allow Valor to upgrade gear to a maximum of 10 ilvl bonus. If you want, add in something from the vendor for a very large amount of valor that lets you upgrade it one more time but price it so that it isn’t likely you’ll go through a tier and just have nothing to spend valor on. This will give people a constant sense of progressing their gear and working towards something in the long term. It shouldn’t need to be said but obviously change the currency each time so you can’t just stockpile a bunch then on one raid have all your gear fully upgraded in the first week.
Tier Sets: Loved them, sadly they aren’t coming back it looks like. This is a bad move and if your concern is “Well you only use just enough tier and it makes you pigeonholed into using certain pieces.” Then add more pieces. Vanilla had 8 pieces, 9 in Naxx40 involving the ring. This gave you some wiggle room in swapping out pieces to maintain lower set bonuses. I find it unlikely you’ll ever go back to 8 piece bonuses but 5 is fine. If you still have problems, design bonuses for each class from the raid and put them into sigils. These would “enchant” a piece of gear to count toward that set bonus. So if you threw one on a dungeon cloak, it still was a piece toward the tier set if you are that adamant about not dictating people have to have certain slots they can’t ever change. Though you really defeated this purpose with the neckpiece and azerite armor. Nothing is more demoralizing than getting a good rolled helmet from like a timewalking dungeon that could be a raid piece but oh wait, it has no azerite traits lmao.
Azerite Traits: Move these all into an essence system or into the soulbinding system. DO NOT PUT THESE BACK ON GEAR IF YOU ARE KEEPING THIS SYSTEM.
Legendary effects: I heard legendaries are coming back. Again, the main problem people had with these was either you couldn’t target a legendary and if you were like me and got your Mantle of the Master Assassin as your LAST LEGENDARY it was a pretty bad time. Just as bad as when someone gets their mantle, and you get something utterly useless like Prydaz. Either keep the same effect but on multiple pieces of gear to allow for gear diversity, or do like above and make them a sigil effect you craft that enchants a piece you want with its effect. This would also enable you to dabble with other effects so people have some option rather than needing to reoptimize their entire gear setup to fit in shoulders which now have broken the tier bonus but they have to have those shoulders.
Tier Bonuses: To counteract the above, either outright invalidate tier bonuses in the new content or be careful to do the thing Blizzard is best for which is making the next option just 1000 times more powerful to justify people using it. Or just keep them relatively in line and allow them to tweak how you play. If the new tier bonuses are bad, let people use the older one without much hassle. Just make sure you don’t design the bonuses around being so overpowered you have to use it.
IDK just random thoughts I’ve been sitting on. Don’t expect this to really go anywhere but I figure if we’re going to make Shadowlands good, we need to give Blizzard feedback on the things they have not already established.