Titanforging and Warforging make me upset

Community General Discussion
3203

I am not entirely sure how you joining a guild run that has everything on farm challenges my point. Of course when things are on farm status you get more efficiency. But even in a farm environment this is still less efficient than doing m+ (maths below as this isn’t my main point).

The argument that people should raid for the ‘feeling of accomplishment’ and not care about what rewards you get is complete garbage. In the world of video games and rpgs these are inseperable. It used to be that killing a boss typically provided a nontrivial power upgrade to your raid team. (In before spurious terrible itemization examples). It made you feel like your character was progressing due to a challenge you overcame, not some luck of the dice. This is a core component of any mmo/rpg. Today this feeling is only reserved for mythic raiders. We kill new bosses on heroic and get shards or, in those special cases, sub-5% upgrades. And even these upgrades are typically placeholders until we get something WF/TF from another source. It’s hard not to feel like normal and heroic raiding are a waste of time and energy. The system we have now rewards rolling the dice as much as possible, not overcoming challenges.

Maths: Raiding vs M+
Say it takes two hours to clear BoD on farm but not majorly outgearing. For us that is 18 WF/TF opportunities. Alternately we could do two m+ groups running 12s, 3 runs each, 3+ drops per run. Same 18 even assuming we don’t get ‘bonus’ pieces. Then add the fact that m+ awards weekly cache plus residuum, residuum that makes BoD Azerite mostly obsolete, provides opportunities for every stat combination, and can be run with zero lockout.

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3204

Then a solution for you is simple…do mythic raiding then you can get upgrades and feel accomplished.

3205

Been there, done that. If they still had 10-man mythic raiding we certainly would do mythic. Flex was supposed to be a level of content for small groups of friends like us, but it has slowly degraded to it’s pointless state.

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3206

That doesn’t even change your statement nor the results nor my statement.
In the old system you can’t be geared faster than today UNLESS you are fed gear by ML. That doesn’t change.

Blizzard has even stated that PL drops more loot per boss on average than ML. On top of that it has the chance to be upgraded to a higher level.

I don’t know how you are still arguing that less drops without chances of upgrades provide quicker gearing than higher drop chances with potential upgrades up to item cap.

So yes, the idea that the old system was faster or even equal is incorrect without loot funnelling.

3207

I wouldn’t bother mate. They are trying to argue two different statements at once and pick and choose when it’s applicable.

As soon as you respond to them saying about the fact they say it “wasn’t uncommon (ie is common)” they say they weren’t talking about the “average” and as soon as you say “funnelling gear” they say it’s not funnelling gear.

Responding is just degrading the thread. So from now I’m just going to continue to respond to others but not them, it might benefit you to do similar.

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3208

Not many people are capable of doing a +10 key, alone alone stepping foot into Mythic+. But the rewards are relative to difficulty to a degree.

I don’t push all the blame into WF/TF. But there are plenty of sources of gear. The shear amount of them makes gear acquisition feel bloated.

Warfonts, Emissary Caches, Raids, Mythic+, and Titanforging on top of it all create an over-rewarding system. On top of that Personal Loot pushes more loot to groups outright. It’s literally designed to have a minimum amount of drops pushed each boss kill. Plus the fact you can trade them relatively easily, you’re accelerating the gearing process even more.

And for the record:

  • Funneling gear rarely happened outside hardcore progression guilds.
  • Titanforging only works with Personal Loot because Titanforging is 100% dependent on RNG.
  • “I deserve loot because I killed the boss.” You helped. You didn’t solo the boss. Everyone deserves loot, but not everyone will get loot. Get over it. See you next Tuesday.

Ya’ll keep arguing about averages. It’s a stupid argument to have. You don’t have numbers to back up your claims and now you’re trying to argue numbers. Stop it. Talk about your personal experiences instead. I doubt any of you actually understand why gear funneling was a thing – and why it’s STILL a thing today.

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3209

A whole lot more players do M+ than do Mythic raids. Plus you got people selling M+ runs all the time. I already explained how casual my guild is and we do M+10. We can easily drag our “carries” through M+10.

3210

Sure, many players do M+. Very few of them to +10’s.

And as you claimed, you’re carrying people through 10’s. So, could those players do it without a coordinated group supporting them? Probably not. But given enough time to find a group of PUGs willing to take them, at best – maybe.

And I doubt most players who cannot do +10 normally are buying carries every. single. week.

3211

Sure I agree, they wouldn’t be clearing 10’s on their own. They can and do pug some M+ usually up to 5 on their own. Let’s face it the lower end of M+ is not overly challenging and it is a great alternative way of gearing outside of raiding.

Edit: I guess you could also say that M+ promotes guilds so you can be with others that might like to run M+ as well.

3212

Note: Sorry to use your players as an example (I don’t mean any offense if it feels that way).

And there’s nothing wrong with +5’s being their limit. (I’m sure they can push if they wanted to.) +5’s happen to reward 385/390 cache, which falls nicely in their skill range. (You said you were a casual Heroic guild, so these players should feel right at home in Normal mode).

Given rewards were appropriate to their skill range, and taking your Heroic raids into account, I’d expect their gear to fall around 397-400 by the end of the tier. However, with all the other sources of big gear upgrades including your Mythic+ carries (figure every other week they get a +8/9/10), I’m pretty sure they’d land around 403 by the end of the tier, and maybe as high as 407 if they get really lucky (like, Warfront and +10 caches rolling big.).

But that doesn’t sit well with me, personally. “Why are Normal-mode skilled players running around so much Heroic loot?” “If they’re running around with 400 ilvl loot mid-tier, they significantly outgear content better suited to their skill level. And how does that impact their choice to do content?” “Do they try to push their keys, or do they wait for their guild to carry them? Or are they just playing and it’s not a true carry – it just happens to be a +10 or whatever?”

I’m interested in the psychology of their choices to a large degree. “Raid or Die” meant that you needed to be in a raiding guild to enjoy most endgame content. I worry it may evolve into “Guild or Die” because their is no endgame progression without guilds.

I’d like to see some sort of endgame progression content for your less-skilled players. I fear they feel like they cannot do anything without you – and I don’t consider Titanforging a form of progression content in this sense. RNG on top of RNG isn’t content to me. Giving them something they can consistently work every week, instead of a Warfront every 3 weeks, would be far better.

But just to bring the conversation back to Titanforging for a moment – All I’m trying to say is that players should receive rewards relative to the difficult of content. Uncapped Titanforging undermines the ideology, and other sources of gear are the same – Mythic+ cache might be too rewarding for the difficulty IMO. Too much gear should affect their choices to participate in certain content – but I’m no PhD in Psychology (luckily, I know someone who is! Maybe they’d find it interesting too).

As always, just an opinion :slight_smile:

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3213

In case someone is interested, Lissanna wrote an excellent blog post on WoW’s rewards system back in 2009, and it still applies to today.

http://www.restokin.com/2009/06/a-look-at-the-behavioral-psychology-of-random-loot/

However, behavioral psychology has nothing to do with being happy, it has to do with modifying behavior (and behavior modification is a normal part of life). You say: “But I’m not like some Pavlovian dog that salivates at purple loot!” My response to that is, well the game is more like operant than classical conditioning, so in a way you are right.

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3214

The guy I was talking to was. He’s in mythic raid and M+10 cache gear and complaining that “titanforging” caused him to gear up too fast. But 410 gear from your M+ cache isn’t titanforged. That’s the lowest level it comes out.

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3215

Probably not, but they can pretty easily be carried through it by the better players in their guild. The same isn’t really true for mythic raids.

After all, you don’t even need to make the timer to get a +10 cache at the end of the week. You can spend 2 hours clearing that +10 and still get your loot, and that is exactly what a lot of people do.

3216

They are getting loot from sources beyond their capabilities. They are being over-rewarded. I’d like to reduce the amount of rewards all players receive and bring it back in line to their relative difficulty.

3217

I don’t think it’s beyond their capabilities - if it was, they wouldn’t be able to complete the dungeon at all. They are just learning. Everyone has to learn at some point.

The first M+10 dungeon I did this expansion took our group 2 hours 12 minutes. I mean, it was Shrine, and it was the 2nd week when we were all in 350 gear, and it was Grievous/Tyrannical, but all the same, we learnt a lot and it didn’t take us anywhere near as long to finish it the next time we went in because we learned from our mistakes.

3218

From my previous posts – they aren’t bad or anything like that. But they’re likely being carried in +10’s. I dislike that “just completing it” is enough. To me, it means +10’s aren’t hard enough. In previous posts, I also directly referenced re-tuning M2-M10 to feel like M2-M15 (and dropping Fortitude/Tyrannical, so M7 provides the seasonal affix).

Learning by pushing keys and getting familiar with affixes is totally fine. Learning by diving head-first into a carry group is not something I view as acceptable. The game is designed around with many difficulties for all types of players. You shouldn’t be doing Mythic raiding if you don’t understand the principles from Heroic raiding. Likewise, if you are struggling in M4’s because you don’t use your interrupts and CC, you shouldn’t be tackling M10’s.

3219

In short, “I don’t think other people deserve the loot they are getting.”

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3220

That’s what this debate always comes down to.

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3221

My complaint was that TF/WF creates items that have relative power greater than the baseline power than the content I’m progressing through. Which means there are fewer and fewer items available from Mythic that are direct upgrades, at 6 weeks into the tier I think having the majority of the gear be direct upgrades over the baseline loot from the next difficult is too fast. ilvl has very little to do with that. TF/WF is what creates that relative power gap, if an item doesn’t WF/TF it can’t have a socket or secondaries then it’s much less of an issue, or having another system that allows other items to get those stats/allocations from other sources would also address it to a large extent.

If you could stop misconstruing my issues with the system that’d be much appreciated :+1:

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3222

I’ll just leave this here. Nothing was misconstrued. You just got called out on the ridiculous claim that M+ cache gear was part of the TF/WF system.

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