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.
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 
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In short, “I don’t think other people deserve the loot they are getting.”
That’s what this debate always comes down to.
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:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/+1.png?v=6" ":+1:")
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.
That’s a reductionist version of the discussion with a heavy negative connotation. One can make arguments about the health of the game and whether systems are too over-rewarding leading to the games own downfall without the explanation being jealousy. I’ve always maintained that I don’t care about what other players are wearing, but to assume that I’m playing the game in a vacuum is flawed.
I hate TF, ideally I’d scrap or ask for a reward reduction for every piece that has it for myself. Can I logically do this in a game where other players depend upon my performance and where we compete against other teams? The answer is no. If you can convince every progression raider to scrap or deforge their loot with me, then I’d do it in a heart beat. Since you can’t… then I can’t.
If I do so, then I handicap my team, I handicap our progression, and I handicap our recruiting potential.
Yes it is. And the unfortunate truth if you look at the arguments being made there’s a whole lot of them that actually boil down to that. Even from people who swear up and down that it’s not about what other people have equipped. And yet if you get them talking a little bit they suddenly start telling you how people shouldn’t have the gear they have because they aren’t good enough, and in the latest example we weren’t even talking about forging.
You’re right though, there’s a lot of different opinions about the pacing of loot progression and we aren’t playing in a vacuum. I’d love to hear recommendations and/or discussion that addresses the problem that also doesn’t result in casuals getting the short end of the stick. Unfortunately we continue to get proposals with sweeping changes that result in massive gear disparities between the top and the bottom and very heavily limit progression opportunities for casual players.
My point is that the motivation behind such thinking is not jealousy from a lot of the same posters. It absolutely is from some, and I disagree with those, but from others it’s more in line of thinking about how over-rewarding can lead to the games downfall.
I’ve already stated my opinion concerning TF and it’s effect on gear progression. Cap it to +15 and I’ll be happy. I don’t see that as a sweeping change that results in a massive gear disparity. I don’t see that causing casuals to get the “short end of the stick.” I see that as a fair compromise that maintains some gear RNG, but also gives determined upper limits of power for content.
As for other systems, I don’t think it makes sense to have the lowest tiers of content reward gear that is equivalent to the second highest tier of content. That’s an illogical step in character progression. A step that contributes to the removal of all the steps in between for the same player. I’ve offered methods to improve this as well. Make gear relevant to the content they come from. Have WF gear, be more useful for WF’s than for raids. You can use affixes to boost their power in WF (not necessarily DPS/HPS). You could even consider similar systems for M+ loot.
Who said such behavior is predicated upon jealousy? When you (generally, not you specifically) start talking about what other players deserve for doing the content they’re doing, particularly when it’s not content intended to be your main source of progression, that’s not talking about what’s healthy or unhealthy for the game, that’s just displaying your own bias. The claim about whether it’s unhealthy for the game is just the illusory high ground people try to stand on as they present their opinion as more than an opinion.
But your position is exactly the same unfortunately. Penalize people that don’t do organized group content because you feel they don’t deserve the gear they’re getting from the content they’re doing. What you said proves it. You don’t want people getting 400 ilvl gear from warfronts/weekly quests, at least I assume that’s what you mean about “the lowest tiers of content reward gear that is equivalent to the second highest tier of content”. You’re doing M10’s, you’re Mythic raiding. You talk about how you’d get rid of forging if you could but then the solution you propose is one that doesn’t actually impact you at all. Not a single piece of gear you have is forged beyond the limits you say you want. They’re changes that impact other people.
As and example: https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/us/moonrunner/Sabbia
Sorry Sabbia for using your toon as an example, but since you espoused similar sentiments in another thread I didn’t think you’d mind.
That character has pretty much zero progression on the PvE side of the game. No raid progress (aside from a titch of LFR), a +4 dungeon, and nothing else. That character already outgears normal mode. With only 2 pieces of gear (the 370 ring has a socket…) that could be upgraded from base normal mode drops. The character also has multiple pieces, including a weapon, that would require WF/TF or sidegrading from heroic BoD.
All of that… and they haven’t even started PvE progression beyond the lowest tier of PvE content. That does not make sense to me.
Everything we say here is an opinion Avagon. I was talking about my, and my understanding of others, intentions in regards to my words. I’m not saying these things because I don’t believe others are worthy of the same rewards. I’m saying these things, because I think the systems erode, in my eyes, the progression system giving people less to do in the game.
Long story short, I don’t think TF alone is the problem. I don’t think WF gear alone is the problem. I don’t think non-stop M+ alone is the problem. I don’t think the Mythic dungeon weekly loot box alone is the problem. I think the combination of all these things together… is a problem. I think it contributes to us running out of gear progression faster. Or hitting the points where we are starting to rely on seriously low RNG to continue our characters progression.
We’ve been down this road. Taking a single snapshot in time of 1 character is not representative of my entire gearing progression across 5-6 toon throughout all of Legion and BfA (when TF has been in effect). That’s not a fair assessment and is inherently flawed.
It rewards both. Doing harder content gives you better dice rolls.
This is true. I’d prefer there be some limit on how high the dice can roll.