Farming for an item, BiS, or any rare drop isn’t even in the same ballpark as combat crits, IMO
Mundane activities that have pleasant boosts here and there are a far cry from scoring 3 Cherries on the slot machine or scoring a TF melee weapon.
I see where you’re coming from, but it’s like someone comparing MC or BWL RNG to today’s overbearing RNG-heavy gearing and loot system.
/IMO
I agree that War/Titanforging is a problem but I think your reasons are immature. Individual skill will always trump RNG. Mythic raiders will always have higher ilvls than casual players who only pug. No one is walking around in full sets of Titanforged gear from wq’s. Getting mad because someone less tryhard than you gets something powerful is pathetic. Them getting something nice in no way negatively affects you nor are you entitled (or qualified) to decide who is worthy or unworthy of a piece of gear.
That being said, gear already operates on multiple layers of randomness. To have two players get the same piece of gear - only for one to Titanforge and the other to…not. It creates a very unsatisfying moving goalpost where the ideal is unattainable. That satisfaction from getting your BiS piece doesn’t exist anymore because your BiS could always be better; and you can’t work for it. You just have to be lucky.
Titanforging can also be unsatisfying when a casual player does get an insanely potent item. What if it has all the wrong stats? Or the most boring traits? No one wants to throw away ilvls but that doesn’t mean it feels good to equip. It also now renders other, more preferential items worthless because even if you get your desired item; it’s a guaranteed downgrade unless it Titanforges too, which again you have no control over.
The highest level of content can be done by a group of highly skilled players at ~30 item levels lower than cap. It’s a non issue.
I’m waiting to see how long it takes before Blizzard admits warforging and titanforging were absolutely atrocious ideas…
My opinion may be irrelevant because I’m not what you’d call a hardcore player; but, this looks like a topic that’s getting some attention and I like to think I represent at least 5% of the community. Been raiding regularly since vanilla, took off after the first tier in MoP until the second tier in WoD.
For the general populace that doesn’t push hardcore mythic raiding WF/TF doesn’t seem to be a bad thing at all. I mean yeah if we have someone new who gets that BiS weapon with a socket, leech, and 20 ilvls of an upgrade it’s going to make me jelly but look at the bigger picture here:
Ignore the neck because that’s not a normal piece of gear this expansion via drops. We have 13 pieces of gear. Say a person has a 400 ilvl with all 400 gear and they get a +30 TF proc. On sheer luck of procs they’ve effectively raised their ilvl by 2 points (402 x 12 + 430) / 13 to get the average. If they just walk into the raid and get that single proc once every 4 weeks and I continue to raid heroic weekly and do my M+10 weekly, odds are very high in my favor that I’m going to outgear them.
Truthfully it’s fun in the guild to flaunt when I get a titanforge proc with a gem socket and then they do the same to me. I might be a little jelly if it’s something I’ve been chasing for weeks but overall it doesn’t make me any less happy to play the game.
As for there being too many ways to get gear with the chance for it to titanforge I mean…I could see why mythic raiders would be upset that my newly geared alt has a chance to titanforge to a mythic piece and I’m sure there’s probably a better solution that what exists right now for that particular group. I’m happy I can gear up a little bit faster and get ready for alt runs on a toon that’s caught my eye. I don’t actually feel overwhelmed. We raid two nights a week from 8 to 11, doing the weekly for the neck takes about 2 hours max, doing M+ could take upwards of 4 hours on rough weeks glares at explosive, teeming, fortified, warfront is an hour, and doing WQ if it has a chance to provide an upgrade every 3 days comes out to we’ll say another 3 hours. Highballing we’re looking at 16 hours of work a week. I don’t feel compelled to run every single thing that comes out and I’m sure I don’t speak for everybody but from our little corner of the community it’s nice to have a chance as a main to titanforge and get a special surprise and I don’t even look at titanforge on an alt it’s just “ooh there’s a 330 from this WQ better do it” and if I get lucky well yay for me…fate smiles upon my alt!
bows respectfully
This issue is that it SHOULD translate to IL = experience. Someone that is around 400 IL SHOULD be someone with a couple of heroic clears or an io score of 1k+ or have whatever pvp rating that equates to. Instead you have people 6/9 N 3/9 H and an io score of 450 sitting in bags of gear ranging from 370 to 415.
Last season my alt hunter was 382 IL at the end. 1 heroic clear. io of maybe 370. Just log in do your emissaries, incursions, and warfronts and youll overgear the current heroic tier. Yes it will take longer but that isnt the point. Catch up mechanics should not exist at the same time as what you are catching up to. 8.2 is going to drop with BoD/CoS being current still and I can GUARENTEE there will be a catch up mechanic to 400 IL. Mark my words on it.
Another issue is the gaps between tiers should be 15 IL and not 30. M Uldir should have translated to H BoD. You would still opt to do heroic runs because of 5 ring azerite, but as it stands I don’t think people should have gotten gear equivalent to even M Zekvoz from something like N Opulence. Normal is incredibly hard to fail until mekkatorque assuming ONE person knows how to use raid warning and call things like p1 health bars on opulence.
QFT
Actually it translates to Normal mode seeing that it drops 385 gear. If you meant moving on to the next gear upgrades then you’re right seeing that it drops 400 ilvl gear.
While I don’t agree that forging is an issue, I do think ilvl scaling is a problem. Disregard the funky timing of the release of the catch up mechanics mid Dec and then the raid towards the end of January that caused wonky ilvl progression this tier. The gap between tiers is too big. That necessitates catch up mechanisms by itself. And that exacerbates how important forging is. It’s a compounding issue. And since the gap is so big that catch up mechanics are almost necessary between tiers, that means that gear is easy to get after the tier is farmed but before the next one comes, that makes me feel like it’s not important to try to get the best gear possible because it’s all going to be invalidated in a very short time period anyways.
Uldir normal dropped 355, heroic 370, mythic 385. Normal BD drops gear equivalent to mythic of the previous tier. If a player does normal Uldir and wants to progress to heroic they are within 15 ilvl and prepared to enter after farming up a bit of normal. If they don’t want to they should be able to go into the next tier of normal and be prepared also (i.e. that same 15 ilvl difference). This clearly delineates the progression path.
More than not TF and WF come with awful stats. It can throw your stat progress way off the mark as it usually does. That is the soul reason why it doesn’t matter if the solo or casual player gets higher gear or not. A high level raider would cringe if their gear was not suited for their toon. There is no comparison none.
Because you’re waiting on something that may never happen.
I think that WF/TF aren’t the real issue that most people have, they’re just the most obvious thing to be angry at. I would say most people that raid at Heroic or Mythic level content have been playing this game a long time. They remember how it felt going back pre-legion when if you were raiding at that level your character felt quite a bit stronger than someone that wasn’t. If you were in a BG you could stomp on people that didn’t have the Arena gear. If you were in a heroic dungeon your DPS was double or sometimes triple someone that just ran dungeons. You could do your world quests in half the time of what it required for one of your alts. The time and effort we would put into the game was rewarded with a feeling of being stronger than your average character and we could feel it in all activities in the game.
With todays game that feeling of being powerful is gone. I raid mainly on my priest who at the end of Uldir was sitting at around a 385 ilvl. I also have several alts that I only did the content that is the “catch up” content who were all sitting above 375 ilvl. The feeling that my Priest was stronger than those characters didn’t exist. If I wanted to swap out my main it wouldn’t have been an issue and there would have been very little power drop off.
I feel that is the biggest issue right now. The feeling of being powerful is gone. The feeling that being good at the game (knowing and doing mechanics for encounters and your character) and putting in the time and effort to get better gear makes me feel stronger is gone. I’m sure I’ll be called elitist for this and that’s ok. I feel that playing a character that raids Heroic weekly I should be more powerful than a character that just does world quests and an occasional Mythic dungeon here or there. I also feel that a character raiding Mythic weekly should feel more powerful than me. That is their ultimate reward for doing the hardest thing in the game.
I think bringing back that sense of being powerful would fix the issues that the “elitist” players want back. At the end of the day nobody really cares that that one person got that one ring to Titanforge to 425 from helping a turtle get to the water. What they care about is that the person doing world quests feels as strong as they are so all the effort they put into doing the harder content is wasted.
That is good. Gives people more options and less burn out. I switch mains after the first raid.
This is a lose lose proposition for Blizzard. A minority of users care what gear other people have and cry when people do welfare content and are almost as good as they are. The rest of us don’t derive our sense of self worth from whether we do more dps or more healing than everyone else. If you’re in the former category you’re going to be disappointed if you want the status quo to change. Doing so pisses off the latter group, and they are actually the bulk of the subscriber base.
You have a fair point that the majority of the player base probably doesn’t care about meters or what other people have. But with that being the case I’m going to ask then why do you care if the welfare content doesn’t make you as strong as a Heroic raider?
Also deriving a sense of self worth is taking a big leap. My sense of self worth isn’t tied to my DPS or healing, I just think it feels good to be rewarded for doing more difficult content.
My view on gear is that it should be static and rewarded based on the content you are doing. Titanforging devalues gear that mythic raiders have earned or high rated players in arena or players that run high lvl keys, titanforging is for casuals trying to stay relevant to the top who feel entitled to the gear that they haven’t earned.
I think world quest should award blue gear, heroics blue gear, normal mythics low ilvl epics, m+ epic ilvl rewards based on the key you’re attempting and succeeding at, lfr low ilvl epics then rising in ilvl based on the difficulty of the raid you are doing. Same thing already applies to arena where your rating determines what gear you get except that if you are a 1600 player your gear can still titanforge up to an ilvl that a 2400 player would get.
Scaling, titanforging, phasing, crz are all systems I wish didn’t exist but here we are…
Deriving sense of self worth isn’t taking a big leap. Look at many of the responses in this thread. There are many people crying because they don’t want other people who do “lesser” content and be as geared as they are and they’re extremely hyperbolic about it. Like you were. First, that position is a lie (in general and specifically your loaded deceptive question). If you do heroic content you’re going to be high ilvl than someone who only does normal. If you do mythic you’ll be higher ilvl than people who do heroic. If you only do solo content you’re going to be lower ilvl than people who do that and do normal raiding. Second, this is a game. It’s entertainment. There’s no such thing as “lesser” or “welfare” content. Those are derogatory terms used by elitist tools. In the end, do content you enjoy with people you enjoy doing it with.
You missed the forrest. I’m trying to make the argument that the “feeling” of being strong is gone. I’m not talking about ilvl, I’m not talking about any specific piece of gear. I’m saying that the feeling of being strong is missing from the game now. It has been there for almost the entire history of this game and the game went along just fine. It’s only now that that FEELING is gone that people are starting to complain in large numbers about gearing.
I’m not missing the forest, you just don’t like my response. People have been complaining about gearing since the game released. This isn’t a new phenomenon. People who do different tiers of content do different damage, exactly as it has always been. 10 ilvl is not an insignificant difference in performance and it’s actually 15 ilvl between tiers. There are more paths to getting those different tiers of gear now with pvp and M+ in the mix, but people who do that content also deserve to have progression paths. If you’re looking at what other people are geared with and complaining about whether they deserve to have that gear or how hard it was and how you’re salty that they are performing as well as you are, that says nothing about the game and everything about you.
The feeling of being strong against some non raiders in open world pvp?
Imagine everyone being Challenger in League of Legends just for logging in daily and playing an ARAM, and how ridiculous that would be. It’s weird to me that wanting rewards proportionate to skill and effort is A-OK in a MOBA but some sort of blasphemy in an MMO.