But it works against that as no one needs to do any organized content because it doesn’t give any better rewards, at least in the attainable skill range.
Warfront just needs to give guaranteed LFR level gear. Because it is still a guaranteed drop, instead of LFR that can wipe and you can get nothing at all. So still better. Maaaaybe 5 ilvl higher than LFR just to offset the 2 weeks cycle.
Edit:
And PvP should give like 5 ilevels below mythic 0 for 2s under 1400 rating as it’s easy to group for but still requires a group of two. And go from there. 3s under 1400 can give M0 item level because 3s is generally more difficult to yolo. RBGs can actually arguably reward normal raid gear even under 1400 rating, because it takes some effort to gather a team and yolo win it, just like gather a pug raid and kill a boss or two in normal raid.
What you have stated is one of my biggest grievances that I have posted about throughout similar threads. Preparing players for content.
Current gearing doesn’t prepare you for organised content, it drops you in the deep end.
Either you drop into content that as a player you may not be prepared for, or the alternative is that you deliberately do unrewarding content as experience to move into the content you were already geared for.
That said, if they did make moves away from the current system it would have to be done so delicately and over such a period of time as to be all but impossible to do in the current game.
Namely from the way weekly quests, embassies, warfronts, and M+ caches work.
They could do it, but it risks a lot and I’m not sure Blizzard have shown the deftness in recent times to pull it off without causing a uproar.
I actually think they can easily do it in a tier or two. They just need to do regular gear jump for LFR content and twice the leap for organized content. Everyone will get gear upgrades, nobody will feel that something was taken away.
^
Agreed. I also believe the same to be true for M+ caches, it should be enough that you get guaranteed rewards (from content not guaranteed)rather than you requiring a significant increase in rewards.
It makes the content also feel less required but more a bonus for doing what you wanted to do in the first place.
Warfronts and LFR are the same, warfronts are easier more guaranteed, personally I would decrease the rewards to 335 (arathi) with 345 rewards for the quest.
That way it’s around LFR the content it is designed around but also provides a slight bonus occasionally (since the rewards are always guaranteed)
In an ideal situation I would love to see it change that easily. My only concern with implementing as you mentioned, ie scaling up organised content instead of scaling down solo content is that it impacts current ilvl inflation.
However I agree, it would be a lot more palatable for those who would feel impacted (as their situation would not change)
Perhaps what you suggest would actually be a reasonable way of prepping the system for change before say an expansion release where it changes it.
Next two tiers for example would increase the gap between LFG and organised content, then the expansion release would be able to lower the overall LFG content rewards (numbers only no actual change) while bringing the gap between LFG and organised content closer again to reduce the ilvl inflation.
Yeah, never said that. Never said people were quitting over forging, if anything I believe people are quitting because they are making WoW so that it requires no effort, rewards don’t feel good, and you are not rewarded for putting more work into the game. Way more reasons why this game is failing but that is a whole other thread.
As for the Devs responding to player feedback they don’t get high marks for that, if anything they got themselves to a D- for listening about the ridiculous ilvl reward from the warfront. They pretty much ignored all feedback given in beta and there are many threads that were created on the subject of ignoring beta feedback. I played a shaman so I know they ignored beta feedback. Anytime a class has to have massive buffs and a re-work this early in a xpac means they didn’t do their jobs.
Last thing is that I don’t mind forging except the way it is implemented in game. Items shouldn’t titanforge from easy content. There needs to be a cap on how high an item can forge to. I have been speaking about that for a while, but please keep making up things I say but actually never said. So you understand, my problem with forging is that it is far to rewarding for easy content, the fact that they removed master loot increases the RNG of it in a raid setting, and the amount it can rise to needs to be capped.
It really doesn’t feel good to “earn” mythic quality loot from a world quest, or LFR, for example. So while it’s personally nice for me to get good loot, it’s bad for the game as a whole when there is a largely disproportionate reward for the work. I don’t feel accomplished for getting a 425 piece, I feel lucky, which is much less rewarding, psychologically. At the end of the season when you are looking at your gear, a lot of it will be from these “lucky” titanforges/warforges, and not from you receiving a proportionate reward for the content you are completing. My character becomes a compilation of my personal luck.
I don’t understand this mentality, that you can’t get BiS, BiS is ilvl 415 with your respective gear that you are shooting for, not fully forged gear. Encounters are not created with the consideration everyone has fully forged gear. The world firsts are doing it with less.
This argument that you can’t get BiS anymore is a non-existent argument. You can and it’s there. Getting forged gear is nice but no one is going to look at someone with forged pieces and say, “man, he really worked for that gear.” No, its pure luck and thats exactly what you will think, “man that person got really lucky.”
Shooting for anything past that is a personal endeavor, it has nothing to do with your progression or BiS. As stated earlier, BiS is 415, any more is just extra stats to slightly make it easier on you, but you are burning yourself out if you’re specifically trying to get forged gear over just being happy getting you’re BiS 415 gear.
I, too, feel like this system is basically a way to keep people repeating the same content. Not only that but it devalues any chase of upgrade because even your upgrade can be upgraded. Tertiary stats, warforging/titanforging, sockets, it’s all just a slot machine designed to keep you subbed. It’s not often that I shizz on something like this but I think the whole thing is terrible design.
I repeat content chasing after a reward that is never truly BiS, and by the time you get that perfect item… oh look more loot has been added. It doesn’t feel like a reward anymore to get an item. It just feels like a continual placeholder until you get a better version.
I don’t look at loot as a reward anymore because its abundance and design have made it that way. There is never a reward. It’s just another item, and I think that’s why more cosmetic rewards and mounts obtained from content are valued much more than epic items and it’s absurd. (At least for me an a handful of others I presume)
Imagine finally getting invincible, but invincible has a chance to invincaforge into a better invincible. Faster, more saddles, more horse screams to terrify onlookers. Sure, you got the first one to drop but it didn’t feel all that great because you knew there would be a better, cooler one that you didn’t get. Maybe after getting the better version, you might see you’re missing an invincisocket now… endless, no feeling of completion… then another, slightly changed in color invincible comes around, and you do it all over again. Buncha invincibuullsh-
Gear “catchups” in classic were incredibly limited, things like battleground rep items like the Ice Barbed Spear/Bloodseeker.
True “welfare epics” were really introduced in BC when a portion of the pvp epics could be obtained by simply playing (win or lose) arena matches and the beginning of later added 5 man dungeons that rewarded gear of the previous raid tier in terms of power.
Wrath of the Lich King capitalized on gear catchups through 5 man dungeons that were added with each tier that dropped gear equivalent in power to the tier before it.
Cataclysm followed this model, with the troll dungeons, and caverns of time dungeons serving the gear catchup purposes, with the final patch adding LFR
Up until this point, catchup gear required group play, even if it was small group play.
It wasnt until MoP that solo play catchup mechanics were available in earnest, and their prevalence increased through WoD before reaching the state they are in now in Legion.
Just want to point out saying you are at 370/380 now due to gear catch up is irrelevant because of the ilvl shift. 370 is the new 340. Next major patch 385 will be the new 340.
This has been this way since the start of the game but the difference is you don’t need to be finding a guild that run old content to do so.