Everyones problem with TF/WF issss the RNG of it? 1=3. You aren’t rewarded for playing well you just get loot randomly no matter what your contribution is or the level of content.
That has ALWAYS been part of WoW, since Classic. It’s the core of MMORPG loot. Drop rates and RNG have never had anything to do with performance in a given encounter.
Being upset that the TF gear you got in Heroic reduces the anticipation of an upgrade in Mythic - that is a TF/WF issue.
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You arent wrong, but like with legiondarys, TF/WF is just another layer of rng on top of rng.
Use to be if you wanted to upgrade your A you went and did the content that dropped B and if it dropped for you, you got B and all its powers
Now if you need to upgrade A you do B C & D despite them all being worse than A in hopes that that second layer of RNG will proc B C &D past A. Or you could go after F which is a for sure upgrade, but B C &D can be just as good for less effort. Then theres the almighty G which technically your best upgrade but only if it TFs so you find yourself eyeballing that in the offchance that it does. If RNG doesnt smile you are left with worse versions of A
After awhile it just begins to feel like pseudo replayability at the mercy of layered RNG and some like while others dont.
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I and many others have zero issue with someone getting a random upgrade in our raid group, given the current system. Good for them. They got lucky.
The problem I have, and I think others are trying to say, with the WF/TF, socket, and tertiary system is as I stated before. This system makes getting gear completely and utterly unfulfilling. Almost every piece of gear, no matter how new it is, is one dungeon/raid/world quest away from being thrown in the garbage and that makes getting gear feel crappy. There’s nothing awesome about getting a new piece of gear anymore. Every new piece of gear just feels like another thing I’ll get to throw into the scrapper tomorrow. Getting new gear should be fulfilling and you should be able to feel the power of your character grow with each new piece.
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Here are the issues I have with the system.
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Devalues effort:
When an item titanforges to 415 with a socket from
a mythic 6 dungeon, - regardless of how rare it is -it makes the gear for the higher difficulty less rewarding. Psychologically I end up asking myself, why am I doing a +10 for 400 gear when I could do a +6 and get an item that forges to 410 with a socket? I’m happy for my guild mates when they get something, but at the same time a little bit of resentment comes in when I see one of their fresh 120 alts who havent done a +10 get an item that exceeds anything I’m wearing when I’m progressing in mythic raids and spamming +10 keys. I know that it’s a rare event, I still feel happy for them, but I become resentful of the system that’s just undercut the effort that I put in to earn the baseline gear that I am wearing. Real world simile using eSports, it feels like there’s a chance for the cash reward for winning regional to be larger than the prize for winning Worlds in the same game hosted by the same company. -
RNG can boost an item you don’t want making it feel wasted:
Say an item titanforges, what are the odds of it upgrading something I need or can use? What if it happens on a piece of loot with bad stats? When something does titanforge, I feel like I’ve been conditioned to not care. To preface this, I don’t consider myself to have a have a BIS list because I know anything and forge and make something that would be on that list irrelevant. The result is that I don’t know what items drop from what dungeons/sources and don’t really care because anything can forge. So, when I see an item forge half the time I’ll actively avoid looking at it either because im expecting disappointment or expect it to be a bad item. Say I’m wearing 385 ilvl Crit>Haste pants, and I get a pair of forged 405 pants with mastery>versatility and avoidance, objectively the current 385 is better. But now I feel like i’ve wasted my TF proc (even though I’m assuming it’s independent random events) on an item that’s going to the scrapper - unless I need to hold it for personal loot trading in which case it’s a salty reminder of how it can feel to be screwed over by luck. -
Makes getting gear in new content less exciting and a burden:
If I have a piece of gear that’s titanforged in M+ to ilvl 410 and comes with a socket, odds are my next piece of baseline ilvl 415 Mythic raiding loot in this slot will actually be a downgrade (happened with my gloves yesterday). So this new 415 piece is now garbage loot, I don’t want to throw it away because it’ll screw over personal loot trading and I don’t want to equip it because it’ll make my character worse so it sits in my bag and I find myself asking why does this work like this? -
Tertiary stats:
In a vacuum, tertiary stat’s can make an item feel bad. Looking at secondary stats as a healer there’s only one that I really want which is leech. I like it and think it’s fun, it improves the performance of my character and did 3% of my overall healing on Grong yesterday. On the other hand avoidance, speed and indestructible feel terrible, so 3/4 possible tertiary stats for me feel like crap. Others may be useful for fun other people which is fine, my underlying complaint is that they are determined by RNG. It’s saying that there is a 25% chance of an item that’s titanforged having a tertiary stat that will actually add to my decision on whether I want to use that item. This feels bad, I’d much rather have the option to select which tertiary stat, or know that it’s not governed by RNG and only comes on specific items as it does with Azerite. -
Items with sockets can gimp your ilvl progression:
So if the name of the progression game is ilvl (which I understand to be the design intent), sockets actively prevent that. Items with good stats and sockets at the base difficulty they are looted at are roughly equivalent to a 15 ilvl increase. Rings are especially guilty of this because they don’t have main stat. So you run into a similar problem as before when an item forges at say ilvl 400 with a socket, your next piece of mythic loot that’s an ilvl upgrade couild easily be a performance downgrade and you run into the same damn problem with not being able to in good conscience use it and not being able to trade it and not being able to destroy it.
These are my experiences, I like the idea of gear upgrading with impactful stats/traits but think that the use RNG in it’s current iteration adds a serious detriment to the system. I’d rather see some type of deterministic system when it comes to how forging works. Maybe you get general exp towards unlocks while using that item (not AP, comes from all content relatively equally), or maybe a time gate on using some type of upgrade token where every item can be upgraded twice by +5 ilvl and the last unlocks a tertiary or socket. I wouldn’t want to see this only baked into specific items because we’d just run into the same issue with Azerite in dungeons again. Forging can be a good system for character progression, it just needs a rethink and overhaul.
6 Likes
Just go watch Bellular’s latest video. He tackles the way loot can work a bit better and sums up a lot of loot problems and proposed fixes to them (as well as a LOT of other tweaks to the game that make it more engaging).
can you confirm that there is a retention mechanic in play within WoW? It seems people who invest more time get lower and lower drop chances. take someone who quit for at least 60 days and they get handed gear left and right with far more wf/tf than ive ever seen. is this some “timegate” to get people hooked into playing?
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Who doesn’t? The issue is it completely devalues something that doesn’t. I don’t care about what other people get/don’t get. However when I get an upgrade in gear that isn’t war/Titan now I’m wholly unexcited. It’s not bis now because it’s missing 10 ilvls or a socket. (Don’t get me started on how bad war/Titans feel on gear with the worst secondary stats)…
I feel like a lot of people in wow are completionists… Collecting every mog, pet, achievement and gear. This war/Titan + AP system leaves you with a forever sense of lack of completion. I’m never done.
This doesn’t make me want to play more, which I think the intent is, it completely demotivates me. Instead of feeling complete gear wise on my main (downed the raid or capped the season) I’m now constantly supposed to chase some endless grind with no end in sight? I used to love completing my weekly stuff and then doing some fun casual bgs or leveling an alt and trying to complete him.
These systems post legion make me feel empty and super demotivated.
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Sheesh man, WF/TF is a bonus, not something to grind out. Just enjoy it when it happens. If you’re geared to the point where only WF/TF is an upgrade, you’re looking at small percentage points, if that, increase in stats.
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The problem is that gear, no matter which level of difficulty it comes from, is never the best in slot for that content unless it’s fully titanforged with a socket and leech. Getting new gear should be fulfilling. If I do a mythic +6 then I and others deserve the best possible loot from that dungeon, no more and no less. Same goes for raids.
If I finally down a boss (heroic ghuun for example) when he is still current content and I get that sweet looking shield from him then it needs to be as good as it can possibly be AND it had better not be able to be replaced by a shield from a ridiculously easy world quest that is also current content. This exact situation happened to me so don’t bother to try to say this kind of stuff doesn’t happen or that it’s fine that it happens. The current system for gear is just really really bad and it feels that way.
I think we have the TF/WF system because of M+ as they needed a system that would also work with new systems like artifact or azerite powers. The problem was how do they make M+ gear in a way that won’t break raiding at all levels of progress for Normal, Heroic, and Mythic raiders over that time. They arrived at a complementary system of progress using RNG. But the 10+ weekly rewards and purchased gear are causing additional problems for Raiders doing less than mythic. Many have fewer than 20 raiding, and of those how many can typically run at that level with their own tanks and healers on a regular basis? This is forming cliques within raiding guilds, and at the same time others are simply buying runs for gold. On top of this, buying RNG 415 possibly bad items causes additional problems with LFG. The content release schedule is far better than it once was long ago, this issue is gearing and the community.
So how can they fix it?
To some degree I feel like feedback is pointless, but here goes:
Gear progression is important. TF should die. It’s unnecessary and creates an ultimately hollow “win”. WF isn’t terrible but would be better combined with a currency system where players who didn’t get lucky can still eventually “Forge” their gear up 5/10 item levels. WF items are free upgrades, and there is again a BiS set to pursue.
Sockets on gear shouldn’t be random! This is almost as bad as TF. In a world where raid farm is about parses, and M+ is about pushing the highest keys, its disappointing to end up ‘competing’ again people with 6-7 sockets when you have 1-2. Bring back static sockets (in no small part so Jewelcrafting is a thing again).
Enchants are boring As an extension of the gem issue, enchanting flexibility/options have been boring for a while. While this dips a little into profession issues, it ties into the gearing system as a whole. Blizzards thought was they wanted items to be usable right away rather than having to go gem/enchant it first. Ultimately though this made gearing really boring.
Tertiary stats are just ok. Speed and Leech were fun (but got nerfed pretty hard) but Avoidance is pretty much unnoticeable.
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If it’s the piece you need, with ideal secondaries and ( in the case of azerite gear) the traits you’re looking for, it’s BiS. Regardless of TF/WF. Yes, some random WQ can drop a higher ilvl, but the chances that it also has ideal secondaries and the traits you want are pretty slim. And, if in the off chance you get a random piece that WFs beyond what you got previously, and it’s an upgrade, what’s the complaint?
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Except for that’s not how it works…
They’ve specifically stated that the point of war/Titan is so that even if you’re doing old content you could still get an upgrade. So you don’t get bored (AP is designed with the same mechanic in mind).
The purpose is to keep you constantly looking for that next bit of power. Which is why I pointed out that I really enjoy completion. As many people do. Complete everything in a season, feel great, and then introduce a new set of things to chase. Not an endless hamster wheel with zero completion.
Legion mage tower was an example of this. Hard content that took a lot of time to complete but man did it feel good to get! No RNG grind it and every now and then you get a new appearance?
Completion, feels good to finish things (though I still procrastinate way too much irl ![:joy:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=6" ":joy:")
)
I’m also not a big fan of Titan/warforging. I’m at the point now where I can only get upgrades (I’m 413 ilvl) from warforging mythic BoD stuff or titanforging M+ stuff.
I find the motivation to run a M+ once a week or so, if even just for the weekly box but it’s insane to think that I need the right item to drop and for it to also titanforge to be an upgrade. So at this point I’m literally only raiding and that’s it.
I was lucky last night and coined a 425 weapon from conclave (I never got a 395 wep last tier, so that was fun (I then grabbed the #1 parse on mythic rastakhan so it must have helped)). But the chance that I will get one of my M+ trinkets at 425 is basically zero.
At this point the burnout will commence after I get a pair of bracers (currently 395 ilvl), we kill mythic Jaina and my character becomes as powerful as it possibly can be. That’s a good thing, right? Well, just knowing that if I really really farmed, I could get even more powerful through titanforging makes it feel incomplete. I see people linking 425 socketed items on various discords and forums and it makes you think “Oh well I could get that if I just ran a few more dungeons.” That’s the burnout mentality.
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I love the idea Chaaka. There should even be a sound effect followed by a laugh track as well as a party announcement of the players bad roll. A visual indictor on the player character might also be warranted.
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I have raided semi hard core in Vanilla TBC & WotLK
I have raided super casual in the next expansions (kids)
I never understood the frothing at the mouth hatred for WF/TF.
Its nice to get an occasional unexpected upgrade.
Where does it stop?
Mythic raiders hate that Heroic raider gets an upgrade
Heroic raider hates the normal raider
Normal raider hates the LFR raider
LFR raider hates the World Quester
World Quester hates the dungeon runner
Why do people look at others gear with such jealously?
Seriously people. It is silly.
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You seem to be attached to this false idea that everyone who hates TF hates it because they dont like others getting gear. For some that may be true, but most of what im seeing in this thread is that people feel that content isnt properly rewarding gear based on difficulty and as such is ruining the overall experience of receiving loot and killing the feeling of progression
Broad generalizations are
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It’s not about what others get.
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Tldr 1800 posts. My thoughts are that I can never truly be done with content because a piece of loot may titanforge. What if I like it when I have everything I need from an instance or I don’t want to do a world quest? No, I have to keep doing content until I have the best possible titanforge out of it. It’s disheartening and makes me feel like I can never finish.
3 Likes