Have no opinion on wf, or tf. Could care less. What makes me upset is having to wait for the second season of Kobra Kai.
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It bugs me too.
people donât even do content anymore they just wait for a âkekforgeâ
Gear has been a treadmill for a long time now and it most likely always will be. Thatâs the nature of MMORPGs. If WF/TF invalidates gear, then replacing gear with the next tier in a couple of months invalidates it. In the long run, the only thing about gear that matters is aesthetics, which WF/TF doesnât affect.
Letâs be real, the only negatives of the system are psychological ones created by players with, yes, an unhealthy relationship with the game. It all boils down to jealousy, gatekeeping, or addiction. Iâm fairly confident Blizzard knows this but canât say it because it isnât good PR speak, considering the system has been around for almost six years now with minimal changes.
The WF/TF system itself has no drawbacks. Gear stays the same as it always has been except now you might actually get something useful from content that otherwise has no upgrades for you. You do not need WF/TF gear for anything. Encounters are not balanced around a raid with full TF gear.
If people feel a need to endlessly grind content they donât enjoy just to maybe get a perfect titanforged piece then thatâs, quite frankly, a flaw with the player, not with the system.
Iâll say this though, the only thing WF/TF might have a tiny effect on is the world first race, but no more than the RNG thatâs always been in the game. But judging from the fact that the same guild consistently gets world first, Iâd say it doesnât seem to matter much, and even if it did, the benefits it brings to the majority of players far outweighs the extra layer of insiginificant rng it adds to the handful of players in the world first race.
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No, WoW didnât use to work that way. In vanilla I scoured the world for the best spellpower gear. Until the tier revamp early BWL none of the mage tier actually had spellpower on it. And the bulk of those blues I hunted down were rare spawns in dungeons which meant running the dungeon over and over and over again for it to spawn and then drop the right item and then for me to win it. And it wasnât just my mage that I had to do that kind of stuff on. WoW is gear. Hell, in almost every RPG ever skill is the least impactful factor of performance. Itâs almost always level or experience (or other equivalent RPG system) and gear that are the primary factors that determine well you do your job.
âAnd no. I deserve to beat anyone I would if gear didnât exist.â
Then youâre playing the wrong genre of game. Have fun playing Apex or Fortnite!
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Similar experience, different reason and time.
LFR in Mists replaced heroics for me. It was strange going from Wrath doing heroics daily plus raiding, to Cata doing nothing, to doing LFR almost exclusively.
Heroics have been dead content to me for 4 expacs.
Legion got me back into mythic 5s, but only because of crafting. I did LFR then mostly for completion.
Now I donât feel incentive to do any group content. I get the philosophy, do whatever you want. Itâs compelling on paper, and I agree 5-25 group content should be equal. But I donât think solo content should be. There should be social and tangible incentive to go from solo to group content.
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My enjoyment of the game is gated behind excessive layers of RNG. WF/TF compounds that gripe with progression. Trivial content being over-rewarding has a negative impact on the endgame for me.
Warfronts are boring and mindless, yet why are they are offering gear that is on par with Heroic raids. That, in my opinion, is stupid. Trivial content should give trivial rewards.
If Heroic Warfonts are as difficult as Normal mode Jaina, then by all means, make Heroic Warfronts reward 385+ gear.
Rewards should be relative to difficulty. The Thunderforged model was perfectly fine too. Bonuses are fine. Mega-Jackpots are stupid. On principle alone, trivial content should never offer rewards on par with the toughest content in the game. No matter how rare jackpots may be, it doesnât matter.
WF/TF is grossly inflating the player power in the game. Yet, the same people who complain about IO scores and AOTC for Normal modes are the people who donât feel WF/TF is an issue. The only reason why groups use IO and AOTC is because your item level is meaningless. You could be a terrible player with a great item level, so in order to weed you out, they use something else.
1100 IO needed for a +6? You can thank a garbage gear progression system for that. (Obligatory, run your own groups/keys.)
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So do me a favor, count up all the forged ilvls on your gear. Iâd be shocked if forging accounts for more than 5 ilvl total. And thatâs me being generous. Iâd do the math myself but your profile doesnât link to a character. Hell, Iâd be shocked if you could find a single character in the game that it accounts for +10 ilvl to the character. The idea that forging is inflating ilvls is bunk.
If your issue is stuff higher than say LFR level then you can point at warfront which occurs once every ~3 weeks for a guaranteed 400, Ivus which is on the same schedule, and 385 emissary quests. Forging is having very little impact on ilvl in respect to those things.
Edit: I just looked at all of my toons to see, the highest any one of them has is 50 ilvls total from forging. Which results a negligible increase in overall ilvl. Just over 3 ilvl from that. Thatâs not crazy inflation.
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OP is completely right.
There has never been a point where gear has mattered less. You have warfronts which are braindead content in which the developers themselves had to come out and clarify that itâs possible to lose them âreward heroic level gear, that can titan forge to the best gear in the game. Thatâs right, the best gear possible can be awarded from content you canât fail.
A monkey would have axed this titanforge system long ago.
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+65. And 4 pieces cannot Titanforge, obviously. 11 Slots can roll those bonuses, and 4 are not WF/TF.
(Due to itemization on rings, I could make this +75 overall, but that defeats the purpose.)
FWIW, my main is only 395. I play ~6 hrs per week. (4 hours of casual raiding, 2 hours to do WQs and such, given the rewards are decent on caches.)
There is too much good loot in the game for trivial content. That is part of the issue. WF/TF just makes future runs less meaningful (as does no WF/TF, but at least thereâs a point where you can focus on getting better itemization, rather than play the lottery).
When these huge rewards TF, itâs just making the other content youâd normally do less meaningful. If they were locked to 400, Iâd honestly still have issues with it. If they were a once-per-patch reward, Iâd honestly have no issues with it.
Thereâs a lot I dislike about the progression in this game. Every thing adds up to a bigger issue.
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So your total ilvl is increased by ~4.3 from all of that. Thatâs not inflation to any substantive degree. Based on what youâre saying youâre using a 2h weapon. Youâd be 391 without forging. Think about that for a moment.
Regarding the latter part of your post, that makes clear what camp your in. Iâm not impacted in any way, shape, or form by gear other people get so I donât care at all. It doesnât make me want to do higher difficulties any less. It doesnât devalue the upcoming gear at all. Iâm not worried about how much of any upgrade something is, whether itâs an upgrade is what matters to me. And if I get a high forge that equals or exceeds the gear from the next tier that just means I can pass gear from that slot to guildies right away.
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4 overall ilvl isnt something to scoff at. Most classes grow exponentially with gear. With at ilvl 385 with 10 stacks of re-origination array sim dps was around 18.5k, at ilvl 340 it was around 11.7k. When you plot it and fit a best fit function then parse out every 4 ilvls, theres a 4.4% relative increase in DPS every time, from 392 to 396 ilvl its roughly 900 dps. Obviously this isnât a perfect metric but trying to say that an overall ilvl increase of 4 isnât big is silly.
It does devalue upcoming gear. If I have a 410 pair of gloves with socket from M+, I got a pair of 415 ilvl gloves off of mythic JFM. The new gloves are a downgrade, so now I have a pair of 415 gloves sitting in my bag that I canât trade, canât wear and if I want to be able to trade stuff in future canât throw away. At not point will I get an upgrade from mythic that will replace my current gloves unless a TF happens. That is devaluing future gear, where a 400 ilvl source outstrips the 415 ilvl source making whatever Iâm getting from the 415 ilvl source irrelevant unless that lucky TF happens on the right boss when I get loot and with the right item. The post above you was literally describing this and it has nothing to do with other people.
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I donât like that WF/TF can get gem slots and extra stats but not always. It seems like they should get them automatically just by being WF. The xpacs donât last long enough for the vast majority to want to farm for top TF.
And yes I have a JC, and yes I want to craft and sell gems. But the other bonus mods are cool too.
IF they do add WF/TF to low level 1-60 dungeon drops, like they should. I hope it doesnât have the randomness of slots/mods. No one wants to farm that much for top tier TF.
Right. Just like they wouldnât have launched a partially finished expansion that essentially stayed in beta mode for many months and Iâm sure they wouldnât have ever released anything as terrible as the azerite system. Blizzard has plenty of foresight and is totally in touch with their player base.
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Youâre aware that in just FIFTEEN ilvls weâre doing nearly DOUBLE the damage we did last tier?
Other factors play into this. Azerite rings are a big one. Itâs closer to 40-70% depending on player skill and itemization. (Read: âA lot, but not double.â)
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I understand the point you are trying to make. It is essentially impossible to acquire all of the upgrades necessary to get a completely fully fledged BIS piece of gear, so why bother even trying to attain that? But at the end of the day, it really is our choice to skip it because we consider it to not be worth the time. The point to my post wasnât to argue against yours, but rather say its all a perspective.
That item with all of its bonusâ is, technically, at its BIS. But its our choice to even bother going after it. There are no doubt people that feel they need to be the best they can and feel the need to constantly roll the dice attempting to get some sort of upgrade. But there are also others, like you and even me, who would never bother with it because its not worth our time. I was just trying to show that there are people with the opposing perspective, and that just because me or you donât think its worth it, we shouldnât just ignore those that do think its worth it.
The game does change, and maybe some people donât want to. But people do want something they can work toward and achieve. BIS was, at one point, a reasonable task to complete, and was changed into a lottery without a new challenge to take its place.
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M+ cache is always 410 baseline and will always be at least warforged
The new challenge is do the highest content you can and get the best gear you can. Ez. sorted
Yep 5th ring is a thing
You make a good point. But I do think we can approach a middleground for everybody. The MOP system seems to be a very popular alternative and would work perfectly for all the varied points of view.
If that chance at an upgrade is exciting and keeps the game fresh for some, we donât have to entirely remove it. But by using the mop system, where we can invest our time and currency into still achieving the same end result, it makes it fair. We could still have gear that upgrades, but all of those upgrades are also attainable through your own personal work through either Valor points or some other similar system. It could still be exciting to get those upgrades for people, but it wouldnât feel like its completely in the hands of rng whether you get better gear.
Also a cap on upgrades, both random and earned, would be necessary. As others have argued in this thread, it is a problem when significantly lower level gear can randomly be upgraded to raid quality for no reason. Having a cap would prevent lower level gear from overshadowing higher level gear, and also give that end goal to players to reach their now BIS.
As much as some people would love one way or the other, compromising is the best option in my opinion.
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