No doubt, anyone who was there in Vanilla would agree the gearing now is much, much better. It could be tweaked to work even better, because yes there is too much gear to get and not enough direction to follow to get your best stuff, but Vanilla’s 3 or so pieces per 40 man raid was just ludicrous.
For sure, absolutely no doubt about that, totally believable.
Not even, M0 drops 400 and if you cannot get to that level within a week of getting to 120 you are worse than I don’t know what you are even doing here, literally I have no idea what you do when you log in, because every source of gear that is basically free will get you to around 395-400 within a week of doing bare minimal.
I honestly think it’s only very slightly easier to get good gear, compared to vanilla. To be more specific, it’s easier now to get good gear without interdependence on a guild.
To get great or excellent gear, it’s a lot more difficult. Mythic raids are harder than any of the vanilla raids ever were, and there simply was no PVP equivalent in vanilla (Don’t say vanilla had PVP gear, I’m talking about great to excellent gear quality).
I think the big difference is not gear. Ease of getting good gear is a side effect of the real problem. The real problem is the ilvl inflation between tiers, coupled with the ilvl inflation even to simple questing gear. So, even world-quests are giving better gear than BFA season 2, so it renders that content inert and makes it seem like current content doesn’t matter because as soon as the next patch comes out, you will be essentially boosted to the current ilvl.
I think the raiding path to gear and the weekly Conquest path to gear are of about the right difficulty. Everything else is way too easy. Mythic+ is making raiding as a gearing path pointless, for example.
There was a small conversation going in the zone Drustvar last night. People agreed it was pretty easy to gear up. People also thought it was nice they could gear quickly to get into the content they enjoyed. I agreed with them, it kind of sucks to have to slog thru weeks of content to gear up for content you want to be doing. Now you can get there pretty quickly and jump right in.
It’s all kind of personal I guess. Some folks want it to take time and get a feeling of progression, other just want to get in there and do it.
edit: it’s still progression I suppose just some like to take a long time at it while others do not.
Aren’t you on record as saying 10-12 keys are heroic difficulty - which I agree with, by the way? Yet they provide gear that’s 10 ilvl higher than heroic raiding, the equivalent of 3 key levels.
Last I checked, there were several times as many people timing 22s as completing 23s, so the difference in difficulty between completing and timing is clearly less than 1 key level. Making people time for gear would fix at most 1/3 of the problem; you’d still have to substantially increase the difficulty or reduce the reward at each key level.
How many of them actually jump into that content? Our guild has given up on its partial raid runs in 8.2 because by the time we were doing the raid, it dropped nothing we needed. So now everybody is doing Classic instead.
The drops are 430, same as heroic. And yeah, I’ve said before that 10-12 is about the same as heroic raiding in difficulty. I’ve also said drops should be 445 at >= +15 and the weekly chest should just go away.
Removing the award for “completion” and tying it to timing a key would get rid of all the freeloaders, it wasn’t a suggestion meant to lower the efficiency of M+.
But yeah, failing a +10 and getting 440 loot is dumb.
Um, no. I love benthic gear, it allows me to run around in the world like a boss without resorting to instances that both kill my computer and my faith in the human spirit. Upgrading it is a bit repetitive, but that’s an issue unto itself. I’ve never felt like I was missing out and never feel I need “bis” grear, just good gear, in fact it saved me some token money because otherwise I would’ve tokened into “bis on ah” anyway.
I have what feels like a reasonably complete character even though I solo now and can only queue, and I don’t even enjoy that. I NEVER would feel that way in classic. I did TBC solo and it kind of sucked, I unsubbed right after capping a single character because I was still in quest greens, which meant no one would take me, which meant I had nothing interesting to do.
I’ve only stayed subbed over the years because of QoL improvements, this expansion is not the best but the game has only gotten better for me over time. Are we on a downturn from legion, yes, artifact weapons was one of the best ideas ever followed up by one of the worst. Doesn’t mean I’d go back to “solo player die” style gameplay though.
It is good the people that went to classic, they can play something they enjoy. I’d guess the people that gear up and jumped into the content they wanted to, was all of them.
It’s not that it’s too easy, it’s that it’s too random to get good gear. You can’t really target any BiS items anymore because of titanforging and random sockets.
Mythic+10 drops 440s weekly, which is 10 ilvl above heroic raiding weekly lockout gear. And timing a +10 and getting 440s is at least as dumb as completing a +11 over the timer and getting a 440, since the timed +10 is easier.
You can get 430s from spammable M+, but that’s to be compared to what drops from the spammable trash before Sivara, not to the weekly lockout gear.
I’ve gotten a 440 or 445 item every time I’ve done a heroic raid this tier, too. With how common forging is, it’s bleh.
The weekly chest is one guaranteed warforge per week, no matter how much m+ you run. That’s probably the best way to think about it. I’d honestly love to replace the “reroll” guy with a guy that lets you buy one “titanforge” token per week and you can apply it to whatever gear you get from any source.
Most alts/casuals are rolling around 385-400 gear at best from WQs and things. I’m about as casual as it gets without raiding, and I’m at 422.
There has always been some method of catchup gear when new expansions/major patches take place. The Mythic and Heroic raiders will always have the edge on gearing, and that’s fine.
I would arguably say M+ is more challenging than everything but mythic raiding. You deserve to give yourself more credit but im honestly a level of challenge = value of reward type of guy.
I generally agree with OP. If all you’ve done is collect bear asses you should have an ilevel that makes it clear your level of challenge has been collecting bear asses. Rewards should scale to the level of difficulty in task completion. They need to offer a different type of reward for time invested.