Much worse than that. Gear is boring so who cares? The only variation to most gear in current WoW is what combination of secondary stats are on any given piece. Then go look at classic itemization. It’s a world of difference.
Nope. With the complexity of secondaries - you can get lots of gear but still not perform very well.
If your guild falls apart that easily, it wasn’t going to do much better if those other sources of gear were removed.
Good gear doesn’t make up for bad play. All the gear does is make sure your character can make a dent in current content; you still have to know what you’re doing.
Then what would the “timegating” people think?
There is no investment and almost everything is too easily replaced. That is the problem. Then toss on the catch up gear and it adds to the issue. There was nothing wrong with expecting players to progress. I guess they just thought it would be better for the game if everyone could get right to the end game content all the time.
In my opinion that is a big part of what is wrong. The journey is supposed to be important. It clearly isn’t. Everything is disposable with little longevity or importance. I mean I get a green and it matters. I get a blue it is NICE then I get an EPIC in CLASSIC as I level and it is like OMG! Having things matter makes for a better game. Hope they learn. All I am saying.
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This. They need to return to the system of gear progression. Still blows my mind how massively wasteful Blizzard is with their content in comparison to FFXIV.
Raid no longer current patch content? Good bye! Player usage drops off by 90% and the other 10% are only running it for transmog.
This I 100% agree with…
world content shouldnt reward anything but greens.
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“Good” means a lot of different things to different people.
My raid nights: 1900-2200 wed/thurs
My playtime outside of those: ???
6 hours a week for mythic raiding seems pretty reasonable.
I’ve made this exact same post a few times now and gear is simultaneously too easy to get and too hard to get meaningful gear and nothing feels rewarding to get.
Due to having four raid difficulties and infinitely scaling m+ dilutes the rewards we do get to the point that you can’t even tell when your character get’s stronger and you have to resort to running simulations to find out if something is in fact an upgrade.
But what if the message is: “If you like raiding, you will raid”?
Is this a permeation of “forced to be social” in Classic? We know how that turned out. The moment players didn’t need to interface with “unpleasant” players - the majority stopped. I guess the community wasn’t as wonderful as everyone remembers - or we’d still be grouping regardless of need.
I know I’m still raiding - and there is very little in there to justify the time spent. I like to raid. I do like to M+, but not everyone does, so it’s hard to bring people together, let alone work up to a challenge. However, I will say we are slowly acclimatizing.
I don’t have the answers, naturally - but I am sure interested in where we are headed.
I wouldnt say the easy gearing is what killed retail. If people drowning in welfare epics actually was killing the game, wow would be dead by now instead of floundering for 10 years.
I think its a combination of gearing, class design, and systems that circumvent wanting to talk to and group up with players (lfg, lfr, realm hopping, etc).
I unsubbed in BfA early on because of ilevel scaling making even my blued out character weak, you need something like benthic gear just to feel somewhat adequate in the world, and currently it’s the only reason I’m still playing.
And believe it or not at this point 385 or whatever isn’t even that great, and upgrading is tedious if that’s all you’re going to do (but it is a good carrot, I’ll give them that). The problem is characters feeling powerless, as a solo player I’m thankful for catchup mechanisms.
Without them you end up how it was for me in TBC, by the time I capped a character I was too late and no one was running normals anymore, that could easily be a thing again if they didn’t give us catchups. It only took a couple days to get full benthic and a few upgrades (the first one is free) but I don’t feel OP against the content, so I don’t see what the problem is.
Raiders and Mythic Dungeoneers still get far better gear. Even getting all this benthic to 430 will be extremely repetitive, and 430 is barely competitive for those activities. Again, the upside is they corrected the “I never feel strong” problem adequately with this gear, but it is not a cost effective replacement to instanced play if you’re more into that.
So everyone can “get good” at whatever they want, even if that’s just dailies and running around the world they won’t just utterly suck like the bad old days.
The bigger problem with retail gearing is how powerful gear gets throughout the expansion. It’s one of my biggest reasons for bailing on retail for classic. When you hit max level in BFA you do maybe 7K or 8K dps. With gear from the last raid you’ll be doing 30K to 40K dps. Why do we have to do 5 or 6 times more dps in the final raid as opposed to the first raid? This problem has been around since Cataclysm. Raid gear scales way too much with each new raid. If dps only went up by 20% throughout the raid tiers of an expansion people would still run old raids and blizz wouldn’t have to hand out crazy high gear from world quests. In Vanilla and BC the first tier raid gear was still decent even in the final raid. Now anything from the first tier becomes obsolete halfway through the second tier. It’s unrewarding system that makes all of the raids feel unimportant.
That’s because we have four difficulties of raids and to balance the ilvl out for that stuff they have to inflate the numbers. We need to go back to single difficulty raids with electable hard modes for the elitist out there.
This is a symptom of e-sports ruining the game.
Enlighten me on how you got full 445 to 455 in a few hours?
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You could definitely pull the entire area for a WQ in mythic 0 ilevel gear during 8.0
Highly disagree. I was in Nazjatar in 120 quest greens doing just fine on this Druid. Minus WM which I never turn off, but that’s another story. Got insta-gibbed more than a few times by other players.
My point being that at the pinnacle of the loot WQ’s offer (390-400), if you still feel weak you’re doing something wrong. Will you able to go into Nazjatar and run into questing areas as Death, Destroyer of Worlds? No, but you shouldn’t have any issues with any mob outside of the elite WQ mini-bosses. Why do you need to be stronger than that???
I played in TBC as well and had zero issues finding heroic dungeon and SSL/Mag/Gruul raid groups via my guild. Solo play was not the intent of the design in those days, you had to be social. Also, anyone could queue up for PvP and start the grind for honor point loot to get entry level epics.
Speaking on better loot in higher difficulty content, this is true and should always be true. If they’re going to offer such powerful loot, it should be. It sucks when RNG screws me in M+ and my time could’ve been better spent collecting bear asses in Nazjatar by myself rather than conquering difficult challenges with other players in an MMO. Also, 430 is a ridiculously competitive ilevel. That’s quite literally heroic raid ilevel, for collecting bear asses… You could effectively time +10s consistently at that ilevel, I could time +8s on this Druid at 405. This is part of the problem.
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the gear called azurite really hasn’t been good from wqs since so many rng traits