I would argue normal difficulty still needs to be reviewed. And in before the hardcore elitists: NORMAL raids are intended for friends and family raiding. It should be tuned to be a sufficient challenge for 233-239 gear you get from the zone, with one legendary at best. You shouldn’t need to run LFR to get tier sets to run a normal raid. There should not be a “meta” for normal raids. That’s why you can’t just “trickle down” the difficulty from Heroic to Normal. Normal raiders have different challenges to overcome - some of them physical, some visual and some technological. That’s why some mechanics need to be blatantly clear, or slowed enough where someone with a high ping, or arthritis can react in time, or have the mechanic not be an insta-kill on failure (unless you are literally just standing in bad). We know Blizzard should be able to do this, because they were able to do this.
Normal raids are intended for the average player - which is why there is no achievement for killing the end boss. Blizzard may have forgotten that promise made back in Mists, but I have not.
Blizzard has turned normal raids into a barrier to entry for heroic raiding, which does a disservice to friends and family raiders as well as heroic raiders who have to “waste” their time in a “trivial” difficulty that technically they have no business being involved with. And while there are pugs who are cheerfully clearing normal, those pugs are not friends and family raiders. You younger folks probably won’t remember that friends and family guilds existed, but those who came from Wrath certainly should, since Wrath had the largest population of casual raiders WoW ever had (Ghostcrawler effectively firing the friends and family player base in Cataclysm, which is why so many guilds collapsed back then – guilds which had been around since launch, but died before Blizzard implemented flex - -all because Ghostcrawler (and his team) decided to raise the difficulty floor on raiding and have friends and family raiders “get gud.” The end result was the players left the game - and the same will happen now if Blizzard doesn’t re-learn that lesson).
In any event, my recommendation is that perhaps a few of the devs actually run with a friends and family team to see where their delta in expectations is; because frankly I think the devs are basically surrounded by an echo chamber of raiders who dismiss “lesser” difficulties as being trivial and not worth the effort. The devs need to either listen to friends and family raiders or see for themselves how the designs are not working as intended for the difficulty.
Normal raids should, if balanced correctly, be the path to onboarding more players into raiding by making the experiences in normal sufficiently but nor overwhelmingly challenging. LFR should only be there for players who don’t want to raid but want to see the story.
8 Likes
These types of casts are all over the place. Are they all bugs or are they intended as a “HA HA, made you waste your interrupt”?
How about make them account bound rather than soulbound, that way I could sent them to alts who could actually use the gear.
15 Likes
Ooookay…
So, to make sure we all understand… Instead of making these BoA, or making the items purchased BoA, so they would actually be USEABLE for us in some way, we instead are going to have even more used bag space than we had before at a faster rate than before…? Am I reading this right?
Because I don’t think anyone, not one single person, actually has a use for these items. By the time we have the relics to buy even one of these, we are already getting Cypher Equipment at equal or higher item level WITH POWERS ON THEM, thus making the relic gear literally trash in comparison.
This relic gear is little more than cosmetic at this point, when it could have been an AMAZING catch up / gear bump mechanic for alts.
Please Blizzard… PLEASE just make the blasted relics BoA so we can mail them to alts! They already take up the bag space, so make it actually WORTH taking up the bag space!
7 Likes
So you’re telling me that FFXIV content releases perfect and never gets any adjustments?
If so can you explain to me why I see adjustments here?
Just make Sandworn Relics a non item currency since they are useless. 246 is minimally helpful when by the time you acquire enough to buy thing you have cypher gear above 246. It’s just transmog, might as well make it “Cosmetic”.
So genuine question here. If the raids and new dungeons need this much tuning, what was the point of such an extensive and long ptr cycle? Retail is basically an extended ptr at this point. Does blizzard even do any internal testing?
2 Likes
that’s nice but my characters are getting 249s now. Never understood the point of this gear - to have made it any value to anyone the cost should have been reduced to one quarter - even your double isn’t enough really.
this is my bags for my main character who has been playing daily in there - I have 220 sandworn relics after a month.
https://prnt.sc/mj8-RyjDUa5N
1 Like
Any chance we can get the sandworn gear convertible to tier pieces at the creation catalyst??
That would do a lot for more open world focused players, and shouldn’t affect anyone competitively. All the world first stuff will have been concluded by the time the catalyst opens up, and the built in time gating would prevent more casual folks from being fully tiered for a bit anyway.
People running high keys or raids will have already acquired their tier sets, and it would make catching up on alts a lot easier as well!
2 Likes
…you realize they hotfix these things on live servers all the time right? Like, this is something they have always done. The PTR isn’t for perfecting everything, the sample size is too small for them to adequately judge all the myriad factors that could affect encounters. It’s a tool that lets them work out bigger pain points which they can refine later as necessary. That’s one of the benefits of it being a live game
You know they had feedback from testers who said that streets and gambit were way overturned right? They chose to ignore feedback again and released it in a terrible state only to have players brick keys and suffer through it before they needed it. The question is why have a ptr and ask for feedback if you’re just going to ignore it and just do whatever you want? This has always been a problem and one of the many reasons ppl have quit
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Or make them bind on account, so you can farm them on multiple chars and mail them to alts who don’t have the Cypher upgrades yet.
Or raise the gear ilvl to 252/259.
Two relatively simple solutions that would make these at least have SOME discernable purpose.
They already are useful.
They are how you get tier sets without having to do grouped, instanced content.
Did they say they could be converted to tier? I know people have asked for this, but as far as I know they never officially made that a thing.
If so, then great.
They could when I logged onto the PTR 10 min ago.
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Okay, so that is an expected change for 9.2.5, but not live, correct? If so that’s a good change based on feedback!
Neither of them were touched on Mythic though?
I only tested on PTR because I don’t think you can currently interact with it on live.
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oh that’s what they are for - they are taking up space and since i am short on bag space I was thinking about buying gear I don’t need just for the room. Glad I didn’t
Yes this was a big disappointment to me as well as not getting the rep and “starter” gear for skipping all the intro stuff with my alt. At least make the relics account bound so we can gear up alts until we obtain stuff that is beyond that Ilevel.