Warforging - A Return

Community WoW Community Council
1

I wanted to open up a thread to get a discussion on Warforging, and the general thoughts and sentiments behind it. For me personally I found that it was an extremely enjoyable system that provided an extra incentive, and could have been perfected with some fine tuning.

One of the personal benefits I saw with warforging is that it provided me with a continued incentive to raid throughout the patch. As it stands currently my weekly activities will include heroic raiding two nights a week, and several M+ dungeons throughout various days. Due to the way the current loot system works the highest ilvl gear I can acquire is through the vault by completing 15+ keys. this means that by a certain point in time I reach a threshold in gear that I can actually utilize from the raid, and my only source of gear comes directly from the vault.

When I am raiding it is purely a social experience - I don’t need any gear from it and I’m not acquiring any resources from it. I don’t think I’m speaking purely for myself when I say that one of the most important parts of raiding, besides having a chance to be social with friends, is the excitement of getting a new piece of gear. It’s been a fundamental part of my raiding experience since I began back during Classic, and it’s something that I felt has been lost ever since warforging was removed.

What warforging did for me is it still provided an opportunity to receive a higher ilvl piece of gear, even if it was randomized and not guaranteed, in a way I wouldn’t normally acquire it. It was an exceptionally feel good experience to get a trinket or a weapon that was able to roll up to mythic quality, it re-created that “cool” factor that I think the game is missing now from the more casual perspective, and it made me excited to go into the raid each week for the opportunity.

A comparison I would like to share on how I see the removal of this system has influenced my game play is the difference between Eternal Palace and the current raid tier Sanctum of Domination.

After getting AOTC on Eternal Palace, we immediately went back into the raid the following week, there wasn’t a break period, and we continued to go in there each week following until Ny’alotha. Some people switched to alts during that time, but for the majority of our core-raiding group it was their mains. Each week provided us an incentive because we knew there was an opportunity to get better gear than we had currently owned through warforging, and each week we were able to get better at the raid until we were effectively speed running it.

Compared to Sanctum of Domination - before even getting AOTC we lost a significant portion of our raiders, and after getting it that number dwindled down even further. I can’t speak to why everyone made the choices that they did, but from my perspective a lot of it had to do with loot. Many of the people who chose to no longer raid, or decided to switch to alts, are still likely to log in to participate in M+ and complete their weekly vault.

Two of the primary antagonists to the idea that I can recall surrounding warforging were the following -

  • Players felt that others were getting an “unfair” advantage, or were getting gear they didn’t deserve.
  • Players felt obligated to run multiple levels of the raid each week.

The first point is one I admittedly don’t understand, and would be happy to discuss it further. From my point of view I don’t see how it offered any sort of unfair advantage. Generally I’ve found that most people will play predominately within their own social groups. This would mean that my own personal activities don’t have any influence, benefit, or detraction from anyone else outside of that social group. My gear and play style are only reflected within those people.

To the second point - that is completely understandable, and one way I can think to fix it is to simply adjust the scaling. LFR can only go to normal, normal can only go to heroic, and heroic can only go to mythic.

I’d like to discuss this further with everyone and get their input. Ultimately for me it boils down to the fact that I would like to continue raiding, but at present there isn’t any benefit to doing so after a certain point.

45 Likes
2

The problem is the RNG aspect of it. Yes, war/titanforging, when it was in the game provided incentives to continue raiding, but its just RNG on top of RNG.

Today, warforging technically exists within the raid. In the form of gem slots and tertiary stats: Avoidance, Speed, and Leech.

I’m not sure about the undeserving aspect of this, but I can resonate with the “unfair advantages” that were felt with the old warforging system. Two players do the exact same content and one gets a piece that is 10% better than the other. That’s not a fun system in my opinion.

Logically, this makes sense to me; but, in actuality, I should not be able to get a Mythic level Jaithys from heroic.

Loot scarcity is a thing in SL. Blizzard said before release that they wanted to reduce the amount of loot in the game. This was their way of incentivizing players to play the game longer, but the actual effect of the change was to make the game less enjoyable.

64 Likes
3

The only time I was OK with warforging is the initial MoP version we had because SOCKETS were GUARANTEED and warforging only went up slightly instead of the mess that was in afterwards.

For me it did the same until sockets were made rng and gear could titanforge really hard. Not only are sockets high in value, titanforging is somewhat rare so it added way too many layers of RNG and I really didn’t like that. It felt like you were opening lootboxes instead of playing an mmo. You could never “complete” a character and that’s something I really loved and still do in this day.

First you had to get the item which can be a lot of rng as it is (Phial/IQD/Scale etc. anyone?). Then it has to proc a socket. Then it has to Titanforge. Then (even better) if it titanforges a lot/max. What if you also want avoidance/leech?

For me it felt like it undermined the playtime I put into the game and made it feel very unfair when people who I could see basically login once a week were walking in same or better gear when I was spending a lot of time farming for such gear, hoping MAYBE this run is the one? It just makes me think, why am I wasting so much time effectively playing a slotmachine?

I don’t mind or care that the people are getting such gear because in the end they’re my friends or randoms I don’t know and might never meet again. It just makes me feel bad that I am putting a lot of time in the game that gives me nothing in return. There is no reward at all. I am just flipping the coin dungeon after dungeon hoping to get something that never comes.

Even if I get lucky, it’s not a feeling of “OH MAN I’M SO HAPPY!”, it’s a “Thank god it finally happened”. A big relief more than anything.

For me as long as the class I play is fun I will run the raid even if I get no gear just for the fun of it. Having max gear just meant the potential dps I can do almost entirely depends on me. Alternatively (xd) I also like playing and trying different alts because now I suddenly have a lot of time freed up which is something I really enjoy.

33 Likes
4

I’m a huge fan of Warforging. I think it adds a lot of flavour to loot in general.

It was (with many WoW systems in the past) good but not perfect and instead of iterating and refining the system to make it better, it was scrapped. Which to me is quite sad.

A large portion of complaints with it from my own scenes was that old raid trinkets were BiS but only when titanforged. I think that this cannot come back, if an item is from a raid it should be capped to that season of ilvl in terms of its WF/TF capability.

With Valor Upgrading for M+ I think Warforging/Titanforging has an excellent space to spice up loot there as it just saves you Valor but should be strictly capped with the amount it can upgrade by to not invalidate Valor completely as this could lead to weird scenarios early in a new Season where people are farming for a WF/TF trinket so they don’t need to farm Valor later in a season (and to also gain early power gains that should otherwise be inaccessible).

Imo, everything should go to Mythic base ilvl, but Mythic should WF higher (+6). Add some excitement to lower difficulties. The insane RNG of an LFR titanforged mythic ilvl item is so low it really impacts nobody, adds excitement and isn’t a statistically high enough probability to warrant farming it. It’s just excitement.

However, there should never be a scenario where an item from any difficulty apart from Mythic is the best item you can get. Might sound elitist, but there needs to be a tangible loot reward for engaging with the highest difficulty of content.

15 Likes
5

Gotta disagree on this one. I don’t want to spend time in LFR every week looking for mythic level raid loot. It’s RNG on RNG at that point.

Yes, mythic raid loot should be the best raid loot available, but doing the raid on lower difficulties should not give mythic level loot, when sometimes it’s hard enough to get it to drop at the regular ilvl anyways (rogue daggers, OWS, etc)

51 Likes
6

A suggestion that I keep seeing from general discussions btw is that you should be allowed to upgrade manually to the warforge/titanforge cap. IF the system is to make a return in any shape or form, I think its is a great idea because the only thing it would do is just save you a bit of time instead of just being something you can never reach without getting very lucky yourself.

24 Likes
8

I think that would be a great idea, especially considering that it would remove part of the RNG aspect, and it would definitely give an incentive to keep running the raid.

I think a good example of this was the shards of domination. By the time most people were clearing whatever difficulty they chose, it’s unlikely that they had the shards maxed out. However I know personally it was fun to keep going back in for a bit to keep getting the embers and eventually get to rank 5.

Sorry, forgot to hit the reply button originally!

2 Likes
9

I wouldn’t be as opposed to a system that allowed you to upgrade your gear by X ilvls which had a chance to drop but is also fully attainable without RNG.

That was my biggest issue with Titanforging. There was no way to ensure the upgrade.

But I’ll reiterate on an earlier point I made, technically warforging still exists in SoD. It’s just tertiary stats and gem slots.

5 Likes
10

Yes, Stygian embers could be used for this, however it’s a very non-alt-friendly alternative with the way embers work right now. If they were uncapped or account wide it would be better

1 Like