What would wow look like if blizzard remove item level from the game?

Community General Discussion
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Im curious :joy:

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Probably would be pretty dead. :skull_and_crossbones:

I have woken at reset time which is the middle of the night in Australia and there will be a full room of people waiting to get gear dopamine or disappointment.

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Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!

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For pug raids, we’d line up in Dalaran to be inspected, if you were fully gemmed and enchanted, you’d probably get into the raid. Typically you’d have the trash + first boss to prove you’re worth it, then they start to cut the people at the bottom lol

I actually preferred pre-gear score WoW, it split up my guild, half of us hated it and wanted to be judged on the merit of our performance, and the other half loved to have a number to assign to people because it’s easier to create a cut-off point where you can exclude anyone that hasn’t done content at a certain level.

I’m not saying people were never judged on achievements or w/e, but things were a lot nicer before we had so many ways to screen and judge each other.

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ESO does that and it’s one of the core things I dislike about an otherwise decent action RPG… There’s nothing to strive for outside of the set bonuses but then once you have them you can just recreate them at max power each time without ever needing to work to get more. I enjoy the grind of increasing ilvl and WoW would be unrecognizable without that grind at this point.

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Not showing the number doesn’t mean it wouldn’t exist. It would still be there for the game to determine how many stats any given piece has. And players would just get an addon to display it anyway.

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If you removed item level, how would you set and determine player power?

8

Games over.

Ilvl and gear lording is what keeps elitists going.

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Good gear has never been easier to get you have 6 slots that you realistically cannot craft and 2 of those slots you just spend dinars on. the other 4? tier gear isn’t uncommon in vault so… Even if you limit yourself to something very casual like say 6 hours a week that’s enough to do at least 4 10s and be very close to someone who plays a ton. What is there to lord over at this point?

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With the addon that used to do it before wow just made it official.

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(Item level has been in the game since vanilla)

We aren’t talking addons or display as far as I am aware.

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The only game that I have ever played where gear level progressed to a certain point and then just flat out stopped, was Guild Wars II. It was a fun game to play and it did well in terms of adding content to keep players busy but to be honest, even there, other forms of advancement were incorporated such as the skills for riding mounts of various types. Without further levelling or gear improvements, most players would need something else to add to their characters or else they would start to feel that their gameplay has gone stagnant.

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item power should still be there in the game. but it should stay relevant or something called horizontal progression

People would be doing more grindy contents on many different classes provided the contents are interesting. Even when the contents are grindy, people always have enough item levels to do the grind and not worrying about being left behind to be contributing to their teams

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Other raiders? Server first etc?

If there’s people still playing Mario 64 to beat world records there will be people playing WoW to try doing the same.

15

No difference really. It’s just a reference number for the baseline power of the item and allows players to easily compare items.

The alternative is just assessing the item stats which the game does for you anyways, No math required.

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There’s a huge difference. You are talking about a system that people can naturally progress through and notice that they are getting stronger, versus… nothing.

So yes, there’s a huge difference and removing people’s ability to have fun to see their character grow would likely kill off the game.

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17

People would still become stronger… and they would notice it… stat gain is power gain.

The only difference is a little reference number. Stills works the same without it.

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Basic psychology disagrees with you immensely. Folks being told “you are stronger now” without any reference point that provides a real tangible way to refer it doesn’t feel like power. There’s a reason why they removed the “+0.1”-talents; because they felt like a hassle to get to the actual power increases back when we had those.

Even when you could select them several times they still never made it as clear as “Your ability now does X.” One of the best examples of this is how Corruption back in the day was an instant cast only if you took the corruption talent to 5/5. But at no point did it say “Corruption is now instant-cast.”

There’s several magnitudes of difference between being told “Corruption have a 2.0 seconds reduced cast time” and “Corruption becomes instant.”
Sorry but you are simply just wrong - doesn’t matter if it mechanically works the same way when the game fundamentally feels differently between these two. Which we can also use a more recent example of when PvP gear was removed and stats were normalized instead and guess what… folks didn’t like that they now lost their progression because they were PvP players.

You can like it or not, but you are just wrong if you think they are the same.

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20

As in just remove seeing ilvl? The community would do exactly as they did before and create their own solution.

If you mean just remove gear scaling? I’d probably put money on the game dying rather quickly

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