Why are people so weird about loot in the lower levels?

Community General Discussion
1

If you ask a mythic raider or a guy who farms mythic 14s loot is just a tool. It doesn’t hold any value and outside of a few slots ( trinkets and crafted items) isn’t actively thought about.

Why is it then that in the lower difficulties people seem to oddly worship loot and campaign to have gearing be dragged out and be more time consuming?

Full heroic is something you knock out week 1. Full 639 is just timegated its not some mark of skill or merit…

Is there a way to get these players more invested in the game play or at the least what the real rewards are aka transmog?

2 Likes
2

I imagine everyone has something important to them. I’m more interested in farming mogs and getting ready for player housing. At the end of the day, there is only one pure fact about this game.

This whole game is just pixels, and they belong to Blizzard. We cannot take any of it with us.

2 Likes
3

It is true that lower level people tend to be very petty about even small amounts of low quality loot. It is not dissimilar from poor people in real life. You can see a glimpse of this if you watch any daytime courtroom TV show. Most of the litigants are poor people, often on public assistance, suing each other over paltry amounts of money and petty nonsense. Few well-to-do, professional people are so willing to debase themselves in that manner.

Poverty truly makes cretins of people.

1 Like
4

I think my confusion is the popularity of for a lack of a better term inflicting the punishments of the real world on the fake one.

No accomplishment in wow save for the extreme outliners like world first, mdi and pvp tournaments will ever enrich a person. Its entertainment nothing more.

Why is there such a overwhelming drive for people to have " work" to do that isn’t centered around the thrill of beating something they find challenging?

1 Like
5

They are likely weary of the game and hope that scarcity will bring back some nostalgic sense of meaning to them. I don’t think newer players want loot to be more scarce or gear progression to be lengthened at all.

6

You think so?

I can understand some rarity but its already absurd… say a dungeon drops three items and my proposal is that it always drops a item for you.

That means on average that is a 1 in three runs to get the item you need.

There are 18 gear slots in wow. Simple math says that means one character at max difficulty level would need on average 54 runs to BiS gear ( I know there are variables like how many drops rng etc.)

People are arguing 54 dungeons runs at roughly 30mins a piece is to trivial and rewarding for there to be a sizable time investment… its well its, its something

1 Like
7

I was doing a world quest in Ringing Deeps the other day. There was a level 79 there.

I kill like 2 mobs then all of a sudden get a whisper from them: “oh you’re rude”

I say nope. Then they go “oh someone with 615 gear in this spot, definitely rude”
I was like do you need help or something? And they just go no, go away.

I was like wtf? Is this a little girl messaging me? Who acts this petty in a video game. I’m not allowed to be outdoors because my ilvl is too high apparently.

That’s not the first time something like that has happened. People act like 619 is 636 or something. It’s a head scratcher.

8

That’s a bit of a fib.

Cutting edge players are extremely intense about acquiring gear. There’s an entire cottage-industry of simulators, guides, and addons that they constantly ape as being ‘must have’ in order to play the ‘toughest content’.

Do not be misled. Cutting edge players are very obsessed with gear. They even go so low as to base their racial choices to give them the most ‘optimal’ chance at succeeding in their content.

9

Different vibe to it. Least from my experiences. Its more a checklist you just tick off or toss into a loot council.

It has its role but its not usually a passionate subject

10

its definitely the people below mythic raiders who care too much about what other people are getting for loot. loot karens

1 Like
11

But consider just how often they play more than the casual player. They have the most investment, time, and resources into no-lifing that threshold of gear they need to get into the cutting edge of the content.

Remember Sacrobrood? I remember Sacrobrood.

12

If we ignore the prestige aspect (which often feels like what the argument is about), there is one VERY important truth about the way WoW handles gear that needs to be made clear:

Gear scales exponentially

I think I did the math years ago, not sure if it’s still true in the raw numbers, but the pattern appears to hold and I’ll use it as an example. Each item level was a roughly 1% increase in power over the previous item level. That doesn’t mean a 50 item level increase is a 50% power increase. It’s closer to 65%; the gap just gets more and more ridiculous as the number of item levels difference gets bigger.

Just looking at DF… let’s say ~360 (finished leveling) to 500 (Season 4 with a handful of upgrades). That’s 140 item levels total. What’s the proportional amount of power increase? Because it’s not 140%.

It’s 302%.
With zero increase in skill, the player is doing quadruple damage purely from gear.

Just think about that, the amount players are behind in terms of raw power if they are stuck to lower item levels. Is it something skill can overcome? Maybe, but at that point it starts to feel all but impossible. After all, it’s not small & incremental gains, but large multipliers.

Gear scaling in WoW is ludicrous. It really does make that much of a difference. Which is exactly why players want stronger gear, because it makes a MASSIVE difference at the lower end of the scale.

If you’re at the top end, you can’t see the difference because you’re working in a narrow band of item levels. You have to look at the difference between the bands.

If you’re willing to try the experiment, just get yourself a set of basic green-quality crafted gear and compare it to being fully kitted out. Do that, and tell us what the difference is. Hell, you probably don’t even need to do anything beyond looking at the different sizes of the health pools to get an idea of how much of a difference it is.

3 Likes
13

Eh, I think that’s a mischsracterisarion. There’s a difference between “This is the most efficient use of my time to accomplish my goals” and reverence of individual items as if they’re going to make or break your performance.

14

Eh…?

Most mythic raiders don’t play all that much, maybe a bit of investment in the first 1-2 weeks but past that the only time you can spend accomplishing the goal of progression / getting stronger is your raid nights and a couple keys for vault. So if that’s all you care about it’s all you really need to do.

It’s kinda paradoxical but across an entire patch the average ends up significantly lower than you might expect. Once progress is over it can drop to to the literal 2-3 hours it takes to reclear for some and no more.

15

I can tell you have many friends.

Have you even seen the sky?

It must get boring looking down all the time.

Trolls be brutal these days.

1 Like
16

People in Mythic gear don’t look at people with a higher ilvl and start treating them like a paragon and get all cheeky and discriminate all randomly, seemingly for no reason.

The people who never did anything Mythic are the ones who act like that when they see geared people. It’s such an oldschool mind set, like being in awe of the people standing on top of the Org bank.

17

On my Evoker S1, S2 of DF was the only time that I was really pushing keys (for me, prolly 14/15 at the highest) and yea, being ahead of everyone in queued content was strange for me. I pay attention to my class, know my rotation, know my talents, but damn! I always thought that perhaps there was some hidden trick I was always missing. Turns out it was just ilvl and grind. Which is fine, it’s an MMO and I appreciate that aspect… but for a long time I just thought that there was some deeper secret to performing well like that. :dracthyr_nod:

18

Progression is important to people and is generally what keeps people around if they’re not altoholics.

For someone pushing 14s and Mythic Raiding, frankly, their progression is not gear. They’re going to have that maxed out immediately because they’re pushing the hardest content well before the people who still need gear get there. They won’t care about gear because it’s a given, not a goal that will help them reach their other goals. Obviously it’s a tool for everyone - but for this crowd, it’s something they already know they’re going to have, because they’ll be spamming the stuff that gets the best stuff from the start.

For people who progress through the game with things like KSM, KSH, or AotC as their goals, gear is a LOT more of a factor. The fact that they’re progressing on these things this far into the game means they are NOT the type of player who blitzes 8s on week 1 in subpar gear and has been 630+ for the last 2 months and 620 since like Week 2.

Gear is part of their progression because they DON’T play like the people pushing 14s who are just going to already have that done and still have goals to chase afterwards. The gear is a clear boon toward the goals they’re still working toward, so they care about it.

I cared about it too. I have KSM and KSH, but still no AotC because I haven’t bothered to go pug it. The Guild is still trying for it so I’ll try to get it with the Guild. And more gear is more helpful to that goal. More DPS makes phases push faster, saves healer mana, skips a popper phase on Queen, etc.

At this point I only need 2 specific pieces from Myth Track in the vault + Spymaster, which is almost definitely either never coming or will be in the Vault. I don’t care too much anymore because the chances of getting one of the few specific items I need is pretty low now and I’m near the max ilvl I’m going to reasonably get. Spymaster is really the only thing that’s going to have a significant impact on my DPS now. Other than like the Queen Ring which isn’t relevant until after we finish that AotC Goal in the first place since that’s where it drops and it isn’t worth it on lower difficulties.

TL;DR People pushing bragging rights keys have the gear by default because of how they play, so of course they’re not going to really consider it as a huge goal in and of itself.

People aiming for lower goals and STILL working on them months into the season still need that gear to improve their chances / efficiency working toward said goals. It is not a given to them, so they care more.

1 Like
19

But so often people could get more from focusing on other aspects of their performance / character than gear. I find often people hyperfixate on gear because it’s a factor out of their control, because if they didn’t they’d have to come to terms with their lack of performance being in their control.

“Oh I’m not doing well because I don’t have the right stats or I’m missing XYZ trinket.” Etc

20

LoL

Lmao even