Nah he’s right.
Gear’s a means to an end. We need it to achieve goals and we optimise what we have access to, but it’s rare people hyperfixate on it in the way others seem to or treat it as the reason to play the game.
Sure. People can always improve their performance if they’re not, you know, 100% bracket parsing or something.
But Gear is a guaranteed performance increase even if they don’t do that or are failing to do that despite trying.
A single piece of generic gear is often not a huge difference, but it’s cumulative, yeah? And of course the OP Trinkets and items with special effects are bigger deals.
transmogs? that’s for fashionistas.
i just wanna press the buttons tbh
i transmog once at the start of an xpack and forget about it till next xpack heh
Really unclear what the actual complaint is here. Is it that gear isn’t valuable? I disagree that being full 639 is not at all some indicator of merit. Unless you paid for the carries and loot funneling, yeah, it is because that gear comes from what blizz has deemed the hardest content in game. That content also does come with special mogs sometimes and mounts.
Everyone has their own threshold of gear value. Yeah, for me I don’t think champion gear is that great. But that’s because I WANT to do content beyond that. Yet I know mythic gear is probably out of my reach. So hero track gear is in a sweet spot.
End of the day, all gear is borrowed power, and I wouldn’t mind more cool mogs are rewards for skill based encounters. The original mage tower is a great example of that.
I think it’s less a complaint and more an observation of which subsections of the playerbase value acquisition of ilvl as a personal goal / reason to play the game and which subsections instead focus more an accomplishments in the respective areas of content they enjoy.
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I find it pretty hard to consider that the world content player is more concerned about their gear progression than mythic raiders or people farming myth track vaults from M+.
It’s quite likely that this kind of focus on ilvl is present in comparable levels across the board and is why we see so many complaints about vault RNG for example from every corner of the WoW community.
Perhaps at the utter bleeding edge it dwindles quite a bit but given the conversations I see sparked around here even by the top % of players I don’t think it just goes away entirely there.
If by “lower levels” we mean everything below actual top 10 guilds and mythic teams then I suppose it probably is more prevalent.
Yeah it was this implication in the OP that I was kinda confused about. The mythic raiders and key pushers I know care A LOT about the gear since that’s essentially for min maxing.
I mean the vault hunters for m+ will push through 8+ high keys in a week just to maximize their chances of maybe getting the one thing they need as an upgrade out of a massive loot pool.
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The people who successfully engage in the highest levels of content are the most skilled and capable players in the game, a tiny upper fraction of the playerbase. They devote a lot of time and energy to playing at that highest level, and because they do, and the highest level of play is balanced around their capabilities, the entire rest of the game seems easy to them.
Effectively, for these people, the entire rest of the game, the portion that 95% or more of the players engage with, does not exist.
But most people do not have the time, dedication, or inherent skill (or some mix of the three) to participate at that level, and for most of these people, increasing iLevel provides them a path toward greater achievement in the game that they could otherwise not attain through practice (again, due to skill, time or dedication deficits).
So increasing iLevel, for the vast majority if WoW players, literally makes the game bigger,and gives them access to more content.
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If obsession over ilvl drops off it does so at VERY HIGH LEVELS of play. It’s not a “lower levels” (ie bottom end keys, normal raiding, delves, world content) problem.
“I was champ geared in week one, heroic raid vault slots, full delve vault slots, and had farmed enough 10s for a potential myth piece in week 2. I am not concerned about gear.”
I think it’s a bell curve. At either end of the ilvl spectrum you have the extremes of players who care about their achievements / personal goals, and in the middle ranges you have more gear chasers who only really see progression as the ilvl of their character relative to the current maximum.
The observation is that the correlation between acquirable ilvl and a player’s perceived fixation on ilvl as a relevant metric isn’t linear.
honestly, I’d have to be told what I was supposed to be admiring as prestige items
20 years of raids and fomo items, many of which I had no interest in anyway, and I couldn’t tell you what was prestigious to own and what isn’t.
I like the Boris Vallejo style fantasy outfits, and we don’t get those in WoW.
I like the big saber, cat type mounts that can fly.
I don’t care for the lava covered mounts, or the poor horses that have their heads partially eaten off.
Like I said, I’m more the old school Vallejo/Bell fantasy type
edit:
https://www.borisjulie.com/product/tamars-vision/
I want my druid or priest to be able to wear this while roaring up on a huge powerful arctic camo colored saber cat with powerful wings, long fur, saddlebags, and big blue eyes.
no want another half eaten horse, poor horse
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Vallejo and Frazetta. The best kind of fantasy type.
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Where are you formulating this hypothesis from? If we’re going by anecdotals, back when bwl was current endgame I remember a druid that wrote like a 3000 word dissertation on why he should have been awarded a trinket that he was passed over for on our guilds guild portal forums.
So obviously people who do the highest endgame content are the most loot obsessed. Who makes the BiS lists and does all the theory crafting? It’s not the people doing lfr.
That is 19-20 years ago to be fair.
As one of the people who does the theorycrafting and makes the lists. I optimise the resources I have but I don’t actually care if I have them beyond my increased ability to do the content I enjoy. Gear is a means to an end, and you’ll find most mythic raiders don’t really have “Get BIS gear” as one of their goals or aspirations for a tier.
It’s the people who, upon reaching XYZ ilvl, seem to lose all motiviation to keep playing that are obsessed with gear in my eyes. And most of those are in the mid ilvl ranges.
I also disagree, CE guilds and peeps pushing high keys tend to be more loot driven then anyone. Farming and grinding min/max gear when new seasons beging. Heck, the very top guilds don’t run splits for fun the first week…it’s purely gear and loot driven.
The mythic raider or M+14 already has all the gear they need, typically. Everyone else is still climbing that hill and know time is mo…short.
But if gear was removed from the game tomorrow do you think they’d care? Is any of what they do because of the gear itself or is it just the achievements (Personal or ingame) from doing the content.
Under/lower geared people want better gear.