Why does gear feel so meaningless now?

Community General Discussion
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I feel like we are being fed too much gear and from too many places. I couldn’t tell you what I have equip right now on ANY of my characters - it could be a random mythic plus weapon or it could be a random quest item that decided to titanforge.

Now, a lot of people might be okay with that, and I guess that’s okay. However, I think gear is a big part of a character’s identity - and I can’t help but feel disconnected from drops.

Even back in Wrath of the Lich King - it felt good to have a solid BiS list to work towards as well as knowing that your character will one day reach its maximum potential, even if you didn’t which was most people, it was still a goal. Now, since Legion it is all down to uncertainty - maybe this piece of gear decides to titanforge, but maybe it doesn’t. That good feeling Blizzard talks about every time an item titanforges, I don’t get that - it doesn’t feel good - it feels like my reward was not my doing.

To add to this, Blizzard wants us to equip gear as soon as we get it - I think that works great with this system since nothing really matters, it’s all about the gear stats. Who cares if the fantasy of the drop is lost because it can get replace at any time anyway. With that said, I think enchanting, gem, reforging and upgrading a piece of gear with badges is awesome, but it doesn’t work with this system that spoon feeds players gear ALL the time.

Enchanting the gear, gemming it, reforging and upgrading it all adds value to the piece of gear you just got, and that feels great. All that is gone now and we have this system where gear feels hollow and worthless, where gear is just numbers to our DPS and nothing else.

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I’ll admit it: having questgivers reward me with gear has made both the AH and the gear vendors pointless. If I could change that in game, I’d make the rewards strictly coin based. That will make both the blacksmithing profession and vendors useful again.

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fed tons of gear but not with right stats/traits most of the time. good for easy gold

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There are several issues with drops this xpac that make them feel meaningless. A short list of issues people bring up are:

  1. Loot doesn’t do anything special. All our loot are essentially math problems. They have nothing but numbers on them. So other than your actual dps increasing, nothing about your character changes. Set bonuses and and legendaries could actually affect your rotation or give you other cooldowns, so they had some meaning. Now you get a piece of gear it just ups your stats a bit. And Azerite armor usually give passive buffs, so I STILL don’t feel any more powerful from having one.

  2. War/Titan Forging. There’s no such thing as BiS anymore. While there may be a weapon you could say is the ‘best’ it could only possibly be considered the best if it Titanforges, with a socket and has Leech or Avoidance. Meaning, you could farm the same boss the whole xpac and never see your BiS. So that sense of excitement you get from seeing your BiS drop is gone because you don’t HAVE a reasonable BiS

  3. Epic isn’t really epic. I don’t always agree with this one but I do understand how amazing epic gear used to feel. You saw purple text you KNEW you had something good. This is no longer the case, given epics are all over the place.

So those are the more common issues I hear about. There is an interesting talk that Travis Day gave about this specific topic. Check it out if you’d like:

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My gear does not feel useless. I am regularly targeting specific gear item pieces I need.

How does reforging gear make your gear feel less meaningless? Your gear is so important to you, that instead of looking for an ideal piece you just change the meaningless stats? If anything, reforging would make gear even MORE meaningless.

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I watched this video. It saddens me they can’t come up with a good system. I definitely pick up on the part where he talks about Diablo 3 and how they x4 drop chance of gear. That is happening right now in WoW since maybe Legion? I skipped WoD. There is just gear EVERYWHERE and this is not healthy for the game.

Gear used to be a goal we worked towards. It is funny how Azerite is technically a better system than that of WoTLK and before, and somehow it still feels worst and meaningless.

Scarcity adds values.

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While it’s true it is raining gear but it is not raining quality gear. BFA is really encouraging you to understand the gear and traits. This feels a lot like diablo 3.

If you check sites like bloodmallet you can see there is a huge spread in performance for gear all at the same item level. Many times lower level gear with optimum traits out performs high level gear.

This is a very different model from the old wow days where gear was much less frequent but overall better quality than today’s gear.

Not saying I’m a fan of the bfa system but it is what it is.

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This is huge for me. There’s no more flavor, or style. Someone said a while ago on here(i can’t remember who or I’d give credit) That the developers specifically Ion don’t care about that stuff. If they could you’d go into a raid and press ability 1 a number of times, then ability 2, then ability 4, then cooldown 1, then ability 1 again…ad infinitum.

I started playing a game called Grim Dawn this week. It’s an action rpg/dungeon crawl like Diablo. You can choose one of 6 classes(i think, can’t remember off the top of my head) I chose Demolitionist(the description of the class is part engineer, part sorceror how cool is that) and with that class you get a skill tree that’s pretty big, and so far the abilities all feel impactful. Then on top of your class there are shrines scattered around the landscape that give you devotion points that you can spend to get passive and active buffs. The tree is enormous!!

I know that WoW and Grim Dawn are different types of games, but if WoW could make me feel like Grim Dawn does then I think there would be no sub issues.

I hope this make sense. I’m kind of rambling. I’m sorry.

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Not surprised, they shipped over the majority of the Diablo Development Team after they couldn’t make a Diablo 4 title work, now we are getting their development preferences that don’t work in this kind of game.

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because it is meaningless

enjoy your slot machine

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If you pull on the strings you end up with Cataclysm. The goal was to make Warcraft faster paced, as developers/corporate were afraid the slow paced nature of MMORPGs would get trampled by modern gamer impatience. I don’t necessarily disagree with this perception btw.

After seeing the raging success that was WotLK dungeons and LFR, they doubled down with Cataclysm. Most notably with talents. WoW talent trees were replaced with ability choices, and the choice kind of confused me at first. I mean, what was the point of all that work? Then I played Diablo3 at BLizzcon and it all made sense. They were making WoW more like an ARPG to try and keep our attention. Heck, many of the new WoW talents were either direct copies or had sister talents in Diablo3!

Myself and many others noted this similarity, and predicted that they would be increasing gear drops to feed us our endorphin levels more often. In order to meet that goal, they had to increase drop rates. But to increase drop rates meant they had to decrease drop quality. Smaller endorphin hits, at faster intervals. Now just about every system we have in WoW has its roots in the ARPG genre.

Our “new” gear system vs the old system (slower, more impactful loot gains)

Rifts->Island Expeditions. IE are the “beta” test…you can bet the system will be expanded next xpac…the replayability potential is just too high.

Seasons->Patches. Now that we all basically get handed a new set of gear at the start of each season, the patch effectively is just “resetting” us all for a new season. M+ and world first raiding leader boards do the rest.

Paragon Points->“Endless” point systems, like Artifact or Azerite power. Expect to see another iteration like this in the future, most likely character based. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was a direct copy of D3’s system.

You get the idea.

I make it sound more analytical than I believe the decision really was. Ultimately it was a group of people desperately trying to keep their love and passion (WoW) relevant in a world that was rapidly leaving the entire genre in the dust.

I think they succeeded, however I also think they have erred too far on the side of the “A” in ARPG and need to bring back some character focus. Throwing the baby out with the bath water would be a mistake, but its obvious some things need to be fixed.

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It does make sense. Gear itself lost the value of scarcity it used and at the same time adds nothing to the game. This wouldn’t be a problem if WoW classes had some depth to them, but they manage to ruin class design too.

In my opinion, each spec in WoW should be able to play at least three different ways, and I’m not just talking about AoE + Single Target. To give a quick example, a Beastmaster hunter should have the option to specialize in taming something like dragons, beast, or spirits. Each one of those specialization should have the base abilities of BM, but play their own style.

This would be way too hard for them though, and hard to balance given they can’t balance the simple specs we have right now. Instead of revamping specs every expansion for the past 10 years, they should have added and build on their previous expansion.

Bland gear and simplistic classes leads to stagnation.

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Azerite gear has drastically changed my rotation. :man_shrugging:

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Guess it must be different across classes. Certainly hasn’t changed my rotation :frowning:

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But there have always been simplistic classes…

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Sorta like how tier gear didn’t always change the rotation for people previously. Sometimes it was so bad it was avoided.

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I agree with you, but I also think that a lot of the blame is on the player base, not all, but a good chunk. Players want everything. They want all races to be able to play all classes. They want all classes to play all roles. They want all their toons to have access to all the gear…etc.

Just this morning someone was complaining that the NA servers don’t make it easier for him to play invasions when he’s in australia. Invasions play at all times of the day on a rotating basis. There was another guy complaining about being forced to grind stuff. He should just be able to unlock all the stuff all the time.

Blizzard has made mistakes, no doubt about it, but they’re not solely to blame. their job is hard, they’re trying to please millions of players. Also the player base that started playing WoW is not the player base that’s playing now.

I’ve strayed off path though, I’m sorry.

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Nah, you’re on the mark. Blizzard is trying to keep both their playerbase and investors happy. Not an easy task.

They are THE forefront of MMORPGs, so every move they make has to be the right one or the lost subs will pile up fast.

Legion proves they still have a lot left in the tank, at least to me. I’m cautiously optimistic, assuming they bring back some of the nostalgia (more impactful loot) while keeping some of the new hotness (better abilities and mechanics.)

Ideally I’d like to see us return to tiered sets of loot that drop less often, and we get a “paragon” level mechanic that lets us slot abilities with different perks based on our old artifact talents and modern azerite traits.

/shrug

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Unfortunately this is exactly what a large part of the community has been asking for since vanilla, the ability to have access to top end gear for the least amount of effort. “Why should I have to raid to have raid level gear if I pay the same $15/month!!!” is the cry of the casual.

Now everyone gets epics from everything and the only way to get true top end gear is hope for RNG Titanforge.

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It is sad that gear is no longer memorable. It used to be a nice aspect to an MMO, which has been lost over the years.