I’d argue that people capable of pursuing higher keys would value their time enough to focus it efficiently. Doing world content for 1 drop a week vs repeatable keys is significant resistance.
It was a joke. lighten up a little and relax
I don’t have the energy to read everything here. But dude, if you do your covenant campaign story, you can get an ilvl of like 197. Which puts you pretty well off for everything. So just by actively doing the story quests, and maybe a couple world quests. You can already get really good casual gear. So I’m not sure what you’re expecting.
Because honestly if just logging into a game gave you high end stuff just because it would take away all of the fun, all feelings of progression to the game, sooner rather then later.
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They’ve tried to add challenging solo content before and it’s inevitably nerfed into the ground because of the complaints. Torghast awarded the most powerful items in the game and people still complained. High ilvl gear for solo content will be too difficult for the crowd that wants similar gear from world quests. The people that can’t enjoy dungeons, raids, or pvp are just playing the wrong genre of game.
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To get heroic level gear from keys, you need to do like…a 7? I guess my question is, if keys are already an infinitely faster and easier gearing path, why don’t people do them if the gear is so important to them? The people that just do a few quests here and there probably don’t care all that much about gear progression. The only reason to get gear is so that you can do challenging content more efficiently.
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What would happen is they would do both, and then they’d feel like they had to participate in too many irrelevant parts of the game (to them) just to do what they wanted.
MoP was referenced earlier, so I’ll bring that back up. Siege of Orgrimmar trinkets were insanely strong, so people who raided heroic and mythic felt compelled to run LFR every week for those trinkets. Those players complained about being burned out. Blizzard did not like this model, so they gutted LFR stuff going forward.
I don’t actually agree fully with Blizzard’s decision because they went too far as per usual, but the point is that people aren’t going to ignore an easy chance at gear. They’re going to just engage in both.
Whether that’s good or bad for the game is beyond the scope of my point here. You could probably convince me either way.
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Yeah…like there isn’t already enough tedious stuff to do lol.
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It doesn’t really need to be challenging, although some challenges could work. I think they largely want something they can work towards on a regular basis that is fun to do. It’s mostly just about giving people more options so they can feel a sense of progress no matter what they’re doing.
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That’s what this comes down to. Like it’s fine if you don’t like doing these things, but you cannot simultaneously be on these forums and acting like Blizzard is taking something from you when, in fact, you’ve simply chosen to opt out of what this game’s been founded upon for 17 years. That’s group content. Even if it’s leveling, it’s all about grouping.
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raid and M+ gear shouldnt benefit you in open world. you dont need it.
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Nothing stops those players from progressing up to a certain point…and that affects all of us. Sooner or later, there’s just no more gear to get. You’ve either gotten it all or you can’t continue on with what is essentially an infinitely scaling difficulty level. It’s very difficult to stretch out the solo progression when it’s the easiest thing to do. Gating solo progression would probably not be very popular lol.
Incorrect. Of course, MMO’s have solo player progression.
You shouldn’t require grouping for player progression. This is one big reason WoW has been declining for so long and will continue to decline.
So, if you are worried about group content falling apart if solo progression is available that means people don’t want to group anyway and Blizzard is creating the wrong content.
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That’s kind of the point here. Progression stops at 233. Why? Apparently just to highlight the difference between solo and group content. If the gear rewarded from some hypothetical system is upgraded through a pool of solo content activities and scaled down or disabled in raid / M+, then there is zero incentive for that community to pursue said content or feel invalidated; their 246-252 gear works just as well in the open world and a skilled player is always going to do more with less.
Admittedly, this doesn’t really address bridging the gap between doing solo activities to get an advantage for low level group content without some tuning like only effective up to a +5 key, but it is progression that doesn’t need to be tied to potentially burnout inducing activities.
It stops there because that ilvl is more than enough to handle the current open world content and it will be enough to do the solo content in the next patch. Again, every player suffers from that. Not everyone can do high keys and clear mythic raids. Everyone settles into an area where they’re comfortable. Should players that can’t do mythic raids demand that normal and heroic give higher ilvl gear?
This argument seems to be all about wanting a higher ilvl on the armory page. Believe me, the community will absolutely tear into the guy with ilvl 252 “solo” gear. If it’s absolutely worthless outside of solo content, I’m just not seeing the benefit. You can’t really call it progression when it doesn’t progress your character.
If the gear doesn’t help with progression into group content, it’s less valuable than it is now. How are people going to do group content with solo gear that does nothing in keys or raids?
As I said, any skilled player can do more with less, but flat out stopping progress just because it’s “good enough” doesn’t hold a lot of weight. Players need something to pursue and circling Korithia daily for hours on end, assuming you can bear that, only to have your progression capped after some point is pretty tedious.
Who cares if they kill a pack of 10 in 3 abilities with world content gear the same way your typical raider / M+ steamrolls that content just to get it over with? How they get to that point shouldn’t really matter as long as it’s reasonably paced given that it has limited bearing on group content.
As for the group aspect, raider io and the built in rating system already exist to identify characters with little experience. People sometimes have to go out of their way to claim their main’s IO score to avoid that discrimination at a glance while on alts as it is, but, as an example, if solo content gear was only effective up to a +5 or normal raids (in terms of today’s relative difficulty), I’d like to think most would just accept the 252 solo gear player with 0 rating with the understanding they might still be learning, it’s only a +5 after all. If you aren’t in the mood for any potential mistakes that’s fine and you can just decline and save everyone the trouble, but seriously, it’s just a +5 and they can experience the group content they technically outgear to get better at it in terms of skill without the relative stress. Personally, I’ve had more issues with 2.4k+ rating tanks in a +10 pulling like it’s a +20 and bailing for the rest of the group not keeping up than players performing far below their item level would indicate.
Though honestly, I suspect most solo only players won’t even attempt to join M+, it’s just something to pursue further in their chosen avenue.
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All progression in the game works that way. Most players will never finish a raid on heroic. Most will never time a +10. For the majority of players, their progression ends well before the available content does. Should they get better gear?
I can promise you that it doesn’t work that way. Keys have their own progression and no one is inviting the guy with 0 rating…even if it’s a 5. Maybe if that player is a tank, but maybe not even then. Item level already isn’t that important, which is why IO exists in the first place. Giving everyone 252 solo gear would make ilvl more meaningless than it already is.
WoW included. What you’re asking for is to put that solo progression on the same level as group content. No MMORPG does that because it’s antithetical to “MMO.”
You don’t have to group to progress in WoW or in any other MMO if you’re defining progression as “getting stronger.” If you’re defining it as “getting the very best gear”, you have to group in every MMO to receive it. Because that’s how MMOs work. We already have the former, so I can only assume you want the latter.
So your “WoW’s declining because of this” diatribe is tired and false. WoW never worked like this and has been here for 17 years. FF14 does not work like this and is growing. No MMO worth playing works the way you claim they should work.
Except that’s not what would happen. Group content would not fall apart.
Again, case in point: when Mists LFR dropped gear barely worse than the other tiers, people who raided higher tiers ran LFR for additional chances at strong gear, spending several more hours a week grinding the game. This risked burnout, so Blizzard changed it going forward. Notice there was no “group content falling apart” mentioned.
If you can think of a way to give solo players a long avenue to get that sort of gear without completely destroying LFR and Normal raiding, M0s, M+, and PvP, then go for it. But at the end of the day, the point of MMOs is to group. You can criticize WoW in a lot of areas, but this game has undeniably been solo-friendly for years. So if you think they’re putting in the “wrong content”, then by all means, let them go back to raid-or-die.
They do, but I think the valor system has helped with this actually. A single reasonably skilled player doing a valor run can easily carry a group. It might not be the most accurate experience of M+ for said beginner tagging along, but I think it’s given higher performers more incentive to run lower keys where ilevel and rating are not that important after a certain period of time through a patch.
Besides, jumping into a 5 to start just because you outgear the contetnt but haven’t experienced it is indeed their fault. But if the goal is to further incentivize solo players into the group content, and I am not sure it is, then they’d at least start at a 2, absolutely demolish it after a few months of solo content at which point this level is considered stale, and start earning “real” group gear as they work up to a 5.
This same thing happens to raiders. They clear the tier and have nothing to do until the next one. It can also happen to M+ players and PvPers depending on what their goals are.
But the interesting thing is gear isn’t the sole reason for any other group to take part in the content they do. So I would have to assume gear isn’t the sole reason people do Korthia. If you’ve cleared Korthia and have nothing to do, you’re in the same boat as everyone else. That’s a content lull and that’s always going to happen in every patch in any MMO when you reach the cap.
You’re right: if they increased the gear to 252 for solo players, they’d have gear progression to work on. But, I would argue if literally just increasing the cap on gear without adding more actual content for solo players is good enough for you, then it’s a wonder why Blizzard, famous for “time spent” metrics, did not do this. Perhaps it’s actually detrimental to just assume increasing an ilvl cap will, in turn, increase genuine engagement in content.
Maybe the argument should be, “do we put in a six month (arbitrary number) grind in that just so happens to put people at 252 solo?” Because just increasing the level of gear you can get isn’t going to get the people in this thread to engage more in solo content. Most people commenting aren’t even solo players.
I agree with you on the current system as if they added tier 7 / 8 for exponentially more Korithia rep is likely to just induce more burnout. When it comes to solo content and the rewards are significantly scaled to that content, the game really should just be about playing the way you want to. Whether that is Torghast runs, mog / achievement collections, rare farming, pet battles, crafting / collecting, etc., I say more power to them if designed in a way that won’t invalidate group content. I don’t see any reason this can’t be done except an unwillingness or perception that it’s not worth it.