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Acquisition of Gear has always been a very interesting discussion point in World of Warcraft. With having seen what Dinars look like in 9.2.5, we explore a deterministic loot option moving forward.
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Yes.
~4:30, one reason people feel the need for BiS is the insane iLevel variance we have now. Vanilla, the difference from one raid to the next was almost trivial. These days, it's massive. The spread between tiers within a patch is massive. And the spread between bad and good trinkets is massive. I can remember being super horny for a BiS trinket in pre-MC that was *0.2% DPS increase*! Loot just didn't matter as much.
As a general rule, if a piece of loot significant for DPS, there needs to be at least an RNG backstop / catch-up / pity system. But those feel bad, too! Ultimately, significant loot should all be acquirable deterministically. Players will be able to plan for them, and feel actually rewarded. And Blizz will be doing themselves an enormous favor by making it easier to tune bosses/raids; they'll know very close to exactly how powerful players will be on a given boss.
(To clarify a little, RNG-with-pity still feels bad because: 1. there's still RNG; some people will get lucky week 1, while everyone else waits, and 2. it changes the incentive from a reward to yet another goddamn grind )
I think bad luck protection is a good thing, but you should have to farm a dungeon a little bit before you have enough currency to buy what you want. For example, in FF14, every time you kill a boss that drops a mount you get 1 currency for that boss. After 100, you can buy the mount it drops. Obviously for gear, 100 runs is insane, but I think something like 20 runs is reasonable. On the other hand, if blizzard didn't make items that were head and shoulders above others at the same ilvl, this wouldn't be as much of an issue.
The loot system rocks when you get drops, it fails for those grinding forever. The dopamine hit when something legendary drops is amazing, but same time, the overwhelming frustration leads to people losing desire to play.
Not everyone can run 20 hours of dungeons with full loot stack.
Dinar token would be great.
Personal loot should return with unrestricted trade.
There definitely needs to be a bad luck system for raiding. I mean they added the catalyst for bad luck with tier, why not have one for raid loot. My friend does LFR, normal raz and heroic raz and still has only seen the bow drop once and obviously hasn’t gotten it in his vault, it’s ridiculous and I’m not even a hunter. Why create a system in the last season of shadowlands that EVERYONE loved and completely just ignore it now
I miss the dinars and the way they upgraded was reasonable and fair.
i traded away a mote on my MW alt before i knew how good it was.
In my opinion loot should be more deterministic. Each Wednesday feels so bad for me. I play on almost all classes and I have like 20-30 options in my weekly vault among those characters. Only 1 character is decent geared, the rest still needs a lot of gear. This week I only had one or maybe two upgrades and the rest of my alts had to choose the currency to get anything from the vault. This is a regular occurrence. Furthermore I had a very low drop of the world boss (like 2% or so) so far and this week I got 2 or 3 peaces of loot on the characters that don't need it.
Another way to go would be to make gear available account wide. If I do decide to grind for a specific tank trinket, that I can use that trinket on all my tanks instead of having to grind it 4 or 5 times.
In my opinion this exp is way better than the previous one. Many things are improved, there are only a few systems left behind that feel really bad now like how loot works, affixes and key depletion. At least from a M+ perspective. At the moment loot gives me a bad experience 98% of the time and a good experience 2% of the time.
I just levelled my hunter to 70 last week. Did the timewalking weekly and got Raza's bow.
I'd hate to see that happening to someone if I was maining hunter from the start.
And on the other hand, now I want to main hunter.
I actually wasn't a huge fan of Dinar. At the time I was playing DPS in raid and tank for M+ and it just felt like shit that I had two sets of BIS gear but the same number of tokens.
No one ever talks about this when they're covering Dinar but the most interesting thing to me was the upgrade tokens. You could upgrade a piece of gear that you looted in Normal or Heroic to Mythic by doing enough Mythic bosses to get the upgrade tokens. In some ways I think this is almost preferable to a vendor. I think one of the reasons that raid gear starts to feel harder to get and less useful over the season is that you can upgrade your M+ loot to 415 and suddenly pretty much every piece of gear you got from Heroic and lower is worthless.
I know a lot of people wouldn't really like this because it would have them going back to lower levels of difficulty in order to farm pieces to then upgrade, but idk I've seen people farming +2s in order to get a piece of gear they're wearing already but with avoidance to dump 5k valor into it. It's optional and honestly not that bad while giving you a new gearing method.
"If I can't get BIS gear why even try" first tier of legion in a nutshell for most people I reckon. (Capped random legendary drops)
I've done 8 or 9 runs at Raz and the bow never dropped for me.
bring back the tokens so i can roll on an extra piece of raid gear, AND bring in a system where you get tokens for killing bosses so you can buy gear from a vendor for that difficulty of raid that you killed the bosses. Would make getting geared through raiding feel a ton better. Just my personal opinion. Also more loot from bosses in general 😀
I understand that this is an MMO, RNG, we need to grind, bla bla bla, that's all fine and dandy until you' spend an entire expansion grinding and you don't get the item you need (happen to several of my guildies in Legion for instance with the legendaries – we had one guy made 2 mages and he didn't get the item he needed in both until the very very very end of the expansion – when he didn't needed them anymore). There should be a "safe clause" against the RNG, otherwise, you're screwed because you can't progress the same way other people can. Specially when you want to push high lvl stuff… So yeah, I understand we need to grind, but in WoW, the grind is just insane most of the times – too much in my opinion.
12:04 thank god someone said it. People need to get it through their skulls that they are not entitled to "get full bis" or "always be best". It's a mentality that devalues skill and overvalues fotm specs and ilvl, a mentality that expects maximum reward for minimum effort. Most people don't even do 2/3 of their sim potential but they're making these emotional arguments that they deserve the newest "best thing", instantly.
I like the vault slot freezing idea. That seems most in keeping with the spirit of loot in this game. Dinars were not – I agree with the Blizzard sentiment that Dinars make more sense for the season 4 scenario where we're doing a victory lap on the expansion's content, Aiming for rewards we've already earned many many times before.
The problem i see with gearing in wow is that endgame performance in general is dependant on 3 things: knowledge, skill and gear (leaving aside the social skills needed to be a part of a group). While progress in knowledge and skill requires time (the more time you spend playing the better you become at the game), progress in gear requires time AND luck. This is why gearing has always felt unfair in WoW.
In my eyes not even the SL dinar system fixed this issue because you still couldn't get more than 1 item per rotation due to the weekly nature of raids . While gearing is fun rn and makes some players feel special, having a time capped challange being dependant on a luck based system is just bad design.
So, the solution for me would be to be able to use the endgame currency (being valor, honor or the primal focus tokens) to bypass RNG. That would fix the unfairness of gearing making more people stay engaged with the game for longer and it would end the majority of guild disbands, ninja looters and other forms of toxicity arround that aspect of the game -.-
Have ran a guildie through CoS 45 times with a Whetstone stack and it hasn’t fallen for anyone yet.
99% of wow players want things given to them. Stop enabling.
At the moment I’m wondering if a different version of the catalyst would work. You will get a charge starting the first week of the season. Charges can be used to change gear not only to tier set items, but any item from the loot table. So a M+ trinket can be changed to any other M+ trinket or raid trinket. This way the catalyst stays relevant much longer. Maybe I want to try a certain trinket but I don’t like it after a few weeks of using it. I can change it to another trinket. Maybe exclude rare items and make sure crafted gear can compete with raid/M+ gear. Or Blizzard nerfs my trinket I farmed and upgraded with valor, now I can change it to a different trinket.
For m+ how about we get something like a pity system, let's say you want to farm Whetstone. How about every X amount of runs you do of that key you get a specific currency that lets you buy items from that specific key's loot table, with items being more expensive if they're on the "rare" side like trinkets.
Solution: imagine a world where raid bosses alway dropped their entire loot pool. Cut the rng on top of rng. Player already have to win a roll on the item. Why do they have to gamble that the item is even going to drop too? For a pug, your odds of getting loot is down to the vault because rng on top of rng. Maybe have it all drop at LFR Ilvl and you have to spend a currency from the raid to upgrade the item in basically the same way you do for crafted items. Like 10 +16 keys to upgrade your lfr raid ilvl item to mythic or 10 mythic raid boss kills. That would probably take some of the pressure off bad rng but still requires you to play the game.
Making items like the bow or staff to be deterministic will also create the problem that it is simply a box to tick. Theres no other options. Items are much more "fluid" nowadays in WoW. Stats blend together. There is no hit/expertise/armor pen to hit different "caps" so there is no need to balance your gear and stats to get the most performance. You just sim and get as much as possible of haste/mastery/crit/vers. Its boring.
about 110 runs for my whetstone whee
I think it was great to be able to get a currency so that you can get some of those high demand items from the raid. This does not have to be available from the get go, so that progression stays interesting at the beginning of a Tier, but like the catalyst it could be thrown in mid way.
For M+ loot, Blizzard really has to fix those loot tables… disgusting how long it can take to get that Court Ring for example. The Dagger from HoV is still a myth imo, i believe it doesn't exist.
Ya, it’s not fun for me personally, or the guild that I run – to have literally the same drops come from most of the bosses for 4 weeks in a row. Killing bosses for currency IS a grind. I don’t know why you’re saying it’s not the same as farmin m+ for a drop. It is.. it’s just a pity system to keep someone from farming an in instance in excess of 50 times to get 1 item. Just knowing, “if I keep playing the game I’ll eventually get it” is a very powerful tool for people.
We don’t all play super high end with highly coordinated groups. We don’t all have amazing m+ experiences. I note that a lot of the tales I see here (some I agree with, others I don’t) come from that perspective. One such example is SBG m+ may need to be harder. While I’ll grant you with a group of friends it’s cake… when you don’t coordinate at higher levels, even it becomes a nightmare. Same with nerfing affixes. They have to keep needing them, because alot of them are so intrusive and penalizing that they just make the entire system unfun. Because we’re more worried about the affix’s than the dungeon. How about more affixes that just enhance or alter how you play, instead of ruining the experience… then they don’t have to nerf them…. They could start them weak, and work on buffing them.
If you’re looking for more specificity- quaking I’d probably the worst offender right now. Especially with the implementation of more bosses with a silence/interrupt mechanic. Happens all the time: BIG DAMAGE > Quaking > Boss silence > a couple of seconds to try and catch people up while dealing with other mechanics > Thundering + BIG DAMAGE > Quaking… so on so forth.
yeah trinkets from M+ being farmable? excuse me ? It took me 100 CoS runs to get trinket for my blood dk 😀 I would love to have som currency to buy it after.. lets say.. 40-50 runs.
I definitely sit more on the deterministic side of the debate. I still do not like the weekly vault system in its current design and since it was added to the game. I prefer the old Wrath system where you were able to do your weekly content to work towards a currency that was used to purchase items. I also play FFXIV which uses this system and allows players to choose how they want to get their weekly currency. In FFXIV nobody complains about this style of gearing, but gear and ilvl isn't as important in that game because there is a ton of side content where gear is not important. Blizzard appears to be flirting with this idea in DF, so perhaps a move in that direction would be nice. Idk though. I find Wow's players to be so opposite from every other MMO community, so they might hate it lol. GW2 has a sort of deterministic gearing system as well, but gear is also not as important in GW2 as it is in WoW.
The craft system should provide items that are competitive, but not better than, the best gear. I think this can be seen for example with the crafted bow and the nerfed heroic raid bow. The absolute best ger should still be in mythic raids. Just my 10 cents.
The difference between vanilla gearing and retail isn’t just mentality. In vanilla you had a goal and you knew how to get it. If it’s raid you do your lockout, maybe a gdkp and that’s it you’ve done what you can, much like in retail.
If it’s dungeon loot you grind it out and get the same version as the next guy.
Now in retail if it’s dungeon loot you can grind it out, but you are getting a worse version than someone who ran 1 key and got lucky in their vault. There is nothing you can do to catch them.
To me the vault just feels like a very manipulative way blizzard keeps people playing the game week after week instead of “completing their character” like used to be possible.
Nope perfectly fine with purchasable loot.
All you 'elites' don't seem to get how hard it can be to get gear in M+. I went a whole season once without getting any shoulder drops for my monk. I run pugs so no one wants to trade 99.99% of the time. And I categorically refuse to pay you guys for carries. Nine out of ten runs you get no loot and nine out of ten times you actually get a drop it's not of any use. Really there is no reason we should not have some kind of loot insurance just like everyone else.
As someone who literally ran Court of Stars over 200 times without getting a Windscar, I support this token. I don't think "very rare" items should be obtainable this way. And I think these should be limited to only like 1-2 uses per character per season.
Yes, its dagerous to at a dinar system into the game, but what is more dangerous is to let, out of a full 25 man raid, only 4 items drop that someone in the raid can actually use… Yeah, it feels great to have raids where 80% off all drops just get disenchanted bcause none of the players get use or equip it… Nice to see a crossbow drop while no Hunter is in the raid… All that while u bet for an item drop thats actually an upgrade…
Oh yeah… Let's talk about Bottled Essence being essentially non-existent too… 600+ dungeons since they were "random drops" and I haven't gotten a single one. Good thing I mained fury warrior and had to spend 4 sparks on just weapons 🙃