Developer Insights: New Upgrade System in Embers of Neltharion

Community General Discussion
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Uh, yes you do. Your whole entire point is that you want it to be fair to players who don’t do endgame content. The amount of time it takes matters little in this situation because you still want Open World players to get the higher crests somehow, even if it means grinding them.

Badly formatted. Also, that’s fine. But it’s not endgame content, therefore you won’t get endgame rewards. And as a quick thing, you may get worse loot than M+, Raid and PVP players, but you get far more mounts, cosmetics, pets etc than them.

Actually, it does matter, for reasons why I’ll explain below.

Again badly formatted. First of all, as people have already said to you, it’s open-world content. In WOW’s (or nearly any MMO’s) open world, gear DOES NOT MATTER. Sure it may make you feel more powerful when seeing all that extra damage you’re doing, but what is the point of that damage if you’re not going to use it for something?

The point of gear is that the better gear you have, the tougher challenges you can face within the game. But if you’re totally sticking to the open world, then the most difficult challenge you’ll face is the WB’s which can be taken down very easily if you’ve got a good amount of players with you regardless of what gear you have. It’s a simple truth that the open world is easy because there is simply nothing challenging there, and even if there is, a small group can almost easily do anything a solo player can’t do there no matter what gear you or your group has. It’s a simple jumping-off point when it comes to gear.

I despise BFA. It was worse than WOD in my eyes. And I only support two changes made in BFA (regarding systems). This is one of them. Constantly upgrading and progressing your gear which you’ll never use is an improvement.

TL;dr: Getting gear if you’re only playing in the open world is redundant and pointless, regardless of how fun you think it is.

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Not sure how anyone can think this is a good idea but i guess we’ll have to see how it works in practice, reminds of a bit of WotLK days where we had like 7 different types of emblems and badges.

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Yes.

THAT doesn’t matter.
It’s NONE of anyone’s business what I use that gear for. Absolutely none.

All that matters is; my gameplay experience is BETTER with a genuine progression system in place; one that offers worthwhile content longer than 3 weeks.

No. That’s YOUR point, maybe.
It’s not mine. And I’m sure there’s lots of other people who don’t share your point of view.

And again; THAT DOESN’T MATTER.
It’s not about the difficulty. At all.
For YOU it might be; fine. For me it’s not.
And I’m talking for ME. Not for you.

No it’s not. Because FUN in a game is NEVER redundant or pointless.
Because FUN is the ENTIRE POINT of a game.

68

I think gearing a character is more of a burden for the player than it is actually fun. You generally improve your item level to gain access to other areas / content of the game, so you can continue playing and progressing through the content. That mentality generally comes from the community itsself because it is commonly known that better gear allows for more mistakes and increases chances of success. It’s gatekeeping done by the community and the game.

Fun is playing the content you like playing or enjoy playing. Seeing a number go up, in that case item level, is satisfying but not really fun. The process is tedious and forced upon but the players expirience can be fun.

First and foremost i wouldn’t consider gearing or increasing item lvl as content. As i said above it’s more of a forced upon burden than a fun expirience but that’s just my opinion.

This will be very hard to implement due to the variety of players you have in a game. Time gating or Capping is certainly not fun to have but it would be the only way to force players to do an activity for x amount of times or a definied timespan.
Without it the amount of time you need to spend to complete solo content is really up to the player. That isn’t completly true for gearing or item level because of drop chances and loot allocation in general.

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For you that might be true.
I can tell you that it isn’t that way for me.

I don’t need any other players to gatekeep me; I’ll stick to world content; no matter what kind of gear I’d get you will NOT find me in M+ or raiding beyond LFR.

Indeed. And for a while now, I’ve been hindered in that.

I think it is; because it is something I work towards. And getting to those goals is satisfying AND fun (to me anyway).

Well no; but the activities you do to get those upgrades ARE content.

It wouldn’t be hard to implement at all actually:

What if the devs added an AP system back into the game (giving AP from all the various world content activities) and a special set that you can complete from doing world content activities. With that AP you can upgrade parts of that set. You wouldn’t NEED it to complete the activities, but you’d have the OPTION to. Let’s say the cap of that upgrading goes all the way up to mythic raid level gear.

To make sure that such a system wouldn’t be abused by really gearing obsessed ‘big 3’ players -and them feeling like they now HAVE to do world content- they could implement a feature that would limit the ilvl of those sets in ANY of the ‘big 3’ activities (M+, PvP, Raiding). Pretty much like how PvP gear is only a higher ilvl in PvP.

For instance; let’s say you’ve grinded AP for a LONG time and you’ve managed to upgrade 3 of your items to an ilvl that is the equivalent of Mythic raid gear. As soon as you’d step into ‘big 3’ content those 3 items would be downgraded to an ilvl that is equal to the normal max ilvl for world content (just like it is capped currently in the live game).

Doesn’t sound that hard to me, honestly.

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Except a) you forgot world pvp, where ilvl do not scale b) you forgot that the vast majority of the playerbase push content by overgearing it, which is the reason they levelled ilvl in pvp.

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I didn’t forget; I don’t care about it. At all.
To me warmode doesn’t exist (except in very rare cases; I’ve toggled warmode 3 times in the last 4 years, for example).

Sure, but you don’t gear in world content to overgear raids, do you? I don’t even think that’s viable.

So I don’t really get what you’re trying to say. Could you give an example?

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You didn’t get it, as usual, if doesn’t suit you it’s wrong.
The point is not the gearing in world content, the point is downscaling in instances. It will make raids tiered at specific ilvls, making it way too hard for the common guy.
Average guild of a 20 man raid has 10-15ppl overgearing it pulling the other 5 around which are there cause social.
Remove the overgearing and this system which is very common for a tons of people, go bust.

73

Don’t start with the personal attacks.

How is that the point?
My post was about gearing in world content.
Are you making this about something else all of a sudden?

‘the common guy’ does LFR. And in that regard nothing would change with what I’m suggesting. The gear would be downscaled to the same equivalent ilvl than what you get now in world content.

So I don’t see the issue at all.
In regards to the ilvl you earn in world content, THAT is the minimum to which the gear would be downscaled; making it the same for those who use world content to gear up for endgame activities as the situation is now. The EXTRA ilvl you can earn THAT is what would be downscaled.

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It’s not a personal attack, it’s a statement based on previous interactions.

It’s the point as you want to introduce a complex system that has no benefit to anyone except your idea of “world quest as endgame”.

The common guy does way more than LFR.
And even if we take for good your idea (which isn’t) it’s best feature is give you top ilvl gear for trivial content.
For everyone else, it will be useless gear that will be swapped as soon as more advanced content is done, or worse, another temporary set to take up bag space while waiting for bigger drop.

Do we really need to spend dev time for something that benefit a microscopic % of the playerbase?

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It literally was. You could have made your point without making a remark about me. But you chose not to.

It’s not complex.
And yes; because THAT is the idea. To provide something for players who enjoy that sort of thing. When they add a new raid, does that benefit everyone? No. Nor does it have to. Not everything is meant for everyone; they’re embracing that mantra more than ever now by making many optional activities and/or systems.

Yes because it’s not ‘a microscopic %’. At all.
And ‘we’ have been underserved for long enough. Ion admitted to them doing so.

76

It’s complex, it’s another set of item that need to have scaling and such.
Also, as a system is pointless for everyone who does other harder content, and in general, breaks the paradigm of “harder risk bigger reward” who is the staple of the current gearing system.

It is ‘a microscopic %’.
The amount of ppl who plays only open world content without engaging in any other activity is tiny. Mostly farming bots.

It’s a worthless effort.

77

Beg to differ.

No? It doesn’t ‘scale’.
It has upgrades; much like the new system they’re doing in 10.1.
But instead of stopping that upgrade progress because you’ve reached the limit of the content you do, you can continue; but with the caveat that in group/instanced content those extra upgrades will NOT be active.

So what?

I don’t like that ‘staple’ and I want it changed. :person_shrugging:t3:
But I want it changed in a way that doesn’t actually impact that harder content; and that is the purpose of my suggestion.

Give me the source of this ‘fact’ if you’re so sure.

I never claimed this. I engage in other activities; but I don’t use those activities as my ‘progression’ because of various reasons.

You are free to not like my idea; but you’re making up non-issues to try and claim it’s a bad idea. I take issue with that. Just say you don’t like the idea; that’s fine.

78

So modifiers that has to work only in specific istances. Scaling.

So a waste of dev time to cater for a tiny % of the population when there are many other things to fix.

can ask you the same, show me how many do only world content and nothing else.

79

Again; stop claiming it’s a tiny percentage. You have no proof whatsoever.

I’m not making any hyperbolic claims though. That’s the difference.
You can’t provide proof of your ludicrous claims; we’re done.

80

This popcorn is very tasty. Just to let you know.

Tah, the problem is that what you want requires you to go into places you don’t want to go. While people do play the Open World, Tahen is right when he says that people don’t consider the Open World the endgame. You don’t play the open world to get gear. You play it to unlock mounts, transmogs, pets, lore, etc. You play raids or M+ to get the best gear, so you can clear raids and M+ easier. They’re endgame content. The open world is not. The open world is a simple jumping-off point for the harder content that you need to do to get gear.

What you have made very clear, is that you want to get endgame from non-endgame content, even if you have to grind for it. But let’s say you wanted heroic or low mythic ilvl gear, they’d have to make it so the difficulty makes up for it, which is simply impossible in an Open World setting where even if you put in a mythic boss, it would easily fall because unlike in raids or dungeons, you don’t have to wipe before you can res. There is no challenge, so you haven’t earnt those gear rewards.

Thing is, I’ve seen what you want in practice before. In SWTOR there was a system called Galactic renown which replaced your XP bar with a renowned bar. And for all activities you did, you’d get your renowned XP. Fill the bar up, and you’d get a box which contained a gear item that was a possible upgrade to your current item. So for example, if your ilvl was 365, you may get something in the box that was ilvl 370 and higher. This essentially allowed everyone who didn’t like raiding, PVP or dungeons to gear to max level over time.

Sounds great right? Not quite. It broke all endgame content gearing entirely. Everyone stopped trying to progress endgame content because they stopped giving out meaningful rewards. Why would they when they could just grind a few daily or heroic quests for a bit and get a crate that cost them less time and effort. And you may go, “Isn’t that the point? Clearly, they prefer doing the open-world content than raiding.”, and the answer is that if you give people an easier option to get the same rewards, 99% of people will take that easier option. It’s the same reason why people despise boosting.

The Devs removed this system completely in 7.0.

Now, I know how you’re gonna respond. You’re gonna say: “But I find that fun for me! That’s what I enjoy doing!”. And that’s good for you and all, but what you find fun is irrelevant. We don’t need facts and numbers to know that the consensus is that no one considers the open-world endgame content, and therefore should allow you to get endgame stuff. Don’t believe me? How many people on this thread, and others you have made replies on regarding this subject, defended you or sided with you?

Look, I’m not going to argue over this, because I know how arguments work on the internet, but I don’t honestly think you’ll ever get what you want. Sorry :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

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