Dumb down item level, reward lasting things

Community General Discussion
1

Is it just me or are there too many item levels of gear, a lot of which are entirely pointless. I feel like a lot of the issues with WoW right now are the gear differentials. Looking at things from a fresh 60 or new players point of view, there is little fun to be had after hitting 60 based on this alone.

PvP - it is not fun to join BGs to get gear, its just not. You may as well not be there. The item level gaps are wild, on top of the crazy damage.

PvE - just whats the point? Reward things that last more than 1 expansion like transmogs, mounts and titles.

Why is there the need for all these different item levels?

What happened to the good old days of having 1 honor set, 1 conquest set. 1 dungeon set, 1 heroic dungeon set. 1 raid set, 1 heroic raid set.

In today’s game the gaps shouldn’t be so high and in my opinion, it should look something like this;

PvP

  • Honor set: 200 ilvl → 220 ilvl in PvP
  • Conquest set: 210 ilvl → 230 ilvl in PvP
  • all other gear: 210 ilvl in PvP

PvE

  • Normal Dungeon: 200 ilvl

  • Heroic Dungeon: 210 ilvl

  • Mythic Dungeon: 220 ilvl

  • Normal Raid: 215 ilvl

  • Heroic Raid: 225 ilvl

  • Mythic Raid: 235 ilvl

Rewards

  • PvP;
  1. Titles (as they are now)
  2. Elite Transmog armor sets (1.8k)
  3. Weapon Transmog (2.2k)
  4. Weapon Enchant (for winning X amount of games above 2.2k)
  5. Gladiator Mount (for winning X amount of games above 2.4k)
  6. Rank 1 title and a more prestigious mount for achieving rank 1.
  • PvE;
    Mythic + dungeons (there would be 5 levels, all levels have gear drop chance, increasing the with the harder difficulty, rewards are for completing all dungeons on that difficulty);
  1. Difficulty equivalent of mythic 5 - Rewards title
  2. Difficulty equivalent of mythic 10 - Rewards Class specific armor transmog
  3. Difficulty equivalent of mythic 15 - Rewards weapon transmogs and weapon enchant
  4. Difficulty equivalent of mythic 20 - Rewards Mount and Title
  5. Difficulty equivalent of mythic 25 - Rewards more prestigious mount, title and transmogs.

As for Raiding, it would be the usual achievements and mounts etc.

Edit:
I’d just like to add what a new patch would then look like because people seem confused at how its worked in the past, atleast for PvP.

PvP:
Conquest gear replaces honor gear and we get a new conquest set. Starting at 220 ilvl and increasing to 240 in PvP. Any other gear would scale to 220 in PvP.

PvE:
Dungeon gear would all go up by 10 ilvl for each difficulty. New raids;
Normal - 225 ilvl
Heroic - 235 ilvl
Mythic - 245 ilvl.

So everything just goes up by 10. There is no need for old raid gear to be made completely redundant with the excessive item level increases. Currently we make progress in a patch and then have to start from scratch every patch, making all the first patch hard work completely useless. It shouldn’t be like that. I can see why they do it. If you completed mythic raid in patch 1, there’s no point doing heroic raid in patch 2. But again, that’s another contributing factor of the item level problem. Too many difficulties causing huge item level inflation.

1 Like
2

the only thing i d agree to is that the item level gap between the difficulties is too large but everything else is absolutely fine imo.

you get titles and mounts/mogs for pvp and pve.

i dont think you need to complicate things more than it needs to be. if you want to put more rewards into the game then just do it with the current settings and just increase the amount of rewards you get.

3

during vanilla or tbc (or maybe even wotlk?), many many years ago, some guy created a post with a mathematical equation of the ilvl of items.

you see, ilvl used to be a hidden thing, until a player found up the secret mathemtical equation of ilvl. later on an ilvl addon was created (along side aggro addon).
eventually, blizzard realized they should just show the ilvl of every item to make it simpler (and more accurate) for the players because they already have that addon.

my point is:
ilvl isnt a magical number thrown in by some guy in blizzard, there is an actual hidden math behind it. there is always an ilvl, even if they remove it.

4

doesnt matter ilvl he want to close the gap between different gear ^^

no hidden math needed then just lower stats

2 Likes
5

Not if they set ilvl = 1 for every item in the game, starting with the starting gear you get when you create a new character.

6

I think currently, it is far more complicated than it needs to be. The thing that I miss in WoW is just logging in and playing what I want. Currently there is far too much to grind to even begin enjoying the game. The issue is the systems you have to grind aren’t fun, they’re just there as ‘content’. But the majority of players don’t actually enjoy them, they just have to do it. Gearing plays a big part in the problem. The 2 biggest issues in WoW are;

  1. All the different item levels of gear.
  2. All the chores and systems people call ‘borrowed power’.

If they simplified gearing and removed borrowed power, they could balance classes much easier and focus on adding more real content and not chores. Having 5 levels of mythic+ that have large jumps in difficulty would be far better imo. Imagine just choosing a difficulty with your group and going in instead of having to level up a key to get to the difficulty you want. Leveling up a key is a chore in itself. In recent expansions, personally I feel like the grind is never ending. And I for one would rather have a geared character and focus on pushing rating in arena, or pushing 1-5 difficulties in mythic+, to earn far cooler meaningful rewards.

7

PvP gearing worked fine in BfA, with scaling to reduce the power differential. But too many elite players complained that they couldn’t delete casuals any more, so Blizz took it away again. And also in BfA we had TF and, again, many elite players complained about casuals having too much ilvl, so Blizz took that away too. And look at Corruption - here was a gear system where ilvl became a lot less important… and many end-game players absolutely hated it (I know the RNG element was part of this complaint, but there were also plenty of complaints about how some lower level items were doing much more damage than higher ilvl items in a player’s inventory).

The moral of the story is that in WoW, increased player power = character progression. For many end-game players, becoming A LOT more powerful over the length of a patch is the main motivation for re-running end-game content. Not just to push higher keys or Mythic raid, but to flex and show they’re better at the game than casuals.

8

Wow was always been like that, the core of wow is making people flex.

Sadly wow is not a game for casuals unless you like so world quests all the patch.

9

All of these rewards are garbage. Maybe if mounts did anything other than being all the same, just with a different coat of paint, a mount reward would be cool.

The ilvl problem is rooted in the amount of difficulties available. Each difficulty needs to feel rewarding in terms of power, so more difficulties means much bigger power progression within one season. Why not have it like this:

Heroic raid gives 230 gear
Mythic raid gives 245 gear. There’s no other raid difficulties.
Heroic dungeon gives 227 gear.
Mythic gear gives 242 gear. There’s no other dungeon difficulties.
M+ exists as VALOR FARM ONLY, which you then spend in the valor vendor to buy dungeon, raid and M+ gear.

Now the endgame gear has a maximum gap of 18 item levels. Still powerful, but the power progression is contained due to the removal of difficulties

10

Problem is when the ilvl was hidden back then the scaling was kinda sustained. Not so much now.
For some reason i remember that the first Epics in WotlK were ilvl 200 and think they ended at 226 in ICC?.. not totaly sure. Now it might be as someone else said that there are to many difficulties so they need more ilvl scaling per tier.
The first stat squish came in MoP however and every squish comes in shorter intervals as the latest one contained 3 in 1 with lvl, ilvl and statsquish.

I had hoped that our numbers would be close to classic numbers being at lvl 60 and all but i think as with the current ilvl we are aready above the end of Wotlk in ivls, we are so in stats aswell… atleast in regards to health.

If this expansion gets to a 9.3 patch im fairly sure we will end up near end of Cata numbers… you know the last expansion pre squish… think i had around 60k at start in greens max lvl and ended near 190k.

Think the visible part makes them need to escalate the numbers far more then than the difficulty steps they added… might be a bit of both

11

lasting things… like… high item level pieces

12

I’d be happy for items that last more than 1 patch (let alone more than 1 expansion).
Not sure how we do this though, the playerbase seem to want a constant stream of gear. When Bliz slowed down gear progression many were unhappy.

I’m currently acquiring and upgrading the Korthia gear, have most of them at 220 (unlikely to get higher as I’m in Tier 3 and I don’t see me making 4, let alone 6). But this Korthia gear replaced the Covenant gear which I poured quite a bit of Anima into for upgrades and now I’m vendoring those.
I hope 9.2 doesn’t bring a whole new gearing system so I end up vendoring all this Korthia gear. My preference would be they add some levels to the current ones. Although if I’m still at tier 3 codex that won’t be of much use to me.

13

Disagree. Totally garbage. The last time PvP gearing worked was in WoD.

The last time gear upgrading worked was in MoP.

14

Literally just decent cosmetic items. The last cool cosmetic class sets were from challenge mode in MoP.

15

I am not sure how this works. Lets say we get 4 raids per expansion. Do we really want to outgear raid 2, 3 and 4 immediately with our raid 1 gear, taking away all the challenges? (or do you really want to 1 shot every mob immediately in the new expansion?)

2 Likes
16

just nerf raid 2.3 and 4 a lil bit and nerf the gap

17

Like i said; take away the challenge and blast the raids in the first week :frowning:

Keeping the same gear for 2, or even more years, does not sound that healthy to me neither.

1 Like
18

I’m more looking at the gear / patch cycle within an expansion. I remember back in TBC and Wrath that gearing was slower so you kept gear for longer. I used a crafted 2 hander mace in Wrath for quite a long time.
I’m just tiring of the gear treadmill. I put in effort to acquire, upgrade, gem, enchant gear that is replaced so damn fast. It’s almost not even worth transmogging gear anymore as you’ll just have to re-mog it again in a few days.

But as I said I don’t know how we do this as the playerbase wants to be constantly getting new gear every week.
How do we keep the players happy and running their M+ and constantly gearing up whilst offering some stability to those for whom the treadmill?
Perhaps this Korthia gear would have been good in 9.0 and just allow it to be upgraded with each patch so that the work of the previous patch to acquire it and upgrade isn’t wasted.

19

well its an valid point u have for sure. but there should be better catch up mechanics, and say raid 2 is out, raid 3 comes out, then the ilvl increase a lil bit on raid 2, to improve the catch up mechanics cause they are lacking, and gear has to be tuned overall to fit pvp better

20

But isn’t it currently 6 months? Not ever week. We currently gain 26 ilvl per tier (previous expansions 30). That’s it.

On what level do you want to end before starting the next raid? We usually get catch up mechanisms to the ilvl of the Normal difficulty of the new raid. That ilvl is enough for starting with Heroic difficulty.