This is indeed an unfortunate effect of HC+.
To bypass it though, sit in Wintergrasp every time it’s up for about a week or so and get yourself a full PvP set. A full hateful set, furious/deadly offpieces, cheap Darkmoon trinkets and an epic weapon from AH (around 1-2k gold depending on class) should get you at around 4k gearscore. Then you’re absolutely fine in HC+, and you also check the gearscore requirements in pugs. Never had an issue being 4k+ myself on any of my alts. You will do just fine in basically any role, tanks get def capped from resillience, healers will just have a slightly smaller mana pool due to lack of intellect on PvP gear, and most DPS classes/specs should be able to reliably push around 3k overall DPS in a 5 man scenario, with some specs even able to push slightly higher. This is more than enough for any HC+.
Edit: Of course your aim besides above is to get as much hit (and expertise) as possible. Gem/enchant into hit as much as humanly possible, and choose PvP offpieces with hit. This makes up for the lost hit from wearing majority PvP gear.
Just in: a multiplayer game forces you to rely on other people. More news at 11.
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There is a distinct difference between playing group content, like raids, pvp, current dungeons, elite quests etc. And boosting someone in a content that’s otherwise trivial to you just so they can catch up. First is the core of the multiplayer RPG experience, second is a glaring flaw in miltiplayer RPG design.
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Do you even need hc+/hc++ as a fresh 80? Shouldnt we get conquestbadges in “normal” heroics next phase, so you can easily grind heroics on a fresh 80 untill you have a 4,6ish gs - which is enough for toc 10 normal / ony 10/25.
Should’ve been the case from the very beginning. Just like M+ in retail I don’t understand what brainlet thinks this may be a bad idea.
Leveling in the old world for alts is a hellish nightmare when it comes to finding a dungeon group it takes hours and at times you can sit in the LFG tool a whole day without anyone to invite. I’ve been leveling as a prot warrior a TANK and it’s been a nightmare. I miraculously got into a BRD group yesterday after 4 hours, very “social” experience that one was waiting for 4 hours for a group.
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Yeah, i can understand their intention. But we all saw, very quickly, that the socialization just didnt happen. At that point they should just admit it, and give RDF.
I would have respected them more then, they gave it a shot, it didnt go as they hoped but atleast they tried.
Yeah, i cba leveling another toon because of this. Some may say i dont want another toon bad enough then, sure, but the results are the same (and im obviously not alone).
The whole LFG needs a rework (and as far as i know, its coming in p3). Just annoyed it took them MONTHS to fix something so obvious.
You are missing my point:
Just in: a multiplayer game forces you to rely on other people [boosting you]. More news at 11.
It is good to have to rely on other players to do group content with, but its not good that new players have to rely on getting boosted by other, significantly better geared players.
The issue is that nobody wants to do normal heroics when they could POTENTIALLY get carried through HC+/++. And then those same people come here to complain that no one wants to carry them instead of grouping with each other for some normal HC.
They don’t have to, but they want to. They dismiss all other paths and end up not doing anything.
You snooze you lose.
Always amazed that some people have a hard time with this concept.
If you skip out of the first monhts of a games release you will always have a hard time.
Which is why devs of MMO games over time decided to include catch up mechanics. Something that started went beyond with Warth of the Lich King especially with release of ToC that was seen and used as a catch up raid. Paired with Heroics that provided previous tier tokens except now Blizzard decided to shift it to “increase relevance of dungeons” by introducing HC+/++/+++ which are only relevant for BiS owners because they’re better current tier emblem gainers than raids. Mode in which difficulty and player made requirements outpace potential rewards which could have been used for catching up.
But hey enjoy player numbers consistently dropping with no new players filling the gaps.
The game sadly just encourages RMT if you’re not an already established player with characters that have professions and gold to send to your new 80 characters.
RDF would sorta fix pre-raid gearing since it at least allows you to spam heroics with other like-minded individuals from the whole region, And collect emblems of valor(conquest next phase) which will net you a good set from the vendors.
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What an out-of-touch comment, People instantly leave groups when they see the host is low gearscore.
I had quite aew people who just go offline after seeing me in 4.2kgs because “sorry don’t feel like carrying ppl”
Catchup mechanics were always designed to allow players to skip a raid tier, but never to skip pre-raid gearing (like, you weren’t taking 20 people in quest greens into ZG or 10 into ZA). However, nowadays people just want to skip everything, which is where this “problem” comes from.
Or maybe there’s just the fact that new players are a comparatively smaller portion of the populace since the overall pop is actually declining, and putting in a mode (hc+) that basically removed the majority of players from the setting that new players would have wanted to do (hc) maybe was NOT a good idea.
Seriously, none of this would have ever happened if those morons at Blizz HQs had the common sense of NOT tampering with an already good game by making it worse.
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Judging by the amount of crying on the forums they seem quite numerous.
That’s selective bias - you only see the ones that are actually complaining. You don’t see the ones that just quit, or the ones that have no issue with it. But population numbers don’t lie - ever since Blizz started with these changes, it’s been a downward spiral.
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Not quite, the player population has been dropping ever since day 1 of Classic. At most you could say that this change did not stop it.
It hasn’t dropped since day one. It’s inconsistent with a downward trend. It’s still hard to say how many people actually left as blizzard doesn’t provide any actual data. And just looking at warcraftlogs/ironforge etc is bs youtube clickbait.
As Zalanji said, the forums have been well known to be overreacting selective bias. They have been calling this game dead since patch 1.2 in 2004.
I’m not saying it’s the only cause, but it probably contributed given the comparative magnitude of the fall during this phase as opposed to the previous ones. You would think that, in a situation like this, Blizzard would try to do something to make the game more welcoming towards newer players in an attempt to draw in fresh blood. But they’ve consistently only listened to the most hardcore segment of the playerbase (even going so far as to actually recruiting some of their numbers from those, in the past) throughout these years. At this point I’m honestly disillusioned about Blizzard’s ability to see the error of their ways, but it baffles me how out of touch with reality some of the players are, as well.