It makes me wonder who they are actually listening to? People like Jito? Or people who actually play PvP on more days than just on a blue monday? I have 0 interest in M+ or raiding, and that isn’t going to change.
I don’t believe the developers of this game are stupid people. So, what is the thought behind such a dumb system?
If they are so afraid of PvP becoming the preferred method of gearing, then why not just reintroduce a PvP stat that makes PvP gear bad in PvE? Sure, PvP stats have downsides, but it is better than what we have now.
We have been following the constructive feedback about the range of gear available on our PvP vendors, and we agree with the underlying concerns. While WoW is an interconnected ecosystem of different content and systems and we feel that the very strongest characters should be the ones who participate and excel in a wide range of activities, each individual progression path should offer the majority of the tools required for success in that path. The current PvP vendors fall short of that goal.
We are considering a few different solutions, such as reworking the stat coverage of the vendor gear and/or providing PvP-specific bonuses through those items. As soon as we’ve settled on a direction, we’ll share our plan for feedback, and get the changes up on Beta for testing.
It’s always PvPers having to do tons upon yet more tons of high-end PvE content, whereas PvErs have to maybe do a few BGs at most to get a minimal upgrade in comparison to what PvPers get from doing PvE.
This is a trash stance and we need to stop accepting it.
Unless they’re adding a 16 piece set bonus which grants 20% damage increase & decrease this will not change anything.
PvE gear will still be higher ilvl and have the same / better itemization (+ broken trinkets & other effect items). It will still be “farm PvE or die”.
Blizzard needs to implement a PvP stat (or WoD scaling). It’s the only solution (besides the 16 piece set bonus).
Honestly I can’t explain to you what’s going through their minds when they design something like that. It’s just so haphazard, so random. It’s got no texture or features - it’s just a bunch of items with currency prices slapped on, deliberately made an awful way to play the game. Why is it here?
I’m gonna rant… I can’t keep it in.
Whether they’re just stupid or not I cannot say. They seem like perfectly normal people to me, but that may itself be the problem. When I speak to the vanilla devs, and I’ve spoken to about a handful of them now, you quickly get the impression that you are talking to the geekiest, nerdiest geniuses on the planet. They are not normal people, and I mean that in a very positive way.
I’ve never spoken to any of the current developers, but a trend has definitely formed here.
I can understand what they’re going for with a lot of the things they’re doing in Shadowlands. If you sit down and analyse and try to figure out what’s going through their minds, there’s often quite a bit of sense in it, actually. Yes, even the covenant system. In fact especially the covenant system, but that’s a topic for another time.
This? I can’t make sense of it.
It’s not cool - I don’t get a “Wow, Azeroth is so cool” vibe
It’s not convenient
Numbers are strange and off. Why +7 and +8 iLvL on upgrades?
It doesn’t re-introduce a BiS PvP list from PvP
PvE’ers might have BiS pieces from here, so it doesn’t prevent that
It still can’t even come close to competing with PvE in efficiency
Whether I view it top-down fantasy first or bottom-up mechanics first it just falls flat on its face. At least people are suggesting ways to fix the bottom-up issues with proper stats.
But again, the top-down world design in the context of PvP is just… missing. I mean during BfA they managed to turn an exploration game-mode into PvP with very limited success and then they simultaneously managed to not make a PvP mode out of “The horde and the alliance have two bases and are literally going at each other!”
How do you even do that? And now we’ve covenants at war with one another and we can’t do any PvP with that? And they made an entire covenant about internal conflict between 5 great houses and somehow didn’t manage to put in a battleground?!
Impromptu brain thought: Isn’t it because a tier is +15 item levels, and Normal, Heroic and Mythic covers 3 tiers, so with 6 item upgrades you get to upgrade half a tier each time?
You don’t need to post if you have nothing to add. I already said it takes 2 week.
One is gonna be bis for pvp and one bis for pve so most people will be changing between the 2 meta covenants. For pve andys they will have 2 meta covenants for their roles they want to swap between. Or they want to simply swap between m+ or raid meta covenants… Only quest lore heroes and people that don’t play this game will not be affected by this system.
I remember Ion explained in the past (fuzzy brain, don’t ask me where!) that Blizzard goes up +15 item levels each raid tier, because that’s what they’ve historically learned works best.
When they tried it with half a tier between raids (like BWL to AQ) it resulted in a less clear sense of reward, because you may or may not be interested in all the drops, and then it brings into question whether the progression effort is worth it given a marginal reward.
So they’ve settled on +15 item levels, because that’s what players feel is the sweet-spot where they’re compelled to pursue the new rewards and feel the reward matches the effort.
Something like that. I think it was explained in a Q&A.
Why’s it different for Mythic+? No idea. Maybe to have more levels to differentiate players between? I’m not sure.
Why not improve PvP upgrades in increments of +15? I would personally prefer smaller, but more frequent upgrades. Then you can cash in on your Honor more quickly and exchange it for power, rather than having to save up a ton of it, spend it to upgrade and item, and then - god forbid - maybe replace that item shortly after.
Cheap and frequent upgrades are less of a worry than expensive and infrequent ones, I think.
Same today in BfA. Choosing what item to put that Corruption or Socket on is a pain, because you really don’t want to put it on an item and then get a better version of that item in your next Weekly chest.
I’d guess that’s their design angle on it. Maybe. Perhaps. Yeah I’m just taking a wild guess.
This is all true but there’s just so much stuff in here that no longer holds up to the simplest of scrutiny.
First and foremost, a dungeon not providing a clear sense of reward for all slots over a previous dungeon isn’t really a problem. Expanding the breadth of possible rewards at a lower tier of difficulty to make a hard encounter easier is a perfectly valid thing to do.
Of course it’s not actually something Blizzard does, because they have somehow convinced themselves that WoW is a seasonal action game, and they are reaping the rewards of that strange decision.
Furthermore, raid tiers are now 30 item levels apart - not 15.
Furthermore, item levels go up so much that our DPS goes up by over 4x over the course of an expansion. This causes all sorts of strange scaling issues, and right now we’re actually seeing PvP completely destroyed by these scaling issues.
And that’s after they tried to re-scale it back to normalcy - it didn’t work in the sense that it failed to rescale it enough, but it was also full of bugs.
So now we’re in a situation where we’ve got more gear scaling over the course of an expansion than the entirety of vanilla till early WotLK combined, and every single expansion they have to reset everything - squishing all our power down substantially.
And now I’m going to be told that that’s necessary to feel rewarded.
Sorry, not buyin’ it.
I have no idea, either - although I appreciate the granularity in difficulty at very high levels of M+. That’s pretty cool. But raids aren’t like that.
The whole “What to upgrade, this is risky”-feeling comes as a result of the random drops. This system doesn’t have that. You have complete control over exactly what drops.
Besides, they could just make it in increments of 5 instead, couldn’t they?
Actually, hey, come to think of it - I wonder if the game has a system where you can trade some materials and have an item created and then modified by optional ingredients. I wonder if there’s a system like that that actually makes gear pieces. I wonder if there might be like an optional component that you can include that changes the stat allocation. That’s be cool, wouldn’t it?
Wait - this all exists! It’s called trade skills and the Shadowlands improvements to it. So we could like… craft PvP items with the exact stats we wanted, buy them off the AH, and then buy upgrade tokens from a PvP vendor and stuff? Wow, then we could even find the PvP vendor!!
See, that’s the most frustrating thing about this. Blizzard have immersive bottom-up, top-down connected and logical solutions to the problems they’re facing here. They’re just not using them. They’re just pulling out random numbers instead. Who knows the true purpose.
Gear creep has been a problem for quite a few expansions now. I am not sure why Blizzard keeps ignoring this fact. They are convinced that raiders need a huge iLevel sausage, or they won’t raid. Which I don’t think is true, as they’ll min/max anyway.
It was more to explain where that +7/8 probably comes from.
But I guess if you’re critical of some of the background stuff regarding the general gear reward structure, then the PvP vendor and Upgrade system are just more of the same.
I do think tiers increase by 15 and not 30 item levels, but correct me if I’m wrong.
445, 460, 475. +15.
I think the point is that the item levels will upgrade in increments that are comparable to gear from other sources.
There are several ways to count to 45, I’m not sure if one number is strictly better than another.
But as far as personal preference goes, I prefer upgrading gear in small increments. And I’ll second your side jab that the Seasonal design of WoW with heavy item level spikes, is bothersome. But I’m saying that as someone who always plays WoW and isn’t privy to a “cyclical” approach.
But we’ll see, maybe they’ll make some changes here and there.
For the most part I think they’ve just carried over the old PvP vendor and Upgrade NPC from MoP, because what players have largely requested is the old designs and not something new. So that seems to be Blizzard’s starting point, to have a PvP vendor and Upgrade NPC that are recognizable in design structure.
The challenge is more to make that old design competitive and compatible with the new stuff, like Mythic+.
Well, the +7 and +8 numbers are still arbitrary even if you accept the rest of the system as is. The system is actually so random that the gear reward contains a rounding error, I mean ???.
But yeah, it is also just more of the same. This isn’t small-scale random garbage - this is much worse.
The difficulties go up by +15, the raids go up by +30. The previous tier was 415, 430, 445, with an iLvL cap of 455 due to Titanforging.
475 for Mythic Ny’alotha is 30 more than 445 for Mythic Eternal Palace.
Also, this happens 3 times for a total of 90 item levels. Uldir gave a 385.
The expansion came out originally starting out with iLvL 300 items.
WoW: Battle for Azeroth’s item levels span 185 item levels for a few items, 175 for most, and that’s just the max level item level span. For context, Sunwell items were level 114 or something like that.
It’s because tBC comes along with 4 tiers of difficulty for an expansion, whereas BfA comes along with 4 tiers of difficulty per season, overlapping 2 tiers with each seasion, meaning a total of 10 tiers of raid difficulty.
They requested a gear vendor with a PvP stat. This is not it.
Anyway, I actually agree with Blizzard that would be a bad solution, but this is an even worse solution.
Well, at least they admit they haven’t got a clue what they’re doing.
People are definitely going to suggest the PvP specific stat. I can feel it. I don’t think it’s a very good solution, but I think it’s going to happen.
And, somehow, they didn’t talk about just how insanely much playtime you need to get this gear.
Pvp gearing system in WoD was as close to perfection Blizzard ever came. Please bring back that system. Back then pvp gear was BiS but someone with pve gear could compete and work toward conquest gear set.
I can’t keep it in.
