After all the talk about bad luck protection and dinars, I feel that the most obvious way to implement bad luck protection is overlooked:
Tokens of merit: the original participation reward that is being overlooked.
The way to implement it is to add 2 consumable items:
Rune of spatial certainty: Works as a vantus rune. Can be used while targeting a font of power or a current season raid boss. Causes the next weekly vault to be populated with items from that boss/dungeon.
Rune of spatial relativity: Work as an enchantment. Can be used while targeting a specific item. Causes the next weekly vault to be populated with items for that slot.
Each of those items cost 6 tokens of merit, and can be used in the same week (thus enabling to target specific items with certainty).
With that system:
You do not provide more gear to the people that get what they want from the vault
You do not add any extra system on top of what you have
You actually increase the value of tokens of merits from the vault
You give a gateway for people that feel that got the worst luck to actually progress towards their endgame bis list
How to permanently solve Bad Luck: Everyone’s best items come exclusively from crafting. All items dropped anywhere (overworld, delves, dungeons, m+, raids, pvp, etc) are just stepping stones towards crafted BiS.
No i meant pay to play, since the gear would be a 2nd requirement to play rather than a paid advantage. In essence they would increase your sub from the 13 euros to 13 euros and 2 crafts per month (however much that cost).
I do not know if you played season 2 of DF, but that was more or less what they tried.
They let crafting be equal ilvl with myth track from the vault/raid, and did not turn away that well.
Gearing was too fast, people were done with the game in 1 month, and actually progression later in the season was non existent (because as long as you got your trinkets, you were done with the season with just crafted items).
That’s because Crafting was equal ilvl to Mythic raiding as you said. So the 2 systems synergized. If crafted equipment was even just +3 ilvl (and with access to trinkets that surpasses those dropping in raids/m+), or even same ilvl but with better and deterministic stat allocation, it would not be fast. In fact, assuming the current acquisition speed of 1 Spark every 2 weeks after the first week, it would take 15 weeks to achieve full BiS on a character for just one spec (possibly +3/4 weeks if multispeccing).
Too convoluted, like every other suggestion. If we ‘NEED’ a currency bring back valor points you use to purchase higher end gear. It worked fine for Wrath and Cata.
It could be even more simple - just set item slot you need like:
Go to the NPC at the Great Vault
Pick dialogue line “I need head/weapon/trinket/ring etc.” slot
You have more significant more chances to get that items for the slot. In that case you won’t stuck with no upgrade or little upgrade instead of huge upgrade i.e.
Imagine you have Veteran wrists and chempion grade weapon. Rest of your stuff is Hero
You need wrists most, then Weapon in that case - so you select wrists and on next opening of the vault BAM - wrists appear!
If you get one week of bad luck, you can choose your slot the next week.
The next step was that if you want you can forgo the bad luck for the next week also, in order to also target a dungeon/raid boss. If you do that you also target one specific loot table.
So instead of just getting a “weapon”, you can also choose to get a “weapon from the 3rd boss”, or instead of choosing a “ring” you can choose a “ring from theater of pain”.