There is nothing as anticlimactic as finishing difficult dungeon in time and having an empty chest at the end. What’s the point even of having a chest, that’s empty. Same goes for raid bosses, you put an effort to get a kill and the boss is just empty. The personal loot made this even worse.
I can see why you wanted experiment with less loot drops, but those times are long gone. Someone might argue, it’s about the journey. But that create certain expectations upon reaching goal on that journey.
It’s like bringing a giant covered plate infront of starving person, and then upon uncovering what’s inside, it be empty.
So you created that expectation, and the disappointment. Not just that, but you’ll have the starving person do 100 sit ups, if they ever want to see the covered plate at all.
If I am to try think of how to fix this… First thing come to my mind is, that you don’t have enough item variety in comparison to nowadays RPGs. There is one thing only to be looted and that’s straight up gear. Professions being meaningful could give you a good counter. Say you drop a material, 5 of which can create an item, rarity (ilvl) depending on the difficulty of encounter. Therefore you get to progress gear even if RNG screw you up, you also get to loot something after completed challenge. And it also remove the complete dependency on RNG. This essentially works as pseudo RNG where you get higher chance to receive item depending on amount of failed loot attempts (after 5th time looting the material the chance would be then 100% to get item, since it’s 5 pieces to create a gear).
Then you have the transmog. Surely you can do better with that. You could try something like tmogs being crafted, and they also be able to upgrade if you manage to get hands on rarer tmog material, just slap it on, have some amazing visual effect be added to it in what could be several stages of upgrade. And suddenly you have plethora of materials that can be put into those empty chest. It be like giving a raw steak on that covered plate. If the starving person can cook it, he’ll eat good. No longer having to deal with the situation where it be empty, And all his efforts were for nothing.
It be nice to see Blizzard fighting to win rather than just fighting to survive.
I am aware of that, that’s hardly a fix, maybe like a tiny little bandage at best.
Besides it doesn’t address the issue of “empty chests” which is just mindboggling to have such a thing in RPG.
You’re right, that’s why I suggest to create some variety of items such as crafting materials (just example), to actually have items that they can put inside the loot chest boss etc.
So you have lack of item variety. Only gear drops or nothing drops. Personal loot makes it worse, since you don’t get to actually see items in there. But players getting them in bag. It’s a psychological thing.
We did see this in BFA, and tbh i ended up with huge amounts of vendor stuff that sold for 1 gold each (whatever they were called) and the items you crafted werent either as useful or just a 1 time craft (alch trinket since it was soulbound)
Even tho the suggestion isnt that bad, i would want to see a big incentive to use said items or give them a longer lifespan.
And maybe these items would have been better as item upgrades instead of “static” valor points.
Especially from an rpg standpoint i would find it way more interesting that my upgrades where something like:
2 mithril bars
2 silver bars
1 iron chain
To then upgrade my already looted belt instead of just “spending” said valor points.
Tricky thing to conquer and overall this expansion i am quite happy with all the systems i place.
What you just mentioned is gear. I don’t see item variety in that. Gear is one item type. Everything is so god damn streamlined. They could play around with professions, to give them meaningful progression. Hell they don’t even have to invent anything new, just look at other games.
For me the Shadowlands is disappointment. It feels like the only reason for me to call it good xpac would be, that BfA was so god damn bad.
Vault Chest?
that was a brand new implemented system for SL that It has much more potential than it currently has, and for development than drop rates currently have, drop rates is the same old story Blizz press a button and increasea drop rates.
i’ve always enjoyed gear being everywhere IF you tried to actually play the game. bfa was perfect for me except titanforging…if they brought that drop rate back in pve i’d be almost content. (i believe the items are lacking in this expansion, not only their drop rates…in bfa you had possibilities to go for perfect stats. not so much here)
also i find being forced to m+/pvp equally stupid.
i’ve not searched stats or anything but it feels like they are trying to bench raiding in favor of m+/pvp. the loot drop in the raid reflects that at least for me.
i mean, technically they could make the chest drop an item for every player and it wont make any difference to progression in 9.05. since upgrading gear will be the “goal” not simply getting a drop. even +15 210 gear wont be worth the leather its made from unless you can upgrade it, so yea why the hell not.
if there dead set on forcing us to regrind because “technical issues” they should absolutely guarantee and item per person. If your grinding a specific item thats still like a 1-12 roll on most dungeons…people could easily still run the same dungeon 12-36 times with ultra bad luck before they got “that item” they need.
The most important thing they screwed up with gearing isn’t the lack of it.
It’s your inability to target what you want. The coins they removed was more or less a targeting system. That and the overwhelmingly high drop chance. But this current system isn’t going to work. the new valor is still RNG.
its still bad RNG, the complimentary prize is you only have to farm a item once. instead of 2 or 3 different ilvl’s as you progress. Better than nothing…still a kick in the teeth
i mean i don’t get it. They design the pvp vendor. then make this ridiculous pve system to match?
Oh yea. Go ahead and run a mythic+ dungeon for a 40 or 20% chance of getting one piece of gear from 20 available options in that run. Also, you can run a single mythic 14 that week and get a 226 vault reward, or you can get keystone master, spam the same dungeon 20 times for the sake of getting that specific gear and then upgrade that gear to 220 with 50 times the effort.
It’s kind of baffling to me how distant they are from the playerbase. It’s like they never bother to play their own game. Which is fine, as long as they listen to the playerbase, but judging by what they’re making, i highly doubt that.
