Like… This is the worst part of gearing in general and it creates extremely hostile situations re. loot early in the season… and some cringe later in the season, so to speak.
While I’m usually lucky with tier acquisition it still creates unfun situation where, e.g. u get huge ilvl upgrade in a certain slot but no cata charge is ready… or you can’t get the crafted 2-set because it takes a tier slot :V
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People from higher “tiers” of game are spamming lower levels to snatch their precious tier sets to get those silly power spikes early on to “push”. Heck, I’ve sold tier sets I won and needed in early weeks of season for hefty gold to those dodos. But it’s not exactly fun.
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While everyone wants to get tier tokens early on, as the season progresses the tier tokens become the unwanted babies of loot - I’m pretty sure you’ve seen raids where people win tier tokens on greed rolls and can’t even vendor them
At the same time, in the great vault you keep getting “Tier set proc’d items” instead of that mog / trinket you want. When of course you no longer need any and it seems like those tier procs are just bloating your vault choices. -
Tier sets are almost always awfully balanced - I’m not even gonna dwell on this but we all roughly recall situations where specific tier sets were broken while others were semi-useless.
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And if the nummerical balance isn’t a problem, the playstyle changes often imposed in recent seasons might be quite annoying. Any of you played with fury warrior tier set in DF where you needed a frigging weakaura to track crit level
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in some seasons tier sets forced specific talent picks - some will say it’s good but also it’s not if you think about it. If TS benefits “glacial spike” there is 0 chance of creating any build that won’t pick glacial which in other seasons happens from time to time. Ironically, in PvP in season with GS bonus some people would just play without tier set bonus because casting GS in arena is kinda meh ;p
5b) Check very early expansions for their tier sets - they were more generic and less based on talent picks. -
We had seasons without tier sets and I know some people cried back then because they couldn’t show their elitism by having early tier set but in general I enjoyed those seasons more as gearing felt less restrictive - even if I had no bis azerite, I had “some” azerite. I didn’t hate it. Same with double legendaries - you could craft and pick them and have bonuses and not like completing 4-set legendaries or whatever.
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Something I don’t particularly care about myself that much but something I hear a lot is how tier items have “horrible stats” which is ofc an exaggeration but I can see how it annoys min maxers.
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Some tier sets give such good and “fun” bonuses players beg Blizzard to make them permanent so we get more and more “talents” that become mandatory in following seasons.
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“Oh you just dont wanna work hard to gear your character” - brah, winning an RNG roll against 10 people isn’t hard work. Also, with tier tokens coming just from raiding people who hate raids or progress slow are even more stuck behind the curve with slow catalyst acquisition and don’t make me start on PvP players who always suffer from losing to people who are good in PvP and get their hands on some tier early on.
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once seasons 2 or 3 start, we get into a silly situations where 2-set from new and 2-set from old is occasionally “BiS” until late ilvl power. I had it on my warr, I had it many times on my mage. It happens. Due to my point no. 3) - where Blizzard can’t balance things properly. It doesn’t feel good to use 20 ilvl lower items just because the tier set is somehow so ridiculously good. And it’s always against Blizzard’s general idea that ilvl should in most cases be an upgrade.
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They literally had to disable past expac tier sets because if you don’t remember we had occasional shenanigans, like rogues equipping very old 4-sets, using something before pull and switching to keep old bonus before pull… And now you can’t even use those in Timewalking raids ^^
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And last but not least, if you are unlucky with tier you will find a moment in the season where you won’t get any invites over that. Even if you managed to get a proper ilvl from your M+/raid drops. The community believes that somehow the power spike of a tier set is everything and somehow it is.
Any solutions?
if removing tier sets is impossible
I’d personally remove 4-set part at least - keep 5 items and just 2-set as max bonus. There is no need for adding more imo. It serves no purpose other than some sort of weird bottle neck of gearing. And frankly, 0,1% and RWF and whatnot are 4-set in a week anyway. So only “casuals, average Joes, andies and unlucky bois” suffer
Make sure tier sets are just generic - they don’t need to be fun and they don’t have to force specific talent picks. Make talents fun and tier sets as just some flat bonuses that you don’t have to play around. We have enough things to track and think about without having occasionally annoying tier bonuses for no reason. Funnily enough, season 2 tier bonuses are more in line with what I’d like than usual but still - “4 set” >.>
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Yes, I know certain people will come to dunk on me as usual but think if this part of game is actually this kind of necessary especially when we had times without them.
