Major gearing issues

Community General Discussion
21

So, all these three things can be looked at separately. But there’s a common dominator here; upgradable gear on different tracks.

That is inherently an annoying design from a player’s perspective. They basically added a way to gear up twice within a season…without adding any content (other than the vault). Genius, yet very very very uninspiring and demotivating.

Say you get some item on Hero and upgrade it. Then you get the Myth version of said item but lack crests. That’s just a “one step forward, two steps back”-situation. It’s not fun, it’s not intriguing, it’s just giving you another chore to do. All the potential joy is gone as soon as you realise this, which is instantly.

This whole upgrade/gear-track system has to go, in my opinion. It’s not it, it never will be.

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22

Isn’t that what Catch Up is?
It gets you to a point where you can start doing the end game content you want to do without needing to farm the low to mid level content.
Catch up is not to complete the high end gearing process but to start it.

For me the best Catch Up system they’ve had was the Benthic system in BFA (BIS belt issue asside).
Account Wide from a readily accessible currency. I could have a freshly dinged alt up and running in mere moments.
Other similar systems were ok too, Timeless, Dauntless, Baleful etc. all were decent gear for fresh alts.
I hope this new catch up system is near as good as those systems were.

Otherwise I think you had some good points in there. Although not sure my opinion on this topic is worth too much as I don’t do high end content anymore.
I’ve basically given up on gearing. I got my first item from a Great Vault ever last week (of any Vault right back to SL) as I did a Bountiful Delve and the Weekly Quest. In DF I did all the weekly activities and geared up and upgraded all the items but it took so long that by the time I’d finished the process a new season started and I was supposed to do it all again, I didn’t. I found the RNG and drip feed of stones and crests soul-destroying.
And so I’ve basically ignored all the weekly events now, I don’t know what this theatre thing is or the machine thing. I might read a guide at some point just to do them once but I have little interest in starting chores.
If there was a more deterministic form of gearing as you suggest then I might engage with it. But I’m not going through RNG trickle feed of items to gear up.

I’ll check this catch up system and see if it’s worth my time to bother with. But I don’t really care about gear anymore so it’s meh…

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23

You could argue that but I beg to differ.
This is basically just arguing about semantics but what you’re describing I’d actually just call something like ‘starter gear’.

To me actual Catch Up gear would mean that I have the ability to get on par with characters that have actively been playing this season, so… “catching up” with them.

I don’t need that gear to be “free” as the so called catch up gear usually is. I don’t mind grinding harder content for that BUT I’d like to have the ability to actually catch up to my main character which I’ve been playing from the very first day.

Now catch up gear not being on par with mythic track gear and only enabling me to get to mythic track gear content faster would be fine IF it was even possible to get said mythic track gear. Due to the nature of the current gearing system (basically wait 1 week for the vault and that’s it) the only way to obtain the real endgame gear is to… wait because it’s heavily time gated. And at the very end of the season you can’t do that because you can’t wait because you don’t have time because the season… ends…

Fully agree and I wouldn’t participate in it either if I didn’t actually need the gear for +14s.

I honestly don’t get why we don’t have this. Yes, Blizzard always says people stop playing after their characters are fully geared and I get that but doing some simple math, I just don’t see what the issue is.

Let me explain: So according to raider.io my first ever M+ run this season was done 11 weeks ago. Mind, I rushed to M+ as soon as it was released to this season is 11 weeks old, period.

A character has 15 to 16 gear slots (depending on whether you use 1h+oh or a 2h weapons).

So if we got a single DETERMINISTIC item each week from the Vault, it’d take us 15 to 16 weeks.

Now afaik the new season is supposed to start in February. We have roughly 4 weeks of December left so in January, we’d be in week 15 of the season. We’d still need about 1 more week to get full BiS.

So if we would’ve played +10s from the very beginning of the season we would be BiS geared by roughly the second week of Januray. Leaving us 2-4 weeks until the next season is about to drop.

And we still could improve our gear with addional sockets.

That being said - I’d reckon that people who do +10s during the first week are the minority so it’d take way longer for the average player to get BiS.

I really don’t see where the harm is to have like 1% of the playerbase be BiS geared 3 weeks before the new season starts and the other 99% of the players 1 week before the new season starts.

Maybe my math is just compeltely off here but I don’t think so.

24

Semantics…

Usually Catch up gear is added in a new Season and it is so that players who missed the previous Season can jump straight into the new Season without have to run outdated content first.
So it is starter gear of a fashion.

In MOP the Catch up gear was on Timeless Isle. In Legion it was on Broken Shore. In BFA Benthic gear was from Nazjatar.
So it comes later to get players straight into the current patch.
So I’m not sure what the point of a Catch Up system would be coming at this stage of the game. Unless it is to get them ready for Season 2 in Feb, in which case it would have to be pretty decent gear.

25

There may not be any harm, but I don’t see the point of it either.

Simply put; what’s the point in having the maximum potential of your character unlocked 1-3 weeks before a new season? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever in the context of M+.

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26

That’s what I said, yes. :smiley:

Well actually it’s added at the end of the season before a new season starts so new characters/alts have an easier time to get into the new season. At least that’s how it was in DF if I’m not entirely mistaken now but I’m pretty sure that’s how it was with the Dreamsurge gear. But I get what you’re saying.

What’s the point in having BiS gear overall then?
It arguably makes more sense in M+ than it does in Mythic raiding since Mythic raids can be done without having full BiS gear or even max. ilvl. It’s tuned to be like that. M+ however is scaling into infinity so you can’t outgear it.

And for the record - I’m not arguing whether Mythic raiding here is harder or easier but ultimately M+ mathematically hits harder because, as I’ve said, it scales into infinity and at some point you can no longer outskill those mechanics. You’ll just need the numbers to counter the numbers.

But all of that is besides the point. I don’t actually mind being full BiS or not before the end of the season. What I’d want is gearing to be less RNG and more deterministic. The whole BiS argument was just thrown into there to illustrate how most people wouldn’t even get to BiS gear even IF loot from the Vault was entirely deterministic.

So again and to be a bit more precise here my point is that I don’t demand to be fully decked out in BiS gear 3 weeks before the season ends. What I want is to just no longer be constrained to the mercy of RNGesus when it comes to gearing.

RNG, in my opinion, is fine when you can farm content to get your gear but it becomes an issue when all you can do is wait and pray for an entire week.

27

I miss the days when we had multiple ways of upgrading our gears.