One Currency for upgrading gear

Community General Discussion
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why can’t we have a single currency to upgrade all gear? Is it important to limit a players gear progression based on the difficulty of content they do?

I just feel that the game would be more inclusive and fun if players could do what they want and continuously upgrade there gear without having to meet secondary requirements such as reaching a rating or collecting yet another currency…

For all of the rng negatives of titanforging in legion it did allow players across the game to continue to increase their ilvl week on week regardless of the content they preferred to do and i always thought a simple upgrade system would solve the issues it had and make it more deterministic.

'why do you need better gear if you ‘re doing easy content’ I would argue that game just feels boring when there is no progression and also its fun to make things easier over time and blast through the content, especially now that wow is a seasonal game.

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In a game with a sheer focus on verticle progression?

Yes.

The game is designed to entice players to push upwards. If you remove the incentivization. It will topple the game, im afraid.

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hmm i guess the current way things are setup it makes sense… I was hoping the game would break out of its competitive mindset and lean towards being a bit more social/chill… couldnt the incentives just be mounts, cosmetics and titles?

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You call it competitive, I call it progression.

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To be fair I believe that easy gear makes the game worse for casual players. This might sound abit weird but bear with me.

Now everyone gets gear easily and can reach ilvl 380-385 without even stepping into dungeons. What this creates is a system that casual players that want to continue progression will join content that drops gear that is an upgrade.
The problem is that dungeons that drop upgrades are in the +7/+10 key range.

What this create is an experience that while you have the gear needed to do certain content, you do not have the knowledge because you skipped the lower levels.

Here you are exactly right on the money.

Gear is there to help you over time in order to progress. It helps if gear is scaled to the difficulty on the content, cause as you are playing a certain difficulty, you also get gear that makes it easier for you.

So yeah to answer that question, we need to limit the gear people take both by difficulty and by time. There is a big gap in the skill level of players in this game, and gear helps player to progress through it without leaving anyone feel powerless.

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Eeeeh no.

Heres the issue. There are mmorpgs which provide what ur asking for, if WoW joins that catagory, you remove a complete type of play from the genre for those that do it.

Not to mention u lean on the concept WoW could stNd up to the competition.

Gw2, ffxiv, ESO all hold chill / social gameplay, and dont rly focus on competitive content at all,

And just like people in that game who demand more verticle progression and end game competitive content get told, no. A game shouldnt bend to a demand, because theres too many opinons in the world to appease them all.

WoW is the competitive mmorpg, it doesbt have the decades of foundations to be a game alike those.

Im afraid, you cant just pull every mmorpg into the same identity, problems arise, this is the type of demand which has caused mmorpgs to stagnate.

Because eveey mmorpg tried to be the nex WoW, we had series of continois flops, its important

The mmorpgs offer different things.

You want story focus, progressive systems through crafting, open world, and ground level content.

Ffxiv is there.

You want story, open world focus, with 0 gear progression

Gw2

You want World PvP, unique set types, aswell as a focus on sandbox exploration

ESO

You want a competitive end game progression focus,

WoW is there.

WoW maybe not for you, it may not be the gameplay you demand, but if WoW falls into the competition with these other games, ur asking WoW to put its entire game at risk

Because just like Rift, Wildstar that went into competition with WoW. .

1 game will always die, u cant have 2 games filling the same position. Because 1 will ultimately kill the other.

WoWa niche doesnt exist in other games, which is why WoW keeps to it,

Id love to play a game like gw2, however its end game content is dead, nobody raids, nobody does anything that has difficulty and everything outside map events are empty.

People play at the abre minimum and output maybe 1/10th of their classes dps. Because without any incentivization to get better, nobody did. Thats fit a type of audience yes, but you have to accept, its fallings are obviousm

And due to this, no WoW would repeat the process and the better game at doing it will win, which will be gw2.

WoWs servers arent but in a fashion to support open world in the fashions gw2 does jt.

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tbh i dont really think about those other mmos at all… wow is the one I prefer graphically and mechanically over the others… I just personally think wow loses out on its potential by primarily focusing on creating a gear progression system only the high end players can fully benefit from… and this new system with flightstones and crests is needlessly overdesigned imo. The game hasnt felt the same since legion and gearing is a main part of it.

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they wouldnt need to do harder content to continue upgrading their gear… they would either chose a difficulty that they enjoy doing or push for higher levels to earn an achievement or a seasonal mount… if they struggled at a certain level they would just drop down… i would argue that there being a skill gap and on top of that there is a gear gap people who have no skill/no gear just have a rough time unnecessarily imo… pvp for example has allowed everyone to get its max pvp ilvl 424 with no rating requirement… making the rating system a truer representation of skill and not having these arbitary barriers to progression.

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You call it progression, I call it frustration. :slight_smile:

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For pvp yes, it is perfect to be gear agnostic because skill should be the only thing that matters.

But for pve, I think gear is not an end goal, but a tuning knob to allow someone to progress.
Think of the eng of the patch, people reach their BiS and only a handful continue progressing.
This happens because that you stop “gaining power” and instead reach a wall where your skill ceiling is.

In order to allow the feeling of “progression”, gear exist in the game. In order to give you a little “help” as you are progressing in certain content, to make it easier over time. This is the reason that in mythic raids all those groups can get CE, because the best guilds get it with lower gear, and by the end of the patch less skillful groups can still get it.

If you do not have gear scaled both by difficulty/time, you will have groups that could complete the content too fast, and other that could not complete it at all. Gear helps “stretching” the life of content.

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I completely agree with everything you said about gear being a mechanism for progression thats why i would like to see more people be a part of it, rather than having that progression gated by harder content.

I dont think enough people complete the content at all… and providing a singular currency upgrade system would in my opinion breath a lot more life into all aspects of the game, as did titanforging back in legion.

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I think you’re missing the point a little here.

Currently, high ilvl gear isn’t just a reward from carrying out difficult content, but a vital tool to progress through said content.

If there were no heroic/mythic raiding or mythic plus dungeon content then I doubt that you’d see the item levels as high as they are now, because the developers would probably decide that a certain ilvl ceiling would be enough for the activities outside of those things I mentioned.

So, to answer your question about the importance of gating gear behind difficulty: Yes. From a game design standpoint, it definitely is important.

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Not only that, but not having any more upgrades to get, makes world content obsolete.
We need worthwhile world content.

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That’s why I keep advocating for a progression system that’s unique for world content. So that it doesn’t impede on ‘big 3’ content.

I shared one simple idea for such a system today:

Just to make it easy, I’ll quote myself:

What if the devs added an AP system back into the game (giving AP from all the various world content activities) and a special set that you can complete from doing world content activities. With that AP you can upgrade parts of that set. You wouldn’t NEED it to complete the activities, but you’d have the OPTION to. Let’s say the cap of that upgrading goes all the way up to mythic raid level gear.

To make sure that such a system wouldn’t be abused by really gearing obsessed ‘big 3’ players -and them feeling like they now HAVE to do world content- they could implement a feature that would limit the ilvl of those sets in ANY of the ‘big 3’ activities (M+, PvP, Raiding). Pretty much like how PvP gear is only a higher ilvl in PvP.

For instance; let’s say you’ve grinded AP for a LONG time and you’ve managed to upgrade 3 of your items to an ilvl that is the equivalent of Mythic raid gear. As soon as you’d step into ‘big 3’ content those 3 items would be downgraded to an ilvl that is equal to the normal max ilvl for world content (just like it is capped currently in the live game).

For some, sure. For others, no.

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I wasnt suggesting to remove the harder content or even the gear that drops from it… just allow people to get to and progress through that content by allowing all aspects of the game to drop varying amounts of currency (valor or flightstones) to upgrade the gear freely… it can be completely tuned in a way that someone who only does world quests will only have enough currency to upgrade casually one or two items to heroic ilvl by the end of the season and maybe finally dip their toes in normal content.

My issue is with creating the whole tiered crests system which i think is completely unnecessary. There is a little to no progression for a player who likes solo/easier/world content and gold/rep is not a motivating reward at all.

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Theres not many carrots to chase in world content atm… just some reputation farms. My issue is the games gear progression just stops and says hey you need to go do instanced content now to continue…

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I mean, the real problem problem that I see with world content is not the progress path, but the content by itself.

As long as the “content” consist of world quests, objectives and activities that everyone should be able to complete without any gear/effort, then you cannot offer any worthwhile/challenging content.

Any sort of “gearing” path you want to create for outside world content is redundant by the simple fact that there is no content to use that gear. Just keep in mind that you should NOT be able to use that gear for instances content.

From where you are coming from, I feel that content is the thing that matters, and NOT rewards.

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I know you weren’t advocating for the removal of difficult content, I didn’t intend to make it come off that way. It was just a way for me to point out that high ilvl items exist solely because of the existence of difficult end game activities, and without those the ilvl ceiling would surely be lower than it currently is.

Ultimately, this is a game design matter. With the new currency changes and the inevitable abandonment of Valor points, Blizzard wants players to dip their toes into progressively difficult content first (and keep on doing them) to gain any meaningful progression.

There was an interview with Ion Hazzikostas on Bellular’s YouTube channel where (amongst other things) he talked about how key depletion is integral to the mythic plus progression cycle. This tells me that they want a certain amount of effort put in before players can access the next tier of rewards and continue their climb up the ladder.

Now, this does seem to throw solo players under the bus because all the difficult stuff is centered around mythic plus dungeons, raiding and pvp; but I will say that I will welcome any challenging solo content with open arms if the rewards are appropriate, if one day Blizzard can incorporate it into the end game.

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Their previous experiments of having a progression system that’s unique to a specific type of content wasn’t that popular.

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Exactly.

It can DEFINITELY offer worthwhile content.
It doesn’t need to be challenging; that isn’t part of the problem with world content. The people who enjoy that content, aren’t doing it because they want ‘edge of their seat challenges’.

That’s because that’s the only way you choose to look at it.
Try to look at it from (for instance) MY point of view: I simply want to have that progression because for me working towards something is FUN. It’s not even about the gear itself, even though yeah getting stronger is also FUN.

The journey is what matters to me; working towards a goal.
And it just so happens that I like doing that journey out there in the world as opposed to instanced content (where your journey depends on others).

Which one was that?

But the thing is; I’m suggesting a system where, in regards to ilvl and gear, it’s the same as it is right now, except that ONLY for world content you have the OPTION to keep the gearing going. If you’re looking to gear up in world content and then progress to ‘the big 3’, then there is literally no difference from how it is now.

My suggestion would give OPTIONS to people who want that; it’s not changing or taking away anything from people who have no interest in it.

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