I think one of the most problematic things with WoW right now is overgearing content.
This has created a lazy practice where players overgear content so much that they can outright brute force a lot of things.
I remember doing my first +17 back in s2 and thinking oh, this ability does damage? I’ll maybe read what it does then.
With the upcoming loot scarcity in Shadowlands, hopefully this will be diminished further, but I still see the same loopholes that greatly increase player power… for example legendaries.
I think most of us and blizzard have forgotten why people raid in the first place.
While loot is a very nice thing to have, and getting shiny items is a really cool feeling there still would come a point where giving too much of that will devalue other aspects.
What good is a defensive cooldown if you don’t ever use it? is the basis of my discussion here.
Right now there are way too many sources of gear, and way too many conflicting sources of gear with the main perpetrator being Mythic+ versus Raids.
Mythic+ gives a very early power boost an average heroic raider can be clad full in heroic gear before stepping into the 2nd week of heroic raiding, which severely devalues heroic items… especially when you get to farm BiS stats items from M+
This is going to be further magnified when items are no longer special and will be just plain stat sticks, and as we have already seen rings with up to 50 ilvl or even more with bad stats can be less powerful than rings with BiS on them.
This collide has also ripped apart many of the playerbase where they are forced into content they don’t like, which creates very toxic atmospheres.
Therefor I suggest a couple of changes for M+, Raids, PvP and Torghast ( if it became it’s own progression path )
1- Loot is more powerful in its respective content but not due to magical scaling, rather by flavourful special effects.
A cool example of this is resilience, or your attacks deal x more damage to player targets.
I suggest adding effects like
- your damage to minion is increased by x%
- Slaying an enemy gives a buff
- While in a boss fight, your damage is increased by x% every second
- Your attacks have a chance to slow
- Sucessfully Ccing a mob does
- Whenever an enemy dies gain X, once X reaches a certain number Y happens.
Etc etc, these are organic buffs, that can be implemented in each type of content that will be good for this very type of content and can interestingly intermix with eachother.
These can be applied to raid sets, M+ sets, pvp sets etc etc.
I think a healthy look at how gear can intermix with itself between different content is wotlk, were you usually wanted 1-3 Pve pieces as a PvP player, and some PvP gear were good for PvE
2- Making loot more unique and gimmicky
This is close to the above, but my point here is loot shouldn’t all be about dps/hps
If loot with gimmicks on it dropped and these gimmicks were good in the content is dropped from then it would be more interesting and healthier for the game
An example of this is Ashvane’s razor coral.
This item is stupidly strong, because it has an uptime of 100% in M+ and doubles as a super execute buff in raids.
So, what happens if its functionality was split such that it is more effective in raid environments rather than M+
Say the buff disappears when out of combat! or the buff ramps up faster when applied to the same target.
3- Better power parallels should be made
I feel like it makes no sense that a +15 drops loot better than heroic raids and the weekly chests loot as good as mythic
And at the same time I feel that having +20s not be loot upgrades make less sense, I think blizzard should revise loot power in M+ and make it such that loot ramps up in power slowly were once you reach a point where an M+ drops gear as good as heroic then the M+ difficulty will be the same as of the heroic raid, and then let that go up until mythic quality gear for say at +20 or 22 or 23.
4- Loot should be progressive in power and be less exponential in power growth
A cool idea implemented at the moment is that Carapace and N’zoth drop 10 ilvl higher gear, I think this should be the case from start to finish of the raid.
I think blizzard should make it that gear from easier bosses and dungeons be of less ilvl, and for M+, 1/2/3 chesting increases the ilvl reward at the end of the run chest.
This way instead of having loot be all powerful from the start, we get to have appropriate loot, save the power levels and then tackle raids without insanely overgearing them.
Ofcourse this would mean that some items even though stronger will be weaker due to ilvl, but this can be remedies by implementing a cool replayability factor that where you can power up less ilvl items when you do the same content over and over.
This way instead of being at powerlevel 100 from the start, you actually organically power up to it, this way powerlevels don’t get insanely high jumps for no reason and make the player character way too powerful to the point where they can outright brute force things.
That is my opinion and suggestions on the matter.
