Problem with Retail gearing

Community General Discussion
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Hello,
This thread will be dedicated to why does recently retail leveling and gearing is so unsatisfying and easy, also how this affects the game.

WoW is 15 years old now and it has come long way from what is was when it got released. Even though raids have become much more complex and innovative each expansion, there have been part of community that have left the game in recent expansions because game does not feel engaging and fun anymore. One of them being leveling and gearing up and overall end game content. Many “old schopl” players saying that champion is awarded gear on every step of the way, which serves as upgrade and soon enough gearing comes as a part of process and items lose its impirtance and attachment of acquiring. Well this is partly true.

As Classic got released I realised that frequency of gear optaining isnt lower, but surprisingly fast phased! Gear drops from regular mobs, etc. But the trick in Classic was nit the gear but the stats. Each gear would have possibility of having any random stat - agi, spirit, str spirit, etc. Point is that all the stats had some value to character and they were always exposed to get a gear that would not do too mich for them. So player had to look for that perfect item with best stats for the character’s build. Also dungeons and quests would never guarantee your class items, making it even harder to get proper items. Because of this random distribution players often stick with items with best stats rsther then higher level items with horrible stats.
Problem that retail developed is that, over time all this chaotic and randomising aspects of gearing has been chipped away.

First gear and main stats have become class spefic. Then all the gear had guaranteed Stamina stat on it, which to be honest is just lazy. Mop took away hit and expertise. Later on Spirit was sacked as well. Quests now only give rewards to your class and spec which is an obvious upgrade.

Bottomline is that the problem does not lie only in frequency of gear reward, but how catered the gear, the player gets, has become. Polished and extremely easy to understand. Before from 15+ stats player had to choose from randomised gear what was best. Only few and higher tier gear had specific stats and thats what made them so desirable. Today new player has to choose from 4 different stats and prioritise them.

So how this change affects game? The aspect of planning and slow gearing made it harder to progress. As for now leveling dont feel chalenging as you will always grt gear which is better for your character, making it easier to reach the next milestone and rinse and repeat. While the player progresses faster then lights speed the content is been consumed at same rate and demand for more is issued. Putting Blizzard in state to produce more and more faster and with “good quality”. But quality demands some time and thinking, planning etc.

So in the end of this rent I just want to say that having a bit chaotic system which tends to be annoying sometimes isnt that bad. There are some things blizz could pick up from old wow and try to impliment it in retail. I think there is no need to cater game towards simple and easy things.

Thanks for your time. /Bow
Vanish

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Man, the number one issue people bring up when it comes to gearing in retail is the RNG, are you saying we should have cloth with agility again? that stats on gear aren’t random enough?

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Dunno about the drops themselves but Blizzard announced - most likely by mistake - that they planned to do a level squish in 9.0, which will most likely come with a leveling rework as a level squish would be meaningless on its own.

So there may already be planned changes for the lack of challenge while leveling.

As for your post… I don’t think useless items will be missed (agility / str on cloth ?) but i agree that not having anything to look for outside of secondary stats and ilvl is a shame. A less streamlined gearing system could be well recieved imo as long as there are no useless items.

I think it mostly come from the acquisition and warforge /sockets. I wouldn’t mind having items without stam and have to decide between dps or HP, or having more stats to play with (not to the extend of going back to vanilla stats tho, Hunters are much better without Intel or spirit on their items)

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They gave that a try with crucible. And again with nazjatar benthic system.

Providing random aspects to gears that some are drop upgrades, some are damage or tank upgrades, etc. And some are completely useless.

that system doesn’t work with the current wow. It only frustrates players more. It’ll be another combination of RNG, with the current RNG system+ the titanforge warforge RNG combined with socket and secondary stats RNG.

It worked with old WOW, because we had master loot. People shared things with one another. Now we have soulbound and account bound and so on.

Too much RNG already, and adding chaotic aspects to it makes things more frustrating.

Here’s the 3 main thing that they need to do.

1- Removing titanforging and warforging completely.

2- Making socket addition an EARNABLE thing and not a random RNG.

3- Allowing older patch contents to be relevant and not immediately garbage 2 months later.

We have things that went great. Like zandalar and kul tiras assaults. They provided decent gear, was a nice world pvp. Now it’s completely useless. Why? Blizzard just tossed it aside.

We have 2 GREAT RAIDS that are untouched nowadays, and probably one of the hardest raids in the history of WOW that also got zero attention because Eternal palace replaced them all. We got a level squish to make lvl 1000 items drop down to 250~60 and then 2 patches later, and we’re already at 455. The scales are going too fast and too crazy. Old content changed from previous expansion to previous patch. The pacing is too much. The drop system is entirely focused on mythic+ which creates an overwhelming number of items for everyone while every other source isn’t even close.

They need to rethink a lot of things for the next expansion.

I just hope that at the very least, we don’t get another expansion with warforge/titanforge.

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I disagree. It is already bad enough with multiplier layers of RNG and you want to add another one? No, thanks. Classic wow may have got some things right but itemization was bad, i don’t think that transferring old expansion flaws into current game is going to make it more fun. Quite the opposite.

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None of the issues you mentioned are caused by warforging/titanforging. At this point this can only be defined as blind rage, no matter what the perceived problem with gearing is, the only solution in everyone’s mind is “remove titanforging”.

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when exactly did i mention that titanforge is the cause of all these problems?

These are completely separate or slightly intertwined problems. Titanforging issue is just the easiest one to fix. And what i’m hoping is for them to at the very least, solve the easiest one.

As for what the problem of titanforging is, It adds another layer of RNG on top of the current RNG based loot system, that not only has the potential of making high end achievable gears completely redundant, but also makes sure that whenever you don’t get a titanforge, it’s disappointing. I did a heroic warfront once. I literally had to stop myself from yawning out of boredom. It dropped a 450 waist.

Did a heroic raid and struggled a lot against one of the bosses and after multiple deaths, FINALLY i got a drop in that raid. A 430 waist. I immediately gave it away because i had no use for it and it was garbage. This isn’t what makes a good game design. This is the problem with titanforging. It doesn’t reward progress or effort. It awards luck.

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The problem with personal loot seems to be the fact that it makes people feel that each item is “their” item. In truth, an item dropped in a raid, if we still had ML the leader would decide where that item goes.
Personally i’m happy when i get titanforges from lower difficulties, so when i go mythic and something drops and i can’t use, i just trade it to someone else, we gear up faster as a group and the raid as a whole gets better, it’s never a waste.
Having a better item equipped than the one that just dropped is nothing new.

Loot has always been about luck, however people who put more effort and do more challenging content end up with better gear, this has always been the case and that’s what we see now, titanforging didn’t change anything.

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They replaced it with Battle for Nazjatar, or how I call I Battle of Lagnatar. They replaced single player and small groups by making raids in LFG, casuing lag to the server and winning by farming players in the base…

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Then you’re deluding yourself if you think it didn’t change anything.

I was once actually an advocate of titanforging. Because i agreed with the general idea behind it. Creating an incentive to make contents worth repeating. But being rewarded more than a mythic raider by doing LFR for being lucky isn’t good game design. I realized that It’s not about repeating the hard content over and over for the better gear. It’s about forcing players to do any content that drops that piece, easy or hard, for the sake of the piece. Because a warmode off assault in zandalar might give you a gear better than mythic uldir. That’s forcing people to do contents they don’t enjoy.

That’s not a battle. It’s the slaughter in nazjatar. One faction always outnumbers the other one 100 to 1. It’s never a battle. The sharding makes it impossible to enjoy. And just as you mentioned, the lag is beyond terrible.

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If you follow my post history you’ll notice that i’ve been demonstrating this WITH NUMBERS ever since legion, i’ve have this argument countless times before and every single time TF account for 2-3 ilvls, you can’t get any more empirical than this.
Every single single time the anti-titanforge argument has been a gross exaggeration.

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You’re not getting it. I’ve seen people with a full set of gear, ALL titanforged and warforged. EVERY single piece. That’s not the relevant thing. It doesn’t matter if one individual gets 20 extra levels with titanforge or 1 extra ilvl.

The issue is the problem this extra RNG provides for the game. Take classic for example with its sources of gear. You got world drops that mobs drop everywhere. Grey/white gear. Usable, but not that good. We got greens that some harder to kill adds drop. some of them are great. Some of them are terrible. Then we got blue or rare gears that drop from dungeons. Strong pieces of gear, provided for a harder content. And finally epic purple gears from raids, the hardest content in the game. Difficulty determines your reward. You achieve something better by doing something harder.

What does titanforge do? it ignores effort to reward system, providing a secondary RNG system on top of the current RNG that rewards lucky over effort.

It’s never about that 3 ilvls you get.

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There’s about a million “Fix my dps” guys that would disagree with you on that.

Not to mention everything still has stamina attached… ur thread is entirely pointless man

It is. It cause outage back in 2004 thats why the system is what it is today. thats why mechanics on raids are scripted. And sry but we dont wanna go back to Huhuran whirlwind tactics where the plan was “Pray she doesnt whirlwind in your direction”. Its why we evolved away from all the random chaotic stuff

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It’s funny cause one time i went to wowprogress, searched all characters and inspected the one with the highest itemlevel in the world. And guess what, it was a mythic raider in a russian guild and the amount of TF was ~5ilvls.
But anyway, let’s get to the relevant part.

First of all, raiders still have the highest ilvl gear in the game and secondly what happens when other challenging content is added to the game?
Because that’s what happened to WoW. A lot of the gear you whine about as being “lucky” simply comes from M+10.
I could understand if that argument was applied to the 430 you get from warfront, this is a different discussion, but when it comes to TF you’re simply missing the mark.

Actually it is, because you’re are overreacting, the hate for TF has been blown out of proportion, it accounts for less than 10% of your item level, yet it’s blamed for the majority of the problems.

Yes the reward structure has changed, but not by titanforging, at the end of the day it still is 3ilvls, this will NEVER make some LFR casual have better rewards than a mythic raider.

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ok. You’re not seeing the bigger problem i’m describing and still clinging to that 3 ilvl argument. If i still didn’t convince you, then it’s beyond my capabilities to do so.

Goodluck and let’s call it a situation that we can agree to completely disagree.

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WF/TF is not an issue and should stay because it gives a reason/chance for any player to get a nice bonus item no matter what content they do, it’s a bonus system that gives every player a chance at getting a lucky upgrade for all content, every player has the same chance to get this so its fair. The problem with WF/TF is in some peoples minds that they expect to get it every time and if they don`t and just get the base level it’s a fail, instead of them viewing it as what it is, a bonus upgrade you would never have got if it’s not there. By replacing WF/TF with a system where you could upgrade an item you are just upping the drop level of items so in effect to balance that you would have to just start dropping lower item levels knowing everyone will eventually upgrade them to max.

Even in vanilla there was a very small RNG chance of getting a lucky epic item drop from a world mob.

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If you want titanforge to stay and your argument is that even classic had it, Then here’s how it should stay. They should reduce its drop chances significantly more. Make it extremely rare. 1% chance and we can call it a lot more RNG based which isn’t a reliable source of item to expect anymore. But right now, the chances are high enough that everyone can expect at the very least, one or two titanforges and a bunch of warforged pieces. And as long as it’s high enough, people consider it the only viable gear they can use. Thus, Disrupting the difficulty to reward balance this game has.

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Hey, I just wanted to say I was that person last patch and it took quite a bit of effort doing m10 for everything to be -forged.
I mean it didn’t just drop in the bags out of nowhere but it took a conscious effort.

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then congrats. You achieved mythic raiding level of gear by spamming mythic 10’s and not even touching mythic raid more than a boss or two at most.

You did a hard content. You deserved 400 ilvl gears for it. Not more. and i doubt that you consider mythic 10 as hard as mythic raid. and if we didn’t have titanforge and warforge, 400 ilvl would have been a very good level of gear back then. Equivalent to heroic level. But since titanforge and warforge exists, you surpassed your lvl and since everyone has that chance, it also made it an irrelevant achievement to be heroic level. Luck basically determined your worth. Instead of it being something that determined the effort you put. If you weren’t lucky and didn’t get a single gear like that, then you would have had 400 ilvls while a lucky guy who put half the effort might have had 410 ilvls.

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Hmmm, not quite.

My base threshold, spammable, was 400 + whatever forge that came with it, but in practice, 410 from the once a week chest was the upper limit + a very small chance chest gear already warforged by default came out as a titanforge weapon at 415. I had one drop like that in the whole patch.

Mythic raid base threshold was 415 + whatever forge that came with it, every week.

So mythic raiders had access to better (+5 ilvl )gear all the time compared to me.

So whatever luck I had, I started off a lower platform compared to mythic raiders and since titanforge adds a maximum value that’s the same over all ilvls it applies to, by default mythic raiders would more or less be geared better than me. Average may be less than five ilvl difference but I would still be lower.