Progression

Community General Discussion
1

I am a player that has played classic and several expansions and returned to TWW after a longer pause. I noticed some things feeling strangely off and think this could be easily improved in upcoming addons:

Character progression feels not good. As a new player you are kind of pushed into playing delves, which are great fun for a while and offer lots of challenges. You get champions gear by doing delves and occasionally even hero track gear (from the card extra chest) and you get free 616 ilvl gear through the weekly vault drop.
After being geared well after a few weeks into the game and delves getting shale, players will look for other things to do and improve the character even more, but there sadly are only few options available anymore at this point.

Playing heroic dungeons will get you nothing useful, not even the correct crests you need at this point, making heroic dungeons useless to play. And heroic dungeons are also not much fun, as they are much too easy at this point of character development.

The same is true for LFR raids, which do not give you anything worthwile, besides low level crests that can be exchanged 90:15 (which is not worth the effort). In normal raids (which already start to feel equally different than level 8 delves e.g. at some encounters), you still only get very few useful item upgrades and only a few runed crest per week on the 2 hardest bosses.
Silken court normal in an average pug group already feels harder that all level 8 delves, which feels to make not much sense if you look at the potential rewards.

For all those activities, the weekly vault rewards are also much too low… they dont nearly reach the 616 ilvl of the delve weekly rewards, while the needed effort to clear those raids feels much higher overall than just running through level 8 delves in <20mins without ever having any real problem in them (especially having a leveled up Bran available after a few weeks).

And even in heroic raids, the average item rewards are better, but not nearly as good as one would expect considering the difficulty level - especially in pugs (which i take as comparison, as delves can be played alone, without a guild raid group, as well). This feels extremely off, especially for pug road-block bosses like Silken Court.
And after having finished a whole heroic raid, which takes quite some time and is clearly harder than running through level 8 delves alone, you end up with ilvl 610 rewards in the weekly vault for some reason… still leaving the 3 delves weekly rewards better.
This makes no sense at all from my point of view and feels completely off.

I cant say much about m+ (which dont seem to have the same problems, at least in the weekly vault), as I think those 30 minute rage fests are not fun at all, especially as healer.

Conclusion

It would be much better imo to have something to do after having finished delve content and getting most useful delve item upgrades, that is not high m+ or heroic+ raiding to get further, noticeable character improvements. In the moment, average players will be more or less locked into delve content which gets stale quickly (being solo content contributes to this noticeably) and having only those few (usually stressful and in comparison not that fun) activities left, that also are harder to do in pugs, is not very motivating long-term.
Delves should clearly be positioned below heroic raiding (which should be made harder) to not have that much content skipped (like heroic dungeons, LFR or normal raiding, which at the same time would be perfectly fitting the skill levels of players just having finished delve content).

I mean… you want to keep players playing and paying each month… so offer them proper content to keep busy please.

2 Likes
2

I don’t get their ilvl logic anymore anyway. During DF s3, M0 have champion loot. What was an m0 back then is a random hc today (but tuned much too easy)… and that offers blue adventurer loot? While m0 today (which would be an old M+10) give Veteran gear… the same as limited weekly open world stuff…

They wanted to make random HCs relevant again by turning them into M0s, but with the launch of TWW they immediately made them irrelevant again. Random hc should be harder and give Vet loot, M0 should go back to dropping champion loot.

3

But then where´s the point of m+2-6 other than crests?

The issue here is the redesign of M+ scaling in general… while we can debate back and forth forever whether or not it was a good idea, any discussions about reward levels unfortunately need to consider this, at least as long as the current system remains in place.

Becasue for ex. champion for 0 (which are arguably on par with LFR at best, challenging is not the word I would use here…) and then hero for 2s is not really going to help anyone, and would IMO likely just lead to even more threads like the ones Kartoffeln keeps starting about himself not being the only potato in m+, because then most will simply gear themselves in 2s and still jump straight to 8s where the rewards are worth the effort again but the difficulty is still beyond their capability due to skipping the levels designed to teach them the basic mechanics.

It´s definitely a problem, and I´m relatively sure Blizzard is looking at it and trying to figure something out, as changes for next season have been announced… but I’m not so sure further devaluing lower keystones is the solution… :confused:

4

They could simply cut HCs at his point, but make M0 queuable and give Vet gear. Well, and delves definitely need to go down to Vet gear, a bountyful T7 (that gives champ gear) is easier than a M0 or at least not harder… or they need to up the difficulty for bountyful delves with the keys working like M+ keys used at the start to up the difficulty for better loot at the end.

5

i have played heroics and i have progressed to mythic plus just fine .not touching delve any point in time.
if you are going to follow the so called meta and what everyone else is doing you are going to run into trouble as a new player.

6

“i have played heroics and i have progressed to mythic plus just fine .not touching delve any point in time.
if you are going to follow the so called meta and what everyone else is doing you are going to run into trouble as a new player.”

So your point is new players should not play delves and waive delve loot and rather stick with other content and go with inferior loot to keep fun up and a feeling of progression?

7

and how do you think a new player who doesnot even play heroics will survive in mythic dungeons ? playing in delves doesnot prepare a new player for challenges in mythic and plus .it is not hard to see the point .

8

Delves are fine.They don’t need any downgrading in rewards or upgrading in difficulty.
Maybe a few more crests would help but thats pretty much all.

If they give vet they will be useless.You can get that literally from everywhere , so they will become dead content.

3 Likes
9

Besides the “Dead content”-argument, people who solely do World content and Delves (Like me) will hit the gear wall within a month (Being generous), and having the “Third pillar of content” be pretty much done and dusted within a fraction of the season’s total length would be ludicrous.

1 Like
10

"Delves are fine.They don’t need any downgrading in rewards or upgrading in difficulty.
Maybe a few more crests would help but thats pretty much all.

If they give vet they will be useless.You can get that literally from everywhere , so they will become dead content."

But do you really think it is right, to have HIGHER rewards by playing level 8 delves in the weekly vault than by finishing whole heroic raids?
And that was the whole point of my post… that the momentary implementation leads to a very defective character progression, that also doesnt feel good.

And in the moment… pretty all content between delves and heroic raiding (and maybe higher m+) are useless, so overall much more content.

And that was also one of my points. Noone will skip something that is fun and easy and gives great gear. And going this way will result in many/most people skipping stuff like heroic dungeons or normal raiding, where they would probably actually belong for some time.

And all of that is quite problematic in my point of view and should be changed.

11

To seperate the ilvl and tie it to the content it is acquired in, like pvp gear, would probably be a good route to take.
Say mythic raiding, m+ 10+ and delves 8+ would all give the same ilvl for the open world/delves but raiding and mythic+ have the ilvl gear modifier but for that content.
This way legendaries acquired in raids not be such a big deal for those only interested in mythic+ and there could even be mythic+ exclusive legendaries that could shake up the meta. Either delves could follow the open world ilvl or be its own ilvl modifier. And vault would not be such big thing for just like raids it would not need to be better than what could be found in delves/mythic+ but on the same lvl as can be acquired.
Raiders of the highest lvl would also not be forced to do mythic+ if they don’t enjoy it as the gear would only be good for mythic+ etc.
There would be great many things by separate the loot and make it valuable only for the content it is acquired in but there of course is a downside too, like maybe the pool of people (tanks and healers) would be even smaller if these people isn’t doing it for the raids anymore…

1 Like
12

Changed how? Bearing in mind that there’s a sizeable portion of the playerbase (Large enough so for Blizz to start catering to them specifically) who will never set foot in raids or M+ at all (So punishing them for players who do try to make that step is unfair), and who’ll still need noticeable progression that keeps them occupied for more than a month per season.

13

Looking at them as a standalone feature I’d agree with you, but it just feels off that I, with a fresh lvl 80 alt in bought delv adventurer gear, tell myself - ok, I’ll do bountyful delves T7/8 now, they give better gear and are easier than M0 dungeons, that would only give me Vet gear.

14

If they never step into anything besides delves, they would not need any higher gear than offered by delves (if balanced in a proper way) and all raid gear could be higher than delve gear. You would only need better gear to continue playing in other content (like raids). And for this, a better progression is needed.
In your scenario there is no problem with having delve as lowest category, maybe at the same level heroic dungeons are. Because thats where they belong difficulity-wise imo.

15

I suggested that in another thread and got simply ignored or criticized; but I think so too - let all gear be at the same lvl in the open world, but based on whether it was aquired in PvP, M+, Raid or Delves increase the stats in said content. No longernis anyone “forced” to do other content for BIS gear in their preferred content.

16

This could solve the problem to some degree, you are right.

17

god damn it another one… what are you people on? You are playing the content you enjoy and you get a reward. If you do not like this system, go play something else. Stop demanding things for free and play the game for once. If you don’t like it the game is simply not for you. Done. Problem solved.

18

It would also solve or at least ease the problem of open world scaling between expansions and ilvl increase in general. If our endcontent gear from instanced content doesn’t work in the open world, quest rewards from the following expansion will be viable for leveling more quickly again and we don’t need to have such huge ilvl increases between expansions.

19

I guess this comment describes perfectly well how the wow community is like these days…

1 Like
20

Exactly what I meant.
I did not mean dead content from the start…but if one plays a couple of days quite a lot they can outlevel it,by having vet as gear.You are very generous with the month mark hehe.
So we can agree downgrading gear is not an option.

1 Like