Punch Cards aren't Gems, are they?

Community General Discussion
1

Hi,

I haven’t seen much talk about this other than people wondering about how it would work pre 8.2, thought I’d check in on what others are thinking.

The Pocket Sized Computation device is clearly unique and cannot be obtained again (or at-least you can’t have two of them on you). That’s cool, but the Punch Cards seem to be working exactly like Gems, in that you put in a new one & the old one gets destroyed. This is what my brain isn’t able to comprehend, which genius thought of this?

Gems, being fairly cheap craftables are understandably expendable. You replace a gem and two weeks later a couple of gear swaps made a different secondary stat sim 1% higher. Feelsbadman.jpg but you go ahead and spend some gold or make more gems.

Punch Cards on the other hand, are random drops from rares / mechagon bosses save a fixed set that you can buy after grinding rep. While right now there isn’t even a reliable way to sim two punch cards to see which one you should use, even if that were the case, they are not as expendable as Gems nor would they ever be. You could easily have a couple of options for any of the three slots that would be more viable for different kinds of content - WHY THEN are they designed to get destroyed when replaced?

Can anyone think of a decent logic Blizzard may have had? Maybe once I have two trinkets MUCH better than the PCD I’d care a bit less about it, but even then doesn’t this basically destroy the versatility that’s supposedly the USP of using this as your trinket? People could very much want to switch between different aspects of the Red slots for different types of content or even various fights in a raid perhaps. Why Blizzard, do you create something pretty interesting and then handicap it in this way?

2

Well yes, but actually no.

5 Likes
3

This sums it up pretty well. :wink:
The PCD is customizable, but it is not meant to be adapted every encounter.
Punch cards are not talents you switch every encounter.
You have talents and essences you can switch freely to adapt. And the PCD is a decent trinket, that might be customizable, but I think there are many other trinkets that are competitive, if you don’t have any of these, you are probably at a level where encounter based optimization is not necessary and if you have these and no spare punch cards, you might want to switch trinkets instead of punch cards.
Optimization is expensive (in terms of effort you have to invest), but for most content (and most groups) optimal gear and playstyle is not needed, decent or good is good enough.

1 Like
4

There isn’t that much to sim there:

  • Blue Punchcards provide only some utility and have little to no effect on combat performance.
  • Yellow Punchcards are just flat stats, maybe you could sim that but for the most part you just go for the ones you need most.
  • Red Punchcards are typical trinket procs, this might use some simming but I think it’s pretty easy to figure out which one would be the best for you.

I don’t like that mentality of simming everything. This pretty much removes from you decision what piece of gear to put on. Instead you want a machine to make that decision for you. It’s also not very immersivee.

4 Likes
5

I love you. Made my day :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
6

This is exactly how i see simming. U worded it perfectly

7

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