I have the opposite problem. I went from 0 to keystone master for mount and I got 1 item with terrible stats during my journey. Im sure Im not going there again either.
You want to progress without raiding in World of Warcraft, LOL. 
Get real.
Sadly most of the guild leaders nowdays give loots to their bootlickers.
In pug, everyone need everything. Without pl, its a clownfiesta.
So in my opinion, gear progressing now with raiding only is harder than ever. Thats why most people these days never touch raid, maybe lfr.
class balance is a problem
its much easier to get party and do content on dk where i can ignore half the mechanics because of magic/pushback/root immunity, short cooldown interrupt and good defensives than on my spriest that probably wouldnt get invited, has garbage cooldowns, durability of a wet toilet paper outside of those cooldowns and 45 sec interrupt. i have died from things ticking for 2mil on my spriest i dont even knew existed on my dk
It was exactly like that when I played back in WOTLK sadly, and it still is, which makes me pretty sure that itâs always been like that.
Raid progression is not suppose to be super fast, itâs just that players nowadays want everything NOW.
I can barely count on my fingers how many times this week that players have gotten mad because theyâre not getting any loot in Nerub-ar palace, saying their loot rolls arenât random âitâs riggedâ and things like that.
Problem is, players expect to win the gear they want in raids.
I canât understand why people wouldnât raid in this game itâs awesome, always been, always will be.
2 Likes
i donât like to raid, i think itâs a waste of time.
it wouldâve been nice if i could talk to an NPC to get locked out for raids that whole season and then instead that youâd get tokens from mythic+ that you could then trade for loot you actually want / need.
a little like they did in S4 in dragonflight, but that you can do dungeon for tokens instead of LFR / raid.
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And yet, with the same exact same utility SP was meta for 4 seasons in a row in DF.
DK also had the same utility as they have now. And yet, nobody wanted them for a whole expansion. What happened ? What made DKs so meta ?
And then, the fact that you are not invited is because there is more at stake than before. You die 5 times and its a deplete. In previous seasons you died 5 times you timed anyways. So of course, with dungeons like that people get really picky.
So no. Its not classes.
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A paladin who complains of defensives thzts a first hahaha
I dont mind the difficulty jump too much because it is very much optional.
people are doing 18s so pugs should be able to do 12s.
could ot be better? sure, but after all it is about pushing score. if you want score you need to get better every key level anyways, doesnt matter if it is 20% or 40% dmg increase.
the grinding is what is bugging me. it takes waaaaay to long to get above 620 ilvl. it is way to hard to get myth track item on alts and farm crests.
crest discount on alts should be 75% or 100% considering how many dungeons you need to run on your main to upgrade everythingâŠ
not comparable.
shadow had a lot of aoe dmg which now got nerfed heavily.
the weak def had to be made up by group comps external cds.
mass dispell was necessary for certain affixes and dungeons, now it has become useless.
mind sooth was great in some dungeons, now it sees basically no play at all.
priests are currently just not useful in dungeons and thats why they are on a bench.
dk does s tier dmg and has great defensives. utility is not necessary if you can ignore loads of mechanics and even dispell yourself. AMZ of course is also another great cd.
this season actually seems more about who can blast the biggest rather than have the best utility.
enhance for example is also terrible defensive wise, it is very squishy if you dont press something. but it has s tier dmg and some useful utility for some dungeons
Raiding gives little to zero loot nowadays compared to vault and M+. And loot council aims to give loot to people with high attendance and those whoâve proven over the years that they wonât go inactive mid-season.
The main goal of raid leaders is the interest of the guild, not the individuals. The 2 ilvl you lose by only running M+ wonât make you rank 1 shaman.
Imo the issue is the combination of how WoW works and how the vault works.
WoW itself is and always was very gear progression heavy/focused. Thatâs theoretically fine but couple that with how the vault works, the combination of both become rather frustrating if not infuriating.
Having all of your character/gear progression and thus arguably also content progression locked behind an âolol once in a week olol rollâ just doesnât feel good. Especially given how thereâs no fail-safe/bad luck protection.
Some people see their friends getting BiS trinkets left and BiS weapons right while they themselves got literal downgrades 3 weeks in a row, with absolutely no control over it and not even any sense of relief/encouragement that the next vault WILL be better.
Itâs just âget lucky or get f*edâ and this is incredibly bad design imo. Whether you NEED that gear for the content youâre currently doing or not isnât even relevant here. Itâs just the fact that this carrot is dangling in front of players and players canât get there, they just need to hope that the carrot drops by itself.
In that sense, Iâd advocate for loot being more deterministic. You could even argue that the vault could become entirely deterministic. Let players just choose any piece they want from the vault.
Why? Because letâs just do the math here: There are 15 to 16 gear slots (depending on whether you use a 2h weapon or mh+oh). Letâs just go with 16. If you get 1 guaranteed item each week, itâll take your character 4 MONTHS to get fully BiS geared.
Thatâs literally the end of the season/already the start of the next season. Now account for the few mythic raiders having completed the entire raid within the first couple of weeks â yes, they probably will have their BiS gear (due to drops) a few weeks earlier but honestlyâŠwhatâs the issue with people having their full BiS gear 2 or 3 weeks before the new season drops? Literally doesnât matter, does it? The Sub was already paid at that point anyways so if such a players takes 1 or 2 weeks off of WoW before the new patch drops⊠who cares? And thatâd just be a super small minority of the playerbase⊠sub 1% even.
Do you recognize what other issue this would alleviate? Correct, raiders, who donât want to do any m+ wouldnât need to do so because the amount of available vault slots would be irrelevant.
Yes, Iâm aware that there are BiS items in one and the other and raiders want certain m+ items while m+ers want certain raid items but⊠at worst youâd just have to do a SINGLE boss/m+ in order to get access to that loot table instead of having to kill all bosses/do 8 +10s.
Granted how raid loot/vault works, killing a single boss technically wouldnât suffice because youâd need to kill that specific boss youâd need the item from but itâd still be better than what we have now.
There are a lot of nuances to it, I agree, but I still think itâd be way less frustrating than it is now.
So, mathematically speaking, I donât see an issue with the vault just giving you an item of your choice once a week. Itâd stop the frustration people have with it.
Or am I missing something crucial here?
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Some people still stick to the old notion that MMORPG should have RNG gearing, because they think it feels rewarding to get lucky.
Plus frankly I donât like the idea of bad luck protection. Itâs a bandaid fix.
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Yeah, Iâm aware of that and I would totally feel it, if WoW would be what it used to be but at this point WoW just isnât classic/TBC anymore. Itâs way too fast paced and competitive to have this amount of RNG incorporated into your character progression (my opinion, feel free to disagree here).
One of my friends I play with literally couldnât get into pug groups the first 3 IDs of the season because all of his vault slots where worse than his heroic gear (sim-wise) and he took sockets thus his ilvl was comparatively low and people just didnât invite him.
Ofc this is anectodal but stuff like this, mathematically speaking, can happen and we know how the WoW-playerbase operates.
To be totally honest here - I dread each wednesday. Idk why but I play 2 characters and for the entire season I didnât have a single vault that excited me. It was either a total bust or just âokay-ishâ and by âokay-ishâ I mean items that are not optimal but I can somehow work with them.
The vault just doesnât feel rewarding at all imo.
Me neither, thatâs why Iâd call for deterministic loot. Bad luck protection would just be⊠slightly better than what we have now.
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Well its rather dissapointing for me if i didnt get loot for weeks from raid (aside the slotmachine).
I played frost DK in s2 and s3 in DF (also in SL) and i tell you, we had all of this all the time! And still nobody wanted a frost DK.
That gearing is only half of the story. In the end gearing (PvE) has the goal to make certain goals (easier) achievable. The difficulty is static, so getting more gear, gaining health, gaining that couple extra HPS or DPS will make the content easier.
Now, in M+ there is something weird going on. M10 is easily possible with, letâs say as average, 615 gear. So this is gear obtainable from ⊠yes ⊠Delves, completely. But, M10 also grants the highest possible reward, already. So in the very base, for the majority of the players, there is ZERO reason to gear beyond that point. Just zero. Perhaps to be able to ignore more mechanics, but thatâs about it. Talking about BiS is also almost a joke when it comes to the vast majority of the player-base, it doesnât mean anything.
The whole gearing system of M+ is irrelevant to the vast majority of M+ attendees. And thĂĄt is a problem. You get into M+ by gearing in Delves, and you can reach the end-content of M+ by upgrading Delve gear. Not because the gear from Delves is so great, but you get showered in them while theyâre easy to upgrade.
This while you can do 5 M+ runs without looting anything but 51 gold.
Not disagreeing, but at least you get the crests in M+ instead of delves.
When someone prefers dungeons over delves i would forever suggest playing dungeons. Delves is quite a long grind if you want to upgrade your 603 champion loot. To me it is delves for some initial gear to get into the 600 ilvl range and then M+ 
Yes, Iâm aware of that hence this part:
Yes, I agree with that but looking at a lot of my PuG runs, Iâd say that a lot of players need the 620 gear to do 10s. But practically speaking, youâre correct.
I mean⊠yes. The only reason to strife for more gear at this point is for mythic raiding or high key pushing but as Iâve also stated:
We can argue about whether players need the gear or not but thatâs not relevant in this context. The game is desigend to grant such gear to players who donât even need it. This creates the psychological effect of players also wanting that gear. Now you dangle the carrot in front of them but give them a potato instead. Whether the gear is necessary or not doesnât matter, it still feels frustrating to get [Corrupted Eggshell] in your vault.
Absolutely, the Delve gearing progression is totally contradictory to the M+ gearing system and Blizzard, according to an interview, is looking to address this in S2.
That being said - I donât mind Delve players having good gear. For all that I care they could also get Mythic Track gear from their vault. It doesnât hinder my own progression.
But regardless of this circumstance, the entire vault system with its rng gear aquisition still sucks to no end. 
You could argue that people with the mental fortitude to be able to bother with Delves for a prolonged period of time deserve that gear because Iâd rather bang my head against a wall than to grind Delves for more than 4 Delves per character (not per week⊠per character). 
They just wrongly shifted the focus on the Vault. It used to be some bad-luck protection, in case you rarely loot items. Now itâs the only path to obtain a certain gear-track items, if doing solely M+.
Just make it solely bad-luck protection again, and I think most can deal with the RNG part. Just donât let us depend on the Vault for all our gear upgrades.
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Well the issue is that this would need M+ to drop actual mythic track gear which raiders are REALLY opposed to because they think that farmable content should not drop the highest possible gear reward because theyâd need to spam farm M+ then and to be fair, I understand this issue.