Right now, gearing in retail is in a bit of a state, isn’t it? Imagine a nice fluffy omelette that you mixed together from perfectly acceptable ingredients and lovingly cooked in a pan for just long enough, but then you cooked it a bit longer, then it bit longer still and subjected it to 8 seconds of concentrated machine gun fire. That sort of state.
(Yes, I stole that joke)
These days, there’s basically no way of knowing whether a new item is better than what you’ve already got. With the benefic stuff, we even have situations now where the 445 mythic belt that fish boss belched up for me is worse than my 425 benefic piece with crappy stats. Unless you go to a 3rd party website to sim every. new. item. you’re groping around in the dark.
So here’s my solution to this madness: Stat templates! In PvE!
I.e. most gear would no longer carry secondary stats. Instead, the value of your crit, haste, mastery and vers would be calculated based purely on your item level.
Obviously for this to work, the stat ratios would have to be designed properly. I.e. every spec has a completely different template, based on their stat priority.
The exception to this rule are rings and necklaces. Those pieces would not carry mainstat, but provide a big chunk of secondary stats on their own.
Then, in order to keep chests, shoulders, etc from becoming completely disposable, introduce elements to differentiate them outside of stats. I.e. affixes, sockets and tertiaries (those being pre-determined instead of random), socket bonuses, etc.
When looking at a given piece of gear, it should be obvious which roles or specs it’s going to be good for.
Say one chest piece has an affix that deals damage to your target whenever you dodge, parry or block an attack, while another chest has a socket that grants a big chunk of leech when you slot a mastery gem into it. From this setup, it’s fairly clear that chest A would be really good on a Monk tank, while chest B should probably go to the Resto Druid.
I dunno about anyone else, but I want getting gear to be fun again, you found a way to make it even more boring than it already was.
There needs to be less sources of gear, less titanforging and stop with the dumb azerite artifact stuff and then it’s fixed.
Make gear targetable like it was, make it memorable and let people go into atlasloot and pinpoint that’s the piece I need, it’s good and I don’t need it in titanforged because that doesn’t exist anymore.
They just need to re-work the entire process of gearing and what gear means. I get why people min/max and sim their chars, and if you really enjoy that(?) that’s great but when you get a new item it should be pretty damn obvious if it’s an upgrade or not.
Having to sim a char just to see if an item is worth equipping is and always has been(in my opinion) ridiculous.
Also when I think about it, why not make gem slots fixed on certain items where it makes sense like rings and necks(or maybe even a tiara or something, a special helm).
I miss the days, when I knew what I needed, what I wanted and when and from where I wanted it. Now everything is RNG, RNG and more RNG. And when you think I get this 445 azerite item instead 430 azerite item, I then have to re-plan 2 other peace again (which what happened to me exactly this reset)
… and then I am like ‘what an actual F’ mode, when I get from M10 bigger upgrade than I get from mythic raid boss. Not 1st boss, but one of the harder bosses.
While I raid for new boss kills and for me ilevels matters much less than for many (as per some discussions on forums here), even for me - doing mythic raid farm just for transmog feels wrong. Doing farm raid should also have another objective than just transmog and some necessity to get on new unkilled boss. Thrill of an upgrade should still be part of raiding too. But when I get from dungeon 450-455loot (or what that belt, boots were) and raid loot just does not proc, i am like “mmmmm… ok… let me farm that Waycrest manor 10000th time for my crit versa ring for socket and titanforged” -
Gear should have set levels, and I am all for M+ rewarding gear that is raid worthy (but should remain below equal difficulty raids - i.e. hardest M+ gear being 5 points below myhic gear, and medium range M+, where masses are should be under HC raid).
It would help if raids would get back their unique bonus-sets, or like we call them in this game : tier sets. I understand that one thing against tier sets was theim locking slots in, but same happens with azerite items, with the neck you never change, and tier sets do not have to be as big, 4-5 items be enough - have a ring, neck, and shoulders and helm, or whatever … Blizz has people, who get paid for figuring this all out.