It’s random. The only thing regarding item drops that should be random is whether it drops or not.
Imagine a game like Monster Hunter, where already rare item drops required to create a weapon can increase your weapons damage from any number between 10 and 10.000.
I know, Ion and his friends LOVE everything that’s a slot machine, but it’s miserable. A slot machine is fun for a few minutes and it’s fun while you win, but with titanforging, you lost 999 out of 1000 times. It just felt bad, if you’re looking at what’s best for your character. And even slot machines are made so they constantly give you small wins to keep you hooked. Titanforging gave you nothing, over and over and over and over and over again.
As an example: Azshara’s Font of Power, a BiS trinket for quite a few classes still.
A mythic Azshara’s Font of Power is itemlevel 445. However, receiving your BiS trinket from the highest difficulty was never enough. It could not only upgrade twice from Mythic itemlevel (450 and 455), it could also roll a socket, which means we have 4 random upgrades on an already random drop.
So what we’re doing with titanforging is staggering chances upon chances to reduce the chance of eventually having what’s considered best to up to nearly zero.
We have a chance to drop the item times the chance of it to titanforge, times the chance of it to titanforge to max level, times the chance of it to roll a socket, times the chance of it to roll a tertiary stat (which is arguably irrelevant, I agree), times the chance of it to roll the correct tertiary stat.
Even if all of those chances as high as 25% (which is way too high, everybody will agree), the chance of receiving the BiS Trinket for quite a few classes would be as low as 0.1%. And that chance is for mythic, for heroic it would be .006%, and for normal it’d be .0004%
That’s not one in hundred kills, that’s one in thousand. Having that chance on 12 slots, combined with a weekly lockout, was just miserable.
People want to go for what’s best. It feels great to be BiS equipped and know that there’s no gear to farm for with your character anymore.
Some people bring up the argument of titanforging devaluing difficulties, with LFR items forging even higher than mythic itemlevel, which is an argument as well, it’s just one that personally never bothered me as much.
What did bother me was random titanforged trinkets that were garbage for me but great for others being untradeable, due to persoloot. Screw that system to hell and back. Guild Master Loot was fine.
What also bothered me quite a bit was the simple fact that every bit of my gear progressing was 100% random. Sure, I could grind specific m+10 dungeons over and over and over to go for that 0.1% chance. Sure, I could kill Azshara every Week on every difficulty for that 0.1% chance. But I’m playing the game to play a game, not to play in a lottery.
If you’ve ever farmed a rare mount, you’ll know how incredibly rare a 1% dropchance is. Titanforging made your entire equipment, the direct correlation to your performance, even rarer.
Some people didn’t care, some people even liked that there was a chance that they were rewarded with an item that’s better than anything that would drop from the most difficult content by pure chance for some random worldquest they’ve completed (as an example, my BiS ring during BoD was a Tortollan Emissary Ring, titanforged to 425)
But rewards should be at least somewhat based on effort and difficulty. Thunderforging was somewhat better, since it removed the entirety of lower level contents being able to reward you, so even if you were still bound to an incredibly low chance, at least you didn’t need to go through the process of doing literally everything, if you’ve wanted to increase your chances of getting what you want.
Sure, titanforging a nice burst of dopamine if you get that 0.1% chance, once in a lifetime, but for most people, it was more a 999 out of 1000 times you get frustrated when looting an item that is about as valuable to you as a grey item from any given trash mob, over and over and over and over again.
And if you become a bit happy, one out of one thousand times, but frustrated the other 999 times, is it really a good system?
Also another issue that titanforging created was it made pugs, regarding itemlevel requirements insufferable, which to this point they still are. They always were, but they were even worse when titanforging was around.
And last but not least, it often took away any incentive to do any content, because, if you’ve completed normal Eternal Palace, but are already 445+ on every slot, from random upgrades from M+, your weekly chest, emissaries, worldquests, etc., what incentive do you have to try and gear yourself through heroic or anything higher, if the chance to get an upgrade is as low as 0.1% anyway?
And people who result in the argument of “everybody who disliked titanforging was an elitist” are the very same that state that everybody who’s killed a mythic boss is an elitist and that people who strive to complete the highest content are also elitists and that their opinion is worth less than that of other people.
It’s a kind of weird cult on these forums nowadays. You can see one of its members in Anyonemon in this thread here.
Of course all of that is only my personal opinion and I can also see why and that some people liked titanforging, but it made the game much worse for me, so I’ll always argue for it being a bad system, in my opinion. Similar to corruptions, really, but everybody and their mother noticed that corruptions were just another “You think you dislike titanforging, but you don’t, so here’s titanforging but worse!”. It was truly shocking that corruptions were an awful system. Who could’ve guessed. Let’s hope prepatch hits live soon.