What's the point of gear upgrade tracks, why not just upgrade gear indefinitely?

Community General Discussion
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Blizzard has a compulsive need to make convoluted systems that have endless caveats and “gotchas” to ensure that everyone stays in their lane and to make sure that no one can abuse ( :scream:) their systems. This design philosophy can be found anywhere and not much has changed over the years, they just move from one system to another when people grow tired of them but they are always fun policing these systems in a way that causes unnecessary friction.

People are currently rightfully upset over myth gear track changes in TWW, but the whole system doesn’t need to exist at all. We are already capped by useless flightstones (completely pointless grind that only exists so everything you do can seem rewarding), and crests, the actual system that ensures that you have to do hard content in order to get high ilvl upgrades.

So, why do gear tracks exist at all? Why can’t we keep upgrading any and all the gear we get in a given season when we are already roadblocked by crests that need to be farmed in challenging difficulty tiers? If we only had flightstones or valor, I would understand the need for it somewhat, but it is just a pointless restriction that makes half of your gear useless, and makes you reluctant to upgrade it and waste flightstones. If flightstones and gear tracks didn’t exist, we could freely upgrade gear with crests, and we wouldn’t feel like we wasted them if we got higher ilvl gear since those crests wouldn’t be useful for it most of the time.

I love this game but every time I resub and start going hard on a season, stupid things like these start grinding my goodwill and eventually make me unsub because I’m tired of being micromanaged. Just looking at the whole gear upgrade system when it was announced and all the surrounding confusion, and it looks like a middle manager-designed workplace bonus KPI system rather than something that should exist in, what should be, a simple, fun, and rewarding MMO.

Another example of this fun policing is restricting catalyst gear to some stupid arbitrary sources even when you get other gear of the same gear track, with no indications of what activities you can do to for catalyst-compatible gear, but that’s a separate discussion.

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someone has been inspired to make this thread I see.

I´ve concluded that this is the game’s path, so it is up to us to continue supporting this system or move on to other games.

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I dont understand why they dropped valor they could have perfected the way that was and improved on it.

All of these upgrade tracks and lockouts for certain content also grinds my gears the devs that make these decisions should no longer be working on this game imo

Blizz dev hmm lets make this cool system but how can we make it gradually worst over time

It should be one currency that drops from all pve content and items should be able to be upgraded to max level no caps make them game fun!

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Justice track for dungeon will do and Valor for anything after. The harder the content you do the more valor you get. I can only imagine how confusing the whole system is for a new player.

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I would also prefer if they removed pvp gear and vendors and made gear gear again.

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My subs end in Sept 13 .

Probably going to go for November as well just to see how the gear system work .

If im going to get overburned by the …do 300 m+ to upgrade the gear …Screw this . I’m not going to upgrade my gear from mythic raid and mythic+ to get my gear delete from the 1st World quest and the faceroll Hc dungeons every new tier , and start again the same over and over …

The season are ok …the progress of the character are dumped to Diablo 4 season …when in order to play start a new …

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The reason they do not allow equipment to be upgradeable until the highest item level is to avoid the degenerate behaviour of farming absolutely every single raid on all difficulties, every single dungeon on every difficulty and all world quests and hunting all rare enemies etc. to get those very rare (but valuable) procs of tertiary stats or gem sockets on gear.

Which is why on another thread I had suggested that upgrade tracks for equipment be entirely removed, tertiary tracks and random proc of extra gem sockets be removed as well, and make Scribes and Jewelcrafters add those deterministically (sp?)

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Easy, it’s all to keep the unwashed masses from getting gear that’s “Too good for them”, so we get two sets of roadblocks: Crests, since the higher tier ones are limited in availability, and the upgrade tracks.

I don’t see why we need both of those, TBH, either of them would be enough to keep people from gear that’s “above their station” (I’m not going into who would say that, but i think we all know…), but Blizz loves their systems on top of systems, so here we all are…

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I dont agree that gear is above anyones station this is an mmorpg and the best gear should be available to anyone fairly with Rng not grinds or skill level.

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So that you don’t just sit in a +2 farming currency and upgrade to max.

The drops and upgrade currencies are relevant to the difficulty you take part in.

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Dragonflights system’s are better then the war withins from what im seeing.

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man, I remember when mmos were all about that one dude who has it all and you look up to that player and he teaches you how to be the strongest player you could ever be in your gaming life. now all I see here are anti-farmers.

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Who is anti farming? The current system we have is farming in the relevant difficulty.

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I was mainly talking about comments like:

I´ve been seeing it in the remix section too. some people don´t like others grinding their way to OP-ness

unless i´ve misunderstood the comment as anti farming post.

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But wouldn’t one of the systems (Whether upgrade track or crests) be sufficient to achieve that? Why put in two systems for the same effect?

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How are you gonna get wyrm and aspect crests in +2?

This is the exact reason why we can’t have fun systems like artifacts anymore. Let people who indulge in degenerate behavior do it, I’m never gonna do that or play with anyone who demands that I do, it’s wild to make every ingame system sterile and boring just so lunatics can’t do 30000 Maw of Souls runs in a day, let them do it.

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Well they would have to reset your currency every season to prevent hoarding from previous season.

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I’m not sure I quite understand what you mean.

The system exists so that there is a difficulty and you can’t just do the easiest stuff and get the highest rewards. Equally as a higher difficulty players you can’t just faceroll low stuff to get the same result.

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Hmm…

I have also thought: I wish all gear was on the awakened track, it would simplify everything, and crests are still there as a progression wall

But, in the long run, over the course of a season it would essentially also reward players that only ever run heroic dungeons with maxlevel gear, because crests can be traded up at certain itemlevel breakpoints. Not to mention the 45 (currently) Wyrms via the 6 Vault tokens for taking no loot (what for if I already have all slots filled with awakened gear?)

Now, is it superlong and tedious to farm aspect crests via whelplings? Absolutely. But has that sort of thing ever stopped dedicated WoW players from doing similar things? No, not really… That´s why we still need things like rising seasonal crest caps, so really dedicated (and /or professional) people dont ding 522 on day one of the season and faceroll the mythic raid thenext day.

And that makes building capable pug groups into more and more of a nightmare as the season progresses for the average player that doesn´t use things like the rio ingame addon, but still often only has itemlevel as his metric, esp with regards to raids.

Just imagining “Oh, a 520 Fury, yeah, he´ll blast”… except that he only ever facerolled heroic dungeons and doesn´t have the slightest clue what mechanics, LOS, WASD, or ABC are, with according results :wink:

And so while i would personally like it, I´m against implementing it, there needs to be a hardcap to how far degenerate laziness /easymode facerolling can get you, and I do believe that currently 515 is a reasonably good spot for that… good enough for M raiding and clearing +10s if the player has the skills to go with it, esp later in the season where “regulars” with higher gear and more experience can more often than not easily carry one or 2 failbobs… but simultaneously not good enough to give the impression of being potentially really really good and able to carry other failbobs :wink:

PS/Edit: I just thought of something… On TWW launch (and presumably going forward) the last 2 bosses of the raid will drop 15+15 crests, 15 of the tier it´s in, and 15 of the next higher tier… which would only further exacerbate the issue of having a single gear track by making itemlevel as a gauge even more unreliable even faster.

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Gearing would be super fast. You don’t need to do higher content to get better gear because everything will already go to max. Not sure they’d go for that. It’s fine for a S4 which isn’t a proper season.

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