Why is my gear so weak?!

Community General Discussion
1

I haven’t logged into this guy for many years. He is still decked out in Legion raid gear, however for some reason it is only item level 50, which appears to be roughly equivalent to level 17 quest gear despite being from a level 45 raid…

I’m barely able to kill anything, and I get kicked from dungeons for doing 0 damage and dying nearly every trash pull.

Why has that happened, and how do I replace it with better gear if I can’t kill anything?

(Also, the same gear shows in the dungeon journal, from Antorus, as being item level 163, so why is mine only item level 50 now?)

2

My older chars have something like a “gear update” option. I assume you can use that and get a bit better gear for the lvl you are.

3

Yeah, I naively thought my Legion + legendary gear would be more than adequate, and I wasn’t sure from the explanation if the “Gear Update” involved deleting my current gear (including legendary MoP cloak etc). So I declined it, and I can’t get that option back now.

4

There was an ilvl rescaling at the start of the expansion, though in classic Blizzard fashion many existing items weren’t rescaled properly and were left with the old SL ilvls. The gear update option is pretty much Blizzard’s easy way out of the situation where many people were stuck with severely low ilvls.

The fast way would be to buy some BoEs from the AH.

The cheap way would be to solo some Legion dungeons while not in Chromie time (hopefully the legacy buff carries you through them) and hope you get plate drops. If that proves to be impossible drop to WoD raids/dungeons and so on.

3 Likes
5

There has been some (rather borked) scaling / squishing done to the world and our characters.

There was a feature that you probably didn’t notice when you logged which is a gear update. It would have given you (I think 178 at level 50) gear in every slot and some 22 slot bags. It would have dumped everything you own into the mail system for you to collect.
A rather unfortunate side effect of this is to wipe your Action Bars also.

Not sure where a level 50 could pick up some ok gear to get going since you’ll have to wide 60 days for that gear update feature to apply to that character again. Perhaps the AH or perhaps doing the intro quests to some expansion.

1 Like
6

Thanks, relying on legacy buffs to clear old dungeons seems to work. I don’t understand why they didn’t just boost existing gear to the correct item level.

There’s lots of vendor gear around the world too, but it’s all old pre-scaling item levels to what I can tell, which is very annoying. There doesn’t seem to be any consistency to the adjustments.

1 Like
7

I saw that Dragon Soul was giving item level 128 gear so I soloed it with one of my alts. But when I looked at the stats it was often worse than the item level 50 pieces. So you might want to confirm that the items aren’t being silly.

1 Like
8

My best guess is too much spaghetti code, but I don’t really know.

9

it’s because of squish & scaling . if you solo old raids where you one shot everything, you get 110-120 ilvl items that’ also weird . heirlooms are the easiest solution to your problem

10

It comes back if the character is inactive again for the set period. However, if you want to play, you’re better off just levelling.

1 Like
11

Yeah I won’t bother waiting, I’m just doing old dungeons (non-chromie time) to get some better gear. It’s a pretty silly work around imo!

I did try levelling straight away but it was very difficult to kill level ~55 mobs whilst wearing gear fit for a level 17 lol.

12

If you do consider taking the gear upgrade on an alt you don’t lose anything. You get everything you had equipped and in your bags mailed to you.

2 Likes
13

That right there is the answer

1 Like
14

So if you don’t log in for a few years, your gear is suddenly completely inadequate for fighting mobs at your own level?

I don’t think that is intended design!

15

Gearing isnt rocket level science either so i dont see the problem.

16

That is why they made the Gear Update. Because they do not know how to create motivating content without a gear spiral so every 2-3 Update they have to make a Stat Squish where your gear becomes weak because if else WoW laggs from to high numbers. You are unfortunataly the victim of two stat squishes so they nerfed your gear into the ground.

17

Isnt it like 2-3 months tho

18

I don’t know…
I mean I leveled after Exiles’s reach via dungeons and we were most of the time literally naked, some of us had Heirlooms, but only out of habit from the time when it was worth to had it, but nothing really… well… above grey or white, just when something dropped, equiped it
Not really mattered, because at the end of the next dungeon it became obsolete
Even with level squish and evolving the gear, you shouldn’t have problem to reach from 50 to 60 wiothout an issue then do TW when its up, and it is up quite regularly

While this happens, but most of the people are out there turbo leveling and wouldn’t care what damage you do, just the Tanks pulls, the healer heals, rest is history
Outdor content? Well good luck with that, just avoid it, simply not worth the time to level with that (tho’ the Compagain Quests are nice chunk of XP, but ultimately if you just do pet battle, cooking and fishing dailes - maybe some gathering or archeology - while waiting the qeue to pop, you end up better net gain of XP than doing quests)
BUT
If your really have an issue, for pocketchange there are quite nice lvl 50 AH stuff to “catch up” they are just become obsolete after you dinged 52 or 53… and thats will happen in a half an hour, maybe +/- 10 minutes depending of you choice of leveling

19

Yeah 60 days. Which is why I said it’s better to just level if it’s a character you want to play.

20

its not, but thats how it just happens to be. inflation hits your gear