Retail gearing has been in the gutter ever since Legion (maybe WoD too but I skipped it so idk). Ever since they removed justice and valor badges/points that allowed you to directly purchase gear, rather than the parody of the valor system we have now that only lets you make minor upgrades, gearing has been RNG clownfest that never feels rewarding.
You’re either getting no drops, or the drops you get feel worthless because it’s 100% luck with 0 determinism. There are no “hard” bad luck protection systems because the great vault is just more pulls of the slot machine, and the upcoming catalyst still requires an item to modify, so you’re exchanging an item not getting a second one.
Professions are also a joke because you’re jumping through more hoops than ever before to spec into the type of item you wanna craft, and then keep upgrading it with the horrible quality system. In Wrath/Cata/MoP on the other hand, you cap your profession, and you relatively easily craft 2 items that are the second highest ilvl you can get for the tier, donezo.
On top of the content being objectively less rewarding, it’s also objectively more difficult and exhausting to play through. Both raiding, M+, and the specs themselves alongside the talent button bloat, are far harder to play through compared Wrath (though not vastly different from MoP), so you’re putting in more effort and getting fewer rewards for it.
For contrast, I’ve spent 1d 17 hours at max level in Wrath and I’m a few items away from BiS for phase 1 having cleared all the content available so far. In DF, I spent 1d 21 hrs at 70 and I’ve gotten up to +15 in M+, down first 4 bosses in heroic and I’m only at 380 ilvl. Ofc these metrics aren’t comparable 1 to 1, but I did spend a roughly similar amount of time doing group content in both games for vastly different results.
Very true, tho I do think having only currency upgrades would ne boring and feel time gated. They are however necessary in combination with RNG drops to avoid feeling like you’re wasting your time. There’s no harm letting people gear up faster, they’re not rationing food to prisoners.
RNG is terrible. It’s like me saying “Gramps buy me a computer game for my birthday.” then he gets me one he knows I already have, then I’m supposed to be grateful? No thanks.
Yeah but even worse because you have to engage in challenging content to get a chance at an upgrade. 3-chesting in Legion was somewhat of a compromise for M+ at least, and it felt far better than every xpac since then.
I would argue that gear isn’t as important on retail as it is on classic/wrath. You can quickly gear up for pvp in 340 honor gear and some drakebreaker stuff and still be competitive because of the scaling. In older versions of the game you would get completely decimated by a BiS character if you stepped outside in that kind of gear.
I don’t pve though (outside of levelling and WQs), so things may be a completely different story on that side of the fence. I just know for pvp things have never been better.
I really like your idea about a vendor selling the lowest upgradeable item. I always wanted a vendor for M+ I didn’t know how to make that work and you found a great solution which will allow to remove the valor cap.
The lack of determinism in rewards is an important problem in retail WoW right now indeed.
In order for me to get 5 tier pieces + my BiS evoker staff, it took 4 lucky vaults + 1 really selfless guildie who took the initiative to pass the staff over to me in spite of the fact that she won the roll.
I believe that Wrath with the badge vendors did a better job at protecting people form some of the bad luck.
But I think that FF14 has currently perfected the Wrath model of having both some random loot and gear from vendors for currency
I prefer “effort-based” grinds rather than RNG grinds. If I could spend my time with a direct known path of “doing stuff = currency = rewards” then I’d be happy.
Same with a lot of people, I am sure.
However, Blizzard doesn’t like that. Gearing is the only endgame in WoW. They have honed everything down to a refined drug. Gearing.
Everything comes down to gearing. If we ran out of gear, there isn’t the community nor the repeatable activity appeal to retain players alone.
Everyone seems willing to play the toxic RNG grind, so why should Blizzard gimp themselves by changing?
It was kind of possible to do that in SL as m0 dropped 1/12 gear. I got the scale trinket by stealthing to Hakkar and killing him.
In theory a crew could have armor stacked and given all drops back to one player. So that player could have all gear at 1/12.
Then with uncapped Valor spam +2 and upgrade your gear to 6/12 (I think it was), then upgrade score to allow further gear upgrades and repeat until you get to 12/12 gear.
However I think they’ve changed it so m0 gear cannot be upgraded now.
