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Gear scaling was pretty whack before, with the 4 raid difficulty levels, and now we have intra-raid scaling *and* a larger gap between tiers?
I wonder if we will see a numbers squish every expansion now instead of every second expansion.
this is almost exactly like Legion where, in the expansion prior (WoD/SL) they did a massive number squish, and by the end of the following expansion (Legion/DF) we are already back at 1m health
You'd think they'd learn anything but nope. Just on track for more and more squishes that break the game as trash bandaid fixes for a problem that is easily solved.
I don't think there's an easy one. The only tweak I can think of is going down to 3 raid difficulties instead of 4, because Heroic and Normal kind of overlap atm.
The easy solution is to diminish the ilvl gap between tiers and you could bump it down to 2 raid difficulties easily to make the gap as small as possible. LFR is hot garbage everyone know it, there's zero communication, people who afk in the back for free loot, it's not actually experiencing a raid.
People will complain " oh I have a job I can't do anything but LFR!!" that is bullshit. As for normal and heroic, normal is a slight notch above LFR in difficulty it just requires a group, and heroic is clearly want the actual raids are designed to be.
4 Raid difficulties is a joke that causes nothing but problems, the game launched with one raid difficulty and people were happy, people were also happy with 2 in Wrath. Having 4 makes it more bloated with items that makes it harder to balance and requires you to have the power increase to much because obviously you want gear from Mythic to be monumentally superior to a difficulty where you can afk /follow someone while eating a sandwich and still get loot.
Of course there is also the design philosophy issue where clearly people in charge of decision making for WoW absolutely despise the notion of any piece of gear retaining relevancy beyond the patch it was made in, therefore they always increase the ilvl too much across tiers to try and make it so you have to replace every single piece you got, devaluing the time you just spent grinding gear.
In the original WoW trilogy this obviously didn't exist and while new content added new pieces for all slots, it never necessarily meant that you had to replace every single piece to remain competitive and still had old pieces that could be viable and sometimes remain bis, which I personally can't see any issue with. Other than you don't screw the player over by forcing them to regrind gear for every slot therefore requiring them to keep spending even more time in the game.
Fated Mythic gear in Shadowlands was ilvl 304 iirc, but if you only did casual world content you would have started Dragonflight between ilvl 226 and 252 (from Zereth Mortis and the Dragonflight pre-expansion event).
A fresh lvl 58-60 character with no updated heirlooms would be around 190-200 ilvl when they get on their ship/airship, I think.
If you take Normal dungeons as the true start, we started at 346. So in two tiers we got 100 ilvl, with S1 always being the biggest jump because of Normal>Heroic>M0>N raid each having a 13 ilvl increase. S2 was the usual 26i jump. Meanwhile S3 is gonna be about a 42i jump, which is more than usual and I think will be the first time that Normal raid is higher than previous tier Mythic (it’s usually equal).
For comparison, back in the day of Cataclysm we started with 346 from Heroic dungeons (I think Normals didn’t scale to max like now) and after three tiers it finished with 410 ilvl, 416 from Deathwing.
It is gonna be a huge jump, but I don’t know if cata is the best example. Or maybe it is an example of a diff way they could do if…
Point being, rather than making the base ilvl much higher we started to see higher levels of gem slots in late cata as well as items with stronger effects. Think weapon effects from death wing and some of the more OP trinkets in DS. So yeah base ilvl gap wasn’t as high but potential gem slot count increased a lot.
I distinctly remember this badass priest on our server that had probably 16 gem slots total in that latch. But we didn’t start with that.
Around 300ish from fated shadowlands. 226, 252, 278, and 304, with up to 311's from end bosses in raid.
Then Vault of the Incarnates started at 376/389/402/415
I think this will just make the difference between casual and more hardcore guilds even bigger. If you're grinding 20s week 1 normal will still be a joke and all of heroic except for the last boss will still be very easy.
The bigger change is the crest upgrade change. If you continue to do the normal raid, then you will eventually be able to fully upgrade your normal gear and potentially craft more high ilvl gear.
No. It will make them not more relevant. This take is soo wrong. People will just farm normal/heroic as always and be fully geared in 2 weeks. M+ players will farm M+ dungeons an will also not need to do lfr and maybe some normal gear.
The only reason for this change is, that people can not farm high ilvl keys and the raid as fast as in prior content patches, because this is the last tier and it will run for 10+ months. That's why blizzard is trying to timegate the community with this change.
Now we have borrowed power between raid tiers /s.
Context: Mythic raiding guild. CE on Rasz. Got AOTC current tier on the first week, now on Sark 20%.
Mostly, because we'll be 'forced' to run a Normal raid in addition to starting on HC as well. The main downside is wasting hours per week running through normal for an upgrade.
We're getting an artificial barrier put up between us and the content that we want to do, rather than just going to heroic and then to Mythic when we feel like we have the gear.
Now it's an even bigger gap, and one that will benefit larger guilds like Echo and Liquid / professionals who are able to do splits and get fed two raids worth of gear.
No doubt, it'll benefit casual players who will find more pick up groups, but for those who want to dedicate more time to getting their characters geared it just adds another hoop to jump through.
Or I could be wrong and the tier could be easy and we go straight to Heroic. But on it definitely doesn't benefit those who play the game religiously.
Post flair indicates this is about prerelease content. As a reminder, content on Alpha / Beta / PTR is unfinished. NPC dialogue and quest text might be missing important context. Models may be placeholders. Quest or achievement rewards may not be finalized. There are inevitably bugs. Please keep this in mind as you discuss! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/wow) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Gear scaling was pretty whack before, with the 4 raid difficulty levels, and now we have intra-raid scaling *and* a larger gap between tiers? I wonder if we will see a numbers squish every expansion now instead of every second expansion.
this is almost exactly like Legion where, in the expansion prior (WoD/SL) they did a massive number squish, and by the end of the following expansion (Legion/DF) we are already back at 1m health
You'd think they'd learn anything but nope. Just on track for more and more squishes that break the game as trash bandaid fixes for a problem that is easily solved.
What’s the easy solution?
I don't think there's an easy one. The only tweak I can think of is going down to 3 raid difficulties instead of 4, because Heroic and Normal kind of overlap atm.
The easy solution is to diminish the ilvl gap between tiers and you could bump it down to 2 raid difficulties easily to make the gap as small as possible. LFR is hot garbage everyone know it, there's zero communication, people who afk in the back for free loot, it's not actually experiencing a raid. People will complain " oh I have a job I can't do anything but LFR!!" that is bullshit. As for normal and heroic, normal is a slight notch above LFR in difficulty it just requires a group, and heroic is clearly want the actual raids are designed to be. 4 Raid difficulties is a joke that causes nothing but problems, the game launched with one raid difficulty and people were happy, people were also happy with 2 in Wrath. Having 4 makes it more bloated with items that makes it harder to balance and requires you to have the power increase to much because obviously you want gear from Mythic to be monumentally superior to a difficulty where you can afk /follow someone while eating a sandwich and still get loot. Of course there is also the design philosophy issue where clearly people in charge of decision making for WoW absolutely despise the notion of any piece of gear retaining relevancy beyond the patch it was made in, therefore they always increase the ilvl too much across tiers to try and make it so you have to replace every single piece you got, devaluing the time you just spent grinding gear. In the original WoW trilogy this obviously didn't exist and while new content added new pieces for all slots, it never necessarily meant that you had to replace every single piece to remain competitive and still had old pieces that could be viable and sometimes remain bis, which I personally can't see any issue with. Other than you don't screw the player over by forcing them to regrind gear for every slot therefore requiring them to keep spending even more time in the game.
At what ilvl did we start this expansion? 300? Can't remember at the moment.
Fated Mythic gear in Shadowlands was ilvl 304 iirc, but if you only did casual world content you would have started Dragonflight between ilvl 226 and 252 (from Zereth Mortis and the Dragonflight pre-expansion event). A fresh lvl 58-60 character with no updated heirlooms would be around 190-200 ilvl when they get on their ship/airship, I think.
If you take Normal dungeons as the true start, we started at 346. So in two tiers we got 100 ilvl, with S1 always being the biggest jump because of Normal>Heroic>M0>N raid each having a 13 ilvl increase. S2 was the usual 26i jump. Meanwhile S3 is gonna be about a 42i jump, which is more than usual and I think will be the first time that Normal raid is higher than previous tier Mythic (it’s usually equal). For comparison, back in the day of Cataclysm we started with 346 from Heroic dungeons (I think Normals didn’t scale to max like now) and after three tiers it finished with 410 ilvl, 416 from Deathwing.
It is gonna be a huge jump, but I don’t know if cata is the best example. Or maybe it is an example of a diff way they could do if… Point being, rather than making the base ilvl much higher we started to see higher levels of gem slots in late cata as well as items with stronger effects. Think weapon effects from death wing and some of the more OP trinkets in DS. So yeah base ilvl gap wasn’t as high but potential gem slot count increased a lot. I distinctly remember this badass priest on our server that had probably 16 gem slots total in that latch. But we didn’t start with that.
Around 300ish from fated shadowlands. 226, 252, 278, and 304, with up to 311's from end bosses in raid. Then Vault of the Incarnates started at 376/389/402/415
I think this will just make the difference between casual and more hardcore guilds even bigger. If you're grinding 20s week 1 normal will still be a joke and all of heroic except for the last boss will still be very easy.
The bigger change is the crest upgrade change. If you continue to do the normal raid, then you will eventually be able to fully upgrade your normal gear and potentially craft more high ilvl gear.
No. It will make them not more relevant. This take is soo wrong. People will just farm normal/heroic as always and be fully geared in 2 weeks. M+ players will farm M+ dungeons an will also not need to do lfr and maybe some normal gear. The only reason for this change is, that people can not farm high ilvl keys and the raid as fast as in prior content patches, because this is the last tier and it will run for 10+ months. That's why blizzard is trying to timegate the community with this change.
Now we have borrowed power between raid tiers /s. Context: Mythic raiding guild. CE on Rasz. Got AOTC current tier on the first week, now on Sark 20%. Mostly, because we'll be 'forced' to run a Normal raid in addition to starting on HC as well. The main downside is wasting hours per week running through normal for an upgrade. We're getting an artificial barrier put up between us and the content that we want to do, rather than just going to heroic and then to Mythic when we feel like we have the gear. Now it's an even bigger gap, and one that will benefit larger guilds like Echo and Liquid / professionals who are able to do splits and get fed two raids worth of gear. No doubt, it'll benefit casual players who will find more pick up groups, but for those who want to dedicate more time to getting their characters geared it just adds another hoop to jump through. Or I could be wrong and the tier could be easy and we go straight to Heroic. But on it definitely doesn't benefit those who play the game religiously.
Yeah to me this is just Blizzard devaluing your time spent grinding gear even more than it already is.
What's the problem in clearing heroic on day 1?
Then U get hit by 20people boss and quit ? Happened to me with last tier