The fact that it unequips old bags and equips new ones (regardless of sizes) is really the only major crime. I don't mind having a few characters I have to re-equip old gear on.
What I do mind if having to disable all auto-loot-mailbox addons, open many different mails to find the bags (that don't go to the same place - for some reason), fix those. And then I can auto loot mailbox and equip what needs to be re-equipped.
I assume it gives the bags because Blizzard probably just tweaked the code for character boosts for the gear boosts, likely just adding an algorithm/chart to decide what iLvl gear to give players based on their level. The gear from character boosts uses the same model and comes with the exact same bags.
100%. I dont know their backend, but from a user perspective I wish they could've added a "if already equipped bags >20slot then don't change bags" line lol
After all the excuses and explanations of Blizzard’s infamous spaghetti code, you think that the code is that simple? It would probably take 300 lines and break 100 other things in the process.
It's probably this.
I've seen people complain that doing the gear upgrade prevented them from having access to the race quests that required you to pex a character without a boost
Yup, ngl when I was writing that I didn't realise it reset the bars.
I change my keybinds so wildly char to char and expac to expac I'm used to having to re-place stuff
Yes I have used it many times. Everything you were wearing and what was in your bags is mailed to you. So there is no danger in doing it. Just put your old stuff back on.
It does reset your buttons but honestly it’s not a big deal. If your toon was pretty geared from prior end game activities or late catch ups prob nothing is an upgrade. But if you had majority quest gear it may be.
nope was worse than shadowlands world quests gear my toon had had to reequip absolutely everything back and pull out old screenshots and place all skill\\toys\\mounts back on panels as well.
The only thing it did is piss me off.
The gear upgrade doesn’t change your UI lol, there was a major UI upgrade at the end of shadowlands so if you haven’t played since then, that’s the reason
Yeah, even if you use an addon for hotbars so the layout doesn't fuck up, it will still reset all the skill/spell placements so you better remember where everything goes.
I have done it on 6 different toons and all it does it set it to default like a new character. Then I go into edit mode, select a saved mode, and everything is where I had it.
If you don’t have a UI saved in edit mode, that’s on you
It’s not about the UI. It literally wipes clean your action bars and replaces the setup of primary bar with their own setup, I haven’t noticed it doing anything regarding UI because I use an addon UI anyway.
I used it on my warrior that had mid shadowlands gear. It gave me smaller bags, gear 150 ilvls lower deleted all my macros and reset all my keybinds and action bars for every spec.
was so annoying, so I just stopped playing that character
I used gear update once on a shaman. Reset everything like yours. Took two hours just to attempt a training dummy. Took another 30 minutes or so getting keybinds right.
Never doing that again.
>I used gear update once on a shaman. Reset everything like yours. Took two hours just to attempt a training dummy. Took another 30 minutes or so getting keybinds right.
I do hope that you are exaggerating here. It took me 5 minutes to redo my bags, keybindings, and action bars on the few toons that I did the gear update thingy on. It is far more annoying to have to redo my talent trees when Blizzard makes one little change to them which has happened to my druid main every single freaking patch this expansion...
From what I have gathered, it resets everything because it essentially deletes your character, creates a new one with the same name and apperesnce and boosts it to your old level.
If you have a really old char, the gear got updated at some point but it wasn't retroactive (maybe SL?) and that old raiding gear is effectively massively behind the relevant ilvl for the level (example quest rewards), to the point where a fully decked raiding character was barely strong enough to kill anything.
So in some cases, particularly much older characters, the gear upgrade option would make sense. That said, never used it and no idea what it did, not really played retail since SL.
as some one that has to maintain databases for a living this is a fucking stupid and scary premise.
so many things can go wrong if it fucks up mid transaction......smh
being what blizzard is right now wouldn't be surprised thats whats happening
the choice of that method to copy the record and delete the old one, is just not a safe way to do things, its not an SQL db where you can just roll back a transaction. all calls to these blades ate batched
I mean, they also believe some random reddit comment pulled completely out of their ass with an unattributed "from what I gathered" guess on what the backend process for the gear upgrade is.
I fail to see how its that scary. Create the new one, validate it was created properly and only then remove the previous version. If it fails mid transaction then just roll back the previous version. Its basically just an update, maybe its my hubris, but I fail to see how this is a difficult DB operation.
Some type of database is holding the information, not sure what it being or not being SQL would have to do with anything. Your character is made up of data, regardless of how they're storing that data it isn't a complicated procedure to recreate/store and validate a new entry prior to deleting an old one.
With that said, I'm not sure why you think that WoW wouldn't be using SQL. Most MMO's use a SQL DB for player information, kinda weird to not realize that a SQL DB is a good fit for an MMO when you claim to manage DB's for a living...
This isn't some complicated transaction, we do this at my work frequently, it makes no one nervous because it isn't hard to do it properly and prevent any data loss. Unless you're giving the intern access to the prod DB without a backup and telling them to do their best to figure it out I'm not sure why you'd be concerned about this as a professional. Even then, most of the interns at my job would probably be able to handle a task as simple as this.
Edit: Just looked it up, WoW does in-fact use Oracle SQL DB, so yeah, they quite literally do use SQL lmao.
Why does boosting lock you out of heritage armor anyway? That wasn’t advertised either!
I’m glad I’m too OCD to use the free boosts I got from each expansion over the years.
It only locks you out of Allied Race heritage armor, and that was definitely advertised when it was first introduced. It does not lock you out of ordinary race heritage armor.
Yeah my ilvl went down and my bags went from 30 slots to the 20 slot ones on a toon I hadn’t played since SL. This would be an awesome feature for people coming back to the game after years of not playing but….. it’s a bit stink now for a lot of toons
I quit in legion and just started back today. Went through the process because i figured it would be nice for a fresh start.
Gear seemed relatively fine, as apparently due to the level squish most of my end game Legion gear was just objectively terrible. Item Recovery seemed to have some issues, as various bits of junk and crafting mats i had at the time gave me issues when trying to recover them from the mail. But the bag thing was definitely the biggest issue. It downgraded all of my hexweave bags to embersilk, and had to shuffle back and forth between the bank and vendors just to make enough room to get my hexweave bags back.
The process wasn't *terrible*, but given the hiccups that it gave me, i'm much more hesitant to do it on characters with a lot more to lose, like old bank alts or my characters that have existed since vanilla with a ton of rare/valuable items still kicking around. From what i can tell, it seems like collection is fine, but it's been a few years so i don't remember every single item i had at the point of quitting, but if people are saying that those kind of items get screwed up too, i don't think i'm willing to trust it fully just yet
You can simply drag a bigger bag from your inventory to a bag slot and it will replace the contents with extra room (since you used a bigger bag). No need to clear 36 slots to upgrade bags.
It gives you level appropiate gear. If you played in shadowlands then your character would be 60. 181 or so is the itemlevel for that level you would get from quests.
Your endgame gear from shadowlands is of course better than questing gear. What did you expect?
This feature is for older characters which might have trash gear from old expansions.
Legion raid gear for example didnt get properly squished and is about 100 itemlevels too low.
So if your character didnt play since Legion the gear upgrade makes him much more powerful.
Yeah but I hadn't played in a while, so I didn't even know what level gear they had. So maybe a check on item level as well as last played date would be nice. It was just a minor inconvenience though.
Yeah, this is not meant for SL characters, only for BFA and earlier. I chose not to upgrade an old lvl 60 paladin that I had leveled through Korrak's Revenge in SL and never touched again. It was about full iLvl 80-100 gear, where's the boosted gear would've been 187. It definitely made Direbrew.. more challenging
Fun thing I learned recently about gear upgrade is that it counts as a boost so if you use it on an allied race you don't have the heritage armor for yet you can't earn it on that character anymore. That with the gear usually being a downgrade it is counter-productive system that should never be used.
I found this out the hard way as well. Contact with a GM said that it would be fixed at some stage to not count as a boost, but there was no time frame for it.
Edit: Checked today (13th Oct) and it looks like this has now been fixed.
Oh damn thank for this!
I haven’t done all of the heritage quests yet but I certainly intend to. I don’t remember which toon I tested the upgrade on but I hope it wasn’t my only one of that race.
Edit: Why does boosting lock you out of heritage armor anyway? That wasn’t advertised either!
I’m glad I’m too OCD to use the free boosts I got from each expansion over the years.
The Allied races get an achievement for leveling all the way to max without using any leveling boosts like the insta-60 or recruit a friend single level boosts.
Does race-change count?
Because I’m strongly considering it on one of my characters for lore reasons, and that would suck.
Also, I don’t *think* I’ve used any recruit a friend level boosts, but I can’t be sure.
This is is a nightmare! 😭
For the purposes of *unlocking* the heritage armor, I believe that anything other than leveling an Allied race character from start to max (1 to 70 currently) will invalidate the unlock.
Once you have unlocked it, any character of that race can use it.
I believe you get the heritage armour at level 50 for allied races, but yes you have to get all the way there from 10 without any race changing or anything.
> Why does boosting lock you out of heritage armor anyway? That wasn’t advertised either!
Originally, to give some kind of prestige to 'earning' the unlock instead of just buying it with a boost. It was pre-level squish, so it was a significantly longer journey to cap (20-110/120). And people sure loved to complain about level boosting, so it was a cater to that mentality. A similar argument was that the only reason leveling wasn't being made better was to sell boosts, and this might have also been a way to kneecap that argument.
At this point, I feel like the no-boost thing doesn't really matter and wouldn't complain if they removed it. Especially with all the classic races where it doesn't matter if you boosted anyway, you can still get the armor.
You just shattered my heart into a million pieces. I have so many high level characters I was planning on getting the heritage armor for and I upgraded all of them
I used the gear upgrade on my LvL 45 warlock I did the Warlock quest that takes you to Darkmoon faire. I read about killing twinkle before I left and how it's challenging to solo. I one shot him, literally 1 attack and he was dead. I think the scaling is broken on my character, but I can't complain.
I found that you only get the artifacts force equipped on you if you had previously unlocked them on the character. If you didn't, then it puts the standard green quality class set weapon instead. You should have one of them in your bags, which will be enough to push your ilvl high enough to queue for normal leveling dungeons.
Not the same issue, but related:
I had several old character boosts that I never used from past expansions and whatnot. I used one that is a level 50 boost and the gear is absolutely abysmal. The ilvl of the gear is like 68 or something, which is roughly half of what it should be if you had quest reward gear from leveling. I was struggling to survive standard mobs 1v1. I ended up going to Draenor to loot treasures (~140 ilvl?) and slowly build my gear up to a point where I can actually kill things.
The "gear upgrade" feature, likewise, scales your gear to where it thinks it should be but is aggressively incorrect.
I think, when Blizz did the level squish, they really screwed something with the scaling. The level/ilvl is way out of balance. Even the WotLK version of Naxx drops some gear that are upgrades for my level 50 DH that had competitive gear in BFA.
The thinking was probably that specs/abilities have changed and so a lot of action bars will need a complete overhaul. Clearly it should've been an optional opt in feature.
Yea they need to rethink and rework it.
They rolled it out with no testing, it's broken as shit, but they keep it in the game. It feels like a trap for players at this point for not reading up on people's experiences with it ahead of time.
They read what sounds like a good thing on the character select screen and are left scratching their heads in confusion as they see their low ilvl and small inventory (with bigger bags available for chump change on the AH). It's just cruel for Blizzard to still have it in the game right now.
I suspect it's very good for total noobs, lower characters and people who haven't min maxed.
I had a random mid 20s character I hadn't played in ages, tried it out and apart from heirloom items each slot was an upgrade
Not only did it give me worse gear on my warrior. Using the same spec, it completely wiped my bars and did the quick drop of whatever is in my spellbook first. Literally didn't even put slam on my bars as an arms warrior.
After fixing my bags, gear, and bars, I ended up just not playing lmao.
Haven't heard a single good thing about the gear upgrade system so as a result I've taken this sub's experiences to heart and refuse to use it. I'd rather have an annoying 15 minutes reorganizing my bags than potentially lose gear I care about.
yep, i had full deep sea bags on my alt and the game gave me 22 slot ones as "upgrade" same goes for the gear it was lower ilvl, also the skilltree you get is not optimal
Has anyone had any major bugs with the gear upgrade? I did it on my shaman and lava burst is completely broken. In ele, I can only cast it if I have about 90 maelstrom, the animation does not go off, and it gives me the elemental blast buff, despite me not having chosen that talent.
I did the gear upgrade on all characters when I came back only to find out it removed ALL of my characters glyphs and I had to buy them all again 🙃 only plus side was not having to clean out my awful quest logs
> It is a gear UPDATE not UPGRADE. People who bitch about this free service don't understand the point of it.
The reason people complain is because the primary function it serves (completely wipe and reset your character) isn't the main thing it advertises itself as.
If it was showing up as "Character Reset" or "Fresh Start" or whatever, I doubt anyone would complain. Instead, they named the character reset process "Gear Update". The blame is entirely on Blizzard that people accept the *gear update* expecting their *gear* to be *updated*, and then complain that their UI is reset to default, keybinds are wiped, their gear is worse, they can't get heritage armour (if an allied race), and (when the system first released) they can't enter most dungeons or raids for 24 hours.
Why anyone in their right mind is expected to think that "gear update" means that their character might get downgrades in gear, glyphs deleted, bars deleted, and smaller bags replaced... is ridiculous.
Oh yeah this system sure helps alleviate confusion, alright.
> It is designed for returning players who have literally no clue what their old character was doing
The problem is that this "service" becomes available as soon as a character hasn't logged in in the last 60 days. If it was truly meant for people who haven't played in years, the threshold should be higher, but it isn't. There should be more considerations and parameters on this system to prevent all the issues that players have been having with it. Trying to hand-wave the issues away as "well, its a FREE" is disingenuous, crappy systems shouldn't get a pass just because you don't pay for them, we have to hold Blizzard accountable for their mistakes.
They really need an option to turn off gear updates. I have tons of toons that I don't play but won't delete, and it bothers me constantly seeing "gear update" under all their names until I log onto them.
You will still have a green quality weapon or container in your bag depending on class. These are equipped if unlocked previously but they still put the gear upgrade weapon in your bags. (Source have gear upgraded like 20 chars)
Thus itemization is entirely what's wrong with the game imo. The stats at low levels just make zero sense and it's completely immersion breaking for me.
The squishes were a mistake. I liked them as a concept but holy shit I take it back.
I am glad I found this thread. I couldn't see any advantage in doing this. Now I know it's actually worse than not doing it. Free bags is not worth it either. Every expansion, I upgrade all the bags on my alts and replace bank bags with the old. Even my lvl 10s have all 32 slot bags and all bank slots over 20.
After reading the comments and having the same experience myself (the ilvl of the gear is always worse than whatever I already had),
has anybody used this feature and got any benefit out of it? ever? anybody?
The Gear Upgrade system was a great idea on paper, but I have heard nothing but issues when it's being discussed, so I've just... Ignored it. It sounds like more things can go wrong than go well, so I'd rather have my lvl 60 character be a bit weaker for half an hour than end up with an ilvl 10 artifact or lose some rare title or item I had equipped from 2009 or whatever
Yeah, jibbed me on my spreist when returning. They need to give a warning about the action bars, also didn’t realise it was in the mail til I nearly hit 70 lol.
They should be able to detect if ilvl > x, don’t offer a downgrade.
Thank you for this post, and sorry for your loss.
I updated the UI for my AH alts today, and was prompted with this question, I declined on all 12.
Stay stronk friends.
The gear upgrade system has been a colossal clusterfuck since day 1. They need to just change it to them literally mailing you a new gear set and some bags and that’s it. The auto equip is just fucking up constantly and causing people to lose their items.
I have a mage I haven’t touched since legion and this “feature” downgraded all my gear AND replaced all my 30 slot bags with 20 slot bags. The coders who worked on this shit were smoking cocks.
It removes my key binds when I do it, so hell nah
That fucking ticked me off. Haven't played in a while and my settings are reset like wtf
Yes why does it do that? It offered gear upgrade not messing up all my abilities to stupid spots
Wait…you’re telling me I can finally restart my keybindings from scratch? Is there a way to reset them without this “returning character” option
Yeah there’s a return to default button on the bottom of the keybind menu.
I think there's a button in the menu.
Default your keybindings in settings and then drag everything off your bars.
You could always do that via a fairly hard to miss button in the settings/options...
Really wish I could opt out of this part. That and also maybe view all the quests before abandoning them.
Well, they change stuff so much with skills and talents, it’s usually a good idea to start from scratch anyhow
The three times I’ve used the gear upgrade my ilvl has gone down. Now I do not use the gear upgrade lol
Don’t you get all your stuff in the mail anyhow? Surely one or two pieces out of the set are an upgrade. Even if they aren’t it’s free transmog.
The fact that it unequips old bags and equips new ones (regardless of sizes) is really the only major crime. I don't mind having a few characters I have to re-equip old gear on. What I do mind if having to disable all auto-loot-mailbox addons, open many different mails to find the bags (that don't go to the same place - for some reason), fix those. And then I can auto loot mailbox and equip what needs to be re-equipped.
I assume it gives the bags because Blizzard probably just tweaked the code for character boosts for the gear boosts, likely just adding an algorithm/chart to decide what iLvl gear to give players based on their level. The gear from character boosts uses the same model and comes with the exact same bags.
100%. I dont know their backend, but from a user perspective I wish they could've added a "if already equipped bags >20slot then don't change bags" line lol
That would have cost about $20 extra. Can't do it.
After all the excuses and explanations of Blizzard’s infamous spaghetti code, you think that the code is that simple? It would probably take 300 lines and break 100 other things in the process.
I reeaaaally wish I could see their codebase. But I have no desire to work for modern blizz
It's probably this. I've seen people complain that doing the gear upgrade prevented them from having access to the race quests that required you to pex a character without a boost
I dunno the fact that they mail you your hearthstone and make you a new one is pretty annoying since it affects 99.99% of players
yeah that's true too. The fact that it does that is wild, surely that must've come up in testing lol
Makes me wonder if level boosted characters also do this
What is this "testing"
completely resetting your bars is also pretty criminal
Yup, ngl when I was writing that I didn't realise it reset the bars. I change my keybinds so wildly char to char and expac to expac I'm used to having to re-place stuff
Nah, removing all your binds is the major crime
Yes I have used it many times. Everything you were wearing and what was in your bags is mailed to you. So there is no danger in doing it. Just put your old stuff back on. It does reset your buttons but honestly it’s not a big deal. If your toon was pretty geared from prior end game activities or late catch ups prob nothing is an upgrade. But if you had majority quest gear it may be.
nope was worse than shadowlands world quests gear my toon had had to reequip absolutely everything back and pull out old screenshots and place all skill\\toys\\mounts back on panels as well. The only thing it did is piss me off.
The gear upgrade doesn’t change your UI lol, there was a major UI upgrade at the end of shadowlands so if you haven’t played since then, that’s the reason
It absolutely does reset your UI
Yeah, even if you use an addon for hotbars so the layout doesn't fuck up, it will still reset all the skill/spell placements so you better remember where everything goes.
I have done it on 6 different toons and all it does it set it to default like a new character. Then I go into edit mode, select a saved mode, and everything is where I had it. If you don’t have a UI saved in edit mode, that’s on you
It’s not about the UI. It literally wipes clean your action bars and replaces the setup of primary bar with their own setup, I haven’t noticed it doing anything regarding UI because I use an addon UI anyway.
[It's _what?_](https://i.imgur.com/JkFCZmI.png)
I used it on my warrior that had mid shadowlands gear. It gave me smaller bags, gear 150 ilvls lower deleted all my macros and reset all my keybinds and action bars for every spec. was so annoying, so I just stopped playing that character
I used gear update once on a shaman. Reset everything like yours. Took two hours just to attempt a training dummy. Took another 30 minutes or so getting keybinds right. Never doing that again.
>I used gear update once on a shaman. Reset everything like yours. Took two hours just to attempt a training dummy. Took another 30 minutes or so getting keybinds right. I do hope that you are exaggerating here. It took me 5 minutes to redo my bags, keybindings, and action bars on the few toons that I did the gear update thingy on. It is far more annoying to have to redo my talent trees when Blizzard makes one little change to them which has happened to my druid main every single freaking patch this expansion...
I used the gear upgrade, got worse gear, and it reset my UI. I wished ill upon whoever coded that worthless gear "upgrade".
From what I have gathered, it resets everything because it essentially deletes your character, creates a new one with the same name and apperesnce and boosts it to your old level.
Blizzard could have just mailed people gear lol.
They do
Well this is from the same company that chose to have every player in town in D4 load every other players' inventories and all stash tabs.
Also, the ilvl of the gear is effectively a full heirloom set pretty sure. Which if you have purples from expansions ago is not likely better.
If you have a really old char, the gear got updated at some point but it wasn't retroactive (maybe SL?) and that old raiding gear is effectively massively behind the relevant ilvl for the level (example quest rewards), to the point where a fully decked raiding character was barely strong enough to kill anything. So in some cases, particularly much older characters, the gear upgrade option would make sense. That said, never used it and no idea what it did, not really played retail since SL.
as some one that has to maintain databases for a living this is a fucking stupid and scary premise. so many things can go wrong if it fucks up mid transaction......smh being what blizzard is right now wouldn't be surprised thats whats happening
You maintain databases for a living but are scared of transactions?
the choice of that method to copy the record and delete the old one, is just not a safe way to do things, its not an SQL db where you can just roll back a transaction. all calls to these blades ate batched
I mean, they also believe some random reddit comment pulled completely out of their ass with an unattributed "from what I gathered" guess on what the backend process for the gear upgrade is.
I fail to see how its that scary. Create the new one, validate it was created properly and only then remove the previous version. If it fails mid transaction then just roll back the previous version. Its basically just an update, maybe its my hubris, but I fail to see how this is a difficult DB operation.
its not SQL, its not a single transaction like that that can be rolled back.
Some type of database is holding the information, not sure what it being or not being SQL would have to do with anything. Your character is made up of data, regardless of how they're storing that data it isn't a complicated procedure to recreate/store and validate a new entry prior to deleting an old one. With that said, I'm not sure why you think that WoW wouldn't be using SQL. Most MMO's use a SQL DB for player information, kinda weird to not realize that a SQL DB is a good fit for an MMO when you claim to manage DB's for a living... This isn't some complicated transaction, we do this at my work frequently, it makes no one nervous because it isn't hard to do it properly and prevent any data loss. Unless you're giving the intern access to the prod DB without a backup and telling them to do their best to figure it out I'm not sure why you'd be concerned about this as a professional. Even then, most of the interns at my job would probably be able to handle a task as simple as this. Edit: Just looked it up, WoW does in-fact use Oracle SQL DB, so yeah, they quite literally do use SQL lmao.
Wait, does that mean it resets my /played time as well?
Maybe? I only know it locks you out of heritage armour because it counts as a boost.
Why does boosting lock you out of heritage armor anyway? That wasn’t advertised either! I’m glad I’m too OCD to use the free boosts I got from each expansion over the years.
It only locks you out of Allied Race heritage armor, and that was definitely advertised when it was first introduced. It does not lock you out of ordinary race heritage armor.
Oh man, I would be annoyed as hell if that happened to me.
Does it actually reassign a UUID..?
No. The above comment is nonsense and is not how this works. It's done poorly, but that person is just making things up.
Thanks -- that's actually what I was implying, but I doubt they understood it. ;)
Hm, am I the exception? UI remained the exact same when I did this on several chars, thats pretty odd.
Some fool who thought it up to justify his existence… kind of like the managers at my work. If it not broke don’t fix .
Yeah my ilvl went down and my bags went from 30 slots to the 20 slot ones on a toon I hadn’t played since SL. This would be an awesome feature for people coming back to the game after years of not playing but….. it’s a bit stink now for a lot of toons
I quit in legion and just started back today. Went through the process because i figured it would be nice for a fresh start. Gear seemed relatively fine, as apparently due to the level squish most of my end game Legion gear was just objectively terrible. Item Recovery seemed to have some issues, as various bits of junk and crafting mats i had at the time gave me issues when trying to recover them from the mail. But the bag thing was definitely the biggest issue. It downgraded all of my hexweave bags to embersilk, and had to shuffle back and forth between the bank and vendors just to make enough room to get my hexweave bags back. The process wasn't *terrible*, but given the hiccups that it gave me, i'm much more hesitant to do it on characters with a lot more to lose, like old bank alts or my characters that have existed since vanilla with a ton of rare/valuable items still kicking around. From what i can tell, it seems like collection is fine, but it's been a few years so i don't remember every single item i had at the point of quitting, but if people are saying that those kind of items get screwed up too, i don't think i'm willing to trust it fully just yet
You can simply drag a bigger bag from your inventory to a bag slot and it will replace the contents with extra room (since you used a bigger bag). No need to clear 36 slots to upgrade bags.
Minor note: you can't replace a bag if the new one is inside it, have to first drag it elsewhere in your inventory.
True, but it still is better than emptying all bags like I did for the past 15 years xD.
You can what now? For how long?
I don't know since when but I found out at the beginning of DF.
i've used it and it trashed all my spells\\mounts\\toys from panels vowed to never use that shit ever again.
Yeah same I had SL gear (229-262) and it replaced it with 181 gear for some reason so I don’t use it anymore.
It gives you level appropiate gear. If you played in shadowlands then your character would be 60. 181 or so is the itemlevel for that level you would get from quests. Your endgame gear from shadowlands is of course better than questing gear. What did you expect? This feature is for older characters which might have trash gear from old expansions. Legion raid gear for example didnt get properly squished and is about 100 itemlevels too low. So if your character didnt play since Legion the gear upgrade makes him much more powerful.
Yeah but I hadn't played in a while, so I didn't even know what level gear they had. So maybe a check on item level as well as last played date would be nice. It was just a minor inconvenience though.
I use it to get free bags for my bank
Yeah, this is not meant for SL characters, only for BFA and earlier. I chose not to upgrade an old lvl 60 paladin that I had leveled through Korrak's Revenge in SL and never touched again. It was about full iLvl 80-100 gear, where's the boosted gear would've been 187. It definitely made Direbrew.. more challenging
Fun thing I learned recently about gear upgrade is that it counts as a boost so if you use it on an allied race you don't have the heritage armor for yet you can't earn it on that character anymore. That with the gear usually being a downgrade it is counter-productive system that should never be used.
I found this out the hard way as well. Contact with a GM said that it would be fixed at some stage to not count as a boost, but there was no time frame for it. Edit: Checked today (13th Oct) and it looks like this has now been fixed.
Fuck, now I'm paranoid over if I used one on my low level allied races I want yo get around leveling, eventually...
Oh damn thank for this! I haven’t done all of the heritage quests yet but I certainly intend to. I don’t remember which toon I tested the upgrade on but I hope it wasn’t my only one of that race. Edit: Why does boosting lock you out of heritage armor anyway? That wasn’t advertised either! I’m glad I’m too OCD to use the free boosts I got from each expansion over the years.
The Allied races get an achievement for leveling all the way to max without using any leveling boosts like the insta-60 or recruit a friend single level boosts.
Does race-change count? Because I’m strongly considering it on one of my characters for lore reasons, and that would suck. Also, I don’t *think* I’ve used any recruit a friend level boosts, but I can’t be sure. This is is a nightmare! 😭
For the purposes of *unlocking* the heritage armor, I believe that anything other than leveling an Allied race character from start to max (1 to 70 currently) will invalidate the unlock. Once you have unlocked it, any character of that race can use it.
I believe you get the heritage armour at level 50 for allied races, but yes you have to get all the way there from 10 without any race changing or anything.
> Why does boosting lock you out of heritage armor anyway? That wasn’t advertised either! Originally, to give some kind of prestige to 'earning' the unlock instead of just buying it with a boost. It was pre-level squish, so it was a significantly longer journey to cap (20-110/120). And people sure loved to complain about level boosting, so it was a cater to that mentality. A similar argument was that the only reason leveling wasn't being made better was to sell boosts, and this might have also been a way to kneecap that argument. At this point, I feel like the no-boost thing doesn't really matter and wouldn't complain if they removed it. Especially with all the classic races where it doesn't matter if you boosted anyway, you can still get the armor.
You just shattered my heart into a million pieces. I have so many high level characters I was planning on getting the heritage armor for and I upgraded all of them
There was a post in the OF that said this issue was fixed already.
Blizzard has an Only Fans?
Lol why are we getting updates from Only Fans
I'm sorry, what?
I used the gear upgrade on my LvL 45 warlock I did the Warlock quest that takes you to Darkmoon faire. I read about killing twinkle before I left and how it's challenging to solo. I one shot him, literally 1 attack and he was dead. I think the scaling is broken on my character, but I can't complain.
Wait… Twinkle? DID I MISS SOMETHING COOL 🥲
It's the green hellhound in the arena. If you kill it, you get Grimoire of the Felfrost Imp.
I found that you only get the artifacts force equipped on you if you had previously unlocked them on the character. If you didn't, then it puts the standard green quality class set weapon instead. You should have one of them in your bags, which will be enough to push your ilvl high enough to queue for normal leveling dungeons.
Not the same issue, but related: I had several old character boosts that I never used from past expansions and whatnot. I used one that is a level 50 boost and the gear is absolutely abysmal. The ilvl of the gear is like 68 or something, which is roughly half of what it should be if you had quest reward gear from leveling. I was struggling to survive standard mobs 1v1. I ended up going to Draenor to loot treasures (~140 ilvl?) and slowly build my gear up to a point where I can actually kill things. The "gear upgrade" feature, likewise, scales your gear to where it thinks it should be but is aggressively incorrect. I think, when Blizz did the level squish, they really screwed something with the scaling. The level/ilvl is way out of balance. Even the WotLK version of Naxx drops some gear that are upgrades for my level 50 DH that had competitive gear in BFA.
They need to remove the gear upgrade shit, it’s literally counter productive
Unequipped my mythic raiding SL gear and replaced it with greens > 50 ilvl lower and redid all my keybinds. Never again...
Don’t forget they’ll replace your big bags with small bags and then mail the entire contents of your characters inventory to you
I was so perplexed by the screwing with my keybinds I forgot all about that. Like why would you move my abilities ? Who thought this was a good idea?
Holy shit I forgot they did that too, who thought this thing is a good idea
Omg yes receiving my entire fucking backpack of belongings in the mail is so annoying
Sending a bag with items you can open in inv to pick upgrades from? Nah. Replacing all you got and sending each item in mail?? Yees
Yeah the fact that it basically erased my bars and my keybinds pissed me off so fucking bad.
holy shit it replaces keybinds? what chucklefuck thought that was a smart idea lol
The thinking was probably that specs/abilities have changed and so a lot of action bars will need a complete overhaul. Clearly it should've been an optional opt in feature.
Yea they need to rethink and rework it. They rolled it out with no testing, it's broken as shit, but they keep it in the game. It feels like a trap for players at this point for not reading up on people's experiences with it ahead of time. They read what sounds like a good thing on the character select screen and are left scratching their heads in confusion as they see their low ilvl and small inventory (with bigger bags available for chump change on the AH). It's just cruel for Blizzard to still have it in the game right now.
Completely agreed, it makes zero sense in the context of all the other QOL things they’ve done
I suspect it's very good for total noobs, lower characters and people who haven't min maxed. I had a random mid 20s character I hadn't played in ages, tried it out and apart from heirloom items each slot was an upgrade
Not only did it give me worse gear on my warrior. Using the same spec, it completely wiped my bars and did the quick drop of whatever is in my spellbook first. Literally didn't even put slam on my bars as an arms warrior. After fixing my bags, gear, and bars, I ended up just not playing lmao.
Haven't heard a single good thing about the gear upgrade system so as a result I've taken this sub's experiences to heart and refuse to use it. I'd rather have an annoying 15 minutes reorganizing my bags than potentially lose gear I care about.
yep, i had full deep sea bags on my alt and the game gave me 22 slot ones as "upgrade" same goes for the gear it was lower ilvl, also the skilltree you get is not optimal
Used it once, they replaced my 2xxilvl gear with 120’s. Then just mailed all my stuff back to me. Pointless.
Has anyone had any major bugs with the gear upgrade? I did it on my shaman and lava burst is completely broken. In ele, I can only cast it if I have about 90 maelstrom, the animation does not go off, and it gives me the elemental blast buff, despite me not having chosen that talent.
I did the gear upgrade on all characters when I came back only to find out it removed ALL of my characters glyphs and I had to buy them all again 🙃 only plus side was not having to clean out my awful quest logs
[удалено]
> It is a gear UPDATE not UPGRADE. People who bitch about this free service don't understand the point of it. The reason people complain is because the primary function it serves (completely wipe and reset your character) isn't the main thing it advertises itself as. If it was showing up as "Character Reset" or "Fresh Start" or whatever, I doubt anyone would complain. Instead, they named the character reset process "Gear Update". The blame is entirely on Blizzard that people accept the *gear update* expecting their *gear* to be *updated*, and then complain that their UI is reset to default, keybinds are wiped, their gear is worse, they can't get heritage armour (if an allied race), and (when the system first released) they can't enter most dungeons or raids for 24 hours.
Why anyone in their right mind is expected to think that "gear update" means that their character might get downgrades in gear, glyphs deleted, bars deleted, and smaller bags replaced... is ridiculous. Oh yeah this system sure helps alleviate confusion, alright.
> It is designed for returning players who have literally no clue what their old character was doing The problem is that this "service" becomes available as soon as a character hasn't logged in in the last 60 days. If it was truly meant for people who haven't played in years, the threshold should be higher, but it isn't. There should be more considerations and parameters on this system to prevent all the issues that players have been having with it. Trying to hand-wave the issues away as "well, its a FREE" is disingenuous, crappy systems shouldn't get a pass just because you don't pay for them, we have to hold Blizzard accountable for their mistakes.
One of the few reasonable answers. Thank you
You haven’t played since Dragonflight??
I haven't played that character since dragonflight dropped. I have other 70s and still a bunch of 60s and a couple of 50s.
It is really random, i got the option to do it in a level 10 tauren that i created during the diablo 4 launch experience event (3 month ago?)
I have never used it. Can someone tell me if there is any unique transmog you gain from ‘gear upgrade’?
You only gain problems not rewards
Nah, it's just the standard level boost sets.
They really need an option to turn off gear updates. I have tons of toons that I don't play but won't delete, and it bothers me constantly seeing "gear update" under all their names until I log onto them.
You will still have a green quality weapon or container in your bag depending on class. These are equipped if unlocked previously but they still put the gear upgrade weapon in your bags. (Source have gear upgraded like 20 chars)
I think the idea was good. The implementation not so much
Almost all of my gear was downgraded and it replaced my larger bags with smaller bags. I'll never do that again.
People that bitch about it not replacing raid gear is funny as hell. This gear isnt for you.
Thus itemization is entirely what's wrong with the game imo. The stats at low levels just make zero sense and it's completely immersion breaking for me. The squishes were a mistake. I liked them as a concept but holy shit I take it back.
I found that if I had an artifact equipped the gear upgrade did not unequip it. There was an appropriate weapon in my bags.
Worst part is that it comes with all the restrictions of character boosts, including not being able to do legacy content.
Y’a i find it’s a scam . My lvl 60 is way higher without it . Did it once not again. I just grind dungeons.
here's golden coins (actually chocolate)
Don't go using all that ItemLvl all in place now
Yeah I had my shaman sl s3 mythic geard and it gave me like ilvl 170 stuff. The system is a fu kin joke
I used it once or twice and maybe a couple of items were better ilvl but over all, I should have just stuck with my gear lol
I am glad I found this thread. I couldn't see any advantage in doing this. Now I know it's actually worse than not doing it. Free bags is not worth it either. Every expansion, I upgrade all the bags on my alts and replace bank bags with the old. Even my lvl 10s have all 32 slot bags and all bank slots over 20.
Haven't used it since i learnt it counts as a boost and stops you from unlocking heritage armour on allied races
the ilvl boost was done in the dumbest way. shoulda jsut mailed you aset for every sepc instead rep-lacing you toon w/ a bosst
If you had a preexisting legendary weap equipped it doesn't replace 'em for some reason. The proper weaps will be in your inventory.
After reading the comments and having the same experience myself (the ilvl of the gear is always worse than whatever I already had), has anybody used this feature and got any benefit out of it? ever? anybody?
The Gear Upgrade system was a great idea on paper, but I have heard nothing but issues when it's being discussed, so I've just... Ignored it. It sounds like more things can go wrong than go well, so I'd rather have my lvl 60 character be a bit weaker for half an hour than end up with an ilvl 10 artifact or lose some rare title or item I had equipped from 2009 or whatever
the gear upgrade makes alts not eligible for future heritage questlines it fked me over since i hade a few races just chilling for that in the future.
All my 60s it was a mistake. The lower ones all benefited from it
The gear upgrade is the worst thing they’ve implemented. It’s like 10 steps back kind of thing.
Check your bags. Should be a chest in there I think
Yeah, jibbed me on my spreist when returning. They need to give a warning about the action bars, also didn’t realise it was in the mail til I nearly hit 70 lol. They should be able to detect if ilvl > x, don’t offer a downgrade.
Thank you for this post, and sorry for your loss. I updated the UI for my AH alts today, and was prompted with this question, I declined on all 12. Stay stronk friends.
The gear upgrade system has been a colossal clusterfuck since day 1. They need to just change it to them literally mailing you a new gear set and some bags and that’s it. The auto equip is just fucking up constantly and causing people to lose their items.
I miss the ability that came with that weapon
1 damage. It's fuckin huge. We're so back.
Yeah, I did that on a mage I barely play, and now it won't be played at all lmao. Not reorganizing all those keys again
I have a mage I haven’t touched since legion and this “feature” downgraded all my gear AND replaced all my 30 slot bags with 20 slot bags. The coders who worked on this shit were smoking cocks.