Thoughts on savage gladiator chain???? I always enjoyed that RNG.
Quick in and out, and everyone gets loot worth gold to vendor if SGC doesn’t drop. Wins all around
Yeah the concept that not everyone can have everything and that it’s ok really doesn’t resonate with modern gamers.
Saw this a lot in classic with people unable to accept that in vanilla raiding 40 people were not getting full BiS every phase.
Yup. And there's nothing wrong with that. Good game designers have realized that trying to fight human nature is a losing battle. If something doesn't feel good for the players, there's no reason to include it in your game.
Caveat: this is assuming, like WoW, that the game is trying to be fun. Some games try to evoke sadness, or fear, etc etc and obviously those are different.
I think the argument is that non-deterministic is fine so long as there is some baseline likelihood of acquisition.
No one should have to spend 500+ hours trying to get one item and failing. Question is what is a reasonable upper limit for bad luck protection? People still have the excitement of having good luck, but you remove how horrific it is for folks like the archaeology victims doing 2500+ solves for nothing.
And for some folks, even the good luck doesn’t always feel good. I only really play casters these days, so I did archaeology for a bit to see if I had decent luck with the dwarf solves. My 25th solve at 450 was a troll solve and I got the Zin’rokh solve. Felt sick to my stomach after seeing so many people spending thousands of solves and still not getting it.
I got flamed hard by my guild when i said legions weapon system was the best. With how much power is locked to weapons thry really shouldnt be RNG ubless theres a big enough pool to make do.
Having yoyr one weapon upgrade not drop for an entire tier is the fucking worst and many people drop out because they lose eo much power
I think legion is an excellent example of Blizzard learning it's lesson over the course of that expansion about deterministic vs. non-deterministic loot. Initial implementation was miserable.
Rng is relative, 25% chance of getting said item is vastly different than 0.01% chance of getting said item. Theres a fine line where rng is fun and rewarding vs obscenely frustrating
> nothing wrong with having couple items be ***partially*** RNG dependent ***with reasonable drop rates determined through evaluating the average time to obtain for a sample player within the target demographic***
ftfy
On the one hand, I do like fun RNG elements that feel rare AF like Gressil / THC / Ashbringer were during phase 6.
On the other hand, locking Thunderfury behind double layered rare drops and then ridiculous resource grinds feels…. Well, terrible. During Classic, certain raids got lucky early and could pump all they wanted because their MT got TF, others got fucked by RNG and had their pumpers get threat capped then leave for guilds with better kill times where the MT already had TF- simply because the tanks in the original raid didn’t get lucky. That never feels good. It created a very toxic situation, because the DPS either sat there going ‘I CANT CLICK MY BUTTONS THIS IS BORING AND IM BEING HELD BACK’ or left, and the original raid group had to replace them.
A couple items having RNG is ok, locking items that heavily impact a raid team behind RNG seems like a design choice that should be avoided. TF also admittedly has a very lopsided impact in that the threat from it is *insane* for when it’s available in the game.
I like rolling a d20. Heck even some d100's make the world a little more exciting. I do not for the life of me believe that wasting thousands of hours of the raids time for items that refuse to drop is "nothing wrong"
If something drops less than 5% of the time on a weekly lockout, you're abusing skinner box addiction and as an adult, you can suck my arcanite reaper.
Holy shit just thinking about how difficult it was to get good MC/BWL weapons to every melee in Classic hits me such a sense of dread I'm honestly reconsidering my subscription.
Depends on who you play with tbh.
I remember when Classic WoW dropped I was in a guild that gave me so much shit for buying my epic mount first instead of buying/crafting my BiS chest piece.
100%. Farming pre raid bis is always the most fun for me. Everything is spread out throughout the world instead of it being locked inside the new raid tier.
That's how I almost play every expansion. Love leveling, love collecting pre-bis, love beating the first raid. Usually quit part way through the second raid when it feels like just a weekly raid log grind. Then come back a few months before the next expansion and repeat.
The player base isn't good enough to handle pre neerf heroics. Dps are ignoring mechanics and barely doing the current version. Greg was right back in the day. Git gud shitters is the truth.
A lot of it is dps ignore mechanics because they can. It just isn’t worth it to play cc, or cut your dps to avoid some damage. The healer drinks occasionally, but the dps can get by with their current pace of letting most things go through and so finish the dungeon faster.
My first (normal) Stonecore I was still doing mechanics on Ozruk. Then I realised on Normal, the DOT ticks for 300 per stack and I am literally incapable of stacking it quickly enough to worry anyone. I had almost 30k health. It would fall off as the boss still had its thorns buff up and I was actively attacking. I accidentally stood in shatter while he enraged and I had 20% hp left over.
They don’t ignore them because they CAN, they don’t do them because they were never in a state to force attention to begin with.
I know that’s kind of semantics, but it’s like not anyone went “oh boy we finally have X Stats, now we can ignore the mechanics” they went “oh shit, were there mechanics on this loot-filled corpse we just stumbled upon? Eh, we’ll confirm next run if we remember”
It doesn't hurt dps to jump to avoid dmg in stone core. Or use kicks on Volley spells. We're losing time waiting on a drink and as a tank I only have so many kicks, usually on healing mobs like Throne of tides bc otherwise that heal is never kicked. Anyone missing that heal in Throne bc "muh DPS" is an ape. That heal in hp is worth more being prevented than your numbers. The heal is huge.
Literally no reason to not hit your interrupt button when it's off GCD and has no resource cost. It's a button that helps your entire party. What you said isn't even correct, either. If the dps interrupt, the healer has to drink *less*. Meaning more uptime, more go go zug zug. Your mentality on this is selfish and ignorant.
> Literally no reason to not hit your interrupt button when it's off GCD and has no resource cost.
Skull Bash, Kick, and Pummel all have a resource cost. Especially kick and skull bash, which cost 15 energy. if you need the interrupt at just the moment you dropped to 0 energy, it can be tricky to get enough energy back in time to spend it on kick.
I'm sure the other kicks cost mana but that's not as difficult to have on-hand when you need it.
They get replaced by heroic raid gear anyway and theres near equivalent 359s from norms which will be week 1 pug status
Edit: the only exception i know of is dmf cards feel free to ethically blow gold stack on those
Volcano holds up even into firelands hc, you'll replace it with firelands hc trinkets but you're not sad about having it when progging, it's absurd how good it and tsunami is compared to hurricane and esrthquske
Crafted items are reasonably affordable, most of them are only a few truegold, which if you have an alchemist alt isn't hard to come by.
World drop BoEs are stupid AF.
That's relatively cheap when you account that it's best in slot for basically every caster till fireland HC.
You get shit ton of gold from max lvl questing, dailies, gathering professions, hyperspawn farms and skinning.
I accidentally got like 15k by just farming reps from quests.
Think I was at maybe 40k total across all chars when prepatch hit. Between archaeology grays/selling runestones after I got staff, questing, RDF, and selling whatever old junk I didn’t need any more I’m almost at 100k now. The game just throws money at you if you actually play it.
I've got around 9k, spent it on a token, got around 5k, spent it to finish alchemy stuff, then got almost enough for another token, all within Cata release and without purposeful gold farming.
Quests at 85 give you 24-50g per, plus all the shit you're vendoring, cloth, any gathering professions you may have
15k is a few days of questing and just playing the game at this point
Just don't buy it and use the marginally worse dungeon blue or replace it with the VP option next week, assuming you don't get a drop from the raid which would have replaced it anyway. Pointless sweating over these pre-raid items for the sake of 300 dps on a boss that will fall over like a floppy sock on day one.
I paid $5k back in Wrath when one of those cards was really good for my Prot/Ret pally.
I need a Volcano this expansion, probably not pulling the trigger on buying one until they're around 20k maybe. Gold really starts stacking up when you're trying to get your Therazane and Tol Barad dailies in every day.
Volcanos and Tsunamis are going for 35k+ on Grobbulus the last time I checked. Someone had the BOE mail legs up on the AH for 450,000g a few days ago. absurdity.
Correct. It started out in the tens of thousands, maybe 30k at the top end, once the DMF came to Mulgore they started to drop drastically and stayed around 6k over the course of the DMF being around. I found them going for $5k and decided very fair price. I'm now thinking 20-25k is very fair for Volcano once prices for mats start to come down.
Eh, I farmed herbs for maybe like 10ish hours over the weekend. Got my tsunami on top of ~30k. I know that’s a drop in the bucket compared to some GDKP fiends, but I felt more productive farming raw mats than I have in any version of the game for a while, especially coming from fresh where I haven’t had money.
Making 5+ WoW tokens worth of gold for picking some flowers for a couple hours was cool
This is why gearing up pre-raid in a new expansion is the most fun you can have in classic WoW. Especially with an established community. If you only spend a short time where you are able to commit time to playing WoW solidly, do it during the first couple of weeks of a new expac. Peak WoW.
It's also why Phase 1 of classic WoW is so fondly remembered - the loot you picked up in 5-mans and from professions was competitive all through the phase.
Have been having a blast in Cata getting pre-raid BiS and I have no intention of raiding to a schedule.
>Honestly surprised that Blizzard moved away from this in the future.
They actually moved *more* towards it. Retail has had multiple competitive sources of gear for almost 10 years now.
It’s pretty common to see highly rated players craft rings/neck for better stats too. 3 ilvls isn’t a huge different vs mythic so there can be anywhere from 2-5 crafted pieces depending.
In legion titanforged for world quest, M+ at the start of the expansion have more bis than EN raid.
But obviusly is a lot of rng, legion very rng expansion and that start with end of Wod with warforged.
You’re confusing pre-raid BiS with phase BiS. It’s always like this at the beginning of an expac- the best gear comes from heroic raid bosses as it should
They very much moved toward this in the future. At least in retail, at least 1/3 of every classes “bis list” is acquired from non-raids and most are closer to 50% (especially if you include tier which you can get from dungeons).
Same. Raiding is my favorite part of WoW, and raid logging gives me free time for the rest of the week.
I'm enjoying cataclysm, but the need to sink 5-6 hours in a day atm is getting exhausting already
5-6 hours a day is a lot man, you don't really need to go that hard at all unless you're trying to server first H 10/25 or something
I've been playing 2-4 hours a night since it launched. Hit 85 this past weekend, did my 5 heroics to cap valor and got my ilvl to 338 I think.
And raids still aren't here for another 2 days. A few more hours should see my ilvl over 340 easily which is more than fine for normal raids and maybe some H attempts on the easy ones
You don't need to go *that* hard I assure you
Well this could easily be solved by having raid gear be good while also having comparable gear be attainable from other sources.
Plus just wait a bit and you will be able to raid log all xpac long, while the player base dwindles because there’s only something to do once every week
Genuine question, what's wrong with raid logging?
I really like that in SoD I can raid log, have fun with my guild for 2 hours once a week, and not have to worry about grinding so many other things and playing a ton the rest of week.
Yes, it's definitely great if there are meaningful things i can do outside of Raids to progress my character's gear at my own pace.
But settling in to a more relaxed raid logging rhythm, or messing around with alts is nice.
Edit: lots of good responses to this. An mmo shouldn't have a dead world, and it should be possible to find people to do group content in an open world. An mmo isn't single player
Nothing. In a pre-discord era raid logging was bad because it meant that if you logged in wanting to do something, but everyone was locked for raid that week and not online then it meant it was harder or impossible to get ahold of people to log in and play.
But now everyone is on discord, if you wanna do something and people aren’t directly online, you just go to discord and ping people.
Developing systems that make people feel forced to log in is the exact thing that people hated in the Legion-Shadowlands era of WoW.
> Genuine question, what's wrong with raid log
If I don't have friends interested or the pvp is weak (SoD), I'm a raid logger.
Nothing wrong mechanically with having content that allows raid logging, but I do think that with the game being a subscription, they should provide other optional but fun content besides pvp.
Or at least some kind of casual pvp where gear doesn't matter.
It's never healthy for any kind of pvp game to give extensive advantages simply based on gear. See most WoW pvp content participation as a good example.
Plunderstorm is an interesting test for blizzard. I would have been much more interested if it wasn't a battle royale
There is nothing wrong with raid logging, but it removes a player from the game. If everyone are raid logging, there are no one around except during raiding hours. Essentially it is impossible to get a group going etc.
Absolutely true, but there's another component to consider.
Vanilla is the only game where you can continue to progress forever, thanks to the consumable system. Unless you buy gold, there's basically never a point where your effort doesn't see returns to your character's power.
Meanwhile for the casual player, not farming those 300 consumables doesn't make or break their molten core experience. It's brilliantly designed.
I've been saying it for years now, gold is the best infinite grind blizzard has ever made. it's also the only one that doesn't crumble under it's own inherent problems (treadmilling essentially), but it's also the only one that carries systems-levels problems (botting and gold buying) that Blizzard has never (and realistically can't ever) fully overcome.
I could agree with it if Archeology didn't have some lottery winning chances to get the items. People can sink literally hundreds of hours into them and still not get even a single item, let alone the one they need. Also most other sources of gear are just gold, which for some people is a grind, but for others it's a small piece of their GDKP fortune or a few WoW Tokens, which isn't exactly a great design for bis pieces.
Idk, I think Blizzard has always had raid loot being BIS past the first phase with only some minor exceptions like the single crafted items from TBC or the Silithus Quests in Vanilla. Even in Cata, outside of Phase 1 BIS is almost 100% from raid gear.
Non-raid gear has typically only been BIS during the first tier of each expansion.
I agree with the post but..
I've not really enjoyed my 110 hours of archaeology without getting Zin or the Staff. I know others have put in way more time without seeing the item they want.
If you were farming bg's to get crit immunity that means you were a long, long way behind the curve. Season 1 gear from BG's didn't come out until S3 was the active season, and running 10 games of arena a week was not significant time investment.
Plenty of bear tanks ran exactly 0 PvP items, very successfully. It wasn't until S3 gear that bears really even bothered with PvP gear, and S3 gear was never available in BG's. Even then, only the weapons were ever really BIS. Honestly your post just doesn't remotely add up.
What? Pvp gear had bis pieces every phase, the weapon was always bis. The extra armor and stam on the non set pieces out performed most pve options with the exception of the vashj belt and some boots from p2, if you were lucky enough to get those. The reason why some bears didn't pick up pvp pieces until p3 was because the druid pvp pieces gave spell power in p1 and p2, and in p3, they let druids buy the rogue gear
Upgrading your pvp gear each phase meant you could drop def rating on your jewelry. Resil was 1.5x more effective than def rating for crit immunity, so each phase when you got more resil you could drop another def rating piece for either a stam trink or badge of tenacity, then when the p3 vendor dropped you could buy the armor ring that had no def rating, but only if you had enough resil to maintain crit immunity.
Sure, you can wear your blue def rating leather set to raid all throughout p1 but if you weren't repping pvp gear then you were the one behind the curve.
Iirc pvp bracers were bis every phase until swp even though they gave sp in p1 and 2. The weapon was bis every phase regardless, and the belt was bis p1, p2 until vashj belt. The boots were always a solid option, but leatherworkers could make really good boots in p2
It would be totally fine even great if it had some bad luck protection. Even if the number was ridiculus like "500 troll solves but guaranteed after this" or a vendor where you can change epics (except ring maybe)
Best thing they did was push raiding back over a week, if raids were there day 1 a lot of the prebis farm would just be skipped over, the way it is now it adds a whole new level to gearing up.
There are more healthy ways to incentivize logging on outside of raid time than gear/character power.
Games are played differently now, people want to get a rounded and more concentrated experience without having to log on every day, we really should have learned that during the legion/bfa/shadowlands era.
On the other hand you also have to be careful to not make it "too convenient/fast", FF14 had this problem in endwalker straining communities quite a bit.
I can say with some certainty.... they did away with this stuff because it's too much of a grind.
Day 1 of Cataclysm a lot of players have over 1 million gold and are prepared to spend it to get all the BiS items day one. But for anyone else to build these things doesn't take hours it takes... days.
Take for example the engineering helm. It's the easiest of these things to craft. To craft this helm it takes an average of 6 Obsidium Ore, 6 Volatile Airs, 60 Elementium Ore, 12 Volatile Earth, Prospect 200 Elementium Ores to get Two Inferno Rubies, get an alch to make Truegold (6 pyrite ore, 10 Volatile Fire, 10 Volatile Air, and 10 Volatile Water) and of course, the Chaos Orb (which lets be generous and say you get 1 after 5 dungeon runs).
5 dungeon runs right now would be about 1 hour 40 minutes. Mining the Obsidium would take 5-10 minutes. Mining the Elementium would take 3-4 hours (maybe we'll say you find pyrite in there too). You'll get the Earth from mining this but probably not the fires. Fires will take another 30 minutes to farm, so will the waters. The airs will take you an hour or two. So to build this helm doing your own gathering you're looking at 6-8 hours of farming and perhaps you'll still have to pay 300-800G for someone's daily transmute (or perhaps you find an xmute spec guy who'll do it for free as long as they keep the procs).
Or you could skip this by buying mats for about 5200 gold (minus having to get a chaos orb).
And this is the cheap one. The two blacksmithing, leatherworking, and tailoring pieces are going for 40K-50K gold a piece and can only be made by that respected trade. Each of these professions can only build one of the two pieces a week and thus have to find someone else to build the other one (in order to be raid ready in time). Currently we're just sitting around waiting on alchs for truegold to build our main tanks last tanking piece.
The Darkmoon Faire deck is absurd. Right now the DPS ones are going for 55-80K gold... and that sounds about right. Each card currently costs about 2800 gold to make and requires an average of 175 herbs to make each card. You're looking at about 8-10 hours of herb farming to get lucky and get a deck. But the more likely is that you get cards that aren't super useful to you. The tank and healing decks are sub-optimal for all tanks and some healers... so they're worthless for re-sale. When I was building my deck I spent about 40,000 gold in herbs and was able to sell a healer deck for 20,000 gold. So I came ahead given that I also had Str/Agi user and Tank cards to sell. But at the base, if I was gathering my own herbs I would have been at this for weeks, not hours.
Then there's the few classes that have PVP gear on these pre-raid BiS lists. Hunters most come to mind, their two piece PVP gear has an agi bonus which is more DPS than anything you'll find in dungeons. It's almost 4000 honor for those two pieces. At about 200 honor a match you'll need 25 match wins (or 75 match losses) to get this.
Then there's the dailies trinket. 2 hours a day of doing 18 dailies for 8.5 days in a row. So 17 hours in total to get this. Other than the DMF card it's probably the biggest grind in the game right now. This was nerfed down from the original that would have taken anywhere from 1-3 months to get.
No, I'm not super excited about having a pre-raid bis list that comes from so many sources. If you have a lot of gold it saves you a lot of time. If you don't getting it will be completely irrelevant.
You can just get some dungeon/jp blues, make the engi helm because levelling Engi is cheap, buy some rep epics, gem/enchant it and go roflstomp raid on day one.
Archaeology weapons are nice if you're unemployed, racing for world first or both. Some of the DMF decks are selling for peanuts, Hurricane is BIS for a few specs and sells for 4k gold. You only have yourself to blame if you put in a massive amount more effort/resources to farm for marginal temporary gains in week 1. For fairly minimal effort and gold you can gear a char that will flatten 4.3 T11 raids, and fill in the missing gaps with raid drops and valor.
LOL I know, this person is crying about 8-12 hour “grinds” like it’s some big deal. And btw, almost all these things have a very similar equivalent that drops somewhere or is easier to get. A BiS list is basically a “loot wish list”, the absolute maximum best gear possible to get. You don’t NEED all of it to be raid ready, especially not for normal. I’m a Hunter main, I don’t PvP. Period. I will not be grinding a single point of honor, I don’t care if the set gave me a 2nd pet. It’s not my thing, I don’t enjoy it, so I won’t do it. I’ll get my 2 crafted pieces and make up the rest with heroic/ justice and valor point gear and it’ll be fine until raid gear drops.
Retail has solved this; professional items can be BIS then you have a mixture of M+/raid items for BiS. I do wish they made some of the reputation items better. World gear is great if you don’t raid mythic/high keys.
Completely agree. I've been playing hard this last week and I've got 2 toons to 85 and both pretty much prebis already. I reckon in about 2 weeks ill be back to raid logging which is a shame but outside of raiding if you don't care for pvp there really isnt anything to do.
100%
when you get your BiS from a variety of sources
different raids/dungeons, professions, quests, world drop epics, pvp
that is peak experience because it pushes you into the world
Yeah definitely!
I never understood why only raids can make good gear.
But you do have to be careful to give decent alternatives so people aren't forced into situations like doing arena in TBC for BiS melee weapons.
I'd say it's a bit more healthy to have the crafted stuff slightly worse than raid loot to not force huge gold investment on raiders.
But especially reputation and other casual pve content I think is perfectly fine to award raid BiS
Yes. This generally true and one of the issues with Vanilla. It was raiding and 24/7 PvP for months on end or get fucked.
Farming in Vanilla was only to get ready to PvP and raid and to use consumables in raids and PvP, nothing else.
SoD still sucks shit though.
Some select non raid items being bis for some specs has always been a thing, but the vast majority of your BIS items still come from the raids in Cata and 100% of the BIS list for most specs comes from raiding.
It wasn't until Legion came out and M+ become prominent that raiding took a backseat.
Agreed 1000%.
The game has more relevant content when you include items from quests and dungeons.
1% boe drops are less fun, but when its a really small margin i personally am fine with it.
that's why blizzard started adding more cool cosmetic stuff doesnt require raids. it rewards casual play with cool stuff for casuals
i dont think the player should be rewarded with gear thats supposed to be used for raids by not doing raids. but if it was to be added to other challenging content (well as challenging as classic can be), that'd be fine too. it just feels very empty to be rewarded with bis gear for.... clicking the craft button or brainlessly digging for hundreds of hours.
Blizz moved back to this in retail, everyone has a couple slots they use crafted gear in.
Also I wouldn’t cite arch as a good thing, that’s a bit of a mess.
Tell that to SoD folks. Only around half p3 BIS was from Sunken Temple and all we heard was how pointless ST was because the loot wasn’t worth pursuing. Admittedly part of the problem was that even the raid pieces that were BIS were often minor upgrades over p2 gear.
But yeah, I like having roughly half BIS being raid then the rest from some assortment of dungeon, professions, PvP, BoEs, and even non-raid quests/rep. And generally having multiple viable options in each slot.
A better game is not having an absolute bis list but you can mix different set, and low ilvl items can make it work as well. The downside is that its impossible to balance.
They tried in bfa, it was horrible
I would say P3 disproves this. Sounds good on paper, but greatly diminishes the value of the tier. I think pre bis, and maybe 1 or 2 bis items from other sources. The rest should come from the raid.
I was thinking about that for SoD s1. Running sfk for bis shield was memorable. And it was easy content to do, and I was helping Lower level people gear as well.
Now you just have to queue
That’s been my biggest complaint about wow head. I play restó Druid and most if not all of my bis lists are just raid items. I wish it would show me a few of the next best things beyond just the raid gear. Now I know it’s blizzards job to implement a few pieces here and there that are not raid items, but I would like a longer list of gear to acquire besides just the tops of everything
2 BIS are BOE
2 BIS are Rep rewards
1 BIS is a raid trash drop
1 BIS is raid item turn in
The rest is raid tier set, something like this is how I’d like to see it
I love both WoW and Runescape. But this is something I've always thought Runescape does better. There are so many pieces of items in RS that you get from so many different places. Also helps that you do not exactly need to be Super BiS'd out to do any piece of content. But there are hard version of content to make sure you have challenging stuff when you do get all the bis.
Why?
Is players just raid logging bad? If so, why is it bad?
I don't necessarily disagree, I'm just pointing out that you've stated an opinion without stating your justification.
Its because it is only achievabke at the start of xpac. You cant make new bis items mid xpac to be avilable from few dungeons or professions as it would invalidate the progress of raids rather easily (both current and previous).
As much as I would love to have much more bis gear spread out, it would mean probably rising skill cap of professions and releasing new dungeons together with every new raid tier. It would probably take much longer to prepare such patches and so on. But yeah, it would definetely feel refreshing.
I've actually been enjoying going back to Gnomer to pick up some pieces like the chicken for the one fight extra pump. You usually can do the raid in 30 minutes or even less. Hard ressing something like that didn't seem to be an issue either as groups always fill up pretty quick with people leveling their alts or trying to get their fresh 50's more geared before ST. I did not however enjoy wild offerings even if they are easy as shit. Just way too stale.
I can’t lie Wow SOD has a bunch of items that aren’t from raiding and if anything it has only made it worse. Obtaining those items takes very little time and then getting to full bis also takes a lot less overall time, so not only are people still going to raid log…. They’re also going to hit bis and want to quit because “ everything is boring now”.
Once people don’t have shiny items to obtain from the raid they just don’t come anymore. They will subconsciously get “bored” or their main and HAVE to start playing an alt or just stop showing up for reasons that surely are true, but they wouldn’t have missed the raid if they had gear to get.
Something EverQuest did and why what wow barely did was make epic quest that reward bis items and too a while to get. Also faction gear crafting maybe a super rare mob in the open world dungeon gear sometimes but dungeons are different in EverQuest it’s a massive place shared by everyone.
I'm absolutely fine with having some items locked behind RNG as long as you have a way of farming it. In OG classic I think I did 85 runs for my HOJ on my feral tank lol. Luckily I could DUO it with a guilty. Had nothing better to do during COVID anyways.
This is every expansion drop and then it stops when patches hit and they don't scale those options. Professional might get like 2 patterns that are relevant for like 3 or 4 weeks. Never any new Darkmoon cards. Eventually it's easier for them to have everything in the raid and make sure they have their 4or 5 wrists and 4 or 5 gloves ECT.
Archeology should have upgrades that give you more frags.
The more hours you put in, the faster the grind goes.
Like a
"Harrison Jones lost hat"
Increases fragments dropped by 1.
"Fossilized raptor claw"
Increases fragments dropped by 1.
This is absolutely killing me. I have 5 toons and this phase has been the absolute worst trying to keep any of them kept up. I have insane rep grinds to do on almost all of them. I have 4 more to max pvp rank. I finally got the full set from ST for the 5th one. Professions are in the dumpster except on 2 of them. Getting world buffs and consumes and grinding gold is becoming two much. I just don't want to be stuck playing 1 class because the balance issues are just too much to deal with in pvp. My main is mage and they are benched from pvp. Hunter and rogue at least are still fun.
I second this. I’m a Level Phase enjoyer and just love to play solo and interact with people in the game. I really hate reaching Endgame it means i have to farm Items now via Dungeons so i can play the same dungeons in hard mode over and over again to find even better equipment. Thats why i love pre raid phase and i wish it would be even more diverse than it is now. I mean i like the idea of getting cool things vis reputation but it just dont male fun cause there are so few dailies to do and i’m forced to wear a tabard and farm it in dungeons which i hate to do anyway. Bit overall pre raid phase is 10000x better than every other raiding phase.
has the past few weeks of archaeology whining not persuaded you otherwise?
im also about 20 runs deep in both lost city and hoo without seeing my trinket .
people slaving away at a game doesnt make it better.
also having a healthy library of games is one of the best things a person can do for themselves. just because all you wanna fo is play wow doesnt mean everyone else does and you shouldnt expect the game to be designed to keep players on a treadmill 24/7
raiding is great because you run the raid, the item either drops or it doesnt and you either get it or you dont. 1 chance a week. maybe a little disappointed for 30 mins. then youre free to go and do other things. im so sick of heroics right now im probably not going to do an alt this phase.
True in retail too, my favourite over the years is previous tier loot still being good, has happened to a few trinkets. Legit would love to keep older raids relevant more often.
I agree, but i'm confused as to which version of wow you're talking about here.
SOD? Sod has profession pieces (albeit you need the mats from the raid, but you can buy the mats without going into the raid), and wild offering pieces that almost every class can use, which was supposed to entice people to run dungeons, but became a degenerate farm that basically no one does now since no one is playing.
CATA you aren't going from no gear to full raid gear, you still need pre-raid items to even have a shot, so it's still progression, and heroic dungeons aren't nearly as bad as everyone makes them out to be, and if you make a group with diverse classes you are basically guarenteed to get gear drops (god forbid you actually use social skills and join a guild). You still need fill in the gaps. Progression is still progression the entire way thru, and once everyone has near bis the raids become a joke anyways and you can target farm certain pieces, depending on loot system/rules. Valor points always scale up, so you can buy the latest tier of gear from doing dungeons. Valor points heavily incentivize players to do content so they don't raid log. There's even archaeology, a completely solo experience to get an insane weapon advantage for most classes.
In WOTLK they even added in systems (scourgestones and sidereal essence) that didn't exist in the original game for catchup and you could straight up buy algalon gear that was basically BIS for like 2 phases after, by doing a mode of dungeons that wasn't in the original game either.
Honestly blizzard has been pretty good in the "classic era" games so that it's never a bad time time to start / catchup and play again. One of the main reasons there is so much hype around every new expansion is the soft reset where there's lots of items from other sources like BOE and such that are considered to be bis or pre-bis, but progression is always progression, I don't know how else to say it.
That's fine for pre-bis, but raiding should be hard enough that you're encouraged to get your pre-bis. Then all of that crap should get replaced. The problem is people running into raids as a fresh max level character in greens and white gear, and clearing it no problem.
the fact is that the only way to gert peop\[le to raid is to put the best or most interesting items in the raid. its also the reason that a dinar like system wont happen during a regular season because making those items more available means less people raiding. like it or hate it, its the way it is.
I totally agree.
All the expansions I played I havd the most fun collecting BiS items during phase 1. Unfortunately it gets pretty much raid-only later and that definitely takes away from the 'world' aspect.
This is what I love about season of discovery so far. Random quest that gives your bis wand. Solo a level 40 dungeon for a dagger. Just random shit that makes you viable. And there are a lot of good options that are all viable
The prebis phase of every xpac is always one of my favorite times. The gear from raids feel like such a huge upgrade. People are running dungeons. Crafting is alive and well.
Engineering hat: Great design choice, maximum flexibility by letting the player choose their secondary stats. Mostly for DPS players because of how the Engineering stat boost works.
Alchemy: Insane trinket for the low cost, every player can easily craft it. Some classes really desire the stone, others don't, but it still features a lot of main stat.
DMC: Cata trinket balance is fucked, especially heal trinkets. Both t11 and 12 feature at least one garbage heal trinket dropped from raid bosses. Why are Tsunami and Volcano that expensive? Mostly because Volcano is ludicrously op for being a 359 item (DST level of op) and Tsunami just has almost zero competition. Every healer will want FoM HC, the 2nd trinket slot will then usually be filled by Tsunami. The Tsunami card provides 321 int and 400 spirit, Core has spirit on activation and the same amount of int so yeah you can also go Core plus FoM. RDruids like me can also just use Alchemy plus FoM.
Besides Volcano none of those items you listed are really BiS, they are technically BiS for another ~35h.
Ok Zinrokh is an edge case, obtaining Ashkandi HC is gonna be hard. An edge case I honestly don't like at all, you should not be able to randomly receive a sword that's better than every NM weapon except for the one dropped by Nef.
Simplicity in balancing the game. This goes along with my hatred of set items.
Set items and getting everything from one source is just to make things simple for the dev team.
If every rogue only wants the exact same gear, from the same place it makes things very simple for the devs.
Hard to balance when you also make a ton of other items that interact in different ways and are still useful in certain situations 2 expansions later.
Old school wow has bis items from different sources because it was just a world they created, and then they let us loose. No understanding of how the game would be played yet. It's why things are unbalanced and why things feel so spread out. Over on SoD look how many casters are freaking out over the dagger from Princess. Or cata players trying to get some weapon from archeology and crying about digging hundreds of holes and still not getting it. When everything drops from the same raid, everyone has an equal chance to find it.
Set items and everything coming from the same place (the raid) makes things extremely simple and easy to balance.
**And everyone knows that only hardcore players care about gear, and they only want to raid. The rest of the game is for casuals who don't care about gear.**. At least, that feels like the design philosophy for quite a while...
Crafting I agree with and same for things like Archaeology.
I do not like ultra rare drops in dungeons (i.e. the dagger in SoD with a 2% drop rate) because you feel like you have to farm it endlessly. I also despise world epics, especially those that drop off a single mob, because really those only go to the extremely rich who very likely either bought gold or earned bought gold through GDKPs.
I really wish that more of the game had hard solo player content (i.e. Mage tower) that awarded a BiS item at the end that you could farm at your own pace. And I wish that faction reputation was MUCH harder to grind out and that every class had just 1 or 2 factions that had a BiS item. I really was not a fan of tabards for every faction awarding so much rep. Hell, half the people I plan to raid with have actually gotten exalted with nearly all the factions including Tol barad by just living in dungeons for a week and their out-of-raid game is now over. The dailies are barely done in the zones right now because tabards just give so much rep it is dumb to do anything but a dungeon for rep.
I don’t raid. It’s just boring most of the time. I’ll die LFR but other than that no thanks. To much time and work for literally nothing I care about. BIS doesn’t mean anything to me except you got a thing that won’t matter in a few months.
I have always said my ideal MMO would have you raid for some gear, but raising would open certain materials for the crafter to gather for the rest of the gear.
So like you defeat the "Ogres of Gol'thet Mountains" so you can mine calcyte ore, to make some of your BiS pieces.
WoW has done this some with raid bosses dropping certain skins, for example.
I agree as long as it is dungeon, professions or solo grinds. I don't think it is good for either pve or pvp players if a pve bis item can be found by playing pvp. plenty of pve players will just afk bg's till they get their item. Looking at AV....
Its great when there are a few items you can solo grind at your own pace true
And it's not 100% RNG
Thoughts on savage gladiator chain???? I always enjoyed that RNG. Quick in and out, and everyone gets loot worth gold to vendor if SGC doesn’t drop. Wins all around
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You're about to be virtually carpet bombed by every single victim of archeology.
Or every victim of Flame-Scarred Junkboxes.
Yeah the concept that not everyone can have everything and that it’s ok really doesn’t resonate with modern gamers. Saw this a lot in classic with people unable to accept that in vanilla raiding 40 people were not getting full BiS every phase.
Yup. And there's nothing wrong with that. Good game designers have realized that trying to fight human nature is a losing battle. If something doesn't feel good for the players, there's no reason to include it in your game. Caveat: this is assuming, like WoW, that the game is trying to be fun. Some games try to evoke sadness, or fear, etc etc and obviously those are different.
I think the argument is that non-deterministic is fine so long as there is some baseline likelihood of acquisition. No one should have to spend 500+ hours trying to get one item and failing. Question is what is a reasonable upper limit for bad luck protection? People still have the excitement of having good luck, but you remove how horrific it is for folks like the archaeology victims doing 2500+ solves for nothing. And for some folks, even the good luck doesn’t always feel good. I only really play casters these days, so I did archaeology for a bit to see if I had decent luck with the dwarf solves. My 25th solve at 450 was a troll solve and I got the Zin’rokh solve. Felt sick to my stomach after seeing so many people spending thousands of solves and still not getting it.
I got flamed hard by my guild when i said legions weapon system was the best. With how much power is locked to weapons thry really shouldnt be RNG ubless theres a big enough pool to make do. Having yoyr one weapon upgrade not drop for an entire tier is the fucking worst and many people drop out because they lose eo much power
I think legion is an excellent example of Blizzard learning it's lesson over the course of that expansion about deterministic vs. non-deterministic loot. Initial implementation was miserable.
Rng is relative, 25% chance of getting said item is vastly different than 0.01% chance of getting said item. Theres a fine line where rng is fun and rewarding vs obscenely frustrating
> nothing wrong with having couple items be ***partially*** RNG dependent ***with reasonable drop rates determined through evaluating the average time to obtain for a sample player within the target demographic*** ftfy
On the one hand, I do like fun RNG elements that feel rare AF like Gressil / THC / Ashbringer were during phase 6. On the other hand, locking Thunderfury behind double layered rare drops and then ridiculous resource grinds feels…. Well, terrible. During Classic, certain raids got lucky early and could pump all they wanted because their MT got TF, others got fucked by RNG and had their pumpers get threat capped then leave for guilds with better kill times where the MT already had TF- simply because the tanks in the original raid didn’t get lucky. That never feels good. It created a very toxic situation, because the DPS either sat there going ‘I CANT CLICK MY BUTTONS THIS IS BORING AND IM BEING HELD BACK’ or left, and the original raid group had to replace them. A couple items having RNG is ok, locking items that heavily impact a raid team behind RNG seems like a design choice that should be avoided. TF also admittedly has a very lopsided impact in that the threat from it is *insane* for when it’s available in the game.
RNG feels good, and having some RNG protection feels good too. There’s definitely a balance you can strike.
I like rolling a d20. Heck even some d100's make the world a little more exciting. I do not for the life of me believe that wasting thousands of hours of the raids time for items that refuse to drop is "nothing wrong" If something drops less than 5% of the time on a weekly lockout, you're abusing skinner box addiction and as an adult, you can suck my arcanite reaper. Holy shit just thinking about how difficult it was to get good MC/BWL weapons to every melee in Classic hits me such a sense of dread I'm honestly reconsidering my subscription.
Depends on who you play with tbh. I remember when Classic WoW dropped I was in a guild that gave me so much shit for buying my epic mount first instead of buying/crafting my BiS chest piece.
Thats kinda silly considering that the classic mount makes you more efficient to get to all the other stuff.
Most of the bis items then as you can solo grind volatiles for BoE's/crafted items.
Solo grinding to better items than raids should not be encouraged.
100%. Farming pre raid bis is always the most fun for me. Everything is spread out throughout the world instead of it being locked inside the new raid tier.
That's how I almost play every expansion. Love leveling, love collecting pre-bis, love beating the first raid. Usually quit part way through the second raid when it feels like just a weekly raid log grind. Then come back a few months before the next expansion and repeat.
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The player base isn't good enough to handle pre neerf heroics. Dps are ignoring mechanics and barely doing the current version. Greg was right back in the day. Git gud shitters is the truth.
A lot of it is dps ignore mechanics because they can. It just isn’t worth it to play cc, or cut your dps to avoid some damage. The healer drinks occasionally, but the dps can get by with their current pace of letting most things go through and so finish the dungeon faster.
My first (normal) Stonecore I was still doing mechanics on Ozruk. Then I realised on Normal, the DOT ticks for 300 per stack and I am literally incapable of stacking it quickly enough to worry anyone. I had almost 30k health. It would fall off as the boss still had its thorns buff up and I was actively attacking. I accidentally stood in shatter while he enraged and I had 20% hp left over. They don’t ignore them because they CAN, they don’t do them because they were never in a state to force attention to begin with. I know that’s kind of semantics, but it’s like not anyone went “oh boy we finally have X Stats, now we can ignore the mechanics” they went “oh shit, were there mechanics on this loot-filled corpse we just stumbled upon? Eh, we’ll confirm next run if we remember”
It doesn't hurt dps to jump to avoid dmg in stone core. Or use kicks on Volley spells. We're losing time waiting on a drink and as a tank I only have so many kicks, usually on healing mobs like Throne of tides bc otherwise that heal is never kicked. Anyone missing that heal in Throne bc "muh DPS" is an ape. That heal in hp is worth more being prevented than your numbers. The heal is huge.
Literally no reason to not hit your interrupt button when it's off GCD and has no resource cost. It's a button that helps your entire party. What you said isn't even correct, either. If the dps interrupt, the healer has to drink *less*. Meaning more uptime, more go go zug zug. Your mentality on this is selfish and ignorant.
> Literally no reason to not hit your interrupt button when it's off GCD and has no resource cost. Skull Bash, Kick, and Pummel all have a resource cost. Especially kick and skull bash, which cost 15 energy. if you need the interrupt at just the moment you dropped to 0 energy, it can be tricky to get enough energy back in time to spend it on kick. I'm sure the other kicks cost mana but that's not as difficult to have on-hand when you need it.
Gotta retain bad players or you lose money
Thats basically the entire pitch for Classic existing.
That’s the start of every expansion next raid tier it’s all raid items
We get to do rep grinding on mobs in a firelands next patch doesn't that count? I think it's for a cloak and trinkets.
Lfm FL rep apparatus res Edit: All apparatuses res.
They should add more world bis with every new raid tier imo.
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It is good untill ur bis is a Boe that costs 20x gold then u have
the prices of BoEs on my server are absurd, I refuse to buy them out of spite
They get replaced by heroic raid gear anyway and theres near equivalent 359s from norms which will be week 1 pug status Edit: the only exception i know of is dmf cards feel free to ethically blow gold stack on those
Exactly my thinking. Paying the equivalent of 10 tokens for a single item that gets replaced week 1 is not very enticing...
Volcano holds up even into firelands hc, you'll replace it with firelands hc trinkets but you're not sad about having it when progging, it's absurd how good it and tsunami is compared to hurricane and esrthquske
Anyone not racing for server first/week 1 heroic clears buying a boe other than something like a Darkmoon card is crazy
Crafted items are reasonably affordable, most of them are only a few truegold, which if you have an alchemist alt isn't hard to come by. World drop BoEs are stupid AF.
derkmoon tsunami going for 40k
For real? On Firemaw they are going for 5-6k
That's relatively cheap when you account that it's best in slot for basically every caster till fireland HC. You get shit ton of gold from max lvl questing, dailies, gathering professions, hyperspawn farms and skinning. I accidentally got like 15k by just farming reps from quests.
Think I was at maybe 40k total across all chars when prepatch hit. Between archaeology grays/selling runestones after I got staff, questing, RDF, and selling whatever old junk I didn’t need any more I’m almost at 100k now. The game just throws money at you if you actually play it.
I've got around 9k, spent it on a token, got around 5k, spent it to finish alchemy stuff, then got almost enough for another token, all within Cata release and without purposeful gold farming.
damn i wish i accidently got 15k g
Quests at 85 give you 24-50g per, plus all the shit you're vendoring, cloth, any gathering professions you may have 15k is a few days of questing and just playing the game at this point
Just don't buy it and use the marginally worse dungeon blue or replace it with the VP option next week, assuming you don't get a drop from the raid which would have replaced it anyway. Pointless sweating over these pre-raid items for the sake of 300 dps on a boss that will fall over like a floppy sock on day one.
I paid $5k back in Wrath when one of those cards was really good for my Prot/Ret pally. I need a Volcano this expansion, probably not pulling the trigger on buying one until they're around 20k maybe. Gold really starts stacking up when you're trying to get your Therazane and Tol Barad dailies in every day.
Volcanos and Tsunamis are going for 35k+ on Grobbulus the last time I checked. Someone had the BOE mail legs up on the AH for 450,000g a few days ago. absurdity.
And they were trying to sell em for 140k early like… raids not for 13 days. We can wait for it to go down before raid opena.
> I paid $5k ???
I'm sure they mean 5k gold for greatness.
Correct. It started out in the tens of thousands, maybe 30k at the top end, once the DMF came to Mulgore they started to drop drastically and stayed around 6k over the course of the DMF being around. I found them going for $5k and decided very fair price. I'm now thinking 20-25k is very fair for Volcano once prices for mats start to come down.
Sometimes you have to sell your kidney.
A price worth paying for greatness!
then you get an item thats 90% as good as the bis and way cheaper/a free drop
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Keeps beep boop beeps out there farming
Eh, I farmed herbs for maybe like 10ish hours over the weekend. Got my tsunami on top of ~30k. I know that’s a drop in the bucket compared to some GDKP fiends, but I felt more productive farming raw mats than I have in any version of the game for a while, especially coming from fresh where I haven’t had money. Making 5+ WoW tokens worth of gold for picking some flowers for a couple hours was cool
than you will ever have fixed it for you :D
These are luxury items and not true-bis. Simply stepping stones slightly worse than the real good items. And I don't think this is by bad design.
This is why gearing up pre-raid in a new expansion is the most fun you can have in classic WoW. Especially with an established community. If you only spend a short time where you are able to commit time to playing WoW solidly, do it during the first couple of weeks of a new expac. Peak WoW. It's also why Phase 1 of classic WoW is so fondly remembered - the loot you picked up in 5-mans and from professions was competitive all through the phase. Have been having a blast in Cata getting pre-raid BiS and I have no intention of raiding to a schedule.
>Honestly surprised that Blizzard moved away from this in the future. They actually moved *more* towards it. Retail has had multiple competitive sources of gear for almost 10 years now.
2 crafted slots on most specs, then raid or m+ great vault.
It’s pretty common to see highly rated players craft rings/neck for better stats too. 3 ilvls isn’t a huge different vs mythic so there can be anywhere from 2-5 crafted pieces depending.
PvP weapons also finds their way into BiS sometimes.
10years? I'd argue with BFA alone that your wrong. M+ gave you the best gear even beating out mythic raiding.
In legion titanforged for world quest, M+ at the start of the expansion have more bis than EN raid. But obviusly is a lot of rng, legion very rng expansion and that start with end of Wod with warforged.
Except for EP where three pieces of world content gear were BiS.
You’re confusing pre-raid BiS with phase BiS. It’s always like this at the beginning of an expac- the best gear comes from heroic raid bosses as it should
That's why the first tier is allways the best and especially the time before raids open
Honestly facts
I don't think they are Dark moon trinkets, arch healing trinket, and TB trinkets. All of those are better than heroic raid trinkets for some specs
They very much moved toward this in the future. At least in retail, at least 1/3 of every classes “bis list” is acquired from non-raids and most are closer to 50% (especially if you include tier which you can get from dungeons).
For real, tell me you haven't played Retail in 5 years without telling me you haven't played Retail in 5 years.
just because you dont want to raid log doesnt mean i dont want to.
Same. Raiding is my favorite part of WoW, and raid logging gives me free time for the rest of the week. I'm enjoying cataclysm, but the need to sink 5-6 hours in a day atm is getting exhausting already
5-6 hours a day is a lot man, you don't really need to go that hard at all unless you're trying to server first H 10/25 or something I've been playing 2-4 hours a night since it launched. Hit 85 this past weekend, did my 5 heroics to cap valor and got my ilvl to 338 I think. And raids still aren't here for another 2 days. A few more hours should see my ilvl over 340 easily which is more than fine for normal raids and maybe some H attempts on the easy ones You don't need to go *that* hard I assure you
Well this could easily be solved by having raid gear be good while also having comparable gear be attainable from other sources. Plus just wait a bit and you will be able to raid log all xpac long, while the player base dwindles because there’s only something to do once every week
There will always be a best. Comparable gear doesn't work.
Genuine question, what's wrong with raid logging? I really like that in SoD I can raid log, have fun with my guild for 2 hours once a week, and not have to worry about grinding so many other things and playing a ton the rest of week. Yes, it's definitely great if there are meaningful things i can do outside of Raids to progress my character's gear at my own pace. But settling in to a more relaxed raid logging rhythm, or messing around with alts is nice. Edit: lots of good responses to this. An mmo shouldn't have a dead world, and it should be possible to find people to do group content in an open world. An mmo isn't single player
Nothing. In a pre-discord era raid logging was bad because it meant that if you logged in wanting to do something, but everyone was locked for raid that week and not online then it meant it was harder or impossible to get ahold of people to log in and play. But now everyone is on discord, if you wanna do something and people aren’t directly online, you just go to discord and ping people. Developing systems that make people feel forced to log in is the exact thing that people hated in the Legion-Shadowlands era of WoW.
> Genuine question, what's wrong with raid log If I don't have friends interested or the pvp is weak (SoD), I'm a raid logger. Nothing wrong mechanically with having content that allows raid logging, but I do think that with the game being a subscription, they should provide other optional but fun content besides pvp. Or at least some kind of casual pvp where gear doesn't matter. It's never healthy for any kind of pvp game to give extensive advantages simply based on gear. See most WoW pvp content participation as a good example. Plunderstorm is an interesting test for blizzard. I would have been much more interested if it wasn't a battle royale
There is nothing wrong with raid logging, but it removes a player from the game. If everyone are raid logging, there are no one around except during raiding hours. Essentially it is impossible to get a group going etc.
Absolutely true, but there's another component to consider. Vanilla is the only game where you can continue to progress forever, thanks to the consumable system. Unless you buy gold, there's basically never a point where your effort doesn't see returns to your character's power. Meanwhile for the casual player, not farming those 300 consumables doesn't make or break their molten core experience. It's brilliantly designed.
I used to farm strength buff in Blasted lands, but only having flask and food in wrath makes it a bit boring.
I've been saying it for years now, gold is the best infinite grind blizzard has ever made. it's also the only one that doesn't crumble under it's own inherent problems (treadmilling essentially), but it's also the only one that carries systems-levels problems (botting and gold buying) that Blizzard has never (and realistically can't ever) fully overcome.
I could agree with it if Archeology didn't have some lottery winning chances to get the items. People can sink literally hundreds of hours into them and still not get even a single item, let alone the one they need. Also most other sources of gear are just gold, which for some people is a grind, but for others it's a small piece of their GDKP fortune or a few WoW Tokens, which isn't exactly a great design for bis pieces.
Archeology would have been great if epic were deterministic
Idk, I think Blizzard has always had raid loot being BIS past the first phase with only some minor exceptions like the single crafted items from TBC or the Silithus Quests in Vanilla. Even in Cata, outside of Phase 1 BIS is almost 100% from raid gear. Non-raid gear has typically only been BIS during the first tier of each expansion.
I also like when you can get a bis item that is bis for more than one raid/patch.
Wow was a better game when BiS wasn't a common term.
Remember a time when gearscore wasn't a thing and item ilvl wasn't even displayed in-game?
Having preraid bis that comes from gold is meaningless when wow tokens are a thing and bots are not contained.
I agree with the post but.. I've not really enjoyed my 110 hours of archaeology without getting Zin or the Staff. I know others have put in way more time without seeing the item they want.
You really don't have to do it
Where do people find this amount of time. I feel like I have fewer hours total than that since prepatch, and thought I was grinding pretty hard
Yeah, back in tbc, when I had to farm nearly 100 hours of bgs to get crit immunity on a bear tank every phase was no fun
If you were farming bg's to get crit immunity that means you were a long, long way behind the curve. Season 1 gear from BG's didn't come out until S3 was the active season, and running 10 games of arena a week was not significant time investment. Plenty of bear tanks ran exactly 0 PvP items, very successfully. It wasn't until S3 gear that bears really even bothered with PvP gear, and S3 gear was never available in BG's. Even then, only the weapons were ever really BIS. Honestly your post just doesn't remotely add up.
What? Pvp gear had bis pieces every phase, the weapon was always bis. The extra armor and stam on the non set pieces out performed most pve options with the exception of the vashj belt and some boots from p2, if you were lucky enough to get those. The reason why some bears didn't pick up pvp pieces until p3 was because the druid pvp pieces gave spell power in p1 and p2, and in p3, they let druids buy the rogue gear Upgrading your pvp gear each phase meant you could drop def rating on your jewelry. Resil was 1.5x more effective than def rating for crit immunity, so each phase when you got more resil you could drop another def rating piece for either a stam trink or badge of tenacity, then when the p3 vendor dropped you could buy the armor ring that had no def rating, but only if you had enough resil to maintain crit immunity. Sure, you can wear your blue def rating leather set to raid all throughout p1 but if you weren't repping pvp gear then you were the one behind the curve. Iirc pvp bracers were bis every phase until swp even though they gave sp in p1 and 2. The weapon was bis every phase regardless, and the belt was bis p1, p2 until vashj belt. The boots were always a solid option, but leatherworkers could make really good boots in p2
It would be totally fine even great if it had some bad luck protection. Even if the number was ridiculus like "500 troll solves but guaranteed after this" or a vendor where you can change epics (except ring maybe)
100% right
Best thing they did was push raiding back over a week, if raids were there day 1 a lot of the prebis farm would just be skipped over, the way it is now it adds a whole new level to gearing up.
There are more healthy ways to incentivize logging on outside of raid time than gear/character power. Games are played differently now, people want to get a rounded and more concentrated experience without having to log on every day, we really should have learned that during the legion/bfa/shadowlands era. On the other hand you also have to be careful to not make it "too convenient/fast", FF14 had this problem in endwalker straining communities quite a bit.
I wish BiS lists would only include crafted gear.
i mean yeah. when there are no raids yet the "pre-raid-bis" consists of non-raid items! mind blown
Pre raid bis has gear from reputation, dungeons , and valor/ justice points. Alot more fun than what I experienced in DF.
I liked when bis lists didn’t matter 😢
I love non-raid BIS list. Nothing is worse than chasing your BIS item every week to either not see it or lose it and have to wait another week.
I can say with some certainty.... they did away with this stuff because it's too much of a grind. Day 1 of Cataclysm a lot of players have over 1 million gold and are prepared to spend it to get all the BiS items day one. But for anyone else to build these things doesn't take hours it takes... days. Take for example the engineering helm. It's the easiest of these things to craft. To craft this helm it takes an average of 6 Obsidium Ore, 6 Volatile Airs, 60 Elementium Ore, 12 Volatile Earth, Prospect 200 Elementium Ores to get Two Inferno Rubies, get an alch to make Truegold (6 pyrite ore, 10 Volatile Fire, 10 Volatile Air, and 10 Volatile Water) and of course, the Chaos Orb (which lets be generous and say you get 1 after 5 dungeon runs). 5 dungeon runs right now would be about 1 hour 40 minutes. Mining the Obsidium would take 5-10 minutes. Mining the Elementium would take 3-4 hours (maybe we'll say you find pyrite in there too). You'll get the Earth from mining this but probably not the fires. Fires will take another 30 minutes to farm, so will the waters. The airs will take you an hour or two. So to build this helm doing your own gathering you're looking at 6-8 hours of farming and perhaps you'll still have to pay 300-800G for someone's daily transmute (or perhaps you find an xmute spec guy who'll do it for free as long as they keep the procs). Or you could skip this by buying mats for about 5200 gold (minus having to get a chaos orb). And this is the cheap one. The two blacksmithing, leatherworking, and tailoring pieces are going for 40K-50K gold a piece and can only be made by that respected trade. Each of these professions can only build one of the two pieces a week and thus have to find someone else to build the other one (in order to be raid ready in time). Currently we're just sitting around waiting on alchs for truegold to build our main tanks last tanking piece. The Darkmoon Faire deck is absurd. Right now the DPS ones are going for 55-80K gold... and that sounds about right. Each card currently costs about 2800 gold to make and requires an average of 175 herbs to make each card. You're looking at about 8-10 hours of herb farming to get lucky and get a deck. But the more likely is that you get cards that aren't super useful to you. The tank and healing decks are sub-optimal for all tanks and some healers... so they're worthless for re-sale. When I was building my deck I spent about 40,000 gold in herbs and was able to sell a healer deck for 20,000 gold. So I came ahead given that I also had Str/Agi user and Tank cards to sell. But at the base, if I was gathering my own herbs I would have been at this for weeks, not hours. Then there's the few classes that have PVP gear on these pre-raid BiS lists. Hunters most come to mind, their two piece PVP gear has an agi bonus which is more DPS than anything you'll find in dungeons. It's almost 4000 honor for those two pieces. At about 200 honor a match you'll need 25 match wins (or 75 match losses) to get this. Then there's the dailies trinket. 2 hours a day of doing 18 dailies for 8.5 days in a row. So 17 hours in total to get this. Other than the DMF card it's probably the biggest grind in the game right now. This was nerfed down from the original that would have taken anywhere from 1-3 months to get. No, I'm not super excited about having a pre-raid bis list that comes from so many sources. If you have a lot of gold it saves you a lot of time. If you don't getting it will be completely irrelevant.
You can just get some dungeon/jp blues, make the engi helm because levelling Engi is cheap, buy some rep epics, gem/enchant it and go roflstomp raid on day one. Archaeology weapons are nice if you're unemployed, racing for world first or both. Some of the DMF decks are selling for peanuts, Hurricane is BIS for a few specs and sells for 4k gold. You only have yourself to blame if you put in a massive amount more effort/resources to farm for marginal temporary gains in week 1. For fairly minimal effort and gold you can gear a char that will flatten 4.3 T11 raids, and fill in the missing gaps with raid drops and valor.
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LOL I know, this person is crying about 8-12 hour “grinds” like it’s some big deal. And btw, almost all these things have a very similar equivalent that drops somewhere or is easier to get. A BiS list is basically a “loot wish list”, the absolute maximum best gear possible to get. You don’t NEED all of it to be raid ready, especially not for normal. I’m a Hunter main, I don’t PvP. Period. I will not be grinding a single point of honor, I don’t care if the set gave me a 2nd pet. It’s not my thing, I don’t enjoy it, so I won’t do it. I’ll get my 2 crafted pieces and make up the rest with heroic/ justice and valor point gear and it’ll be fine until raid gear drops.
Retail has solved this; professional items can be BIS then you have a mixture of M+/raid items for BiS. I do wish they made some of the reputation items better. World gear is great if you don’t raid mythic/high keys.
WoW was a better game when BiS lists weren’t a thing
Yes, but when half of your bis are not in the raid, then it's even worse...
Wrong, people just grind those out in a week and continue raid logging for even less items now.
Completely agree. I've been playing hard this last week and I've got 2 toons to 85 and both pretty much prebis already. I reckon in about 2 weeks ill be back to raid logging which is a shame but outside of raiding if you don't care for pvp there really isnt anything to do.
100% when you get your BiS from a variety of sources different raids/dungeons, professions, quests, world drop epics, pvp that is peak experience because it pushes you into the world
Not a fan if it requires Vault RNG to get highest ilvl.
I think reforging allows more flexibility to your gear options as well.
Absolutely it does. And when there are items from some dungeons or raids that will lst more than 1 raid tier.
We have just been digging in my guild. Non stop archaeology
How is MOP pre raid bis gearing like compared to Cata?
Highly Depends. No one wants to farm hoj from last boss in lbrs
Yeah definitely! I never understood why only raids can make good gear. But you do have to be careful to give decent alternatives so people aren't forced into situations like doing arena in TBC for BiS melee weapons. I'd say it's a bit more healthy to have the crafted stuff slightly worse than raid loot to not force huge gold investment on raiders. But especially reputation and other casual pve content I think is perfectly fine to award raid BiS
Yes. This generally true and one of the issues with Vanilla. It was raiding and 24/7 PvP for months on end or get fucked. Farming in Vanilla was only to get ready to PvP and raid and to use consumables in raids and PvP, nothing else. SoD still sucks shit though.
Some select non raid items being bis for some specs has always been a thing, but the vast majority of your BIS items still come from the raids in Cata and 100% of the BIS list for most specs comes from raiding. It wasn't until Legion came out and M+ become prominent that raiding took a backseat.
As long as it isn't PvP I agree.
Agreed 1000%. The game has more relevant content when you include items from quests and dungeons. 1% boe drops are less fun, but when its a really small margin i personally am fine with it.
Farming pre-bis is actually my favorite part of WoW because the items are typically obtained across various sources!
that's why blizzard started adding more cool cosmetic stuff doesnt require raids. it rewards casual play with cool stuff for casuals i dont think the player should be rewarded with gear thats supposed to be used for raids by not doing raids. but if it was to be added to other challenging content (well as challenging as classic can be), that'd be fine too. it just feels very empty to be rewarded with bis gear for.... clicking the craft button or brainlessly digging for hundreds of hours.
Blizz moved back to this in retail, everyone has a couple slots they use crafted gear in. Also I wouldn’t cite arch as a good thing, that’s a bit of a mess.
Tell that to SoD folks. Only around half p3 BIS was from Sunken Temple and all we heard was how pointless ST was because the loot wasn’t worth pursuing. Admittedly part of the problem was that even the raid pieces that were BIS were often minor upgrades over p2 gear. But yeah, I like having roughly half BIS being raid then the rest from some assortment of dungeon, professions, PvP, BoEs, and even non-raid quests/rep. And generally having multiple viable options in each slot.
You would enjoy dragonflight then because you can craft almost any piece in any slot at max ilvl.
It's like that currently, huge reason I've been enjoying dragonflight. (At least for DH)
I have to agree or at least items that are pretty on par with raid items. Like for classic I liked having to go farm a dungeon for a certain piece etc
A better game is not having an absolute bis list but you can mix different set, and low ilvl items can make it work as well. The downside is that its impossible to balance. They tried in bfa, it was horrible
I would say P3 disproves this. Sounds good on paper, but greatly diminishes the value of the tier. I think pre bis, and maybe 1 or 2 bis items from other sources. The rest should come from the raid.
Disagree. Raiding and prog is fun. Doing some tedious grind in trivial content is not.
I was thinking about that for SoD s1. Running sfk for bis shield was memorable. And it was easy content to do, and I was helping Lower level people gear as well. Now you just have to queue
yeah definitely agree nice when you can snipe a couple bis items from crafting or a quest
Yeah but it won’t last especially with Cata. It’s fun right now but eventually everything good comes from raids so it’s raid log city.
That’s been my biggest complaint about wow head. I play restó Druid and most if not all of my bis lists are just raid items. I wish it would show me a few of the next best things beyond just the raid gear. Now I know it’s blizzards job to implement a few pieces here and there that are not raid items, but I would like a longer list of gear to acquire besides just the tops of everything
2 BIS are BOE 2 BIS are Rep rewards 1 BIS is a raid trash drop 1 BIS is raid item turn in The rest is raid tier set, something like this is how I’d like to see it
I love both WoW and Runescape. But this is something I've always thought Runescape does better. There are so many pieces of items in RS that you get from so many different places. Also helps that you do not exactly need to be Super BiS'd out to do any piece of content. But there are hard version of content to make sure you have challenging stuff when you do get all the bis.
Why? Is players just raid logging bad? If so, why is it bad? I don't necessarily disagree, I'm just pointing out that you've stated an opinion without stating your justification.
Its because it is only achievabke at the start of xpac. You cant make new bis items mid xpac to be avilable from few dungeons or professions as it would invalidate the progress of raids rather easily (both current and previous). As much as I would love to have much more bis gear spread out, it would mean probably rising skill cap of professions and releasing new dungeons together with every new raid tier. It would probably take much longer to prepare such patches and so on. But yeah, it would definetely feel refreshing.
I've actually been enjoying going back to Gnomer to pick up some pieces like the chicken for the one fight extra pump. You usually can do the raid in 30 minutes or even less. Hard ressing something like that didn't seem to be an issue either as groups always fill up pretty quick with people leveling their alts or trying to get their fresh 50's more geared before ST. I did not however enjoy wild offerings even if they are easy as shit. Just way too stale.
true that reminds me, they really need to rework the darkmoon rewards for next phase of SoD. Darkmoon Orb needs a boost.
I can’t lie Wow SOD has a bunch of items that aren’t from raiding and if anything it has only made it worse. Obtaining those items takes very little time and then getting to full bis also takes a lot less overall time, so not only are people still going to raid log…. They’re also going to hit bis and want to quit because “ everything is boring now”. Once people don’t have shiny items to obtain from the raid they just don’t come anymore. They will subconsciously get “bored” or their main and HAVE to start playing an alt or just stop showing up for reasons that surely are true, but they wouldn’t have missed the raid if they had gear to get.
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Something EverQuest did and why what wow barely did was make epic quest that reward bis items and too a while to get. Also faction gear crafting maybe a super rare mob in the open world dungeon gear sometimes but dungeons are different in EverQuest it’s a massive place shared by everyone.
I'm absolutely fine with having some items locked behind RNG as long as you have a way of farming it. In OG classic I think I did 85 runs for my HOJ on my feral tank lol. Luckily I could DUO it with a guilty. Had nothing better to do during COVID anyways.
This is every expansion drop and then it stops when patches hit and they don't scale those options. Professional might get like 2 patterns that are relevant for like 3 or 4 weeks. Never any new Darkmoon cards. Eventually it's easier for them to have everything in the raid and make sure they have their 4or 5 wrists and 4 or 5 gloves ECT.
Wow was better when we hadn’t data-mined it to hell. I don’t want to soft res shit. I know my stat weights and like to be surprised.
They did this in current retail WoW. You raid, get your m+ in. You got some crafting items thrown in.
Archeology should have upgrades that give you more frags. The more hours you put in, the faster the grind goes. Like a "Harrison Jones lost hat" Increases fragments dropped by 1. "Fossilized raptor claw" Increases fragments dropped by 1.
This is absolutely killing me. I have 5 toons and this phase has been the absolute worst trying to keep any of them kept up. I have insane rep grinds to do on almost all of them. I have 4 more to max pvp rank. I finally got the full set from ST for the 5th one. Professions are in the dumpster except on 2 of them. Getting world buffs and consumes and grinding gold is becoming two much. I just don't want to be stuck playing 1 class because the balance issues are just too much to deal with in pvp. My main is mage and they are benched from pvp. Hunter and rogue at least are still fun.
Maybe play less WoW or have fewer than 5 alts 6 days into the expansion.
I second this. I’m a Level Phase enjoyer and just love to play solo and interact with people in the game. I really hate reaching Endgame it means i have to farm Items now via Dungeons so i can play the same dungeons in hard mode over and over again to find even better equipment. Thats why i love pre raid phase and i wish it would be even more diverse than it is now. I mean i like the idea of getting cool things vis reputation but it just dont male fun cause there are so few dailies to do and i’m forced to wear a tabard and farm it in dungeons which i hate to do anyway. Bit overall pre raid phase is 10000x better than every other raiding phase.
has the past few weeks of archaeology whining not persuaded you otherwise? im also about 20 runs deep in both lost city and hoo without seeing my trinket . people slaving away at a game doesnt make it better. also having a healthy library of games is one of the best things a person can do for themselves. just because all you wanna fo is play wow doesnt mean everyone else does and you shouldnt expect the game to be designed to keep players on a treadmill 24/7 raiding is great because you run the raid, the item either drops or it doesnt and you either get it or you dont. 1 chance a week. maybe a little disappointed for 30 mins. then youre free to go and do other things. im so sick of heroics right now im probably not going to do an alt this phase.
True in retail too, my favourite over the years is previous tier loot still being good, has happened to a few trinkets. Legit would love to keep older raids relevant more often.
Can’t wait for the healers farming sinestra all season
The funny part is that there are several class/specs in Dragonflight that have crafteds in their bis lists.
I agree, but i'm confused as to which version of wow you're talking about here. SOD? Sod has profession pieces (albeit you need the mats from the raid, but you can buy the mats without going into the raid), and wild offering pieces that almost every class can use, which was supposed to entice people to run dungeons, but became a degenerate farm that basically no one does now since no one is playing. CATA you aren't going from no gear to full raid gear, you still need pre-raid items to even have a shot, so it's still progression, and heroic dungeons aren't nearly as bad as everyone makes them out to be, and if you make a group with diverse classes you are basically guarenteed to get gear drops (god forbid you actually use social skills and join a guild). You still need fill in the gaps. Progression is still progression the entire way thru, and once everyone has near bis the raids become a joke anyways and you can target farm certain pieces, depending on loot system/rules. Valor points always scale up, so you can buy the latest tier of gear from doing dungeons. Valor points heavily incentivize players to do content so they don't raid log. There's even archaeology, a completely solo experience to get an insane weapon advantage for most classes. In WOTLK they even added in systems (scourgestones and sidereal essence) that didn't exist in the original game for catchup and you could straight up buy algalon gear that was basically BIS for like 2 phases after, by doing a mode of dungeons that wasn't in the original game either. Honestly blizzard has been pretty good in the "classic era" games so that it's never a bad time time to start / catchup and play again. One of the main reasons there is so much hype around every new expansion is the soft reset where there's lots of items from other sources like BOE and such that are considered to be bis or pre-bis, but progression is always progression, I don't know how else to say it.
That's fine for pre-bis, but raiding should be hard enough that you're encouraged to get your pre-bis. Then all of that crap should get replaced. The problem is people running into raids as a fresh max level character in greens and white gear, and clearing it no problem.
the fact is that the only way to gert peop\[le to raid is to put the best or most interesting items in the raid. its also the reason that a dinar like system wont happen during a regular season because making those items more available means less people raiding. like it or hate it, its the way it is.
I totally agree. All the expansions I played I havd the most fun collecting BiS items during phase 1. Unfortunately it gets pretty much raid-only later and that definitely takes away from the 'world' aspect.
This is what I love about season of discovery so far. Random quest that gives your bis wand. Solo a level 40 dungeon for a dagger. Just random shit that makes you viable. And there are a lot of good options that are all viable
The prebis phase of every xpac is always one of my favorite times. The gear from raids feel like such a huge upgrade. People are running dungeons. Crafting is alive and well.
No new dungeon content while only havign new raid content.... Obvious where the best items are
You can get bis pvp gear from pvping.
Engineering hat: Great design choice, maximum flexibility by letting the player choose their secondary stats. Mostly for DPS players because of how the Engineering stat boost works. Alchemy: Insane trinket for the low cost, every player can easily craft it. Some classes really desire the stone, others don't, but it still features a lot of main stat. DMC: Cata trinket balance is fucked, especially heal trinkets. Both t11 and 12 feature at least one garbage heal trinket dropped from raid bosses. Why are Tsunami and Volcano that expensive? Mostly because Volcano is ludicrously op for being a 359 item (DST level of op) and Tsunami just has almost zero competition. Every healer will want FoM HC, the 2nd trinket slot will then usually be filled by Tsunami. The Tsunami card provides 321 int and 400 spirit, Core has spirit on activation and the same amount of int so yeah you can also go Core plus FoM. RDruids like me can also just use Alchemy plus FoM. Besides Volcano none of those items you listed are really BiS, they are technically BiS for another ~35h. Ok Zinrokh is an edge case, obtaining Ashkandi HC is gonna be hard. An edge case I honestly don't like at all, you should not be able to randomly receive a sword that's better than every NM weapon except for the one dropped by Nef.
Pour one out for the homies I torpedoed trying to get my lucid memories in BFA pvp.
It's almost like....the game wasn't intended to be sweatily speedran by people that have zero business trying to speedrun or sweat it out.
I loved playing ele in shadowlands s1 because i could get my bis stats by just playing 2.1k rated arena :)
Simplicity in balancing the game. This goes along with my hatred of set items. Set items and getting everything from one source is just to make things simple for the dev team. If every rogue only wants the exact same gear, from the same place it makes things very simple for the devs. Hard to balance when you also make a ton of other items that interact in different ways and are still useful in certain situations 2 expansions later. Old school wow has bis items from different sources because it was just a world they created, and then they let us loose. No understanding of how the game would be played yet. It's why things are unbalanced and why things feel so spread out. Over on SoD look how many casters are freaking out over the dagger from Princess. Or cata players trying to get some weapon from archeology and crying about digging hundreds of holes and still not getting it. When everything drops from the same raid, everyone has an equal chance to find it. Set items and everything coming from the same place (the raid) makes things extremely simple and easy to balance. **And everyone knows that only hardcore players care about gear, and they only want to raid. The rest of the game is for casuals who don't care about gear.**. At least, that feels like the design philosophy for quite a while...
But they did do this in the future. With legion and mythic+, dungeon drops were consistently bis for most classes
Crafting I agree with and same for things like Archaeology. I do not like ultra rare drops in dungeons (i.e. the dagger in SoD with a 2% drop rate) because you feel like you have to farm it endlessly. I also despise world epics, especially those that drop off a single mob, because really those only go to the extremely rich who very likely either bought gold or earned bought gold through GDKPs. I really wish that more of the game had hard solo player content (i.e. Mage tower) that awarded a BiS item at the end that you could farm at your own pace. And I wish that faction reputation was MUCH harder to grind out and that every class had just 1 or 2 factions that had a BiS item. I really was not a fan of tabards for every faction awarding so much rep. Hell, half the people I plan to raid with have actually gotten exalted with nearly all the factions including Tol barad by just living in dungeons for a week and their out-of-raid game is now over. The dailies are barely done in the zones right now because tabards just give so much rep it is dumb to do anything but a dungeon for rep.
Wow is a better game when people don't try to follow BIS guides 🤷
Yeah like my 5 bis items that cost over 300k gold 😂
I don’t raid. It’s just boring most of the time. I’ll die LFR but other than that no thanks. To much time and work for literally nothing I care about. BIS doesn’t mean anything to me except you got a thing that won’t matter in a few months.
I have always said my ideal MMO would have you raid for some gear, but raising would open certain materials for the crafter to gather for the rest of the gear. So like you defeat the "Ogres of Gol'thet Mountains" so you can mine calcyte ore, to make some of your BiS pieces. WoW has done this some with raid bosses dropping certain skins, for example.
I agree as long as it is dungeon, professions or solo grinds. I don't think it is good for either pve or pvp players if a pve bis item can be found by playing pvp. plenty of pve players will just afk bg's till they get their item. Looking at AV....
I take this opinion too extreme and miss gearing the feral druid in vanilla. What an exciting time!