Blizzard revealed today that there will be no Warforging, Titanforging, or Corruption for loot in Shadowlands. Essentially, we will be going back to the static items as in previous expansions before Legion.
I personally did not mind these mechanics. Blizzard gave out more loot, so that it was easier to hit the baseline, but harder to get Best-in-Slot. Now they will revert that, and we will go back to a more Classic feel where there is less loot overall, and upgrades are rarer, but if you get a piece, you're not going to replace it again until a new tier comes out.
That does mean that the variance will be higher. I remember some tiers where one time simply never dropped for us.
On the positive side, this means that class sets can come back. You won't have to choose between set bonuses and warforged items.
Overall, it's probably a positive change. I think that there was a significant faction of the audience who had troubles dealing with the fact that you could not "finish" a character in Legion/BfA. That you could not say, "this character has the best gear possible, I can put him aside and move on to a different character".
Regarding your last paragraph, I've not been raiding for a while, so I'm absolutely a different audience, but I still have never been a fan of Warforging, Titanforging, or the random upgrade procs and especially not of Corruption. I mean, sure, gear is kinda meaningless when I don't "need" it to raid, I've never been a fan of "perfectly kitted out" chars and I play too many to realistically do that. But I actually don't want WoW to be Diablo or Destiny, I don't want to replace my gear every day with a new world quest.
ReplyDeleteSo yes, I like this "I can focus on other things now", I think I've 100% ignored enchants, gems, and sometimes even transmogs because every time I spent even a little time and gold to do it, a new meaningless upgrade came around. It's devolved into just following the tooltip suggestion by the game or Pawn and stupidly replace items.
This might make no sense, but if I'm playing just 2 chars on a random day and can't name you a single item I have equipped because it's all volatile trash (that happens to have good stats) - gear becomes not even just a means to an end (like I used to think) but just a nuisance that needs permanent attention.
I suppose that's true. Personally, I always regarded the warforge/corruption as a bonus. Once I had the base item level for the tier (for example, 460 for Heroic Nyalotha), I was "done", and didn't really care about gear anymore.
DeleteOn the other hand, I don't run alts, so I just kept going to raids with my main character anyways.
I just have a recollection of previous tiers where a specific slot would never, ever drop (bracers in particular), and that slot would always be a tier behind. In the current system, that doesn't really happen. That slot may not be warforged or have corruption, but at least it's up to the current item level.