Friday, January 22, 2021

An Interesting View of Gear in Shadowlands

Wrathofkublakhan at Coffee Cakes and Crits has an interesting way of looking at gear in Shadowlands:

Visiting the Wow Community Forums, I see all-in-caps complaining about the low loot drops in dungeons and raids. I think that they are looking at it wrong. The right way, it seems to me, is to look at your own ilevel. Mine is about 200 with a 9/10 clear so far of the current raid. That is about perfect.

I have gear pieces above and below 200 and a chest piece and/or weapon drop at 200 would be welcome. This is good. The game is working. I remember in BfA out-gearing the raid before we even started. The same in Legion, there would be times when we’d start a raid and all eyes were on the final bosses for chances of an upgrade.

I think this is a good way of looking at gear. I'm i205, and we're 4/10 Heroic Nathria. That's just about perfect. Loot is scarce, but every item that drops in new and challenging content is an upgrade. Most likely an upgrade for me, but guaranteed for someone in the raid. I have some high pieces (Legendary and rings, for some reason) and some pieces that could still use a Normal Nathria upgrade (bracers, as is tradition ever since Cho'gall).

I really like how loot is handled in Shadowlands. Loot is scare and thus valuable. I know there's a lot of complaints on places like Reddit, but I strongly hope that Blizzard holds the line.

About the only thing that might need a look is collecting raid sets for transmog. And even that might be fine after a couple more months.

3 comments:

  1. Hard disagree in general, although the item level thing is correct.

    Let me elaborate, as someone who last raided in MoP and didn't get any of this Legion/BfA WQ gearing (only as a casual and I was always miles behind our raiders in iLvl). The problem is that gearing simply doesn't *feel* good. It's simply the amount of loot that drops (or doesn't, actually). I'm playing Fury and my BiS Legendary is in the Legs slot. Guess what I had 4-5 of and all other slots with shit gear? Yes, leg slot. If there had been more loot I wouldn't have been completely annoyed at my blues while I have 4 pairs of unusable epic legs. Also weapon drops are simply too scarce, especially for dual wielders.

    We're 5/10 Hc now and I think most of us are 200-208 ilvl, so that fits. But we progressed in an ok pace (in my opinion) so you could also say we farmed half of Normal for 7 weeks already.

    I don't remember investing that much time back in MoP and earlier to be on the same level of gear. Also I kinda need to do M+ or PvP when stalled on Heroic progress, and actually it's a lot smarter to do 1 or 4 high M+ keys and hope for the vault than go raiding. That feeling simply sucks.

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    1. I do think that Blizzard should put some slot protection in the vault. Like guarantee that every square will contain a different type of item.

      I don't know, to me it feels pretty much the same as loot in Cataclysm and earlier, and I liked that pace.

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    2. I might actually be misremembering how much gear dropped but maybe the change to personal loot also comes into play.

      Anyway, maybe it's a bit of a meme in my guild especially with hardly anyone being happy with how much loot drops for how well we are progressing (and how many bosses we are killing each week, but we're mostly 21-27 people in raid).

      One anecdote was last week where someone wanted a normal Castle Nathria drop for a transmog and someone said "would rather have a shard for the guild bank". Usually you should absolutely have enough shards from DEd raid loot no one wants but this time around it's 100% contributed things, or that exchange wouldn't have happened. And yes, of course we all have enough money that it's not a problem and of course said person could get their transmog by paying a shard, but I think it helps my point.

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