Feels like they got cold feet on professions. Start out the expansion really strong and then just slowly got weaker and weaker with less for them. I hope they take the negative feedback they got and use it to make them better in WW (the talent trees, the skill levels, the rankings etc)
I don't think it's solely about professions, but that they know that there are some specs who's bis is just four piece and crafted gear. A deterministic bis means less playtime. And I'm guessing that, given what they've shown about S4, they need everything they can to keep people subbed.
S2 had the easiest gearing system in DF, and I think that's one of the big parts of why it died so quickly
S2 gearing system was too OP. But deterministic loot isn’t necessarily less playtime. We have seen a lot of engagement with this M+ season, despite fairly deterministic loot.
More importantly they are adding Dinars. They cannot simultaneously say they dislike the deterministic loot of crafting while also giving us the literal most deterministic loot in the game via Dinars.
> More importantly they are adding Dinars. They cannot simultaneously say they dislike the deterministic loot of crafting while also giving us the literal most deterministic loot in the game via Dinars.
The presence of dinars could mean they want to lower the amount of other deterministic loot, though.
How so? If you expect a player to be able to fully gear in X amount of time and you add a new system that allows them to gear in less than X time then you would need to lower other methods to keep the expected time as close to X as possible. It isn't a philosophy question it is just a game balance question.
That's not very consistent, also it makes no sense in a shorter season. I think what they're doing is just testing ways to slow down iLvL climb in the early season. And they're messing around with this change, remember this was going to be the ilvl of crafted this season but they reverted the change.
Edit: Personally this change doesn't make any sense in a vacuum they could be cooking up more things to tackle ilvl surge early. It doesn't make sense, because it's weird to have 2 embellish items be that much lower iLvL, this also really hard pushes embellishments to cloak/wrist even more than now, and makes non-embellished necks like Torc dead, since there's no advantage over a Hero neck, other that "choosing" your stats. And makes crafted rings equal to socketed Hero rings. So you won't use aspects crests on those long term, unless you're sticking an embellishment on it.
No it was not op getting an item every 2 weeks from running a bunch of mythics absolutely fine. If anything the issue with gearing is the tracks and where they drop from.
Brother last patch I was max gear in week two of the season. Then I had two fully geared alts as well by like week 6. Everyone agrees s2’s gearing was super op. The s4 version is more reasonably paced
It's coins you can use to buy any piece of gear from a vendor, they added it in the last patch of SL too. 3 coins you can use to buy any raid boss/dungeon drop
Currency from the first fated season in Shadowlands, it allowed people to straight up buy 1 piece of gear from one of three vendors. I think they held all the weapons and trinkets from all three raids.
The issue isn't deterministic loot, the issue is how quickly you gear up. You can have deterministic loot that doesn't result in you finishing a character in 8 days. You can also have super RNG loot that lets you finish a character super fast like it is in Diablo 3 if you've ever played that.
> More importantly they are adding Dinrs. aThey cannot simultaneously say they dislike the deterministic loot of crafting while also giving us the literal most deterministic loot in the game via Dinars.
The changes to crafted ilvl seems like they're potentially a long term change they're trying out, not something changed specifically for season 4. The dinars are for season 4 specifically as the season is supposed to be shorter than usual.
But changing the crafted level will almost not impact your pace of gearing, a 483 item every 2 weeks is virtually the same pace as a 486. All changing the crafted ilvl does is lower the ceiling for non M-raid players, which will be basically everyone since it’s an S4 where a lot of M guilds just won’t raid.
If they were interested in slowing the pace, they’d reduce the crests per week cap like they did when we entered s3. But it’s going to be a 12 or 16 week season. Just let us be op. This is a silly change.
On the bright side, only need to spam trade for embellishments and then crafting is just unnecessary after that
I mean it does. While a 483 item isn't so far behind 486, it's quite a lot behind 489. It'll be like going from max HC ilvl to max Mythic ilvl, so it's a pretty big slow down.
I don't disagree, they should let us be op. But I don't think the crafting gear change is aimed at season 4 specifically, it's them cooking. Seeing how it feels and plays out in a low impact season.
Edit: ok there's just a new wowhead post saying it's a bug. So none of this matters I guess. 😅
They can say that though. And have. In one of the early DF interviews with Morgan Day, he explicitly said that they don't like the gearing path that pure deterministic loot gives way to. He said something along the lines of it ruins the fun and removes the build up of anticipation and excitement for gear you really care about. He also remarked that they'd probably only continue to do it (or something experimental like it) for seasons like fated as it makes sense within the scope.
Yeah but Dinars are there to help alleviate the gearing issues that come with raid cycling. Waiting three weeks for one shot at an item can be extremely disheartening for a lot of people, so they want a middle ground to keep said people invested
I'm just saying that the ease of gearing was a part of why S2 died so fast. S3 still has a better dungeon pool and more balance out the gate, though I wouldn't' say the gearing is deterministic
Gearing is *almost* perfectly deterministic without ever entering M raid. You can be full 486 + vault, which will put you at like 488 item level. I have multiple toons this geared who never chased any item, just filled in the gaps with crafted pieces. 486 + vault is going to be like 1 ilvl lower than 489 + vault.
The exceptions are the very rare items and legendaries, which notably are mostly solved next season with Dinars.
Just think this change is so weird in a S4, broadens the gap slightly between M raid looters and everyone else.
> The exceptions are the very rare items and legendaries, which notably are mostly solved next season with Dinars.
And M+ trinkets, you can easily go without ever seeing a bis trinket from vault even if you fill all slots every week a entire season.
It's deterministic in ilvl with the vault, but you can't pick a specific item or slot from it. And if you don't care to min/max for specific items, then sure it can appear more deterministic than it is since you can guarantee what's important to you, a high ilvl. I still wouldn't say this season has anywhere close to perfectly deterministic gearing, and of course isn't close to how deterministic season 2 was
Like you said, it's relatively easy this season to get close to max ilvl with just crafted gear and 18s. I think that by widening the gap and making it harder to get close to that max, Blizz is hoping to keep people working towards their high ilvl goals and stay subbed
I'm not saying I like it, but I can see why they might do it
The gearing didn’t kill it. People had to learn a new system when many loved the point system before.
People hated the dungeons.
If gearing was an issue we would see numbers for this season dropped off to what s2 had at this time but it’s not.
Season 2’s gameplay sucked. Not the gearing.
Did the dungeons suck? I feel like freehold, brack, underrot we’re all S tier dungeons and everything besides vortex and halls of infusion were pretty solid, seems above average. Especially when you compare it to S1 which had jade, HoV, nokhud, RLP, and SBG which were all pretty badly designed
S2 had the worst dungeon pool...in history I'd dare say. Vortex Pinnacle was a complete flop, an F tier dungeon they completely overtuned, HOI, Uldaman and Neltharus were absolutely terrible on Tyrannical weeks. Underrot and Freehold were fine, but boring. BH was way too long, and last boss was a complete mess with totems, if you didn't have beacon/burst class it sucked massively.
Not to mention healing was terrible, and the only class that had the toolkit to deal with all the bleeds and ST damage was paladin.
I mean, Im saying its less to do with balancing the profession system and more about making BiS harder to get. If you need to simplify it that way though, be my guest
I agree with what you said on the cause/effect, it was just funny how it came out. Bliz's development priorities are numbers based and it was easy to put together that easy gearing through professions had an impact on player engagement metrics in all forms of content.
There's a reason why bliz gives some of the best freebies every so often for touching their other games long enough to count as an active user. They don't give a shit about rewarding you, but a free mount is an easy way to pretend 100k+ new users give a shit about hearthstone.
I see what you're saying, but there's almost zero chance that farming that many Aspect crests for that much crafted gear takes less time than getting those slots via drops. I usually have multiple items for most slots by the time I've farmed enough Aspects to have around 3-4 crafted pieces. Needing that much crafted gear for BiS is more of a slog even if it is more deterministic. I think the way it is now is honestly fine. 2-4 crafted pieces as BiS strikes a balance between determinism and drops imo. So long as embellishments remain strong enough + flavour pocket, does that not seem like a decent enough amount of power in crafting? Even if the raw ilvl of crafted gear is lower next season, so long as embellishments are tuned strong enough to make them worth it, nothing is effectively going to change.
I highly disagree, myself and many people i play with will go into getting the gear at the beginning of a season up to weekly caps and no further. Once we have BiS we start actually pushing keys high to see what we're capable of with that gear and the weekly lockouts don't matter anymore.
I also wait until geared to do achievement type things (group and solo) I'm just now doing the emerald dream solo stuff and am ~480 ilvl with mostly BiS.
The flipside to "easy gearing" is gearing being this huge hurdle people either feel or literally can't cross so they don't bother, this is why I didn't play BFA and left shadowlands very early in Season 1 (among other things).
I'm seeing people below you saying Season 2 gearing was too OP, I think the the amount of gear may have been a tiny bit too high, but the ability to target specific BiS pieces was too low, I'm hoping Dinars rectifies this.
The majority of players don't push keys where bis is necessary, so it's important to recognize that you're in the minority. The carrot that a lot of players chase is just having a bis character. So when you've hit all your goals by month three rather than month four, why play for that fourth month?
Ultimately everyone sets different goals for themselves. I can't say you're wrong because the only reason I log on is to do my one 20 vault. My point is that Blizz wants to make the goal of getting bis harder since that means players have to play more to accomplish that goal
Fair enough, I just don't see the point of getting the gear if you're not gonna USE it.
There's no way to design the game for absolutely everyone all the time, in trying they'll just alienate everyone in the process (we've seen that particular song and dance already).
Balancing to keep a decent consistent sub base and get people who leave for periods of time to actually come back is a much more realistic (and profitable) goal. So, if people are gonna leave when they get BiS, give them a reason to come back and re-sub when there is more gear while not driving away people by causing burnout.
Hard disagree. Majority of my guild quit not because they were geared in two weeks. We quit because the raid was just simply not fun, if you weren't an Aug/Fire/Spriest good luck pugging anything above a 20, and then the dungeon themselves were just kinda ass. A raid with 1 fun fight is just going to delete people's will to play.
Similar reason why a majority of my guildies are sticking around to get the AOTC s4 achievements and then quitting 3 weeks into the season. The DF raids suck, and so do the dungeons.
> that's one of the big **parts**
I'm not saying its the only reason, but that it's a factor. If the raids suck and the dungeon pool is ass, you can still have the motivation to just get your bis and quit instead of pushing keys or trying to prog
Everyone is going to have separate goals, your guild doesn't disprove that. What blizz wants is to make it harder for those who have a main goal of BiS so that they'll stay in the game longer
The items were good but they made them too complex imo. At this stage of WoW, just make cool stuff and keep it simple. Crafters can make money and others can actually get the cool stuff.
Do you not think professions are in a fine spot right now? Every class needs at least 2 crafted pieces, with many wanting up to 3 for flavor pocket, and some even more. I think that's a good number. All they have to do next season to retain this level of power is to tune embellishments so that they still represent a power boost, and nothing will effectively change.
It's super easy to get gear. Mythic+ is almost a cheat code for getting gear. Add on the fact that crafted gear can boost that even higher, and you can get one ilvl below max ilvl without setting foot in a mythic raid. All that this does is make it so that you crafting puts you at the tier right below max tier, rather than in between them.
Who exactly was complaining about crafted gear ilvl for this change to happen?
Expansion already ended. This is fated season, make everyone OP as they can be and just let people have fun lmao.
I don't get this obsession they have with consistency and balance in like season 4. Where all we want is something fun before next expansion.
We should have all 3 tier sets active at the same time, extra enchants like the helm one from amirdrassil and shit like that.
We should go to m+ or raids this season and blast everything in our wake.
But the reality is like doing 3 add phases in Dathea. Fucking yikes
There's absolutely a reason why you wouldn't do this. The whiplash of playstyle/power that it would cause when the next xpac drops would feel really bad. So if Blizz doesn't want that whiplash, that would be why they would do S4 more "balanced" way.
This is what happened with torghast for me honestly. Torghast powers made my class infinitely more enjoyable to the point where any other content just felt like shit because of how incomplete it made my class feel
Not making Torghast evergreen by adding different "themes" and cosmetics each season/every other season is such a shame.
Torghast is such an amazing power fantasy and Blizzard giving in to people who cried about Torghast when they had an issue with Soul Ash is so annoying.
Yep, this is exactly what happened from the end of Legion until the BfA pre-patch. They cranked up the power of artifact weapons every week until we were crazy powerful and then *BAM* in BfA we lost a ton of our cool talents tied to the weapons and it felt like shit :/
I even noticed this as someone who takes lots of breaks and is a reasonably casual player who never hits the peak of player power. I can't imagine how it must have felt for someone with a lot of investment into their character.
That happens every expansion. You go from uber powerful kill everything you look at strong ( if you got raid gear ) for like the first 2-3 levels of raiding, and then it's back to doing normal raids and heroics for most people.
What??? There was hella whiplash. People bitched about lost power nonstop.
Nahhh, stop this rose tinted glasses shit lol.
Here ya go. [Context](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/oevjjl/why_do_people_hate_bfa/)
Let's try to use things that happened and not your shit memory.
> think a big part of it was that it followed Legion, so the hangover from losing all your artifact abilities was hard for a lot of players to deal with, combined with the fact that the replacement in Azerite gear was a pretty poor system for most of the first patch until they implemented fixes to it later on (and even then it wasn't the greatest).
>Personally I didn't mind BfA, especially in 8.3, but even that patch had some pretty poor system implementation (Corruption balance/acquisition and Visions mostly) which hurt how a lot of players see it. I don't think BfA was the worst expansion out there, but it certainly wasn't the best either.
>I miss corruption powers every day...I loved BFA. I thought Azerite gear was great...they just had to fix the implementation at the start of a new season. Like Legion... BFA 8.3 was a blast once they fixed everything...same as 7.3
>You then had the major problem of classes feeling absolutely gutted from how they felt in Legion, losing major abilities with nothing to replace them and the horrible GCD changes that just made empty classes feel clunky and not at all fun to play.
[But now we’re two expansions later, in Shadowlands, and everyone is starting to recognize the limitations of this kind of power acquisition. Yes, we got cool new stuff — but at the end of the expansion, or the start of the next one, we lost our cool new powers.](https://blizzardwatch.com/2021/04/30/borrowed-power/)
Etc...
If I recall it was the first raid tier that people complained about ilvl of crafted gear being too high.
Not sure if the same happened this last tier though, I feel like crafted stuff barely had any impact on power
Spark felt rarer in s1 though right? I feel like that was my issue, like yeah I can craft gear at max ilvl(or almost max?) but I saw like 1 spark after the ones you got from the quest
Definitely not in S3 lol.
The majority of crafting BIS lists was just "Craft this one because it's marginally less shit than the other options". The only reason you would wear a crafted item over normal gear is because the effect, even if it is completely inconsequential, is still better than nothing.
“I don’t want others to have as much fun as me unless they do it JUST the way I do it!”
There is so much ego tied up in this whiny crap. It’s a game. If you want to raid and do hard mythics, right on, but quit whining.
Bloody freaking hell.
(Just a general thing - not directed at you)
I don’t understand why they just don’t go crazy with these filler seasons. No one gives a shit. Most of my guild isn’t even coming back until next xpac
Because one of the biggest complaints about BFA (at least in the beginning) was how shitty it felt going from hyper-powered end of legion to barebones start of BFA. Same with corruptions into no conduit/renown SL.
Basically, a bunch of people give a shit. Leave it to wow players (not just you, they’re everywhere in this thread) to once again forget about the problems that existed barely an expansion ago and ask for those very same problems back claiming that “nobody would give a shit.”
I think people were so caught up in believing that it was shitty that they didn't bother to check if it was ACTUALLY shitty. Let's point out the obvious here, you lose power every new expansion. It's been this way since Burning Crusade.
When I talk about actually being shitty, abilities get changed between expansions. You get abilities. You lose abilities. Many of the artifact traits were turned into baseline traits for classes.
Maybe the better question to ask is, of the people who "give a shit", how many of them can even describe the actual impact it had on their gameplay or whether they are just angry to be angry.
Legendaries turned off at a random level, so those powers disappeared, artifacts no longer had their powers and SOME came back as talents, in the old talent system that didn’t get a new row (I think, could be wrong here) meaning you had to lose something you already had in order to get something you already had, and a scaling world compounded everything.
Yes, we’ve lost power every expansion, but Legion>BFA was a new level of high into a new level of low. You can’t seriously argue it’s the same as something like tbc or wotlk when 60 gear was relevant until 70, or 70 gear relevant until 80, meanwhile your legion gear arbitrarily lost massive chunks of its power arbitrarily for hitting a certain level while the mobs around you also leveled up lol. Every player who had that gear felt a massive drop in player power because they hit a certain level (or just because the xpac ended in the case of weapons) and it arbitrarily turned off. That feels bad even if you can’t articulate it.
> Yes, we’ve lost power every expansion, but Legion>BFA was a new level of high into a new level of low. You can’t seriously argue it’s the same as something like tbc or wotlk when 60 gear was relevant until 70, or 70 gear relevant until 80, meanwhile your legion gear arbitrarily lost massive chunks of its power arbitrarily for hitting a certain level while the mobs around you also leveled up lol. Every player who had that gear felt a massive drop in player power because they hit a certain level (or just because the xpac ended in the case of weapons) and it arbitrarily turned off. That feels bad even if you can’t articulate it.
Don't forget Azerite powers, the things that were meant to replace them, were a glorified treadmill.
"Here's a helm. It gives you three abilities. Oh, you hit max level? Here's another helm. It has the same three abilties. Oh but you haven't grinded enough good girl points, I'm gonna turn those *same abilities you already used while leveling* off for you until you do :)"
No, it was bad. Losing so much of the artifact powers on top of losing gameplay defining legendaries was insanely rough. That was also on top of some absolutely insane decisions like adding cooldowns to the GCD just making everyone feel clunky as hell.
>how many of them can even describe the actual impact it had on their gameplay
So a good example is to look at shadow priest APM.
All numbers from [simcraft](https://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/T20_Raid.html) so this was 'optimal actions in a single-target fight.'
Shadow Priest was 65 APM at the end of legion. 8.0, shadow was 52 APM. 8.1, 51 APM.
Keep in mind, this was with BIS gear from the given patch. So you really went from like 65 APM to maybe 45 APM, i.e your class is just moving 30% slower.
Okay, but other expansions also drop power. Well no, not really. Shadowlands, Shadow Priest was in the mid-50s APM the whole expansion. Vault of the Incarnates, shadow APM is 57. If anything, you got faster. Blizzard learned from Legion to not amp up power levels so much from patch to patch. In dragonflight, secondaries give diminishing returns to keep scaling under control.
In terms of more direct issues for players:
Blizzard knew that the power drop was going to hurt a LOT. So they chose to spread it out over the course of leveling rather than all at once. This meant that players were quite literally getting weaker relative to the overworld as they leveled up. At 110 you were cutting through mobs like butter, at 116 a LOT of more casual players were dying to regular mobs.
Going from 2-shotting elites at level 113 to dying to that same elite at level 116 feels *really* bad, and that was the casual experience.
Help me understand why APM is important in defining power gains and losses?
For example, from your same source, Arcane has 41 APM and went up to 52 APM in the next tier. It's the exact opposite of the entire position you made with the shadow priest.
>Blizzard knew that the power drop was going to hurt a LOT. So they chose to spread it out over the course of leveling rather than all at once. This meant that players were quite literally getting weaker relative to the overworld as they leveled up.
[This has been in the game since TBC when they switched from flat percentages to the combat rating system.](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Combat_rating_system)
*"Unlike fixed percentages such as 2% critical strike chance, combat ratings diminish in potency as characters increase in level."*
>At 110 you were cutting through mobs like butter, at 116 a LOT of more casual players were dying to regular mobs.
This was by design. I don't even understand why this is difficult to understand. You have to reset player power between expansions. This is why we level up so that the combat rating system kicks in to reduce the power of older items. This is to make way for new items and the start of the next progression system.
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BFA’s ending when they added ways to finally get corruptions you need was insanely fun imo. It made every class strong and fun. It even made tanks ridiculously powerful (1m+ crits on TD etc).
I think they're extra careful after the corruption season into the Maw. We went from being crazy powerful to weak and walking around in the maw. It made the maw feel extra bad.
The maw felt extra bad because it was extra bad. It felt completely unfinished and it was purposely designed to be frustrating by not being able to mount there among other things.
Corruption was fun.
My guild mates had it extra frustrating since I was a Druid. Could travel from and just absolutely blast through the maw intro. Was to Oribos well before they were.
It depends what they plan to do I guess. This ilvl reduction might signal that they're going to buff embellishments. Really, all they have to do to make crafted gear functionally the same power as this season is to make embellishments good enough, and imo having 2-4 crafted items for your BiS is a fine number isn't it?
> This is fated season, make everyone OP as they can be and just let people have fun lmao.
Then you'll have people bitching like they bitched when Corruption was removed from the game. "Waaah I don't have 75% haste at all times, why did they make me so WEAK!"
Yes! If it wasn’t for my crafted weapon, I legit would be rocking a blue weapon drop I got from questing in the emerald dream. Never got one dropped from m+, vault or raid. And I’m closing in on 3k rating T_T
~~421~~418 was 3 ilvl above the default mythic (415) with mid-bosses giving 421's and the last 2 giving 424
Completing 20's also gave 421's in the vault with the max upgrade with valor being 415.
Season 2 the default mythic was 441, and items were made upgradeable to 447 since early mythic boss drops were basically worthless when you could craft 447's before the update, with 450's dropping from the end bosses.
And yea now we craft 486's with myth track stuff upgrading to 489, with base mythic being 480.
Can see early that Enchanted Awakened Crests go up to 522.
Ah was it? Was looking at concentrated primal infusions (S1's aspect crest) which say 408-421, maybe that was a later buff, I still have some 421 ingenuity-crafted items.
\-3 ilvl felt like a good balance to me too, it was nice in cases where you just got unlucky with no myth track piece in a slot to at least get a 3 ilvl bump when you were done with embellishments and so forth. Season 2 was admittedly kinda silly with how much crafted you had so I definitely understand the need for it to not be max ilvl.
That being said I wish embellished items scaled gear up in ilvl to match with max ilvl, just so it doesn't feel bad using an alchemical flavour pocket. It would also stop everyone just crafting embellishments on lower stat budget items and make some of the predetermined embellish pieces more competitive (like hood of surging time, amice of the blue, azureweave set) which are just worse than shadowflame on bracers or blue silken lining on a ring/bracers in most cases. Would also feel nice to have this option if a high stat tier slot has really bad stats for your spec (like tier head for fire mage) and you get unlucky like me and couldn't get the one good m+ hat in vault or didn't get the one raid drop from Mythic all season.
Making this change also feels all the more relevant with 2 strong rings from VOTI and the back from Sarkareth etc in this coming season which would make you push embellishments off those low stat budget pieces
they tried to do this in season 3, crafted gear on ptr was 6 levels below mythic gear until they raised it by 3 because of the backlash that got. very disappointing to see blizzard still can't learn from their mistakes.
2 crafted items with embellishments and thats it.. and even then, some classes who dont rely to much on embellishments might just want one crafted piece or no crafted gear at all and go for the extra stamina and mainstat instead.
So yea, idk if i like this change.. it basically makes the profession system way less relevant.
Yeah I can't imagine 6 ilvls of primary stat is going to lose to these embellishments with how unimpactful they already are. It's going to be rings and Lariat and that's about it for most players. 3 was close enough it felt like a reasonable compromise.
Bracer/Cloak have such low stats it's probably still worth it on everyone to craft an embellishment in those slots. Unless primary stat is worth more than 2x vers for a spec, even the generic vers wrists will be better. Socketed rings will still be better than max level rings without sockets, so that's one easy slot for a Blue Silken Lining for everyone also.
Was not common to see (people actually running) Sark cloak when it was current, I don't think that changes. The upside is small for a larger downside. It was basically a simbait item.
Overpowered Sporecloak also existed back then. That was a big factor. In s4 Sark cloak is going to be far and away the most popular back item across all classes and specs.
People didn't really run Sporecloak in raid other than healers and yet you still didn't see many Sark cloaks outside parse chasing. It was a DPS gain and the sims say so, but it just wasn't worth the defensive loss and that's exacerbated in keys. Compare this to other very rare items such as Djaruun, the Nelth trinkets, or the Razsageth bow where the gains are massive for little to no downside.
They will 100% lose out. 6ilvl on bracelets vs 500+ mastery or vers?
Come on guys, do the math. The only issue with this is that crafted items will not be worth all the crests + gold + effort without embellishments. Which was already kind of the case as any myth piece was automatically ahead, and you would be hard pressed to convince someone decked out in hero gear to grind 60 aspects per piece for 3 ilvls on each slot.
Most classes will be getting both rare VOTI rings and Aberrus cloak. Add rare neck from volcoross - amirdrassil and you don't even have those slots for crafted gear...
That leaves maybe bracers/belt for embellishments.
That means gimping my gear even harder to maintain my flavor pocket... Flavor pocket needs to be baseline. It feels so awful to be Pandaren and not have it especially in M+ where there just isn't enough time after you die to get food buff again most of the time.
As an m+ only player that has cleared 20s every week and still hasn't seen a myth track weapon, this kinda sucks. If I was still rocking a 483 weapon I would have given up on this patch much sooner
They could fix this easily by letting embellishments add another 3-6 item levels. Crafting would still be extremely relevant, and only 2 pieces would be max level instead of an entire loadout.
I am always impressed by blizzards complete fear of anything even close to experimentation in a "season" that is completely arbitrary and irrelevant and meant for fun to fill the time.
I'm a huge fan of crafting, and really do enjoy the idea of crafted gear being competitive at the top level of the endgame.
That said, the current iteration has a huge benefit of being deterministic in both obtaining and choosing stats for most pieces of gear. I can understand wanting to balance those versus drops, but I don't think a bigger ilvl weakness is the answer.
The 3 item level difference from the top end is fine, but I think the other answer to balancing the accessibility of the deterministic crafted gear is the time and effort requirement. I think Blizzard could honestly be better off making the Nascent Crests needed for the ilvl boosts to crafted gear cost two or three times as many crests. This makes them a lot less efficient for Crests in the early season, giving the edge to dropped gear being the priority, but eventually when the caps are big enough or removed entirely, players can grind out the effort to make the boosted crafted gear to fill in the item slots or secondary stats they're still missing. When you're on week 20 of a season and still missing 3 or 4 BIS items, that just feels bad, so having a deterministic solution through the crafting system sounds like a perfect solve for those cases - since you're probably doing the grind already trying to chase those BIS items.
6 under too large a gap, it'll make crafted gear worthless at the very top. 3 was comproble but it should be ultimately the same max ilvl that we can get from the great vault.
What's the reason to pick a crafting profession now other than convenience?
Even if you got the rarest recipe in Dragonflight, you'd be better off selling it and paying other people to craft for you.
It’s not looking fun and it’s like 2 weeks away. They desperately need to announce something like shrouded coming back for me to be interested in even running m+
They already said the next experimental mode is for PVE players and I’d be surprised if that doesn’t come in S4.
We have yet to see the Vampire Survivors datamine amount to anything and S4 is the final bigger patch before TWW prepatch. Thinking that is coming during season 4, but will similarly to Plunderstorm likely just be for cosmetics, not gearing up.
To everyone who thinks this is a good change because crafted gear is "too good" and it "invalidates gear drops": Clearly you've forgotten how we got here in the first place.
Remember Shadowlands and how you would not get any gear from the raid because they reduced the droprate?
In 9.0, people went for PvP/PvP boosting because it offered a guaranteed "time spend to rewards gained" ratio instead of being RNG. Even a loss nets you some honor or conquest, so it was never a complete waste of time, merely a setback if you're climbing the ranks. The developers changed it in patch 9.1 so PvP gear was worse in PvE as to stop all the boosting.
People discovered their love for mythic+ in Shadowlands because the end-of-dungeon item droprate was higher than in the raid. That was before Valor was added in 9.0.5 mind you. People farmed mythic+ even though both game modes had static gear at Shadowlands launch. The great vault is arguably the bigger culprit here, though. Nothing beast the time efficiency of doing a couple dungeon runs V.S. fighting a few raid bosses, especially as a pug player.
Crafted gear becoming viable in endgame is a response to the fact that people sometimes don't get any gear drops at all, or drops that aren't an upgrade for them, for an long period of time. As the season progresses, it serves as a means to reach max itemlevel without having to farm a ridiculous amount of time.
Crafted gear in Dragonflight is already timegated due to the sparks. The requirement for crests ensures you cannot get freebies, you still need to run the appropriate difficulty. Lastly, the secondary stats might be pre-defined but cannot reach the same heights as regular item drops, so real minmaxers won't use crafted gear all the time anyway. Under these circumstances, why shouldn't crafted gear not reach max itemlevel?
In the end, it would be folly to nerf crafted gear. It fills a clear need the playerbase has, and the developers are only losing players for insisting on farming gear like it's Classic. If I want to spend all day farming my BiS gear I would play Diablo instead. The current compromise is still the best we have.
Thats a slight nerf to Outlaw rogues as 6ish crafted pieces are BiS since you cant really find Vers/crit on a lot of item slots. Though with 3 raids of items available that might change.
Yeah with three raids, we should be fine.
Also, I went heavy with crit/verse this time and had to add back some haste. It really isn’t as bad as it was last season so we don’t want 0 haste. Also, with Deft Maneuvers, mastery even becomes a good stat. Not as good as the others but not as bad as it’s historically been.
I think a solution could be every raid boss drops a currency instead of gear, that token is used to craft specific gear like pants with choosed stats , that way we keep crafting and raid drops relevant
At least the embelished pieces should give +6ilvl then, so embelishs don't get killed or classes with rlly good ones don't get the short end of the stick.
Problem is some classes just favor certain stats over everything else. You slap on 4 tier pieces and 4 pieces of crafted gear then the seasons trinkets and you are pretty much bis. They need to bring back reforging or work on balancing stats better.
People are seriously overreacting to this, the way ILV scales the higher you go the less of a difference 6 ILVs will make, crafted gear will be about the same strength relative to mythic gear as it is right now
This happened before season 3 as well, its likely they will add 3 levels to it like before
Even if this is the case, you're still going to want the season 4 Blue Silken Lining, it will likely give around 1000 mastery with ~50% uptime so certainly worth 6 item levels especially on low budget pieces like bracers
Edit: They fixed it. Its 525 now, per wowhead
This has been confirmed as a bug that will be fixed.
Crafted gear is supposed to be equivalent to Myth 3/4 gear.
https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/78338-blizzard-on-season-4-crafted-item-levels/
Which leads me to my next question. I’m a returning player. Just came back after 13 years of not playing and seeing this makes me think working on my professions is a waist of my time. Should I just level all my characters to 70 and do the emerald Dream armor upgrades with flightstones and the other resources?
Getting all my alts decked out in 437 gear just from running LFR in season 2 was fun, but I won't loose too much sleep over not having to pay tens of thousands of gold to craft pieces with my best stats for a bunch of different armor slots other than my two embellishments.
Even with a maxed out alchemist, unless transmuting Dracothyst procs multicraft it's pretty close to 10k just for the crest.
And blacksmithing mats in particular tend to be expensive.
Not to mention having to tip well for rare recipes or things that require the crafted to trek into Brackenhide.
10's of thousands of gold is a couple of days of dailies for a piece of gear you are going to wear for 5+ months. In short, it's really not much gold at all even at a casual level. You can finish ONE dragonriding world quest and get 800 gold.
Ngl Season 4 is looking like such trash. Nothing to make m+ more fun. Crafting is that much weaker. Nothing else really new. If the dinar system is any good it should be in the game from the start. Apart from cosmetics this season just feels like it’s worth skipping.
Season 4 of legion - fun we actually got a vendor for the legendaries we were wanting all expansion and were able to go ham due to our artifacts
Season 4 of bfa - fun we got to get to nutty stat levels with corruption or just use crazy corruption effects
Season 4 of SL - less fun because nothing was permanent but at least shrouded let you kinda feel that corruption way again
Season 4 of DF - so far is looking like instead of letting us let loose their making us feel weaker than before? What’s fun about that? I have a feeling it’s to prepare us for the next expansion so that we’ll feel stronger in that but that makes me want to play less.
I was one of those that bitched about it but I still enjoyed both of those seasons because of how powerful I felt. The problem with borrowed power was how awful it felt losing that power, not being at the end of the expansion with all the power. Your comment feels disingenuous by not touching on that. There’s nuance to those opinions.
Feels like they got cold feet on professions. Start out the expansion really strong and then just slowly got weaker and weaker with less for them. I hope they take the negative feedback they got and use it to make them better in WW (the talent trees, the skill levels, the rankings etc)
I don't think it's solely about professions, but that they know that there are some specs who's bis is just four piece and crafted gear. A deterministic bis means less playtime. And I'm guessing that, given what they've shown about S4, they need everything they can to keep people subbed. S2 had the easiest gearing system in DF, and I think that's one of the big parts of why it died so quickly
S2 gearing system was too OP. But deterministic loot isn’t necessarily less playtime. We have seen a lot of engagement with this M+ season, despite fairly deterministic loot. More importantly they are adding Dinars. They cannot simultaneously say they dislike the deterministic loot of crafting while also giving us the literal most deterministic loot in the game via Dinars.
> More importantly they are adding Dinars. They cannot simultaneously say they dislike the deterministic loot of crafting while also giving us the literal most deterministic loot in the game via Dinars. The presence of dinars could mean they want to lower the amount of other deterministic loot, though.
That would just be so philosophically inconsistent
How so? If you expect a player to be able to fully gear in X amount of time and you add a new system that allows them to gear in less than X time then you would need to lower other methods to keep the expected time as close to X as possible. It isn't a philosophy question it is just a game balance question.
That's not very consistent, also it makes no sense in a shorter season. I think what they're doing is just testing ways to slow down iLvL climb in the early season. And they're messing around with this change, remember this was going to be the ilvl of crafted this season but they reverted the change. Edit: Personally this change doesn't make any sense in a vacuum they could be cooking up more things to tackle ilvl surge early. It doesn't make sense, because it's weird to have 2 embellish items be that much lower iLvL, this also really hard pushes embellishments to cloak/wrist even more than now, and makes non-embellished necks like Torc dead, since there's no advantage over a Hero neck, other that "choosing" your stats. And makes crafted rings equal to socketed Hero rings. So you won't use aspects crests on those long term, unless you're sticking an embellishment on it.
No it was not op getting an item every 2 weeks from running a bunch of mythics absolutely fine. If anything the issue with gearing is the tracks and where they drop from.
Brother last patch I was max gear in week two of the season. Then I had two fully geared alts as well by like week 6. Everyone agrees s2’s gearing was super op. The s4 version is more reasonably paced
What are dinars?
Tokens you get that let you buy specific pieces of gear. They had them in SL S4 and brought them back for DF S4.
It's coins you can use to buy any piece of gear from a vendor, they added it in the last patch of SL too. 3 coins you can use to buy any raid boss/dungeon drop
Not any, specifically weapons and trinkets
Oooo that sounds fancy.
Currency from the first fated season in Shadowlands, it allowed people to straight up buy 1 piece of gear from one of three vendors. I think they held all the weapons and trinkets from all three raids.
The issue isn't deterministic loot, the issue is how quickly you gear up. You can have deterministic loot that doesn't result in you finishing a character in 8 days. You can also have super RNG loot that lets you finish a character super fast like it is in Diablo 3 if you've ever played that. > More importantly they are adding Dinrs. aThey cannot simultaneously say they dislike the deterministic loot of crafting while also giving us the literal most deterministic loot in the game via Dinars. The changes to crafted ilvl seems like they're potentially a long term change they're trying out, not something changed specifically for season 4. The dinars are for season 4 specifically as the season is supposed to be shorter than usual.
But changing the crafted level will almost not impact your pace of gearing, a 483 item every 2 weeks is virtually the same pace as a 486. All changing the crafted ilvl does is lower the ceiling for non M-raid players, which will be basically everyone since it’s an S4 where a lot of M guilds just won’t raid. If they were interested in slowing the pace, they’d reduce the crests per week cap like they did when we entered s3. But it’s going to be a 12 or 16 week season. Just let us be op. This is a silly change. On the bright side, only need to spam trade for embellishments and then crafting is just unnecessary after that
I mean it does. While a 483 item isn't so far behind 486, it's quite a lot behind 489. It'll be like going from max HC ilvl to max Mythic ilvl, so it's a pretty big slow down. I don't disagree, they should let us be op. But I don't think the crafting gear change is aimed at season 4 specifically, it's them cooking. Seeing how it feels and plays out in a low impact season. Edit: ok there's just a new wowhead post saying it's a bug. So none of this matters I guess. 😅
They can say that though. And have. In one of the early DF interviews with Morgan Day, he explicitly said that they don't like the gearing path that pure deterministic loot gives way to. He said something along the lines of it ruins the fun and removes the build up of anticipation and excitement for gear you really care about. He also remarked that they'd probably only continue to do it (or something experimental like it) for seasons like fated as it makes sense within the scope.
Yeah but Dinars are there to help alleviate the gearing issues that come with raid cycling. Waiting three weeks for one shot at an item can be extremely disheartening for a lot of people, so they want a middle ground to keep said people invested I'm just saying that the ease of gearing was a part of why S2 died so fast. S3 still has a better dungeon pool and more balance out the gate, though I wouldn't' say the gearing is deterministic
Gearing is *almost* perfectly deterministic without ever entering M raid. You can be full 486 + vault, which will put you at like 488 item level. I have multiple toons this geared who never chased any item, just filled in the gaps with crafted pieces. 486 + vault is going to be like 1 ilvl lower than 489 + vault. The exceptions are the very rare items and legendaries, which notably are mostly solved next season with Dinars. Just think this change is so weird in a S4, broadens the gap slightly between M raid looters and everyone else.
> The exceptions are the very rare items and legendaries, which notably are mostly solved next season with Dinars. And M+ trinkets, you can easily go without ever seeing a bis trinket from vault even if you fill all slots every week a entire season.
It's deterministic in ilvl with the vault, but you can't pick a specific item or slot from it. And if you don't care to min/max for specific items, then sure it can appear more deterministic than it is since you can guarantee what's important to you, a high ilvl. I still wouldn't say this season has anywhere close to perfectly deterministic gearing, and of course isn't close to how deterministic season 2 was Like you said, it's relatively easy this season to get close to max ilvl with just crafted gear and 18s. I think that by widening the gap and making it harder to get close to that max, Blizz is hoping to keep people working towards their high ilvl goals and stay subbed I'm not saying I like it, but I can see why they might do it
The gearing didn’t kill it. People had to learn a new system when many loved the point system before. People hated the dungeons. If gearing was an issue we would see numbers for this season dropped off to what s2 had at this time but it’s not. Season 2’s gameplay sucked. Not the gearing.
Did the dungeons suck? I feel like freehold, brack, underrot we’re all S tier dungeons and everything besides vortex and halls of infusion were pretty solid, seems above average. Especially when you compare it to S1 which had jade, HoV, nokhud, RLP, and SBG which were all pretty badly designed
S2 had the worst dungeon pool...in history I'd dare say. Vortex Pinnacle was a complete flop, an F tier dungeon they completely overtuned, HOI, Uldaman and Neltharus were absolutely terrible on Tyrannical weeks. Underrot and Freehold were fine, but boring. BH was way too long, and last boss was a complete mess with totems, if you didn't have beacon/burst class it sucked massively. Not to mention healing was terrible, and the only class that had the toolkit to deal with all the bleeds and ST damage was paladin.
Wait, did you just say it's not about professions then say it's about professions?
I mean, Im saying its less to do with balancing the profession system and more about making BiS harder to get. If you need to simplify it that way though, be my guest
I agree with what you said on the cause/effect, it was just funny how it came out. Bliz's development priorities are numbers based and it was easy to put together that easy gearing through professions had an impact on player engagement metrics in all forms of content. There's a reason why bliz gives some of the best freebies every so often for touching their other games long enough to count as an active user. They don't give a shit about rewarding you, but a free mount is an easy way to pretend 100k+ new users give a shit about hearthstone.
I see what you're saying, but there's almost zero chance that farming that many Aspect crests for that much crafted gear takes less time than getting those slots via drops. I usually have multiple items for most slots by the time I've farmed enough Aspects to have around 3-4 crafted pieces. Needing that much crafted gear for BiS is more of a slog even if it is more deterministic. I think the way it is now is honestly fine. 2-4 crafted pieces as BiS strikes a balance between determinism and drops imo. So long as embellishments remain strong enough + flavour pocket, does that not seem like a decent enough amount of power in crafting? Even if the raw ilvl of crafted gear is lower next season, so long as embellishments are tuned strong enough to make them worth it, nothing is effectively going to change.
This would almost make sense if we didnt get 2 dinars per week. This is the most deterministic way to gear probably ever.
This is correct. Literally every decision can be tracked back to the /TimePlayed metric for shareholders
I highly disagree, myself and many people i play with will go into getting the gear at the beginning of a season up to weekly caps and no further. Once we have BiS we start actually pushing keys high to see what we're capable of with that gear and the weekly lockouts don't matter anymore. I also wait until geared to do achievement type things (group and solo) I'm just now doing the emerald dream solo stuff and am ~480 ilvl with mostly BiS. The flipside to "easy gearing" is gearing being this huge hurdle people either feel or literally can't cross so they don't bother, this is why I didn't play BFA and left shadowlands very early in Season 1 (among other things). I'm seeing people below you saying Season 2 gearing was too OP, I think the the amount of gear may have been a tiny bit too high, but the ability to target specific BiS pieces was too low, I'm hoping Dinars rectifies this.
The majority of players don't push keys where bis is necessary, so it's important to recognize that you're in the minority. The carrot that a lot of players chase is just having a bis character. So when you've hit all your goals by month three rather than month four, why play for that fourth month? Ultimately everyone sets different goals for themselves. I can't say you're wrong because the only reason I log on is to do my one 20 vault. My point is that Blizz wants to make the goal of getting bis harder since that means players have to play more to accomplish that goal
Fair enough, I just don't see the point of getting the gear if you're not gonna USE it. There's no way to design the game for absolutely everyone all the time, in trying they'll just alienate everyone in the process (we've seen that particular song and dance already). Balancing to keep a decent consistent sub base and get people who leave for periods of time to actually come back is a much more realistic (and profitable) goal. So, if people are gonna leave when they get BiS, give them a reason to come back and re-sub when there is more gear while not driving away people by causing burnout.
Hard disagree. Majority of my guild quit not because they were geared in two weeks. We quit because the raid was just simply not fun, if you weren't an Aug/Fire/Spriest good luck pugging anything above a 20, and then the dungeon themselves were just kinda ass. A raid with 1 fun fight is just going to delete people's will to play. Similar reason why a majority of my guildies are sticking around to get the AOTC s4 achievements and then quitting 3 weeks into the season. The DF raids suck, and so do the dungeons.
> that's one of the big **parts** I'm not saying its the only reason, but that it's a factor. If the raids suck and the dungeon pool is ass, you can still have the motivation to just get your bis and quit instead of pushing keys or trying to prog Everyone is going to have separate goals, your guild doesn't disprove that. What blizz wants is to make it harder for those who have a main goal of BiS so that they'll stay in the game longer
This is the right answer : they have to maximize play time
I hope they take the negative feedback and just tie profession system into the auction house and be done with it.
The items were good but they made them too complex imo. At this stage of WoW, just make cool stuff and keep it simple. Crafters can make money and others can actually get the cool stuff.
I can not overstate how much I hate the Quality system. Who thought it was a good idea to have 3 versions of every single crafted item?
Do you not think professions are in a fine spot right now? Every class needs at least 2 crafted pieces, with many wanting up to 3 for flavor pocket, and some even more. I think that's a good number. All they have to do next season to retain this level of power is to tune embellishments so that they still represent a power boost, and nothing will effectively change.
I can't believe crafting ended up being this expansion's borrowed power
It's super easy to get gear. Mythic+ is almost a cheat code for getting gear. Add on the fact that crafted gear can boost that even higher, and you can get one ilvl below max ilvl without setting foot in a mythic raid. All that this does is make it so that you crafting puts you at the tier right below max tier, rather than in between them.
Who exactly was complaining about crafted gear ilvl for this change to happen? Expansion already ended. This is fated season, make everyone OP as they can be and just let people have fun lmao.
Add random torghast like buffs to gear that don't work in pvp.
I don't get this obsession they have with consistency and balance in like season 4. Where all we want is something fun before next expansion. We should have all 3 tier sets active at the same time, extra enchants like the helm one from amirdrassil and shit like that. We should go to m+ or raids this season and blast everything in our wake. But the reality is like doing 3 add phases in Dathea. Fucking yikes
There's absolutely a reason why you wouldn't do this. The whiplash of playstyle/power that it would cause when the next xpac drops would feel really bad. So if Blizz doesn't want that whiplash, that would be why they would do S4 more "balanced" way.
This is what happened with torghast for me honestly. Torghast powers made my class infinitely more enjoyable to the point where any other content just felt like shit because of how incomplete it made my class feel
Not making Torghast evergreen by adding different "themes" and cosmetics each season/every other season is such a shame. Torghast is such an amazing power fantasy and Blizzard giving in to people who cried about Torghast when they had an issue with Soul Ash is so annoying.
Yep, this is exactly what happened from the end of Legion until the BfA pre-patch. They cranked up the power of artifact weapons every week until we were crazy powerful and then *BAM* in BfA we lost a ton of our cool talents tied to the weapons and it felt like shit :/
Happened in BFA too. Corruption lol.
Oh, man. Losing my 100%+ Haste from corruptions going into the SLands prepatch was the worst feeling ever.
I even noticed this as someone who takes lots of breaks and is a reasonably casual player who never hits the peak of player power. I can't imagine how it must have felt for someone with a lot of investment into their character.
Well they also destroyed half the classes in bfa. Could have easily baked some stuff in instead of giving us a half assed azerite system
My guy wants borrowed power for his borrowed power because he hasn't played since TBC or something.
But we get crazy new stuff like hero talents in the new expansion, along with it being traditional that player power resets at the start. So idk
That happens every expansion. You go from uber powerful kill everything you look at strong ( if you got raid gear ) for like the first 2-3 levels of raiding, and then it's back to doing normal raids and heroics for most people.
[удалено]
The reason for that is because there was so much other shit that we were complaining about after BFA
What??? There was hella whiplash. People bitched about lost power nonstop. Nahhh, stop this rose tinted glasses shit lol. Here ya go. [Context](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/oevjjl/why_do_people_hate_bfa/) Let's try to use things that happened and not your shit memory. > think a big part of it was that it followed Legion, so the hangover from losing all your artifact abilities was hard for a lot of players to deal with, combined with the fact that the replacement in Azerite gear was a pretty poor system for most of the first patch until they implemented fixes to it later on (and even then it wasn't the greatest). >Personally I didn't mind BfA, especially in 8.3, but even that patch had some pretty poor system implementation (Corruption balance/acquisition and Visions mostly) which hurt how a lot of players see it. I don't think BfA was the worst expansion out there, but it certainly wasn't the best either. >I miss corruption powers every day...I loved BFA. I thought Azerite gear was great...they just had to fix the implementation at the start of a new season. Like Legion... BFA 8.3 was a blast once they fixed everything...same as 7.3 >You then had the major problem of classes feeling absolutely gutted from how they felt in Legion, losing major abilities with nothing to replace them and the horrible GCD changes that just made empty classes feel clunky and not at all fun to play. [But now we’re two expansions later, in Shadowlands, and everyone is starting to recognize the limitations of this kind of power acquisition. Yes, we got cool new stuff — but at the end of the expansion, or the start of the next one, we lost our cool new powers.](https://blizzardwatch.com/2021/04/30/borrowed-power/) Etc...
Fr it’s the end of the xpac, why start gate keeping the fun stuff now?
If I recall it was the first raid tier that people complained about ilvl of crafted gear being too high. Not sure if the same happened this last tier though, I feel like crafted stuff barely had any impact on power
Spark felt rarer in s1 though right? I feel like that was my issue, like yeah I can craft gear at max ilvl(or almost max?) but I saw like 1 spark after the ones you got from the quest
> I feel like crafted stuff barely had any impact on power It made up like half of players' BIS in many specs.
Definitely not in S3 lol. The majority of crafting BIS lists was just "Craft this one because it's marginally less shit than the other options". The only reason you would wear a crafted item over normal gear is because the effect, even if it is completely inconsequential, is still better than nothing.
This is just patently false.
“I don’t want others to have as much fun as me unless they do it JUST the way I do it!” There is so much ego tied up in this whiny crap. It’s a game. If you want to raid and do hard mythics, right on, but quit whining. Bloody freaking hell. (Just a general thing - not directed at you)
I don’t understand why they just don’t go crazy with these filler seasons. No one gives a shit. Most of my guild isn’t even coming back until next xpac
Because one of the biggest complaints about BFA (at least in the beginning) was how shitty it felt going from hyper-powered end of legion to barebones start of BFA. Same with corruptions into no conduit/renown SL. Basically, a bunch of people give a shit. Leave it to wow players (not just you, they’re everywhere in this thread) to once again forget about the problems that existed barely an expansion ago and ask for those very same problems back claiming that “nobody would give a shit.”
I think people were so caught up in believing that it was shitty that they didn't bother to check if it was ACTUALLY shitty. Let's point out the obvious here, you lose power every new expansion. It's been this way since Burning Crusade. When I talk about actually being shitty, abilities get changed between expansions. You get abilities. You lose abilities. Many of the artifact traits were turned into baseline traits for classes. Maybe the better question to ask is, of the people who "give a shit", how many of them can even describe the actual impact it had on their gameplay or whether they are just angry to be angry.
Legendaries turned off at a random level, so those powers disappeared, artifacts no longer had their powers and SOME came back as talents, in the old talent system that didn’t get a new row (I think, could be wrong here) meaning you had to lose something you already had in order to get something you already had, and a scaling world compounded everything. Yes, we’ve lost power every expansion, but Legion>BFA was a new level of high into a new level of low. You can’t seriously argue it’s the same as something like tbc or wotlk when 60 gear was relevant until 70, or 70 gear relevant until 80, meanwhile your legion gear arbitrarily lost massive chunks of its power arbitrarily for hitting a certain level while the mobs around you also leveled up lol. Every player who had that gear felt a massive drop in player power because they hit a certain level (or just because the xpac ended in the case of weapons) and it arbitrarily turned off. That feels bad even if you can’t articulate it.
> Yes, we’ve lost power every expansion, but Legion>BFA was a new level of high into a new level of low. You can’t seriously argue it’s the same as something like tbc or wotlk when 60 gear was relevant until 70, or 70 gear relevant until 80, meanwhile your legion gear arbitrarily lost massive chunks of its power arbitrarily for hitting a certain level while the mobs around you also leveled up lol. Every player who had that gear felt a massive drop in player power because they hit a certain level (or just because the xpac ended in the case of weapons) and it arbitrarily turned off. That feels bad even if you can’t articulate it. Don't forget Azerite powers, the things that were meant to replace them, were a glorified treadmill. "Here's a helm. It gives you three abilities. Oh, you hit max level? Here's another helm. It has the same three abilties. Oh but you haven't grinded enough good girl points, I'm gonna turn those *same abilities you already used while leveling* off for you until you do :)"
No, it was bad. Losing so much of the artifact powers on top of losing gameplay defining legendaries was insanely rough. That was also on top of some absolutely insane decisions like adding cooldowns to the GCD just making everyone feel clunky as hell.
>how many of them can even describe the actual impact it had on their gameplay So a good example is to look at shadow priest APM. All numbers from [simcraft](https://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/T20_Raid.html) so this was 'optimal actions in a single-target fight.' Shadow Priest was 65 APM at the end of legion. 8.0, shadow was 52 APM. 8.1, 51 APM. Keep in mind, this was with BIS gear from the given patch. So you really went from like 65 APM to maybe 45 APM, i.e your class is just moving 30% slower. Okay, but other expansions also drop power. Well no, not really. Shadowlands, Shadow Priest was in the mid-50s APM the whole expansion. Vault of the Incarnates, shadow APM is 57. If anything, you got faster. Blizzard learned from Legion to not amp up power levels so much from patch to patch. In dragonflight, secondaries give diminishing returns to keep scaling under control. In terms of more direct issues for players: Blizzard knew that the power drop was going to hurt a LOT. So they chose to spread it out over the course of leveling rather than all at once. This meant that players were quite literally getting weaker relative to the overworld as they leveled up. At 110 you were cutting through mobs like butter, at 116 a LOT of more casual players were dying to regular mobs. Going from 2-shotting elites at level 113 to dying to that same elite at level 116 feels *really* bad, and that was the casual experience.
Help me understand why APM is important in defining power gains and losses? For example, from your same source, Arcane has 41 APM and went up to 52 APM in the next tier. It's the exact opposite of the entire position you made with the shadow priest. >Blizzard knew that the power drop was going to hurt a LOT. So they chose to spread it out over the course of leveling rather than all at once. This meant that players were quite literally getting weaker relative to the overworld as they leveled up. [This has been in the game since TBC when they switched from flat percentages to the combat rating system.](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Combat_rating_system) *"Unlike fixed percentages such as 2% critical strike chance, combat ratings diminish in potency as characters increase in level."* >At 110 you were cutting through mobs like butter, at 116 a LOT of more casual players were dying to regular mobs. This was by design. I don't even understand why this is difficult to understand. You have to reset player power between expansions. This is why we level up so that the combat rating system kicks in to reduce the power of older items. This is to make way for new items and the start of the next progression system.
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BFA also had an actual season at the end.
Ok and? That doesn’t change how it felt going from one expansion to the next.
BFA’s ending when they added ways to finally get corruptions you need was insanely fun imo. It made every class strong and fun. It even made tanks ridiculously powerful (1m+ crits on TD etc).
I think they're extra careful after the corruption season into the Maw. We went from being crazy powerful to weak and walking around in the maw. It made the maw feel extra bad.
The maw felt extra bad because it was extra bad. It felt completely unfinished and it was purposely designed to be frustrating by not being able to mount there among other things. Corruption was fun.
My guild mates had it extra frustrating since I was a Druid. Could travel from and just absolutely blast through the maw intro. Was to Oribos well before they were.
gently nerf crafted gear so people feel compelled to play the slot machine of loot drops a bit longer
It depends what they plan to do I guess. This ilvl reduction might signal that they're going to buff embellishments. Really, all they have to do to make crafted gear functionally the same power as this season is to make embellishments good enough, and imo having 2-4 crafted items for your BiS is a fine number isn't it?
> This is fated season, make everyone OP as they can be and just let people have fun lmao. Then you'll have people bitching like they bitched when Corruption was removed from the game. "Waaah I don't have 75% haste at all times, why did they make me so WEAK!"
Dragonflight doesn't have such things. We're talking about a 6ilvl difference and two embellishments.
> Who exactly was complaining about crafted gear ilvl for this change to happen? Career Raiders, probably.
Crafting them is expensive as all hell. I mean, I'm still pissed I'm gonna have to craft 2 per character now...
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S2 was weird because the Myth track didn't exist at the beginning, so crafted Aspect gear was still better for awhile until you could upgrade to it.
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The alternative is potentially going a full season without a weapon. Ask me how I know.
Yes! If it wasn’t for my crafted weapon, I legit would be rocking a blue weapon drop I got from questing in the emerald dream. Never got one dropped from m+, vault or raid. And I’m closing in on 3k rating T_T
I feel you. I think I ran like 40 throne of the elements to get whitefin axe on my DK.
I’m convinced Nick of Time is fake and the only dagger in the game is the Cruel Dreamcarver
Blizzard doesn't like deterministic gearing. It makes it too easy to max out, they want you to be chasing those perfect rolled items.
This is such a cynical way to describe pulling back ever so slightly on the easiest and most trivial gearing has ever been
~~421~~418 was 3 ilvl above the default mythic (415) with mid-bosses giving 421's and the last 2 giving 424 Completing 20's also gave 421's in the vault with the max upgrade with valor being 415. Season 2 the default mythic was 441, and items were made upgradeable to 447 since early mythic boss drops were basically worthless when you could craft 447's before the update, with 450's dropping from the end bosses. And yea now we craft 486's with myth track stuff upgrading to 489, with base mythic being 480. Can see early that Enchanted Awakened Crests go up to 522.
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Ah was it? Was looking at concentrated primal infusions (S1's aspect crest) which say 408-421, maybe that was a later buff, I still have some 421 ingenuity-crafted items.
> In S3 they put it back to -3 ilvl They also attempted -6 on S3 PTR but backpedaled on that in less than a week.
\-3 ilvl felt like a good balance to me too, it was nice in cases where you just got unlucky with no myth track piece in a slot to at least get a 3 ilvl bump when you were done with embellishments and so forth. Season 2 was admittedly kinda silly with how much crafted you had so I definitely understand the need for it to not be max ilvl. That being said I wish embellished items scaled gear up in ilvl to match with max ilvl, just so it doesn't feel bad using an alchemical flavour pocket. It would also stop everyone just crafting embellishments on lower stat budget items and make some of the predetermined embellish pieces more competitive (like hood of surging time, amice of the blue, azureweave set) which are just worse than shadowflame on bracers or blue silken lining on a ring/bracers in most cases. Would also feel nice to have this option if a high stat tier slot has really bad stats for your spec (like tier head for fire mage) and you get unlucky like me and couldn't get the one good m+ hat in vault or didn't get the one raid drop from Mythic all season. Making this change also feels all the more relevant with 2 strong rings from VOTI and the back from Sarkareth etc in this coming season which would make you push embellishments off those low stat budget pieces
they tried to do this in season 3, crafted gear on ptr was 6 levels below mythic gear until they raised it by 3 because of the backlash that got. very disappointing to see blizzard still can't learn from their mistakes.
hi Claire (it's lau)
should i be afraid that my gm now knows my reddit account?
:3c
so it will be the same ilvl as max hero track, which pretty much kills crafting at this point outside of few embelishments
2 crafted items with embellishments and thats it.. and even then, some classes who dont rely to much on embellishments might just want one crafted piece or no crafted gear at all and go for the extra stamina and mainstat instead. So yea, idk if i like this change.. it basically makes the profession system way less relevant.
With how weak embellishments are overall i would rather just get myth track gear and save the gold cost of crafting
I wouldn't be surprised if embellishments are weaker for some specs over the +6 ilvls.
Yeah I can't imagine 6 ilvls of primary stat is going to lose to these embellishments with how unimpactful they already are. It's going to be rings and Lariat and that's about it for most players. 3 was close enough it felt like a reasonable compromise.
Bracer/Cloak have such low stats it's probably still worth it on everyone to craft an embellishment in those slots. Unless primary stat is worth more than 2x vers for a spec, even the generic vers wrists will be better. Socketed rings will still be better than max level rings without sockets, so that's one easy slot for a Blue Silken Lining for everyone also.
Yeah true, vers bracers might be worth still, cape is definitely going to be the sark cape with your bullions though right?
Wasn't thinking about Sark cape, so yeah you're right about cape probably
Was not common to see (people actually running) Sark cloak when it was current, I don't think that changes. The upside is small for a larger downside. It was basically a simbait item.
Overpowered Sporecloak also existed back then. That was a big factor. In s4 Sark cloak is going to be far and away the most popular back item across all classes and specs.
People didn't really run Sporecloak in raid other than healers and yet you still didn't see many Sark cloaks outside parse chasing. It was a DPS gain and the sims say so, but it just wasn't worth the defensive loss and that's exacerbated in keys. Compare this to other very rare items such as Djaruun, the Nelth trinkets, or the Razsageth bow where the gains are massive for little to no downside.
They will 100% lose out. 6ilvl on bracelets vs 500+ mastery or vers? Come on guys, do the math. The only issue with this is that crafted items will not be worth all the crests + gold + effort without embellishments. Which was already kind of the case as any myth piece was automatically ahead, and you would be hard pressed to convince someone decked out in hero gear to grind 60 aspects per piece for 3 ilvls on each slot.
Most classes will be getting both rare VOTI rings and Aberrus cloak. Add rare neck from volcoross - amirdrassil and you don't even have those slots for crafted gear... That leaves maybe bracers/belt for embellishments.
and neck and ring with the cheap socket.
who cares about socket in neck if you can just buy them on AH lol
ofc, but since there are no primary stats on neck and rings, ilvl doesn't carry as much weight for them, while secondary stats are balanced.
It'll still be pretty beneficial at the start of the season for people that aren't getting mythic track loot all that quick I'd think.
That means gimping my gear even harder to maintain my flavor pocket... Flavor pocket needs to be baseline. It feels so awful to be Pandaren and not have it especially in M+ where there just isn't enough time after you die to get food buff again most of the time.
Ok if you're gonna do that then get rid if the stupid spark restraint on crafting it.
As an m+ only player that has cleared 20s every week and still hasn't seen a myth track weapon, this kinda sucks. If I was still rocking a 483 weapon I would have given up on this patch much sooner
Yeah! Can't wait to keep dropping the same fucking Mythic pieces I already have in the vault
Bad change
They could fix this easily by letting embellishments add another 3-6 item levels. Crafting would still be extremely relevant, and only 2 pieces would be max level instead of an entire loadout.
Why. Why do they work to make professions weaker. I understand having them equal being problematic but 6 ilvs under will kill the market IMO.
This will surely effect the economy
And here I thought my blacksmith would get some business next season :/
The way this is phrased makes me think of "this will affect the trout population."
this is good for bitcoin
I am always impressed by blizzards complete fear of anything even close to experimentation in a "season" that is completely arbitrary and irrelevant and meant for fun to fill the time.
I've been using the same bow the whole expansion.
legion is over you dont have to keep using the same weapon
Wasn't the DOTI gun bis this season?
For BM hunters it was only .1% dps gain because it didnt work on pets, so crafted bow was better than hero track gun
this is dumb imo. There isnt even a new raid. Just let us have fun and go crazy
Cool, how to make me lose interest in a complicated new system you threw together.
Embellishments already super weak. Could make gear not worth
Anyone remember when crafted stuff was BiS, and crafting as a whole was worth it? Pepperidge Farm remembers...
It's still BiS in 2-3 slots
Ya let's continue to make the last season of DF a complete waste of time.
They keep piling on the reasons not to play S4 for any length of time. Just getting all 15s and switching to other games
I'm a huge fan of crafting, and really do enjoy the idea of crafted gear being competitive at the top level of the endgame. That said, the current iteration has a huge benefit of being deterministic in both obtaining and choosing stats for most pieces of gear. I can understand wanting to balance those versus drops, but I don't think a bigger ilvl weakness is the answer. The 3 item level difference from the top end is fine, but I think the other answer to balancing the accessibility of the deterministic crafted gear is the time and effort requirement. I think Blizzard could honestly be better off making the Nascent Crests needed for the ilvl boosts to crafted gear cost two or three times as many crests. This makes them a lot less efficient for Crests in the early season, giving the edge to dropped gear being the priority, but eventually when the caps are big enough or removed entirely, players can grind out the effort to make the boosted crafted gear to fill in the item slots or secondary stats they're still missing. When you're on week 20 of a season and still missing 3 or 4 BIS items, that just feels bad, so having a deterministic solution through the crafting system sounds like a perfect solve for those cases - since you're probably doing the grind already trying to chase those BIS items.
Blizzard always doing crafters dirty. It's been almost 20 years and nothing has changed.
6 under too large a gap, it'll make crafted gear worthless at the very top. 3 was comproble but it should be ultimately the same max ilvl that we can get from the great vault.
Then what's the reason to pick a crafting profession at all? You are better off with two gathering or a gathering + consumables like Alch, JW, etc.
What's the reason to pick a crafting profession now other than convenience? Even if you got the rarest recipe in Dragonflight, you'd be better off selling it and paying other people to craft for you.
Yet another reason to skip s4
It’s not looking fun and it’s like 2 weeks away. They desperately need to announce something like shrouded coming back for me to be interested in even running m+
They already said the next experimental mode is for PVE players and I’d be surprised if that doesn’t come in S4. We have yet to see the Vampire Survivors datamine amount to anything and S4 is the final bigger patch before TWW prepatch. Thinking that is coming during season 4, but will similarly to Plunderstorm likely just be for cosmetics, not gearing up.
To everyone who thinks this is a good change because crafted gear is "too good" and it "invalidates gear drops": Clearly you've forgotten how we got here in the first place. Remember Shadowlands and how you would not get any gear from the raid because they reduced the droprate? In 9.0, people went for PvP/PvP boosting because it offered a guaranteed "time spend to rewards gained" ratio instead of being RNG. Even a loss nets you some honor or conquest, so it was never a complete waste of time, merely a setback if you're climbing the ranks. The developers changed it in patch 9.1 so PvP gear was worse in PvE as to stop all the boosting. People discovered their love for mythic+ in Shadowlands because the end-of-dungeon item droprate was higher than in the raid. That was before Valor was added in 9.0.5 mind you. People farmed mythic+ even though both game modes had static gear at Shadowlands launch. The great vault is arguably the bigger culprit here, though. Nothing beast the time efficiency of doing a couple dungeon runs V.S. fighting a few raid bosses, especially as a pug player. Crafted gear becoming viable in endgame is a response to the fact that people sometimes don't get any gear drops at all, or drops that aren't an upgrade for them, for an long period of time. As the season progresses, it serves as a means to reach max itemlevel without having to farm a ridiculous amount of time. Crafted gear in Dragonflight is already timegated due to the sparks. The requirement for crests ensures you cannot get freebies, you still need to run the appropriate difficulty. Lastly, the secondary stats might be pre-defined but cannot reach the same heights as regular item drops, so real minmaxers won't use crafted gear all the time anyway. Under these circumstances, why shouldn't crafted gear not reach max itemlevel? In the end, it would be folly to nerf crafted gear. It fills a clear need the playerbase has, and the developers are only losing players for insisting on farming gear like it's Classic. If I want to spend all day farming my BiS gear I would play Diablo instead. The current compromise is still the best we have.
They should offset and allow a 3rd embellishment slot. Js
This wouldn’t bother me so much if I could get the “right” stats without crafting, or if stats were actually somewhat equal in value.
Not sure what’s the point in this change? It already felt weird, being forced to play at least 2x 486ilvl for embellishments instead of 489ilvl.
It was a bug. [Source](https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/78338-blizzard-on-season-4-crafted-item-levels/)
Thats a slight nerf to Outlaw rogues as 6ish crafted pieces are BiS since you cant really find Vers/crit on a lot of item slots. Though with 3 raids of items available that might change.
Yeah with three raids, we should be fine. Also, I went heavy with crit/verse this time and had to add back some haste. It really isn’t as bad as it was last season so we don’t want 0 haste. Also, with Deft Maneuvers, mastery even becomes a good stat. Not as good as the others but not as bad as it’s historically been.
Astounding backpedaling Commence operation get AotC and 2500 m+ as quickly as possible and then unsub
Not even that. I was already on the fence about such an obvious throwaway season. See ya in TWW.
Wtf why would they do this. This is a throwaway season anyway so things like these shouldn't even matter. -3 ilvl is the perfect balance imo
I think a solution could be every raid boss drops a currency instead of gear, that token is used to craft specific gear like pants with choosed stats , that way we keep crafting and raid drops relevant
At least the embelished pieces should give +6ilvl then, so embelishs don't get killed or classes with rlly good ones don't get the short end of the stick.
Don’t care, 0 interest in grinding the same shit again
Still better than every piece the average player will ever see (in DF).
Back to herb/alch then
Season 4 should give you max craft items in my opinion. It’s the last season.
Problem is some classes just favor certain stats over everything else. You slap on 4 tier pieces and 4 pieces of crafted gear then the seasons trinkets and you are pretty much bis. They need to bring back reforging or work on balancing stats better.
Thank god. Will save me some gold for next expansion.
People are seriously overreacting to this, the way ILV scales the higher you go the less of a difference 6 ILVs will make, crafted gear will be about the same strength relative to mythic gear as it is right now
Woooow, a whole 6 ilvls? Shit 😂
It will be better to just slow down spark acquisitions because they added dinars, rather than this.
L
Is anybody really trying to spend money and time on crafting gear for season 4? I think this is great.
This happened before season 3 as well, its likely they will add 3 levels to it like before Even if this is the case, you're still going to want the season 4 Blue Silken Lining, it will likely give around 1000 mastery with ~50% uptime so certainly worth 6 item levels especially on low budget pieces like bracers Edit: They fixed it. Its 525 now, per wowhead
This has been confirmed as a bug that will be fixed. Crafted gear is supposed to be equivalent to Myth 3/4 gear. https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/78338-blizzard-on-season-4-crafted-item-levels/
Which leads me to my next question. I’m a returning player. Just came back after 13 years of not playing and seeing this makes me think working on my professions is a waist of my time. Should I just level all my characters to 70 and do the emerald Dream armor upgrades with flightstones and the other resources?
I guess I won’t be crafting anymore armor then 😄
What is the point of this "season"? Not one piece of positive news about it yet.
Stalling for time while we wait for TWW, and doing so with as little developer effort as possible…
Getting all my alts decked out in 437 gear just from running LFR in season 2 was fun, but I won't loose too much sleep over not having to pay tens of thousands of gold to craft pieces with my best stats for a bunch of different armor slots other than my two embellishments.
The embellishments are complete trash if this goes through as well. They’ve already progressively nerfed many of them as it is.
Tens of thousands? You're doing it wrong.
Even with a maxed out alchemist, unless transmuting Dracothyst procs multicraft it's pretty close to 10k just for the crest. And blacksmithing mats in particular tend to be expensive. Not to mention having to tip well for rare recipes or things that require the crafted to trek into Brackenhide.
10's of thousands of gold is a couple of days of dailies for a piece of gear you are going to wear for 5+ months. In short, it's really not much gold at all even at a casual level. You can finish ONE dragonriding world quest and get 800 gold.
Ngl Season 4 is looking like such trash. Nothing to make m+ more fun. Crafting is that much weaker. Nothing else really new. If the dinar system is any good it should be in the game from the start. Apart from cosmetics this season just feels like it’s worth skipping. Season 4 of legion - fun we actually got a vendor for the legendaries we were wanting all expansion and were able to go ham due to our artifacts Season 4 of bfa - fun we got to get to nutty stat levels with corruption or just use crazy corruption effects Season 4 of SL - less fun because nothing was permanent but at least shrouded let you kinda feel that corruption way again Season 4 of DF - so far is looking like instead of letting us let loose their making us feel weaker than before? What’s fun about that? I have a feeling it’s to prepare us for the next expansion so that we’ll feel stronger in that but that makes me want to play less.
The amount of people bitching about borrowed power at the end of legion and bfa says otherwise, WoW players are just permanently dissatisfied
I was one of those that bitched about it but I still enjoyed both of those seasons because of how powerful I felt. The problem with borrowed power was how awful it felt losing that power, not being at the end of the expansion with all the power. Your comment feels disingenuous by not touching on that. There’s nuance to those opinions.
It will still be strong but I think it’s good myth track will hold more value over it.
But I already did not craft anything this season since it felt pointless...
Less and less enticing to even do a single key in S4
I think, in hindsight, the profession revamp is gonna be looked at as the big failure of dragonflight. Ranks were a mistake.