Dont think this video aged well into war within, where now losing a life means reducing the timer - very much making it central, not just in the background.
Great video glad I came back across you I stopped following you many many years ago when you were no longer creating content. I was always a big fan when you were at tape spot doing PST PST
I don't feel like the upgrade system is all that overly-complicated. I don't really mind the 4/8 breakpoints wither, that's kind of arbitrary. The UI works well for telling you what you need to upgrade each piece and the tooltip for the crests tells you exactly where to get each type. The only change I wouldn't mind seeing is maybe making the trade in ratio for the crests a little better for the higher tiers once you unlock that ability.
@@selitoskuldakis2209 I think this is the correct take tbh - I still think there are some things that could be done to clean it up a bit, but the complexity isn't the issue, it's that it's unintuitive
This is the problem when Items/Equipment isn't really "Gear" or real anymore, Gear is more like an array of stats rather than a Sword or Chest Piece... Big bummer. Think its one of the biggest, unintuitive, sleeper problems with Modern RPGs. I don't think our brains attach to the gear properly and why gear in Classic-Wrath is so beloved and stick in your mind and we can't name a piece of gear we have equipped and it all just feels meh, primary stat (numbers too big to make sense of) and secondary "stats" that we check with our stat prio on wowhead guide. We kinda just need to get "Azuresong Mageblade", equip it, in all its glory, and be done with it.
Loved the video and hope it highlights to Blizzard the gaps it has, so it can be addressed in the future. I do agree that the gear upgrade system needs to cover a lot of ground in modern WoW, and account for the granularity of content that is available out there. I hope we'll see another iteration of the system soon (perhaps still in TWW). By the way, I found the discussion about complex vs complicated fascinating, and this comparison can be used in very universal ways - not just game design, but product and UX design in general. An example popped into my head to illustrate complex vs complicated - car transmission. I know that in US folks tend to predominantly use automatic transmission, but where I come from (Europe), manual is still pretty popular. A manual transmission could be considered a complicated system, at least for a driver that simply wants to get from point A to B. The different parts (clutch, gear stick, having to shift gears) don't justify the outcome that the system is meant to create, i.e. car driving. An automatic transmission would on the other hand be a complex system. It is simple and only has few parts (gas pedal) from a user perspective, but it can perform complex things, i.e. get a car driving. In some sense, car transmission can be only complex (automatic transmission) or both complex AND complicated (manual transmission). Complex / complicated can also be subjective, depending on the user. A race car driver might need to leverage the efficiencies that the manual transmission provides to maximize the driving performance. For a regular, everyday driver, the automatic transmission is by far enough, and having to deal with manual transmission creates the complexity that is not required or useful.
The catalyst is something have been needing to explain to at least 1 person every couple weeks because it gives you options for every piece of armor. It isn't just for getting tier set, ever piece of armor can go in the catalyst and pop out something to match your tier set and it may change the item into a piece with different stats. Someone in my raid got bummed because they got a cape with bad stats from the first 10 they completed this season and I asked if they had 4 set already and if they did they should put the cape in the catalyst if they have extra charges just to see if the stats are different and holy crap wouldn't you know it spit out a cape with perfect stats.
If you max 8/8 champion gear when you get the heroic gear you'll be able to upgrade the heroic to the max ilvl same for Mythic Iv upgraded my Heroic tier to 6/6 626 lets say i Get the Mythic track helm 1/6 is only 623 I can upgrade the mythic track helm to 626 for just valor stones because the tier i currently have is upgrade over it but on a lower track so you really don't lose out on the crest to upgrade lower track gear.
feels great for people targeting gear, but as someone who likes to relax and just get a satisfying gear progression from doing things I find fun, rather than pushing myself to do things I might not want to do... more often than not when I'm faced with that decision I lose interest in the system entirely. I still don't understand why it cant be one currency. Its a seasonal game after all and if a someone does thousands of m0, because he likes it and managed to upgrade a few pieces to mythic level as a result.. I really don't see the issue.
I hate this notion that if a PC game can be played with a controller, then that's a bad thing. No, it's a good thing because it makes the game accessible to people who already know how to play with a controller, and there are countless games on PC that people play with a controller that no one complains about, including Elden Ring. The current optimal way to play WoW is with a keyboard and MMO mouse, which almost no one has used prior to WoW or even when starting WoW, which all contributes to the horrible new player experience that currently exists.
The "break points" in the gear are designed so that a player has to re-acquire that piece of gear at a higher ilvl in order to continue to improve it. Before the crest system, a player could get a low ilvl piece of gear and level it up all the way to the highest possible level using a single farmable currency.
Afrisiabi - it's ok to say his name. He's not voldemort. He's the "guy" that the writers had to clean up after. It's kinda amazing that someone with such a short stay at the company had such a tremendous impact that will be discussed forever I think.
Blizzard had this solved already with justice / valor badges. - Justice badges upgrade dungeons gear - Valor badges upgrade raid gear - x badges upgrades delve gear Easily understandable, you never need to change how it works every expansion or season. Stop reinventing the wheel.
The following changes should be made to the gearing system: Get rid of all the tiers and get rid of crests altogether. None of that is needed. All gear should be upgradeable to the same level regardless where you got the gear. Only the entry point should be different. In MoP Remix gear had 36 upgrade levels and used just 1 currency. A similar system should be used in Retail, with Open World gear starting at level 1, normal dungeons at let's say level 4, heroic at level 10 and Mythic Raid at let 34 or whatever. And all upgrades should be payed for with valorstones only. By using a system like this everyone can eventually get a few good pieces, while the people who do the hard content still get rewarded for their effort by getting high level tier a lot faster. Easy to understand and use system, no unnecessary upgrade limitations, still rewarding people for engaging with hard content. 21:19 Hard disagree. It is NOT a good point. You're solely viewing the situation from the minority of players who want to do the hard stuff. You completely and entirely ignore the majority of players who far whatever reason either don't want to or can't participate in high M+ or the upper raid tiers. You said that no tiers and just one currency would lead to a situation where mythic raiders and people running high M+ keys would be forced into doing easier content against their will. That is fundamentally untrue. They can reach the same goal by doing the hard content they enjoy. It might take them 0.0003 seconds more per run, but that doesn't matter. At all. But there's another side to the coin. With the current system you force the majority of players into doing hard content against their will - or exclude them entirely from upgrading their gear above a certain level if they can't do the hard content if if they wanted to. Why are you not talking about forcing this group of players into content they don't want to do against their will? I'm sorry but your take is unfortunately very one-sided in favor of the top 10 -25 % of players. What is in THEIR interest. The remaining 75 %? You ignore their interests completely. Not a good take, especially considering the fact that it is this large but silent group of players that keeps the game alive with their money, not the small but extremely loud minority of top end players. 27:30 Nope. Crests and different gear tracks add absolutely nothing to the system and that's what we should get rid of. PS: You're wrong about valorstones btw - they cannot be transferred. They are character bound, not warband-bound, just like the crests.
Dragon Flight got so overwhelming because of all this and I honestly never upgraded my gear when I rejoined late in DF. My thought was "Yeh im not doing that, I'm just going to wait till TWW comes out, then ill get new gear anyway.... "
This! I returned to WoW in DF season 2 or something. Felt like I needed a Bachelor master's degree in crests just to craft some gear. Never bothered with it. Never understood what was wrong with just having normal and HC gear. I returned for TWW and now everything just feels overwhelming..Everyones talking about how great delves are but I just see the same dungeon with 10 different difficulties wich is just boring
20:45 the solution is just terrible, though. You could just have separate levels of valorstonea. Like WotLK emblem of heroism/valor … why can’t it just be a few levels of that and then it resets for the season. I don’t see the need for both stones and crests. Just different name stones is fine. And have them align with the gear track names 😅
the worst part is that crests change names and the names are kind of like wtf at least in dragonflight season 4 we had whelpling drake, wyrm, aspect which make sense from a dragon pov but now we got carved glided runed and weathered like how dafuq is anybody suppose to understand that shit at least make it earthen like pebble, stone,boulder,mountain or some shit
The crests are not related to the 'track' at all -- just the ilvl of the item. A 613 piece will require Runed crests to upgrade, regardless of if its Champion or Hero. Otherwise, there couldn't be any overlap between tracks, which would kind of defeat the point of the system.
Any system where upgrading your gear can possibly be a secret mistake because it 'wastes' capped currency is a massive design problem. It just punishes new players and makes them feel bad and stupid for getting new gear, something which ought to be fun and rewarding.
@Mathrand yeah it's a huge oversight with the system. The primary concern of designers should be making it feel good to upgrade your gear and avoid upgrading feeling 'wasteful' or like a trap for new players. Terrible fundamental design.
Make the crest reduction per slot account wide and make valor stones account wide and the system is bis. You could also just make crests one currency and separate the difficulties with exponential cost/reward scaling per difficulty tier.
Theres nothing complicated about, there are crests for diffferent tiers of gear. You need to think ahead and spend your crests on the correct peices of gear, each crest has a weekly maximum.
Here's the easiest way I can explain it. There are 28 upgrade levels. Upgrades up to level 8 don't require crests, so upgrading from 1->2, 2->3, ..., 7->8 are just valorstone upgrades. After that, upgrading 8->9, 9->10, 10->11 and 11-> 12 require weathered crests. Then going up from 12 to 16 requires carved crests, 16 to 20 requires runed, and then 20 to 28 requires gilded. An item's upgrade track determines the level it can start at and finish at. Explorer can start at 1, and can only be upgraded to 8. Veteran can start at 9, and can only be upgraded to 16. Champion can start at 13, and can only be upgraded to 20. Why the 4 upgraded level overlaps between item tracks? Well, if you farm out normal raid and move on to heroic, but you are unlucky and keep missing out on boots, at least you can upgrade your normal raid boots to the equivalent level as your heroic gear. Why do gilded crests have 8 item levels of crests instead of 4? The intention is to make deep farm of mythic more appealing, as it gives players more room to grow in power and outscale the raid (which is the appeal of deep farm). This is different from dragonflight, where myth crests only had 4 upgrades, so we'll see if it works out this patch. Why do valorstones exist? I don't know tbh, they suck. They could be for non-instanced content, but they're just so hard to farm, my guess is they are an artificial timegate for engagement metrics.
I'd agree it's not interesting enough and needs a redesign. From simple and convolution to something more straightforward and flavorful with a good depth.
When I run out of Valorstones, I just stop upgrading my gear. I don't go attempt to "farm" 1000 Valorstones. So I must conclude the only reason they exist is to drag out play time.
While i like the system while you understand it. It is idd to complex. Would remove crest and simply demand specific achievements to be allowed uppgrade more. Like do all m+ on 9+ to unlock mythic
one thing to note about the confusion is that (unless some cases with the cap early on) theres no trap in upgrading Champ gear because once u hit the Ilvl for the slot the upgrade is free like if u upgrade champ shoulders to 619 and u get hero 610s they will be free up to 619 and thats per slot
Hey Lore! Great video as always. I completely agree that upgrade system is too complicated as it currently stands. However I also feel like it has been tightly designed for a specific purpose, and the complexity is unfortunately a side effect of this. Taking a stab at the below question from my own intuition as a junior designer. - Why does the required crest switch mid track (going from 4/8 -> 5/8) ? This is a combo of two factors, the first is not wanting too many item level steps between tiers of content and the second is to not make your previous gear irrelevant when you reach a source of the next track of gear. For example, If we use raid only to keep things simple. As you are gearing through normal raid, all of your gear is champion track. If champion track gear had all 8 levels upgradable with the crests from normal, then the starting item level would need to be much higher in heroic, to make the gear feel relevant. This would likely lead to way too much item level inflation per content tier. By having the tracks overlap, it means that as you progress into heroic, you can use the new crests to at least further upgrade your champion gear, until you get some hero gear. Which may seem like a "trap" as you mentioned, is very dependant on how much hero gear you have available, and whether as a player you want more short term power gains. Or if you'd rather min-max and get to your "maximum" power as fast as possible.
I'm the type of player that just stops playing if the systems are to overly complicated. Which is why I don't play PoE past a few days each season. I've just been pvping casually in TWW and don't plan on playing it much longer.
I've been saying very similar things to my guildies after coming back in late dragonflight. The system is overly complicated. The names of tracks dont make sense, the names of crests dont make sense, and the split currencies across tracks doesn't make sense, and the multiple currencies don't make sense. This whole system borders on incompetency. Let's not even get started on crafting... They should start with naming content difficult tiers and gear tiers the same. We have heroic dungeons and raids, mythic dungeons and raids, but the track names don't match. Don't talk about hcampion or aventurer unless we rename that content. The little green item source text should tell you the name of the content tier and the track.
They could simplify a lot more but at this point the problems seems intended. I do prefer it vs valor as it reward doing higher content. It seems a solution to the many contents and difficulties that exist in the game and tries to cater to all different groups of players which is something I feel you cannot do as much simply as you'd want.
I haven't really played WoW since I watched Lore on Legendary with Gary Gannon and Mike B. I used to think all I needed to do to raid was get max level, run some heroics. But now it's really complicated! I still don't understand it. --- One of my big pet peeves at the moment is that I don't know which stats are the best. Say for example I get a 603 piece with shitty stats, but I get it first, and the I upgrade it one level to 606. And then another 603 piece drops later with BiS stats. I actually won't know it's an upgrade, because 606 item level will be better, so I can't compare them. I kinda wish the spec panel said what my BiS stats are. Like how it says "ret paladin uses str, not int!" -- I've been stacking that one stat, I forgot what it's even called now, the one that reduces damage taken, because I run delves.
Hey Devolore, thanks for your insights from my question from last week. Apologies I am new so I am trying to catch up with backlog and I was basing my comment about your profession engagement off a small sampling so thank you for clarifying your position and giving context. I do agree with you about the quality thing, i use all rank 2 things myself lol, rank 3 is for profit. I have just been hearing this sentiment echoed from many people i play with and wanted your two cents.
