The part about the new system that I hate is the endless grinding for the same gear at higher levels. Instead of just running a ton of keys to get valor and pushing up say trinket that is hard to get or a weapon that is hard to get, you have to get that same hard to get trinket or weapon again at the higher level (vet>champion>hero). How is this any better than running the same instance over and over and over each season to get the bis trinkets that the whole rotation on the instances was suppose to fix.
My thoughts on the gearing system.Positives:+ Upgrade the slot instead of the piece is a great system because once you upgrade the slot you only need to use dragonstones to upgrade any other piece. It makes it not overly punishing to upgrade a pair of bracers that aren't your bis stats so that when you do get your bis stat bracers you can upgrade them.+ It makes farming normal/heroic mode for gear to use in Mythic relevant.+ Everyone gears at basically the same rate.+ Alt catch up friendly... as long as you grind you can technically upgrade your character to the same iLvl as everyone else.+ Once you upgrade all the slots: that's it. You're done. It's not like valor where you need to continuously build up more currency each week.Negatives:+ Crests clog up your inventory.+ Gearing is a bit too fast. By week 3 anyone farming M+ or raid is iLvl 435++ Flightstones are too hard to farm in open world content.+ If you're farming +20s... having to drop down and farm lower keys for crests gets a bit old.+ Anyone not farming raid has to farm M+ a lot more. In one hour you can get 100+ fragments in normal/heroic. That'd be about 6 M+ runs.+ Not timing keys is a bit punishing. You only get 5 crests vs 12 for timing.+ No real improvement on how you acquire gear. It's still a slot machine.
I think it's a good system but you should be able to upgrade champion past 4/8 without doing heroic raids or higher M+ imo.The upgrading just stopping is kinda weird.
Biggest problem with the upgrade system (aside from the utterly stupid way fragments and crests were implemented) is that they need to stop forcing raiders to supplement gearing with M+. Raiding alone is enough of a commitment each week. I don’t need or want to spam dozens of M+ runs on top of it, especially when that game mode has been utterly broken and frustrating for years now. Having both of these gearing tracks seemed like a good idea at first, and perhaps it was back in Legion and BfA, but now it’s become a chore and a pain.They also need to allows us to trade lower level crests for higher ones at like a 1:5 ratio or something because as things stand right now you’re inundated with lower crests that you will never use. Better yet, scrap the entire concept of separate tokens and have everything be upgradable with the same currency as it should have been from the beginning.
I like this method, however, the biggest draw back is its going to lend itself to an item squish next xpac and further. And when a squish happens it doesn't feel right or good at the beginning especially when leveling.
Another oversight I have noticed. If a Tier piece drops that everyone in raid has / or has higher already. That tier will just auto go to someone completely random that is unable to use. Let it at least go to someone of that tier so they can roll it for a chance of a tertiary stat that may be an upgrade than someone who can do nothing with it.
I for once am happy that i dont have to waste months of my life trying to get max level bis gear. Its been hardly a month and i already have 440+ bis gear + AOTC so now i can unsub and move on to other games.
Less than 3 weeks to get 440 which is almost endgame gear. No way we will be getting 10 of each crests in next season.It's bs that gear from +9 can be upgraded to almost mythic level. 441 from mythic raid early bosses quickly become irrelevant and I didn't start mythic raiding. On the other hand swapping stats on gear is easy when you need only flightstones. It's really a good idea with discounts.Overall it's a very good system.PS: For all people complaining about lower grade crests:You can trade higher grade into lower tier.Aspect => WyrmTo upgrade item from +17 (hero 1/5), you need 3 wyrms and 1 aspect. It's reasonable to trade aspects to wyrms if you don't want to grind low tier content.
champion gear should not force you into mythic plus for any reason.. it should go all the way up .. as is (normal).and tHE same with vetern leave mythic plus out of it .. WHY YOU KEEP PLAYERS FORCING MYTHIC PLUS IS THE MOST HORRIBLE TRACK.. that maens if I dont want to do mythic plUS im SOL!.. CAUSE AGAIN I HIT A WALL. HARD STOP.
i dont mind the new upgrade system at all seems to be working well for me
Casual mythic raider here, I think making mythic raid gear upgradable to 447 is fine but the gap between 441 and 447 would get old for m+. As a person that doesn't like raiding on alts, it feels annoying when the BIS gear comes from raid which is fine as its small power gain. If you add ilvl diff then raiding is still OP for m+ content. if they let mythic raid gear be upgradable to 447 why not also make gear obtained from 20s up be the same thing upgrading to 447. Its cringe when people say m+ players have it easy choosing 1 piece of rng loot at 447 while raiders are getting 4 drops per boss on mythic. The other point of nerfing the system so blizzard can time gate people is horrible. The reason they didn't have a catalyst week 1 was because of Ian saying "Having the catalyst even one week earlier would break the game." While he said that we got to watch the sweaty world first raiders all get 4 set for the first week and the game worked fine. Catalyst shouldn't be time gated because getting tier for an m+ player or pvp'er is bad waiting a week to see nothing in the vault. Raiders currently have an edge from trinkets to tier over the rest of end game content. The only thing that would make sense for balance would be to just make gear scale in their own setting, aka raid gear scales in raid and m+ gear scales in a key. This is a cringe idea tho so just balance the gear level and opportunities for tier. Remember someone with blizzards RNG might get the catalyst 6 weeks into the patch but they might have to wait to week 8/9 to get 4 set depending on if they get their free token piece.The bag situation also needs to be fixed. bags have been full with gear for different content and it doesn't help when you do vaults and get all the gems for the onyx ring or all the crest slots. If you use a crafting profession or two your reagent bag is most likely full by default so cleaning up stuff that has no use in a bag would be nice. If you are a sweaty player a good amount of slots are probably devoted to consumables for raid/m+/bgs so everyone would enjoy having more space.The state of WoW has greatly improved even with how many little things need to be changed. Seeing more options for tier is a necessity. I think the biggest change Blizzard can make would be to allot players to buy a gear token for a max item level piece of gear. Say you get screwed on your vault 2-3 weeks in a row and you get the 6 tokens each week, having a vendor with all the raid/pvp/m+ gear would be nice for those collecting tokens they can spend 2-3 weeks of no gear for their BIS piece. It sounds like a fair balance but also a needed change as my friends and I have seen multiple weeks of 3 rings at the 447 or 3 belts at 447 which is are embellishment slot. Being able to choose a specific piece of gear would allow for our frustrations with the rng system to calm down a bit as we will be rewarded for not getting a weekly reward. Something to think about going into the next patches. P.S. please let hunters have some overpowered bow or something because we do not bring any utility to a raid or key. We are too squishy and need like a spec piece to make it worth bringing us into end game content.