It’s Raining Epics
Last Thursday, I sat down and decided to run some World Quests. And I got these:
/humblebrag screenshot
Those are ten epics, with ilevels at or above 840, along with three relics.
That ilevel is above what you can get in LFR, and at least matches what you would get from Mythic dungeons. While more organized content like raids and Mythic+ still beat these pieces – including offering more exciting options, like trinkets – I did have a WQ epic proc all the way up to 880, which is just shy of Legendary status.
Bit of an upgrade.
Remember when people complained about the ability of noobs to queue LFD and eventually get tier set pieces after dozens of runs? Pepperidge Farm remembers It feels almost quaint. While you can’t exactly pick specific pieces of gear off a vendor, all of these were 100% guaranteed drops from quests, some of which took less than 5 minutes to complete. No dungeons required.
Don’t get me wrong, the WQ system is exactly what is necessary to get me to continue playing WoW at the level of commitment I am willing to put forward. But it is starting to dawn on me that this is the most loot-laden expansion yet. I feel that even Warlords of Draenor pales in comparison to this.
Posted on November 2, 2016, in WoW and tagged iLevel, Questing, Welfare Epix, World Quests. Bookmark the permalink. 11 Comments.
In An Age 
It’s a bit out of control isn’t it? I logged on late last night after an evening out to quickly do one lot of WQs for an emissary reward and got an ilvl 890 trinket.
My main character’s ilvl is now 852 – he’s done one normal mode run of Emerald Nightmare (and got zeo loot from the whole run). It’s all come from WQs or the odd heroic/mythic dungeon run for profession/class hall quest unlocks…
I don’t think I’ve ever had a character this well geared so early in an expansion!
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What makes it really crazy is when they fixed the “bug” that allows WQs to continue scaling their rewards past 830 in 7.1. That 890 trinket you got is going to continuing raising your baseline ilevel reward for the rest of the expansion. Almost like a “rich getting richer” scenario.
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And? I mean, it’s all vendor trash at the next patch/expansion, so it’s not like it’s important stuff, right?
I actually LIKE that you get gear “just because” and it’s not an infinite grind (even if I find that the warforged/titanforged approach is more or less RNG junk), so that I can focus on playing because I like to play and not because “epics”. If WQ reward better gear than LFR/LFD/dungeons then it means that people who only care about gear will do WQs and not pollute instance groups, so it’s like a win-win for everyone….
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Sure, it’s all trash next expansion. But in the meantime, gear is an extremely important gameplay incentive and helps direct player attention. Plus, you know, providing a sense of character progression.
The progression piece is actually why I enjoy the current system, because if group content was the only avenue left for gear, I would have lost interest by now. At the same time, WQs being so ridiculously lucrative means that group content holds zero value to me. That might sound like a distinction without a difference, but I feel like it closes the door to a casual player “graduating” to group content. Additionally, there are more serious players chain-running dungeons to farm Artifact Power and those people get next to nothing else from these runs. Why have WQs scale gear and not dungeons too?
In any case, it’s a curious design shift from back in the day, and it appears to be accelerating.
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Group content, especially on higher difficulties, appears to be the best source of legendaries, both directly via drops and indirectly via incrementation of bad luck protection counter.
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Well, you seem to be starting to find one of the main reason many people unsubed over already. “The RNG problem” and well, one of the reasons I didn’t want to play my mage this expansion. the frustration of keep getting “upgrades” with wrong stats. WoD was enough on that part already. Enjoyed my prot paladin while it lasted tho since it at least benefit almost equally from all stats.
The disc priest is a different story. it really needs haste. at ilvl830 in mostly blue gear I had 24% haste and it felt great to play. now, after all the “upgrades” it has 854 item level but 14% haste and feels terrible. :< Really wish they brought back reforging to counter this problem at least a bit. Can't stand the farming for lottery gear any more.
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I might write another whole post about Reforging, because the situation with stats right now is just ridiculous. One of the arguments against Reforging was that you needed 3rd party software to optimize your gear, but now we need to run simulations just to see if that 860 piece beats an 830 one. It’s profoundly dumb.
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The abundance of epics is not a part of the RNG problem, it’s a part of the solution for it. As the flow of items intensifies, the chance that one of them will have a good distribution of stats approaches 100%.
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I don’t know if it was confirmed, but 7.1 seemed to drastically increase the drop rate of legendary items too. That first night the patch was live, I got my first legendary from an emissary cache. Out of 10 guildies online, 4 got at least 1 legendary that day. That’s after a grand total of zero legendaries guild-wide up to that point since the xpac released.
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At least they normalized gear for the most part in pvp. I mean there’s like a 100 ilevel spread in gear now between hitting 110 and mythic raids?
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Getting gear thrown at you is kind of a two edged sword. There’s definitely a lot out there, but there’s also a lot of crap too.
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