What a joke.

Yesterday, I was talking about the Gearing Deadzone that exists between ~295 and 320 average ilevel. I had been receiving a few lucky drops from heroic dungeons, so I was quite far along in my quest to queue into Warfronts by that point, when I stumbled upon some easy “upgrades.”

First, Plundered gear. These are mostly “transmog” weapons that occasionally drop from Island Expeditions. The thing is, they are actual 325 ilevel weapons that sell for as low as 12,000g on the AH. The Agility 1-handed weapons are quite a bit more (around 20k), and you really want two of them, but it’s possible that this is an avenue to get you past the deadzone. If you have ilevel 300 weapons already, each Plundered upgrade will give you another +1.56 average ilevel.

Second, and I can’t believe this still works, just having BoE gear in your bag counts. Remember how I was saying that the DPS Darkmoon trinket cost 70k and that’s not worth the +3.75 ilevel bump? Well, I purchased the tanking Darkmoon trinket for 12k with the expectation of “I might potentially tank on this character someday anyway”… and then queued for Warfronts without equipping it. Because the 320 gate doesn’t care about equipped gear apparently. If I can sell it for the same price that I bought it, I’d only be out like 600g. That’s like four herb nodes.

So, I queued for Warfronts. Spent the entire battle wandering around, trying to figure out how to chop trees. Killed some mobs. Then got ilevel 340 gloves and ilevel 370 helm after about half an hour.

That was my lowest-level piece too.

Again, what a joke.

I’m not the sort of person that participates in the “log in, loot epix” criticisms of WoW. Using gear as the metric of achievement or skill always seemed asinine to me, because the drops are random. We all know (or have been) someone that cleared a raid a half dozen times with zero drops before. Having the whole set meant you were either lucky, or grinded out the RNG for months and months. Is that somehow more admirable than the person standing next to you, with the same Achievement unlocked, dealing comparable DPS in lesser gear because they rolled low?

The whole thing is silly, has been silly since the very beginning, and is especially silly in a world where Mythic Uldir gear is likely to be transmogged into gear sets from a decade ago the minute it’s equipped. Gear’s only relevance is to indicate how sloppy you can be and probably still complete content, or otherwise used as an artificial gating mechanism.

Just a smidge of an upgrade.

Having said that, what is ridiculous and poorly designed is precisely this dumb gap between the end of leveling gear (290) and free loot raining from the sky (320). I understand the mechanics behind why the system is designed this way. Specifically, if Warfronts only rewarded 325 gear or whatever, then no raiders or Mythic+ players would participate, and it’d be dead content the entire expansion. Meanwhile, the 320 gate was slapped on so as to not invalidate dungeons altogether with fresh level-capped players getting fulls suits of 340.

But, seriously, man. After checking last night, the Warfront is actually going to be active for another day or two. Which means I’ll be chain-queueing that and turning in lumber until I have 340 gear in every slot. Then I’ll be running around tagging Arathi rares for every more loot and toys until it goes away for 2-3 weeks. The cycle will then repeat itself, possibly at a higher ilevel.

And that’s fine… if it were consistent with the rest of the level-cap experience, which it’s not. You ding and either cheese the 320 gate via gold/guildies, or slog through a bunch of dungeon content for hours and hours. Then, at 320, it’s free loot for the rest of the expansion. “Luckily,” by the time 8.1 rolls around, new alts will probably not have to endure this awkward phase at all and jump straight into Warfronts as soon as they hit level 120 via Profession BoE gear.

Fake Edit: In one, long Tuesday evening of playing, I queued five times for Warfronts and received 5 additional pieces of 340 gear. Not sure if it’s luck that I haven’t received any duplicates, but I almost cannot even stand to queue for it again. I see why people AFK through it – it’s not engaging.