Yes you are missing something. The process of acquiring gear to tackle content. It’s a core tenant of MMORPGs. Wards are this game’s version of that. The altenative is:
Constant and perpetual power creep with replacement of gear. It’s not just about power creep but the length of the belt on the treadmill.
Without banes and wards in the current system folks would be wearing the exact same armor for every instance that they first stepped into them a year ago in.
I think every MMO has something to grind to. However, I will say the shift to mostly PVP perks in the random drop pool and crafting buckets makes a very large portion of most drops I get worthless to me as a PvE player. And I’ve almost stopped trying to get crafting rolls. The luck required to get PVE perks is silly. Maybe BS will help with that some.
I understand this - Ive been playing WoW for… a long time. They have it right, your heroic dungeon gear gets replaced by mythic gear, which (may or may not) be replaced by raid gear, which will be replaced by heroic raid gear… replaced by mythic raid gear.
They part that they have right is that you dont need 45 different sets of gear.
My issue is chasing pieces of gear for a set I use for one dungeon or two dungeons that is just wasting space in my inventory - its a bloated, cumbersome system.
I mean god forbid I wanna use a set I got from the highlest level difficulty mutation.
When do I use this gear? If I cant use gear from M10s FOR M10s, to improve my time. What am I even doing it for - shards? for what? to level up my ward gear? I should be proud I earned this gear, but Im not even going to use it. (in theory)
Something is off with the system in my opinion. Way off.
Yeah I just dont like how obviously time sinkey it feels, also grinding for ward gear to do M10s to get… shards for… PvP gear maybe? - the PvE gear you get is useless.
Secret is both this system and WoW’s raid system is similar grinds in terms of time synch. Its just highly more noticeable here because you upgrade the same item to max power over time. This grind is actually better in terms of smooth linear progression of power but the feeling of reward. That excitement at opening a bag it just doesn’t exist.
Inventory management is a nightmare and while i understand why it is how it is for wards, and i understand the challenges to improve that, I’m not sure how they can without some major changes to how RNG works.
I wrote an extensive post back in August about this:
Its certainly similar but it just feels like AGS is taking steps to eventually be where WoW is at as far as endgame gearing goes, but they are like a baby taking its first steps.
Resistance perks on gear in WoW and resilience on PvP gear in WoW are no longer a thing, because at the end of the day its just bloat - Blizzard found this out eventually. AGS has a confused system disguised as “gather this gear to be more effective in this dungeon”
I understand its all in the same vein - WoW and NW - but in one its very clean and direct, the other requires you to keep track of 30 sets of gear.
I just know what direction its heading in and the sooner its address the better off
everyone is.
And again… why am I spending so much time farming ward gear for mutated dungeons for gear im not even going to use - thats not linear or horizontal progression… its scrambled.
In wow the resistance requirements for raids was arbitrary and a secondary layer of gating.
You needed to be keyed. To get keyed you needed to run dungeons and do quests. To do those things you needed gear. Then you finally get geared and you needed special resist items to survive in the new dungeon and then you finally can go inside.
Ward gear helps but its not required.
Its mechanics and the worse you are at mechanics the better wards are.
In wow you literally couldnt avoid the fire damage. It was a straight gear check. Pass fail.
Prior to summer patch it was a heck of a lot easier to get the wards than wow’s resist gear. Where certain classes required certain armor weights and it took months farming bop items to get resist set.
Im assuming you are talking about attunements when you say “Keyed” here. In that case getting an attunement was the same goofy little timesink we had with tuning orbs. In a similiar way it was just a key to get in.
Unless you were talking about Keys for mythic dungeons, which you never needed to swap gear sets for.
Regardless - WoW removed everything you mentioned above because, well plainly it sucked.
AGS has already removed the tuning orbs - I can see ward perks being next.
True, I don’t even use it as a healer - Its just the concept of it, the fact someone might get denied from a group wearing a full mutated dungeon set because it doesnt have ward - that’s goofy.
Those sets mostly have wards so you tell me. Id guess easy entry level ward gear for early pioneers given how random most loot is. Its a reliable functional set not the best but functional.
Tuning orbs just required mats and crafting skill.
Attunement meant completing five man dungeans. Doing events groups at the time struggled to compkete. Event that needed other dungeon gear for most of the party.
I dont remember needing gear for attunements, I just level a paladin to 60 when classic WoW released.
Also, again, they removed attunements and resist gear for a reason - it was dumb.
Im just putting it out there that I simply dont expect to see ward gear to stick around for much longer - soon enough as all these returning players start to come back and question why its even used, it will go by the wayside.
Onyxia required running the jail break event where the naked npc set the pace and ran ahead aggroing stuff while your t1 healer was huffing siiting down or trying to for mana. Was always a crap shhot getting people attuned for that and then running the mc attunement part before people discovered skips.
Then you had the black temple attunement i think it was that required a quest compkete in ssc i want to say i could have that wrong.
Either way we are way off topic. If were gonna debate wards further we should move that to its own thred.
