Working dad here... this loot system slaps! I haven't had that much fun playing wow in a while

JB's take on tanks that scold people for getting hit once by a mechanic because they can just stand in everything is perfection.

i would love more of this content its kind of like a podcast and was a great discussion

(On the gearing system) - I dont high end pve atm, but i remember a very weird thing happened to me in 5.4, siege of orgrimmar. Right before the raid released, the other fury warrior in our guild had irl issues and took a break, at the same time our resto shaman rerolled disc and our hunters rerolled to rogues and mages. What followed was a literal god run for my fury warrior. I was not only the only strength plate melee, but i was also the only protector tier class in the raid. I also got *stupid* lucky and got 2 weapons, 2 trinkets and 4 set on the first clear of 25 normal, instantly making me the best geared warrior in the world by like 4 item levels. I then spent an unholy amount of playtime boosting all of my guildies in 10 normal and flex mode. I then went into random pugs and boosted them too. And i do mean HARD boosted. I was doing like 700k dps and the next guy was on 300k. I ended up clearing SoO about 30 times in 2 weeks. I bring all this up to say: if i get all my gear fast, i dont quit because i have no goals, i play MORE because not only are most classes way more fun with max gear, but my character boosts people just by existing. That feels good. So yeah, keep the current gear system. It makes me want to PvE.... after Diablo 4 :)

Not letting us see Jdotb's chest hair is a crime honestly.

THIS NEEDS TO BE A TWICE A TIER VIDEO FOR SURE ❤❤

My only complaint about the upgrade system is how few crests you get from Heroic. My guild is currently progging Hero, but I could get ten times the number of crests by running 11's which are a joke compared to some bosses.

4 weeks to BIS, per character, is ideal. It fits within the sub model so people feel their time is respected. It means alts don't feel like a chore to grind up.

The gearing system now is much better and probably where Blizz wants it. Most players dont complain about getting gear too quickly because it frees them up to do other things, whether its outside of WoW or content they dont usually do. Once I'm done with the raid, I'm going to focus on M+ and when I'm done with that, I'll do some PvP and try get 1800 at least. I'd imagine Blizz are quite content with their players exploring that too.

As a father of 2 little boys and working full time, im very happy with this loot system. Altho, i rarely can play more then 4-10 m+ a week, and I maybe get 1-2 items a week, i need the vault for progress.

I like Dorki takes, as a HC raider that doesn't do splits and 4-8 M+ a week I don't feel like I'm getting that much loot. Actually I have more crests than I can use... I'm just not getting the drops and I don't have the time/enthusiasm to spam m+ more.

This group needs to be on a weekly podcast.

i knew this would be good but it's always really fucking nice to hear everyone's perspective in this group and the feedback that followed

love this type of content max. thanks for all you do!

With the scaling issues on adds in M+ I think it is the multiplicative nature of a) it has more hp to live longer and b) it does more damage. It just scales faster than simple linear stuff. I think they could either stop scaling the damage (or health) at +20 or they could implement something like a square root scaling function. The add on the last boss in Vortex Pinnacle is the perfect example for this problem in my opinion. Subtopic: these also scale harder with tyrannical, because both the damage and health gets buffed. This is in danger of bringing players into a situation where you have to permanently hit a priority add and only cleave on a boss (say on first boss in Neltharion's Lair). This exponentially prolongs bossfights to be completely unfun. The way I think about tyrannical is that it should emphasize playing mechanics at bosses well enough that you can live for a long time, and not burn it down with cds alone. Vice versa, fortified should mean that you have to actually care about trash mechanics instead of being able to just blast the trash away with cooldowns no matter what. I see that it is hard to hit that sweet spot.

This was awesome! Please do more videos like this!

WTF CRUZER THE BRUZER IS A MOD IN MAX'S CHAT? That's the wildest crossover I've seen in a while, real blast from the fucking past

I love it when jb is in a panel because everything he says is so out of left field. thanks for the time all ❤️

HARD YES for JdotB's take on dispel. ESPECIALLY with this week's affix.

Just want to say, absolutley love these open discussions. A little biased on some topics as you are top tier players in 22+ keys and Mythic raid but all in all really enjoy the different opinions and open to speak your minds.

I would like a way to target an item or even target loot from a specific dungeon in M+. Still feels bad to run some dungeons a 100 times and not see the item you want/need. Bonus rolls helped with this and they could be M+ specific even. Or do a dungeon X amount of times in a week to guarantee a vault slot from that dungeon. Anything to help get specific stuff.

The thing about loot that you guys are forgetting is that most of us have jobs and kids and don't play all day. This new loot system is amazing because there's always something that I can play for when I log in. I'm not even close to bis. I think similar to Max's comment that blizzard shouldn't design the game around world First raiders also applies to how fun the game should be for most people.

I love these kinds of videos, perfect second monitor content.

10 man mythic would make mythics a lot more accessible to smaller guilds, where it is extremely hard to get 20 stable people

One solution to the crests would be to just have all difficulties drop as you go up. If you do heroic raid you still get normal tokens, if you do 16+ you still get normal and heroic tokens. You might run into the cap faster since you could still do 2-3 difficulties of raid each week. The other possible downside is that fewer people will pug lower keys in m+ even more so than now (since the item upgrade breakpoints exist). Though I think raid pugging will mostly stay the same since normal gear can get pretty good ilvl.

The healing adjustements are required because EHP scales at a lower rate than HPS, so every time the total stat sum increases we move closer to one-shot meta. The scaling difference is caused by HPS scaling from 4 secondary stats while EHP only scales with stamina (and vers if it's good for your spec).

I love that none of them give a sh*t about classic 😂❤🎉 M+ feels better. As someone who pugs exclusively, BH's first boss need some tweaking, even on fort weeks it doesnt go well.

I have a thought on tier gearing. Bring out the catalyst on week 2-3 and remove tier as a drop from vault. Keep the bonus token for AOTC, KSM, or pvp rating and everyone that plays the game can have tier by week 4, and lucky raiders can get it a little earlier. That makes tier (not necessarily bis iLVL) easy to get because as you guys said, the bonus is what matters with tier not the ilvl, and it helps to declutter the vault. IMO I don't think the vault functions as "luck protection" as blizz seems to think it is designed to. Because the vault is itself luck based. I can get the same pieces of gear in the vault that I am wearing. I can get same useless pieces of gear from the vault that I would want to trade away if it dropped in other content. I think the best version of the vault would give 100% deterministic gear. Im thinking something like the effective value of 2 weeks of complete 9/9 slots vaults to get whatever max level piece you want. I just hate that the vault is marketed as luck protection when it totally fails to do that. I went the entirety of last season fishing for the diurna ring by doing the first 2 bosses only for weeks and never saw it drop or show up in my vault. 3/4 weeks my vault would give nothing of value to me and I very quickly had max sockets which feels more like a pity prize than anything I actually wanted.

It should have catalyst at second week limiting 1 thing per week. And at week 5 be able to cat all pieces. If the set bonus wasn't so required it wouldn't matter so much.

A little Problem I personally have seen as a player who came back that season is that the crest farm in 11-15 is holding back people a bit cause high i lvl player are getting in this spots besides that this season plays awsome

what a juicer of an upload to get home from work to

Good thing they did the myth track. Essentially fixed a chunk of the initial issues.

As a Mythic guild that up until last week was still doing normal + heroic farm, we have seen more Rare agi staves, Sark cloaks, and class trinkets than chromatic essence trinkets each, not combined.

I think the perfect way to handle tier would be that instead of the AOTC/2k Rio/PvP rating rewarding an omni-token, it rewards the activation of the Catalyst with one charge, gaining one per week just like normally.

They fixed the TOGC twin valks door strat for classic on the PTR around the time this Convo happened

If blizz decide to reduce mythic raid size to 10 man would be cool , i dont care abt how hard is to tuning and balance , people will come back to play with friends

I like those types of videos please do more of those 😊

S- tier squad, definitely do these more often

Regarding Zzkarn cheese I guess twins in sunwell could be a comparison. You just stacked at a spot upstairs and had enough resto shamans to spam chain heal.

love this content

Great talk as always ^^ I do wish there was more raiders in the talk that could speak up. Especially raid healers instead of only m+ healers

idk if healers are overly OP. since so many are still missing from m+ specifically. it's quite rough finding them at times. Additionally, I do agree with JB on the not needing to go back to 11-15's for crests but for a different reason. (I don't do 16+'s yet, so very different reasons) 1. when you have 2400-3k io mythic raiders joining 11-15 keys at a pretty high rate. most people running those keys will just take those over others who can actually have good benefit from them. to such a point they'll sit there and wait for a few of those for a quick painless key. So those who can use them or are even at the level of those keys, experience dramatically longer wait times to even start 2. in the same node of higher skilled and far better geared players in 11-15's, many others don't really learn the dungeons that fast or that in depth. When the dps joining outgear it so heavily nothing lives long, or they carry the interrupts because they know where they are etc. You can get away with so many very detrimental things and misplaying bosses/packs purely because you outgear it by an astronomical margin.

More of this content please

UR and SMB are no comparison xD SMB was soooooo chill, UR actually has things you have to do and bosses that can wipe pugs

imagine incorporeal during thundering during boss mechanics during tyrannical

i miss season 1 shadowlands affix. that was super cool and made routing incredibly engaging and made even the random dps in keys want to gain routing knowledge. was lit. edit 3 affixes does feel empty a bit.

was this the video they talked about the timing on forgotten?

Ninja loot in RWF that is giga chad if i ever see one.

An idea for not having a super lenient timer but also allowing for deaths: what if they added a system where you would want time back for killing mobs in rapid succession? Like you get a buff for killing a mob within 5 seconds of another and it adds time back to the timer at like 5 stacks or something? That way if you only safe pulled you wouldn’t get any time back and have a really tight timer. Or you could do a big pull and basically earn back the time wasted from a wipe.

this banged

I think increasing the cost for upgrades is the best compromise

Catalyst earlier and I’m happy, sitting at 3/4 on 4 toons now feels sooooooo bad

The "make dispel not have a cooldown but cost a lot of mana" is a perfect solution imo...legit make it spammable but cost something crazy like 12% of total (not base) mana..i'll take that everyday

What about instead of giving you a max timer there's a max amount of deaths you can use to time a key. And then if you run it very fast you +2/3 it but if you slow and steady do it sub 15 deaths or something u just complete it?

Uldaman boss is about if you have a team full of dwarves or not

I think the gear system is actually incredible becayse it frees you up from the gear grind early, to play alts if you want and other games. Like Jdotb said, there's still the final stretch goal of 447s from Vault/Mygic endboss loot, and couple with the slow drip of 447s from Sparks. And for the vast, vats majority of players, who are not Mythic Raiders and are doing normal seasonal progression. They get to actually enjoy the game.at the start of a season instead of 10 weeks in when Valor finally uncaps.

"IT WAS REAL TO ME" Severely underappreciated interjection.

I think seasonal affix is good overall. Thundering was shit but I do feel it adds a lot to the seasons

People that complain about this gearing system because it’s too powerful need to get a job.

do more videos like that plz and ALWAYS inv JB to those, very entertaining

Still only got 1pc of tier. Got all this gear sitting in my bags I can’t use because I need the old tier set until I get the new one

im at 37 boss kills in aberrus (normal and hc) with a group of 15 and got only 1 drop, the wep form neltharion

The classes feel like they are being designed around tier, so having it be hard to get tier is a horrible feeling. I got really happy to be able to get 2 set from drops, then buy the last 2 slots. Especially on alts.

Its weird because... I dont feel like I am getting any loot. I have raided in for two weeks and have not gotten any tier and m+ drops feel really scarce. Could just be a luck issue but this season i feel like I am getting NO loot.

Maybe they can bring back prideful for 21+ keys if not having a seasonal makes their timers so "free"

I fucking love jb man "what do you guys think about the zskarn chang..." "OK HERES THE PROBLEM WITH NO HEALER KEYS"

As someone who works alot, and only have time to play m+ and enjoy that. With the current systems. Im as happy as can be :D

Id like a very rare items to literally just be some unique special effects. Very rare cloak is same as other cloak thats normal but has this unique COSMETIC effect.

My daughter: “Can we watch Wiggles?” Me: “no we’re listening to Max, Jdot, Dorki, Tettles, and Dratnos. They’re talking about dragons” Her: “ooookkkaay”

This is 10/10 content

I've been super unlucky this tier, I JUST got 2nd tier piece (1 from vault just this reset, 1 from 2k score), I can't equip it till I get 4 piece if I want to be optimal. My ilvl is 4-5 behind where it could be if I had a bit more luck, I have stuff in my bags from wk 1 waiting for catalyst. Catalyst is way too late, trying to get into groups for ~+20 keys last week was HELL since everyone is asking for tier + higher ilvl already and I'm stuck because of bad luck with tier. The only thing releasing catalyst earlier does is help people like me who got sh*t from vault wk 1/2 (I had to pick a SOCKET wk 1 and a 'hold for catalyst' piece wk 2).

regarding the raid size topic. i agree that reducing it down to 10 would not be good for the game, however, i absolutely think they should work on something new as 10-man content specifically. would making another content cornerstone (like raid,m+,pvp) create the ''too many buckets'' problem ? maybe, but if the fun, rewards, and the number of players is high enough, it COULD be a fantastic addition to the game.

Nice talk. Also I know that most wow players just play a lot timewise, but if you're looking at the gearing system I dont think its too fast for the average player that plays 4-10h a week. I mean thats basically 1 raid day and 5-10 m+. Thats like 3-5 items max and they are not upgraded at that point.

I feel like getting the mythic appearances and 441 off of just doing heroic is kind of a downer - I think the upgrades for normal should go to 428 or 431 and heroic to 437. Shadow priest rework was a banger, really, really good.

I'm one of the ones that prefers super fast gear and spend the rest of the patch just blasting dungeons and raid as high as i can for ranking, logs, etc. New loot isn't as exciting to me as achieving 1 key level higher than my personal best, but i realize I'm ultra competitive.

i've been playing since beginning of wrath and I feel like this is objectively the best period of WoW. Not only is the game getting more content than ever, but the overall WoW community has never been this positive that I can remember And this is just the x.1 patch which is usually the time of the expansion everyone is bitching and moaning about some obviously broken thing blizzard released before they start fixing it in x.2. Feels good man

I've done 50 dungeons each week first 2 weeks and gotten maybe 3 or 4 pieces that were worth equipping. Mainly because you're farming dungeons for a weapon or trinket. Feels really bad. Only reason to do other dungeons that don't contain your BIS weapon or trinket is to get IO so you can get into keys.... It's so horrid doing a dungeon 30-40 times just to get 1 item. On top of that now you have to do it at a 20 instead of a 15.

I'm sort of upset that that Fire and Arcane were first to be changed but Frost is easily the one that needed the most work. By a long shot, Frost needs a whole lot of work. All of it needs to be changed.

1:59:05 This, literally this

nice

i would like to see heal dps not being mandatory and that impactful. the fact that resto shamys are doing passively more dmg in m+ with acid rain, than a disc is ridiculous?

anyone thoughts it perhaps it's stats problem and we might need go back to healing done and attack power? right now, for casters. our resource (intellect) feels like empty. it does not increase our mana or anything. it is disgusting

the gearing upgrade system is pretty good.. I think they should change the crest token names to be consistent from patch to patch.. World Crests, Normal Crests, Heroic Crests, Mythic Crest. drake/wyrm, etc is not super intuitive.

I wish they would distribute fragments a little better trough the different key lvls. Getting 12 wyrm fragments from a +11 and zero from a +10 doesn't feel right. A +10 should drop some wyrm too.

What if "very rare" becomes Mythic only difficulty and its purely cosmetic? Like a secondary appearance for mythic teir or something

Something you might not being seeing at the level you all play at, and with the communities and connections you have, is that m+ pugging is not in a good place right now. Filling keys with lfg is the hardest it has ever been, in my experience, and I've played almost every season since m+ was invented. I play Warlock at a "race to world last" mythic level. This season I need an Irideus Fragment from Halls of Infusion. Having to farm specific trinkets from m+ sucks IMO, but I'm used to it. I ran nearly 30 Nokhuds in the first week to get my feather in season 1. This season, I'm not sure how I'm going to get my Fragment. At 438 ilvl, AotC and 2500 io (3k last season), it still takes me around 15-30 mins to get accepted to a Halls key when I apply to every 17-20 I see (before I could at least run lower keys and waste more valor, but now it needs to be 17 or higher). Once I'm in a group, there is around a 25% chance we get no healers applying for upwards of 10 minutes before the group leader just disbands. And once I finally get into a group that actually fills, there is still a decent chance, if anything goes wrong, the group will disband mid key. Last Saturday I set aside the whole afternoon to try and farm out my Fragment. I started at 1 pm EST. I played until around 6. in those 5 hours I managed to complete 4 Halls Keys and, unsurprisingly, the trinket didn't drop. And, to be clear, once I'm actually in, these keys are VERY easy. I'm not sure what to do at this point. Do I really need to spend another 10-20 hours waiting around to do easy content, so I can get a trinket that is pretty important for my class. Right now I'm just relying on my friends and guildies to run their occasional Halls keys with me instead of rerolling them, but who knows how long that will take to get the trinket. Other than trying to get that one trinket, it doesn't really matter for me, because I have friends and guildies I can do my weekly 20s with, but if its this bad for me, with my gear and being someone who has a lot of m+ experience, it must be horrible for people that pug all their keys. It's been scaring me a bit, that the game might be dying. I wonder if the m+ numbers are insanely low, because it definitely feels like it. And this is early season (and before D4 comes out).

yeah if they would actually put in 10 man raiding for norm and heroic now that would be great. we can have 10 but the scaling is awkward where 12-14 people is the preferred comp

What if early mythic raid gear was upgradable to mid tier mythic but takes a while to get it there. That way early mythic raid gear matters and they won't be dead items

Tier needs accessible in m+

Personal loot should be brought back as an option

1:25:00 JB is absolutely right. If you made the keys so that death was expected the top groups would still push to do it faster because of human nature. Currently completing a key faster is ALREADY the bar. Even in classic and retail raiding, completely separate from M+. Time trials are always going to be a thing and what top groups shoot for. Even other groups not in the top are always going to compete that way just to show status and to have a goal to reach for. There's not going to suddenly be a system where "oh all we have to do is be careful and we clear it." That will work for less skilled groups like us normals play in, but not at the top ranks, ever. Also design mechanics can easily make it so you have to move fast "enough" without being super slow- stacking debuff for boss that collects per minute, after 10 minutes starts to have negative affects until you fight a boss and clear it or die to it. There's your time pressure.

I wonder how many healers absolutely hate Afflicted in keys on tyrannical above 20 because I am one that does hate it. When you feel very global locked at the start of fights it is so punishing needing to dispel an add. Or when you need to dispel the afflicted add but also have trash mechanics that need to be dispelled. VP gust soldier dot needs to be insta dispelled at 22 or it 2 bangs or need personal+health pot/healthstone. Was definitely the same vibe in VP during incorporeal and needing to spend globals to cc as a healer but need to dispel. New affixes feel giga cursed as a healer because pugs seem to expect you to do it as a healer but can't understand that you don't have the globals to do so all the time.

Ngl I love when JB cooks shit up

2:00:41 DKs in general are paying for previous borrowed power.

I mean i feel like if people enjoy the loot system then they would be more likely to roll a alt so even though their character is "finished" it doesn't mean they are done with the game Also I'm loving just being able to do raid honestly. Like before the most efficient way to raid was to get gear from mythic plus, which is still true to some extent but being able to upgrade raid gear has been great. Actually feel like stuff from raid is useful. Might even play a healer now because I don't enjoy mplus healing but if I can just raid that would be nice

Last tier i got icon in the vault last week of the season 😂😂😂 feelsbadman.

In NA we call it Echo

I've killed nelth on 2 difficulties every week and only seen 2 of the samerare trinkets I don't really think the drop rate is that good

Why not release the catalyst right away, but make the token needed to use it something you have to earn from content and its for that character only... then 5-6 weeks later add a quest that lets you earn that token ( kind of like how it is now ) that is account wide or something like it was in season 1 so that the catch up/alt friendliness is still there.

Also this patch is going to be a ghost town compared to last patch around 8 weeks in. AOTC is far too easy and that's where most of the player base sits/raids at. You're going to have whole guilds who don't have the numbers for mythic who could easily do 4-5 bosses in there sitting around doing nothing or going on breaks being they made heroic far too easy vs previous tiers. My second FnF guild that struggled on end bosses in heroic for years (usually only a few kills max - sometimes needing pugs help) already swept through sark. Raid ilvl is like 426 lmao. People in there are already saying they wont be around for another ~15+ runs of heroic because they never expected it to be this quick. My 2 night 6 hour CE guild that only manages few end boss kills per patch is already on echo. We were barley off terros at this point last tier. Its 100% not just a gearing thing, the raid is by far the easiest its been at least since Nathria (didnt play that dogshit BFA expansion). They rushed this patch out the door because of Diablo's release and they're going to tank the playerbase in the second half of this patch because of it. Maybe its a tactic to get people to finish in 2-4 weeks so people want to buy/play something else, because that's exactly what it feels like.