Is gear useless now?

[rapstar]

Gear still matters. The factor at which it matters is down-scaled a bit, but gaining gear still is intended to make you grow stronger in comparison to your surroundings. The change, according to Blizz, is only meant to slow down the rate at which your power level rises compared to the world over the course of the expansion:



Now, arguably for us this is change is fairly irrelevant, since our strength does not come from being gear capped, but rather having multiple toons. I don't like the design of the system, as it's just a cheap way of trying to make trivial content take longer. Applying such a system, especially mid-expansion and not talk about it until players call them out on it, is not going to over well or look very good on their behalf. I don't however see this affecting my gameplay all that much.

Agreed, it might even make multiboxing more powerful IMO. If I wasn't boxing I'd be taking a break (or more) due to this change.

[JohnGabriel]

Gear still matters. The factor at which it matters is down-scaled a bit, but gaining gear still is intended to make you grow stronger in comparison to your surroundings. The change, according to Blizz, is only meant to slow down the rate at which your power level rises compared to the world over the course of the expansion:

It seems to be working out as they planned. Basically its stopping the uber-geared from one shotting all the quest mobs.

My mildly-geared hunter team is not noticing any increase at all, only my highly geared pali team notices. They should have just put this in the patch notes.

[mrdsp]

Basically its stopping the uber-geared from one shotting all the quest mobs.

Hopefully they will next look at uber-geared from one shotting mid geared 5-man teams in the open world next?

Haha, I wish!

[Mosg2]

I had a noticeable increase in kill speed with the changes. You still gain power relative to the world with every upgrade, and it certainly makes a difference in pvp

[mugg70]

can agree that somethings changed. did brh +2 and i usually just run through them..
first myth + since 7.2.

this time i had to work for it. felt more like +5.

[Novacrash]

can agree that somethings changed. did brh +2 and i usually just run through them..
first myth + since 7.2.

this time i had to work for it. felt more like +5.

Mythic+ was made more difficult and the loot reward ilvl was raised so yeah a +2 is more like a +5 now.

[Jabberie]

can agree that somethings changed. did brh +2 and i usually just run through them..
first myth + since 7.2.

this time i had to work for it. felt more like +5.

The guys already answered this pretty well but just to be super clear - this has nothing to do with the scaling effect being talked about.

[Wubsie]

As Novacrash said, they basically dropped the lowest tiers of mythic+. This is a great change in my opinion, since the lowest ones were kinda pointless. World quests give 865 gear and broken shore gives you access to 880 items easily. So, instead of having to do a bunch of low level mythics to upgrade your keystones before you actually get to the ones you want to do, you just essentially start at a higher one.

Additionally the gear rewards are on a "shorter" scaling chart now. Before you needed to do a +15 to get the max rewards. Now it's +10. While it's around the same difficulty (or slightly higher), it again means a lot less runs before you get to the +10.

[ILikeTwins]

I have slowed down my playtime the last couple of months but this may cause me to just take a break for a while. One of the things I used to love was to feel powerful in old zones. I mean I am supposed to be able to help take out gods right and yet a spider in a forest gives me a hard time??? I understand that they want the outdoor content to remain relevant but to me it just makes me feel like I am grinding for nothing. Not sure if they already do this but maybe if they make mob drops scale with their power level that might help feel like you are getting some reward for the more difficult content. I know they bump up the world quest drops so there is precedent for it.

[rapstar]

Just to pipe in on the Mythic+ difficulty increase. Yup they definitely made them significantly harder. Still doable, but where a +2 used to be a faceroll it now requires a decent amount of effort. I'm sure it'll become easy again once we gear up and fill out our artifact traits. If you could do +10 before patch, but are now struggling with +5, then are the rewards truly any better?

Here's the thing that they are doing, and I'm worried it's their new philosophy. They raised the gear ilvl for dungeons (from normal to M+10), WQs, and crafting. However they also raised the difficulty for all of these at least somewhat relative to your power increase, even open world mobs! So before you get excited about that 920 ilvl item, recognize that 920 in 7.2 isn't the same as 920 in 7.15 because all of the relevant content (except old raids... maybe?) had it's difficulty increased in turn.

Basically blizzard is playing with a set of sliders. They take existing *old* content and increase the difficulty slider, then they increase the gear (power) slider via artifacts and raising ilvl. They're doing this because they screwed up the power scaling. No other xpac has seen such a power (gear) increase in so short a time. If you're a mythic raider, it's like you're geared in a future that's 2 patches from now. They're trying to correct this mistake, but by doing so they are building a scaling framework which IMO will come back to bite them in the ass.

If you could join a server that was 20 ilvls harder for the same content but would reward you with gear that's 20 ilvls higher, however you start out with your current gear, would you join it? All it really is, is a step backwards right? Would the majority of players join this server? I highly doubt it.