Dragonflight arrives November 28th! This week on the podcast, emallson and Anomoly talk about the implications of that, holiday raiding (again), recap Heroic testing of Vault of the Incarnates, and cover the new (old) loot system!
This show is also available on YouTube and is streamed live every week at 1:30pm EDT over at https://twitch.tv/emallson
Timestamps
00:00 Wrath Launch & Raid Recap
20:30 Heroic Raid Testing
39:51 Dragonflight Release Date!
45:06 Dragonflight Season 1 Details (Hope you like Christmas Raiding 🙃)
01:02:46 Monk Tier Sets
01:10:30 Creation Catalyst, Group Loot, and Loot Trading
01:30:10 Dragonflight Hype?!
Music: Skye Cuillin by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4371-skye-cuillin
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Really enjoyed the podcast, as always. Thanks so much for putting it on!
About waiting 6 weeks for inspiration catalyst to open (i.e. 9 weeks to get 4set)
“Tier sets are a raiding reward. In my mind, if you’re not going to do raid difficulty content…”
1) When heroic raid gear is more powerful than M+ vault gear or duelist/elite pvp gear, it’s not a difficulty barrier. It’s an unbalance of power awarded for different end-game content as if one of them is more legitimate than the other two, with no bearing on difficulty.
2) Am I crazy to think the game difficulty/gamer skill level for top 0.1% raiders is not much different than the top 0.1% of PvP or 0.1% of M+? The exception being, raiding has more difficult to overcome barriers to entry. But has no more or less (roughly) time or class skill or game knowledge required.
And the problem isn’t just, well do all content to get the best gear; that’s fine, and a part of the game. It’s a combination of a.) the quite large amount of power increase between the gear b.) the quite large amount of time investment required in the raid content and c.) the quite large barriers to entry to perform said content.
For *most* players, you can’t realistically complete a tier set before catalyst opens anyway. In order to do that, you need a coordinated Mythic raiding guild that will do fairly optimized things (like full clearing the raid difficulties “backwards” to optimize trading—though thankfully that is going away).
Sepulcher is also unique in the extreme power level of the tier sets, where in the past (and the future, given how Vault tier sets look) it has been somewhat common to just ignore a tier set in PvP because it doesn’t provide a useful bonus or requires sacrificing too much of [insert current PvP stat].
All that said: the most equitable solution across content types *is* to just open Catalyst on week 1 and remove tier from raid loot tables. Other options (like making it available directly from M+ or PvP) would just lead back to the same spot we were in pre-Catalyst: having to do all forms of content in order to play any early in the season.
(Also: trying to compare player skill across different types of content like that is a fruitless endeavor, turn back lest ye lose yerself to madness)