The Patch 10.1 Upgrade System - Dratnos and Tettles Discuss

Posted 2023/05/30 at 2:04 AM by Squishei

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Comments

Comment by vidplayer

M+ hater here, I wish I could cap fragments through raid somehow. That is all.

Comment by cordiq

M+ hater here, I wish I could cap fragments through raid somehow. That is all.

Fully agree. You can cap it through mid lvl m+ but cannot through raiding. WTF?

Comment by CJLo

Overall the new upgrade system is good. Not having a cap on flightstones and upgrade discounts when you have higher ilvl gear is a huge step in the right direction.

Some changes needed are when you are capping the top tier (Aspect) fragments, you should start earning the next lower tier fragments (Wyrm>Drake and etc.) when doing the higher level content as suggested by Blizzard themselves. Hope this come sooner than expected.

Last but not least, make them appear in currency tab instead of taking up bag slots will be a huge QOL improvement.

Comment by blupache

The start of mythic raid being essentially negated by grindable 441's is the obvious failing to me - definitely agree it should either be at, or go to 447.

And I think crest acquisition is an issue just because it seems like you have two camps of people - those who're swimming in crests & those who have less than half of what they need. It feels like something where Bliz needs to manage the curve better.

Comment by Dromes

It's so weird how the upgrade ranges are seperated. Like maxxed out normal gear being only 4 ilvls below max heroic gear and mythic with no upgrades at all, despite them making the mythic loot have a large ilvl range in the first place? I don't even understand the need for that seperation in the first place, we already have the crests for that, just make it into a single large ilvl scale like titanforging but with actual effort and progress and without RNG.

Comment by solisolisoli

Rerunning raid for upgrade material would be pretty sweet.

Comment by Morrdd

I love the new system, but given the granularity wish there was some better way to sloooowly accumulate bits that are out of people's reach and blend the tiers a bit more. e.g. would it break the game if you couldn't manage M+ above 15, but the vault gave you some few Wyrm/Aspect bits so you could slowly collect them over ~3 weeks, and choose where to spend your precious higher-than-content-you-do tokens?

Hard ceilings feels a bit sad when the system inherently supports lower-level assembly to blur the distinctions, and stretch out the bands people can work towards.

Comment by Mutley1984

Honestly, don't care about people getting strong gear super early. If you're a terrible player the gear won't do much for you anyway... It's nice to see a patch where your not gated by gear if you do want to do things like push m+ without raiding or gear alts to raid on. Valor was a terrible system and we had it for too long. However, the first mythic bosses in raid should give higher item lvl because it makes no sense that raiders are not getting rewarded for the ealier bosses.

1. Make crests an actual currency, and not something you hold in you're bags.
2. The max upgrade of 441 would have made more sense at 437 because it would have made more early mythic loot viable.
3. As a m+ player I don't mind farming crests, but increase the quantity that drops from raid since not everyone likes dungeons.

Comment by MyFingerIsOnCD

Remove the crests and upgrade range limits

Comment by Thoorin

The new system is good, but far from perfect.

I like the general idea, but some details are just annoying and could be easily corrected.

First, Blizzard was lying again promising me more account-wide features. Remove the 2000 flightstones cap, and make the currency account-wide. It's not gonna break the game, but it'd do wonders to help me enjoy the alts that are undergeared and underplayed. Seriously, as is, I hardly ever bother with alts, I don't want to retread the path for the umpteenth time. And yes, I've yet to run out of flightstones, other than on extremely underplayed and undergeared alts, but the very EXISTENCE of the cap means mandatory bad feeling on a main when you do a quest on the quick to finish that rep grind, and realize you've been wasting your effort because you've capped flightstones AGAIN, but have nothing to spend them on when your beggard alts could kiss your main's boots for such gift.

Second, I dislike "tiering", i.e. capping an item's potential. Why not make the last, ninth upgrade to say 8/8 Champion, make it switch to 1/8 Hero etc? If someone LIKES a piece, let them keep it. To upgrade it further, they will still need crests/fragments from harder content. Consistently engaging content should be rewarded, not penalized. I do understand "kill things, get loot" but if we're already going in the direction of materials and currencies and gear upgrades (which, by the way, is VERY GOOD), then just go all in. Going forward, we could get things we know from tabletops, like rolling multiple items into one to get improvements, or merge traits.

Third, it is mindboggling how inept the devs are. Where are their BRAINS? They willy-nilly WASTED 8 - EIGHT - bag slots on four types of fragments and four types of crests... even while there already is a crest VENDOR in Loamm. All they had to do was make fragments a CURRENCY, and then put the crests, priced 15 fragments each, on the VENDOR. No bag space wasted, effect the same, the only downside is needing to hit the vendor... but if they put upgrade NPCs in raid, why not add vendor too, or add vendor function to the upgrade npc?

Everything else about the system is good, the only other major problem is how late the tier conversion system is launching and how previous tier, though still active, is no longer available. Another case of "silo-ing" stuff, when having 2+2 combos would make game more interesting. Also, I already have BANKFULL of pieces that I could use if they were tier, but can't until they are because the tier bonuses outweigh the raw ilevel upgrade value. If they wanted to stagger the tier switch, they should have left it as a currency purchase... for example, make "tier conversion charges" something that costs flightstones. This would make interesting choice - do you upgrade, or do you convert first, and with an account-wide currency, any flightstone gains anywhere later in the tier would still have reward value due to overflow to the needs of alts.

Comment by Newermore

Loot from first 3 mythic bosses sucks hard, basically its just heroic loot now. Even loot from 4th and 5th boss feels terrible, when I do compare amount of effort and skill required to kill those bosses reward is just not here. Overall new upgrade system is great addition and definitely helps players but loot from mythic raid got much worse and less rewarding.

Comment by Elunario

It is also worth now going to LFR again, for an extra chance to get tier pieces and BiS trinkets. You can then upgrade these items to 424 max using the shards dropped from normal raid or m+.
When you get the same tier piece again in better quality, the shards put into the LFR items are not wasted.

Comment by Slayer6

Still no Crafted Gear limit, and this time they only need 3.75 timed 11’s for a recraft to 437 or 3.75 timed 16’s for a recraft to 447… AND end up with gear better than M+…

Comment by neescher1

To be fair, the first bosses in mythic raid have been useless (loot wise) in season one as well, except for the very rare drops.

In season 1, the ilvl of those bosses was 415, the same you could get from m+ with upgrades - that hasn't really changed. The only difference is, how fast it can be done at the start of the season.

Comment by neescher1

Still no Crafted Gear limit, and this time they only need 3.75 timed 11’s for a recraft to 437 or 3.75 timed 16’s for a recraft to 447… AND end up with gear better than M+…

It's limited to one piece every two weeks, and you need 5 16s. It's still only half as much as season 1, but they do have to be timed. However the fact that crafted gear is now the same ilvl as m+ items from a +20 weekly chest means the items are actually useful even late in the season.

Comment by Bredant

Overall it's WAY better than it was previously. I love that once I upgrade a slot to max all it costs is flightstones for subsequent gear for that slot and character. Amazing change.

Comment by Rellyne

No need to "nerf" stuff as suggested. There is room to make it less convoluted and pratical, but no need to nerf the good sides of it.

There is still room for fixing one of the main problems since all this M+ began and only got worse until a terrible point now in DF S1 and still in DF S2: M+ crushing Raid gear.

Being able to upgrade raid gear finally started to fix that problem, better raid loot for S2 (and M+ rotation) also helped a lot. But there is still room to fix the fact that you can reach 447 faster and easier (and also better itemized) outside of the raid. M+ weekly chest still beats raid weekly chest for less effort.

1) More fragments when you don't time your m+ run. Not only for our own time lost, but also to help remove the problem created with the fragment farm where people will leave (or not even join) runs that they don't think it will be timed (and also stop the low key level farming and let people do higher keys more often). Raid bosses should also earn you more fragments overall since raids take more effort and time than spam the lowest m+ for each tier of crest.

2) Bring back the "ease of use" from S1 upgrade system. Remove it from professions. Let players just earn their fragments, etc. right click on it and form their crests for upgrade AND crafting, ask for 4 crests when crafting and that's it. Solve the public work order problem with real fixes. This entire crest system should be a "game system", not a profession bandaid like today. Also, remove flightstone cap.

3) Make it all currency, start double checking stuff to stop the unecessary bag clutter. They did a good job for DF cleaning our bags just to make it worse since 10.0.7. Only fragments should be in our bags (so you can click it to create crests) or just make it all currency that also transform in crests.

Comment by MarkElf

The upgrade system is good but not when shared with crafted gear and teir. As far as embellishments go for hunter I should have two peices with shadowflame patches (and since I want to use a flavor packet this time, we add one, plus enji bracers ideally for non-brez classes). This limits the "good" weekly vault loot to only rings, teir, and trinkets to be worth taking. Either way, players can end up with full 447 without ever stepping foot in a +20. Having to farm 11s is very odd at the start of the season and I'm sure people were carried through 16s for crests which translates to some io inflation but that's negligible at best.

Comment by TOMRUS

System is good, but not good enough.

Comment by CashmereWizard

IMO I like I can get my gearing done quick and not spends weeks and weeks farming the same items just to get another 3 ilvl squeezed out of them. Mythic raid loot should start higher, but thats my only complaint. If raiders are made m+ people can get close to max mythic ilvl, idk its 2023 and the game doesn't need to be gated like that anymore, esp when 5% of the playerbase is raiding mythic anything more than the first 3 or so lol. For people who raid and m+, its great both ways. Would like to get lower crests if you cap out of aspects, or some way to trade up whelp/drake crests or use those to make BOA 400ilvl gear or something for alts. I have so many drake/whelp stuff on my main that is just occupying bag space. Bad.

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