WOW - Has Blizz messed up itemization? : World of Warcraft General Discussions

Personally I think with TBC I think they have ... lets look at the facts.

Pre-TBC - Instance gear was at the highest lvl 58 (and only a few peices where this high), the lvl 60 gear came out of Zul'Gurrub and from BG's. Raid gear was extremely powerful, the gap between raiders and non-raiders was huge ... did it need to be toned down? Yes

This set up made it worth doing BG's because the items where a very nice upgrade, it also made doing ZG worthwhile because the loot was better than anything in normal instances.

Post TBC - Instance gear is all lvl 70, a homogenous mix of items, it becomes very easy to max out your gear by running the same high lvl instances time and again. The BG gear is also lvl 70, and stacks stamina, but its not really better than instance gear, just situationally better and given the amount of time needed to gain the honour for it, its kinda disapointing imo. For example I have made the 39000 honour necessary for the Sergs Heavy Cape and the Dreadweave Robe, at about 650 honour an hour thats a massive 60 hours or 2.5days played (approx) for items that r only really good in BG's or Arena's, not imo a worthwhile expenditure of time, though it was fun especially as I tend to do well in BG's.

Heroic Instances - ok I'll admit I have only run one and we were unlucky in that nothing that dropped could be used by our classes, however the loot does not seem that great, not much of an improvement on what people already have. The epics off the end bosses in Heroic instances also dont look all the epic, one at least (a totem) was worse than a green totem already carried by our shaman (it didn't drop, he used atlas-loot to show us it).

Raid Instances - Kara, the items from here seem to be only a marginal upgrade on what we already have though tbh I haven't seen anything drop that I have so cant fully compare, but agian its a marginal step up. I do however think that reducing the gap between raid and non-raid is a good idea but I think they reduced it to much and didn't fully use the Heroics and Kara to create a decent stepping stone between the raiding guilds and non-raiding players.

The way I think it should be - I think they would have been better off working to the time tested way of doing things, non-heroic instances dont drop higher than lvl 68 items, except off the end boss which should drop two lvl 70 items. Heroic instances drop lvl 70 items with epics from the last boss, BG items should all be decent lvl 70 items. This way it would give players a way of continually improving thier characters, as it currently stands I am pretty maxed without lots of raiding, I intend to do more Heroics because I haven't really gotten a feel for them, also being so hard they are alot of fun; I don't however forsee many PUG's doing well in Heroics, so they may also become the province of guild groups who know how to play thier characters to full effect.

Sax.

From Saxif-of-Prydwen

So you hate the idea you had then.

I totally agree with OP. I am only doing marginally better damage at 10 levels over 60 now. And the few pieces of Kara gear I have were begrudgingly rolled on by me as very minor upgrades. Some were downgrades even (but I was sick of having the same blues I've had for weeks).

I personally don't think that raid items should be toned down, raid gear symbolizes that YES you have done it, you have accomplished what few (or many have done), I think of it as a token of accomplishment. take that away and, hell?!?! who wants to play MMO's ?