by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

There is a problem with the rewards scheme in PVE content for Warlords of Draenor. When the expansion launched we had multiple forms of content that varied in difficulty to progress our characters and get ready for raids to open up. Since Highmaul has been up it seems like all this initial content content is no longer useful or rewarding for its difficulty.

When you hit level 100 you are normally hovering around the 600 item level mark which is good for normal level dungeons. Normal level dungeons reward 615 gear that helps you get to 610 for heroic dungeons and 615 for Highmaul LFR. You can trade in a number of apexis crystals obtained from daily quests for 630 pieces that can be upgraded with more crystals. There are also 640 crafting gear pieces available, which by this point in the expansion is not very expensive to get.

The problem starts with the requirements needed for LFR and Heroic mode dungeons compared to the rewards they give. Heroic dungeons are fairly difficult and have various mechanics that matter to all roles. To enter a Heroic mode dungeon you need to have completed at least Silver proving ground for the role you want to queue as, which makes sense. You see a big difference in quality of players that you get paired with in Heroic dungeons.They reward 630 gear with a chance to roll Warforged, sockets or tertiary stats. There is a feeling of progression when jumping from normal modes to Heroic dungeons and so far that has been very good.

LFR, in the other hand only has no proving grounds requirement at all. You can realistically achieve 615 by only running normal mode dungeons and because LFR rewards 640 gear, this makes the progression path into Heroic dungeons almost meaningless. It is true that LFR can only be run once a week and Heroic dungeons can be done many times if queued randomly, but there comes a point when the rewards don’t seem like they are worth the hassle. This gets a lot worse if you are playing a pure DPS class that has to wait in queue for a long time to get into a dungeon.

There is some sort of balance Blizzard has to reach in order to create content that is rewarding enough that is worth doing but is not too rewarding to make it almost mandatory. I know there is no such thing as mandatory content but when you are trying to improve and progress your character most people will do all that is in their reach to accomplish this.

My suggestion would be to lower the item level differences between LFR and heroic dungeons. If you have LFR quality gear at 636 for example it makes it better than Heroic dungeon gear, but because of how warforged items work you can still roll a similar item from a Heroic dungeon. People will still most probably run LFR every week for the legendary quest drops, but they know that running dungeons is still worth their time.

Would you like to see different or better reward be given for Heroic dungeons? Or are you happy with how the reward structure works now in this expansion? Please share your thoughts in the comments bellow!