Damn....for someone who doesn't raid (too many alts to find time), no stomach for PvP and is suffering through some rep grinding for some nicer gear upgrades....I was hoping for a BC style gear jump again. haha.

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My precious [The Unstoppable Force] was made obsolete as soon as i stepped into Outland. I worked my butt of to get that epic through the old pre-honor system.. Oh well, at least I still have my pvp rank left :)

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To the Raiders: Congrats! Now WotLK has even less to offer you as your endgame gear will last you until 78. Have fun running all the new content, getting no upgrades, and finding nothing rewarding in WotLK until you step up to Arthas himself :D

It had to happen at some point before we started strapping on epics with an item level of 250.

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What scared a lot of the pre-BC raiders from the raiding scene was that their Naxx gear was still functional after the expansion, but hardly competitive with quest rewards from Nagrand and it was those set bonuses and quirky unique effects that kept them viable into Karazhan. Obviously stamina was blown wide open, but that won’t happen again.

What I want to know is whether level 80 quest gear will be on the level with Sunwell and >T6 loot or will some of us be able to ding 80 and walk right into Naxx and be ‘ready’ (as in, not cripplingly undergeared) for some of those encounters wearing mostly BT/Hyjal quality pieces?

It would be a nice reward for progressing far into the game if that quality of gear would enable us to largely skip the obligatory 5-man dungeon crawl everybody faced gearing up for Karazhan to gear up for Gruul/Mag to gear up for SSC/TK, etc. I’m not saying I don’t want to replace my epics or experience the new 5-man content, or silly enough to believe they’ll last far into 80… I’m just saying it would be nice to dampen the magnitude of downtime in raiding between level 80 and Naxx as bad as Kara had it for guilds that weren’t racing for first kills. The best thing is that there won’t be the horrid 20-to-10-man, 40-to-25-man transition that killed so many guilds and caused so much drama.

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I actually think the level 60 endgame content is problematic in lots of ways that have nothing to do with gear quality, and the transition is BC is a bit overstated. Yeah, comparing level 58-60 quest blues to level 62 BC greens is a big jump, but in a lot of cases you'd see a pretty similar difference between level 50 quest blues and level 55 greens.

My feral druid and my rogue were both in gear from MC and the first few bosses in BWL when I went through the dark portal. My druid got a lot of green items in Hellfire Peninsula right away, but then again, feral itemization was pretty bad before the expansion. My rogue was still wearing some BWL epics until Blade's Edge and Netherstorm.

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I am not scared to "lose" anything because I don't consider the time I spend online "Work" its a game. I really find it annoying that people are more worried about their loot than seeing new content. My old raiding guild all grouped and skipped content and powered their way to 70 to hurry up and hit end game content as soon as possible. Only a handful of them are even still playing anymore.

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Here's my question:

ilvl of items dropped by Kel'Thuzad: 92
ilvl of items dropped by Kil'Jaeden: 164

A top-end 60 before BC was wearing gear that was effectively 30 levels higher than him. Those items were replaced in Kara, generally, by items with an ilvl of 115.

A top-end 70 is wearing gear thta is effectively 90 levels higher than him. When is he going to replace his gear? Heck, the new badge loot is 148. Even a relatively casual raider who just does kara weekly and maybe takes a shot at ZA occasionally will be in gear 60-70 levels higher. There was no massive ilvl inflation in early BC, everyone just replaced their gear because the item budgets changed. Stamina exploded, attack power and agility appeared on the same random greens, etc. If this doesn't happen in WotLK, I don't expect to replace my gear, which has an average ilvl of 145 overall, until well into the new 25 man dungeons.

So what is my reward going to be for buying the expansion? I love new content, don't get me wrong, but I like new shinies, too.

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When I read that post, I didn't get the impression that Bornakk was saying that your currently gear wouldn't be obsolete within a few levels, as it seems some others read it. What it sounded like to me was confirmation that they weren't planning to change the iLevel values of various stats like they did with TBC.

Stamina in particular was a massive change with TBC, where its iLevel value dropped dramatically, leading to a large increase in the relative amount of stamina on each item. His comments about the stats being more "consistent" seems to fall in line with the idea that stats should work the same way they do now, though there will obviously be more of each stat on items.

I imagine that the change won't be as jarring as it was with TBC, but I don't see anything in his post that outright says that 70 epics will last to 80 any better than 60 epics lasted to 70. Seems to me he just says that they'll work the same way and have a smoother rate of obsolescence.

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I believe that Blizz should incorporate upgradeable items in WOTLK. Not quite like the one peice ata time upgrades for the tier.05 stuff. More like do a 5 man in WOTLK and get a token that increases all attributes of a set of pants by 10%.

Kill another boss and get a head +10% to all the stats. Make only one token usable on one piece. SO say the loot from Unamed Vampire Viking BOSS in a 5-Man would be dungeon blue + dungeon blue + random upgrade token worht +10% to all stats on an item sockets and enchants would not be calculated in that.)

And the tokens value would increase for higher lvl dungeons.

SO a 70-73 dungeon might be 10%

A lvl 75-78 dungeon might be 30%.

And a 80 Heroic might be 50%

SO you could in essence maybe never change your gear if you have raiding gear or badge loots.

Or another idea might be to have a daily quest to exchange your old gear for badges equal the item lvl of the item.

SO you cash in your lvl 70 badge loot or raid loot and get say 500 Badges of 'we hate the lich king and want him to die'

TO buy a full set of lvl 80 WOTLK badge loot would cost like 1000 of those new badges. THe other badges are obtain in a similar fashion to the existing badge system. AND there will be normal gear from rads etc with a progression similar to normal.

It would probalbly have to be set up so you can only cash in one item of each slot that way. . . . .so you don't cash in endless supplies of lvl 70 gear that you farm @ lvl 80 for the purpose of cashing in.

SO best case you cash in what epics you have and keep rolling with dungeon blues some epics etc while gearing up, but the better the items the bigger a jump you get on lvl 80 gear.

Worst case you lvl to 80 and run sunwell 25 man a lot in order to stack up the maxxed gear for cashing in.

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People need to get over this "gear reset" crap. Expansions come out, you move your character up and start the gear acquisition over again, it's the nature of the game. If you're raiding just so you can have the best gear there's bigger issues. Yes gear is certainly part of it but you shouldn't be upset because you get to move up to bigger and better gear. If people can't get used to this idea that gear will always be made obselete by something they need to stop playing MMOs.

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All "teh blue" seems to be saying is that no stats are having their distribution value changed. With BC, stamina took up a lot less "item points" or whatever you'd call it, so items in BC had so much more stamina old-world items became laughable if you cared about that stat (and really, who doesn't?)

In WotLK, your epics without a dobut, will still be obsoleted, I just expect it will take a few more levels; IE you'll be replacing T6 at say 77 instead of 73. T5 at 75 instead of 72. Something like that, but by level 80, we're exactly where we were with TBC, a bare handful who are clinging to their Kil'Jaden epics, but everybody else in quest greens.

I think this is really a good thing, its the same gear reset, but spread out over more levels, which is good for both the Hardcore AND the casuals; a nice compromise we don't see to often.

Another bonus goes with the notion that Northrend gear will look northrendy, instead of just recolored low-level gear and then floating crystals of doom (which I personally love, don't hate progress)
It would be cool to be able to tell someone's level at a glance just by the proportion of outland-to-northrend gear, if they were 70 pre-WotLK, if blizzard means it when they say Northrend gear will have its own unique look.

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I agree that WotlK is a completely different purchase and therefore should be bigger and better.

You raided and spent a lot of time in BC... woohoo. You are running around the top dog right NOW.

But when WotlK comes out, I really don't see all the fuss in wanting the items to not be A LOT better till you get to 80?

I liked the change from pre BC to BC. I had full pvp epics and they lasted me till 65, even though we had a big jump in items. Now its not even going to be a big jump?

Great... like another poster stated, I'll be rolling around on my gear till 80, same look.

Hopefully the game will start at 20 bucks instead of 40, since i'm only going to be getting half the reason for playing out of it. To see new content, but no rewards.

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Thats good news.... I just lvl'd my first toon to 60 and made the jump into outland..... and to my surprise the gear I had to work my butt off for in the eastern Plaguelands with 5 man groups were made obsolete on my first kill.... some random green had twice the armor and stats than the blue item it replaced.....

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