This week's GG WoW video covers the
announcement of changes to how Tier pieces will drop as tokens rather than as items, and at a reduced rate compared to a bugged rate that we saw on PTR. We expect this means that Mythic tier bosses will drop 2 non-tier and 2 tier pieces, with other difficulties scaling on the same ratio based on raid size (although Blizzard did not clarify the numbers in this post). In addition to the tier discussion, the blue post also introduces some specifics about the Creation Catalyst, which will unlock after 8 weeks and allow players to create tier pieces. The tokenization of tier begs some further questions about how exactly they'll work with Trading.
Historically, tier tokens dropped for different groups of classes and were also often tied to specific armor slots. Both of these criteria aren't announced in the blue post but are assumed to be how they'll work this time as well. There are a lot of different ways that trading these tokens could work:
- They could fit into current personal loot rules - so 252 Tier is tradeable if you have 252 or higher in that slot, whether or not it's tier. Since tier is more powerful than non tier this could create some weird situations where it feels bad to loot non-tier since you can now trade tier of that item level, and might therefore be against the personal loot philosophy.
- They could add a stricter rule so you could only trade 252 Tier if you already have 252 Tier or higher in that slot, which creates a different problem where 265 Tier represents a small upgrade for me over 252 Tier but a huge upgrade for someone else in my raid who doesn't yet have tier in that slot.
- They could let you trade 252 Tier if you already have tier of any item level in that slot, which solves the above problem but then what if a player drops a Tier helmet and already has 4p from all the other tier slots and therefore wants to be able to trade their helmet?
- They could of course make tier tokens fully 100% tradeable at all times, but would this create huge incentives to either do as many alt runs as possible even for guilds that normally wouldn't consider it, since it'd double or triple their tier income? For guilds that don't decide to do this, would they instead funnel all of their tier to the specs that benefit the most from it, and would that feel bad for the players that had to trade their tokens away? In many ways this series of questions leads to a similar debate as the ones surrounding Master Looter.
What do you think about these different possibilities? What tradeoffs do you think are worth making with the system, or is there another possibility that we've missed? Let us know in the comments here, and be sure to let Blizzard know as well, since they specifically mentioned trading as something they're looking for feedback on!
