Hot on the heels of the 7.3 reveals, Bioware made a post on the PTS forum in which they announced another change that's going to come with the next patch: the removal of Daily Resource Matrices, sometimes also referred to as daily commendations.
I was honestly kind of surprised by how much that bit of news excited me. I'm long past the point where I have to worry about upgrading my main's gear, and while I still get the occasional earpiece, implant or relic for an alt, that's just something I do for fun when I'm getting close to hitting a currency cap.
However, the requirement to farm dailies to upgrade any kind of gear never sat right with me, and I mentioned it as one of my major annoyances with Legacy of the Sith's gearing system shortly after the expansion's launch. Due to this, I've probably done more daily rounds in the last year than I did in the three previous years before that.
Some of my guildies hated this part of the system even more than I did - usually they were healer mains like me, for whom it seemed particularly awkward and annoying to go grind dailies (the new loadouts feature notwithstanding), when all they really wanted to do was heal people in operations or PvP.
I also had a couple of guildies who were totally fine with it though, and who were in fact constantly capped on daily commendations since they seemed to "naturally" acquire more than they could spend in a week anyway.
Ultimately, I had no idea how my own dislike of this part of the system compared to the rest of the player base. Being raiders, we're often far from representative of the "average" player. Maybe more casual players spend all their time at max level farming daily areas, and that's why this change was made? I kept trying to tell myself that it probably made sense from Bioware's point of view.
Needless to say, I'm taking the fact that they are removing daily commendations entirely in 7.3 as a sign that I was in fact not a lone weirdo for feeling like the daily grinding required to keep your gear upgraded was in fact not that great. Now that I think about it, daily commendations are also the reason my alts on the other servers don't have a higher item level than they do - I've had to exchange both Conquest and PvP currency for tech fragments at some point or another due to getting close to the cap, but I couldn't use them to upgrade my gear due to always being starved for daily commendations (and outright refusing to grind dailies on the other servers just to gear up).
I figure maybe it was a sort of experiment on Bioware's part to get people to engage with the old daily zones more... in which case my response to that would be: Okay, you tried; let's not to that again. Dailies already have their use as sources of reputation, credits and Conquest points as well as for the occasional seasons objective. I think that's enough to keep them relevant. Having to do them dozens of times to upgrade your gear as well was just overkill.
I'm so glad they're being removed. Daily zones should never have been made obligatory content, and I'm saying that as somebody who enjoys doing them semi-regularly! The difference between doing something because you enjoy it and because you must do it may be minor or even irrelevant to a lot of people, but it is always an important thing to bear in mind in my view.
ReplyDeleteIn general, I am pleased to see them dialling back somewhat on the grindier aspects of 7.0, even if it the changes are far later than they should have been. At least they aren't sticking to their guns all the way until 8.0!
I'm not against upgrade currencies at all. I think they do a good job taking the randomness out of gearing, but I don't think anyone will miss DRMs. They exist in a weird spot where we'd either have way more than we need or not nearly enough. If you have enough you don't even notice them, but if you don't it's not a great feeling to finish an operation with a pile of OPs Catalysts to spend, but be blocked from upgrades by not having enough DRMs.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the notion that BW wants people to do more than stand around waiting for queue pops or logging on and off for raids, but having to go out and get DRMs felt like doing chores and that's probably not what they were going for.
If DRMs were something we wanted to earn instead of something we needed to, it might've felt better. I think Tech Fragments have landed in a good spot. I'm done gearing but I feel like they come fast enough (especially now that we can exchange conquest comms for them ) and I don't mind hopping down to fleet to spend them down once a week or so. But I can't think of anything they could've used DRMs for that is not already covered by the other currencies out there.
I don't mind the gear upgrading in general either. I expect it will feel a lot smoother after the patch when you can actually upgrade your ops gear by running ops, upgrade your PvP gear by doing PvP etc. without running into that wall of needing to go out and do dailies for the second currency.
DeleteI'm pretty happy with tech fragments too. They come at a decent pace regardless of what you do and are useful in some way no matter what stage of the gearing process you're at.