Observations on World of Warcraft issues

Recently, World of Warcraft has started on a path. By recently, I mean in the last couple of expansions. A path of perpetual power increase. These are just my observations. There is not really any evidence that I am right, it's just opinions.

Seasons

Seasons was introduced a while ago, in the beginning of Battle For Azeroth. It's a why to make gear and progress "limited time only", since you progress through a season, get gear and when the next season starts, you are basically starting all over again.

Each expansion has had 3 or 4 seasons. With each season you get a big jump in item level. This in it self is not bad, we had this all the way back in classic, with different raid tiers. Tier 1, 2 and 3, could just have been named season 1, 2 and 3. The big difference, is the gear and progress reset. Each season has it's own currencies. They can only be earned and spent in that season. So if you have only progressed through half the content and a new season comes around, you start progressing the new season and leaving the old one behind.

This creates an arbitrary feeling of missing out. FOMO (Fear of missing out).

Gear Tracks

Gear tracks where introduced in The War Within. Each season got split into 6 sub categories called Gear Tracks. These where called:

1. Explorer (entry level)
2. Adventurer (heroic dungeon level)
3. Veteran (mythic 0 level)
4. Champion (normal raid level)
5. Hero (heroic raid level)
6. Myth (mythic raid level)

I have not yet figured out what the reason was for this. Why not just reward items at specific item levels for different forms of content instead. It worked for previous expansions just fine.

This track system, makes it feel like, unless you are a mythic raider, that you have to keep getting more and more competitive to get better gear. And that is healthy to an extent. But people might start to shun you if you only have champion level gear.

Upgrading

Now here is where it gets interesting. A method to upgrade your gear was introduced in Dragonflight. Doing content earns you Crests. A type of crest are only valid for one season. Within that season, there are 6 different crest levels. You guessed it. One for each gear track. And you can only upgrade a certain track with certain crests, e.g. Hero track requires hero crests to upgrade. Pretty logical. But each track then has 6 upgrade levels. Usually an item start out at 1 of 6. Then you upgrade it once, using crests, and it becomes 2 of 6 and so on. Each upgrade gives the item about 3-4 item levels and the stats to match. Great!

But this also means, that each track needs at least 3 x 6 item levels, before the next track starts. Example from Midnight Season 1. A Champion item starts at item level 246 at 1 of 6 Champion. Fully upgraded it's at 263. That's 17 item levels for 1 track in 1 season. Granted, Explorer gear is not really used anymore, as you get Adventurer gear from world quests and normal dungeons.

Adventurer gear starts at item level 220.
Myth gear ends at 289 (weapons and trinkets at 298 with Voidshards)

That is about 70 item levels in 1 season.

Increasing Item Levels

As a result, the Season 2 item levels will be even wilder and higher. So with 3 seasons in an expansion, the items level increases by about 200 for a fresh max level. This results in way to high stat numbers, health pools are insane at multiple millions. So how does Blizzard handle this. Item Level Squish. It has happened multiple times before, but usually some expansions in between. We just got one with the Midnight launch. And we will probably get one again for The Last Titan launch, if not sooner.

It's just not a viable solution. It's a bandaid at best.

Possible Solutions

These are just thoughts, ideas and opinions.

The main problem, as I see it, is the ever increasing Item Levels. The reasons for that happening is the addition of Gear Upgrades and in part gear tracks. Hear me out.

1. Remove Upgrading. It's a tedious chore and it only increased item levels so everything in the next season has to be that much tougher. I don't think it actually has any benefits to the game, as most competitive players will be required to have it all maxed out anyway.
2. Reduce the amount of tracks or remove them entirely. We could easily get by with 3 or 4 tracks. Normal, Heroic and Mythic is fine. With the upgrading gone, you can their item level closer together, so not to have big jumps. Normal could be 237, Heroic could be 246 and Myth could be 259 (example). Or remove tracks and just set the items levels depending on what level of content it was gained from.
3. Change out Seasons for Tiers again. That way you have 3 tiers pr expansion, but the gear from the first could still be used until a better one drops in the second. So if you had Tier 1 on Heroic level, you could still use it all through Tier 2 if you only did Normal level stuff. This solution won't really change much, I just don't get why they felt they had to change stuff from Tiers to Seasons.