In Final Fantasy XIV, the Savage raid tier lasts for two major patches.

What this functionally means is that the tier launches, item level adjusts upwards such that the new normal raid eclipses the prior Savage and the new Savage is on a plateau untouched by anything but augmented tomestone gear, and players start the grind on the tier for their gear and clears. When the major patch after that launch hits, catchup mechanics come in strong – you can augment the existing crafted gear (which itself matches the normal raid gear and ends up perfectly between normal and Savage once augmented), getting augmented capped tomestone gear is easier, and things like the Normal raid loot unlocking come through to offer more better gear. In the current Abyssos tier, you probably started progging Savage in full crafted gear at item level 610, but someone starting today could be at 625 against the Savage level of 630 without even touching the raid. This allows the tier to naturally progress and increase clear rates over time, and it keeps the content as the pinnacle of attainment within the game.

WoW’s seasonal model that started in Legion has never really offered this.

The philosophy behind seasons in general, in fact, has largely been that each season is an island unto itself, and when the new one comes out, the catchup is always to sprint to the starting point for endgame of that tier – getting an item level just high enough to not feel bad, but low enough to mean that everything the season offers in terms of drops and player power is a valid path for progression. If you start mid-season, tough shit – you start the grind at the bottom and the only solace is that maybe people will trade you unneeded drops because they already have their gear.

So patch 10.0.7, with the Forbidden Reach, item level 385 gear tokens, upgrades to 395, and the Onyx Annulet all mark a pretty sharp departure for Blizzard. After all, we are still in the Season 1 Dragonflight grind, and it is likely to remain the case for at least another two months – most educated guesses on the launch of patch 10.1 put the patch either into late May or mid-to-late June, so it either launches before Diablo IV and has suitable time for people to hit goals in WoW before delving into Sanctuary, or the late June window so that it does not step on Diablo’s toes. Yet here we are now, with a pretty substantial amount of gear upgrades. My alts that were languishing unplayed in the 350 item level range are all now a bare minimum of 375 item level, mostly on the strength of the gear tokens from Forbidden Reach alone. At the same time, outside the normal patch structure, Blizzard has launched the Turbulent Timeways event for 6 weeks, making 6 straight weeks of weekly timewalking events and upgrading the level 70 character quest reward from a normal raid cache to a Heroic one.

With all of this in mind, how does it feel?

Well, I used the FFXIV example to lead in because I think that mid-season catchup is a good thing. FFXIV uses these gentle mechanisms to push the average item level a player might have equipped higher and higher, and it reflects with higher levels of overall participation in the high-end raiding scene (as a percentage of players from public data, so accuracy is not as high as it could be). However, in FFXIV, there is a twist – each raid tier is basically standalone in gear terms, and you pretty much replace everything when moving up to a new tier, so catchup mid-tier is consequence free – you need to eventually farm up a full new set of gear for the next Savage tier as soon as it launches, and so the power on offer from those upgrades is, for Savage raiders, very temporary. Right now, we have the Abyssos Savage unlock coming next week, and while we’ll be able to gear fully up to 630 item level, the new raid tier in 6.4 will have gear starting at 640 item level for Normal, with 660 as the Savage rewards. Even the new crafted gear we’ll get in the patch will be 640, and with capped Tomestone gear at 650, the current tier’s Savage loot will be long-forgotten in short order.

In WoW, things are quite different. While a new tier in 10.1 will mark an upgrade in item levels, current gear will remain relevant for some, as the current Mythic raid item levels will become the new Normal raid ones, and so a modest leap of 26 item levels will be the expected increase of power. That means that while getting Heroic raid caches from Timewalking quests now is a huge boost in power, that item level will be equal to what will become LFR in 10.1. This does make catchup tricky, however – the philosophical approach between the two games is quite different in terms of how long those catchup rewards are valid and good for. There’s a risk in WoW’s model that offering catchup gear can invalidate content, and while that is also true in FFXIV, FFXIV’s roulette model and use of a wide array of content means that no content ends up being completely useless for progression. In WoW, on the other hand, the current Forbidden Reach catchup gear actually stands to invalidate 3 modes of content – the Primal Storms, since you can skip right to 385 with the tokens and then upgrade further to 395 (although there is a caveat we’ll come back to later), LFR raiding, and even Normal raiding (to a point).

Now let’s repeat what I said near the top – for all the context I just jammed in above, I think catchup mid-season is a good thing. Getting back into WoW mid-season can feel terrible in the old model, where you just have to grind the worst parts of the treadmill for slightly better gear, doing low keys when the experience is trivialized, waiting an hour for an LFR queue for a shot at likely one piece of gear, or trying to find a Normal raid PUG when many groups start demanding existing raid experience you simply do not have and cannot get since all the groups want that experience. For whatever soft catchup exists under the old ideology, it’s also dependent on social friction – asking people to trade you gear, getting them to agree, and weighing a stranger’s gear acquisition against things like Valor upgrades or disenchanting. For some folks, they just won’t benefit because they won’t ask or end up in groups that are also trying to gear up mid-season, so it ends up being a soft catchup that doesn’t quite pan out.

On the point of content invalidation, there’s something worth noting as it stands – the content that is most invalidated by this new gearing mechanism is the stuff that people already are kind of not doing. Primal Storms are minor world events rarely filled with players at this point, queuing LFR at this point in the season is a miserable experience in waiting, if you can get a group at all, and even normal is only really worth doing if you still need the Raszageth dragonriding skin (which, I mean, I do, but I only pugged the fight once outside of my raid team). The content most harmed by these systems is content that is already dying on the vine of WoW’s perpetual forward march. On the other hand, stuff like low keys in Mythic Plus remain highly populated thanks to uncapped Valor and bonus Valor rewards, not to mention that rating and the social mechanisms that gatekeep access to better keys involve a non-zero amount of grinding on those lower keys for the rating boosts, especially if you’re playing DPS or a non-meta tank or healer.

Finally, I want to discuss the idea that the gear might remain valuable into 10.1 and even beyond, and refute it simply – so what? I have two Keystone Master characters and 3 toons north of 400 item level, and someone who plays world content being able to eventually get a full set of 395 gear from world content doesn’t bother me at all – and why should it? Sure, I bet there are some sweathogs out there who are very mad that players can leapfrog the entry level of the current season now when it was something a lot of us had to do just a few short months ago. Something that Blizzard is actually doing better is that they are pushing more towards achievements and feats of strength to denote accomplishment of tough goals, and the gear rewarded is not really made the point. Sure, having more player power is nice and feels good, but it also isn’t something worth lording over other players, especially given that the game slides that scale higher every few months. By the summer, we’re going to be chasing a 450 item level and all of us tryhards doing Keystone Hero are going to immediately need to start over, but for the average player, why bother being bothered by what they have? In fact, here is a core hypothesis I have about MMO endgame content – if the barriers to entry are removed or trivialized, everyone wins, because more players fill the modes, groups get running faster, and people can convert from casual on-the-fence players to dedicated endgame content enjoyers. Even then, like, so what if someone can kill a world quest mob faster? Who cares? This is, in fact, very similar in spirit to the way borrowed power worked from Legion through Shadowlands – as the season progresses, soft caps and moving target goals open up and make the average player more powerful. Dragonflight only does this via gear, so mid-season catchup has to be, well, gear.

I can speak to how it has helped me play more. I hadn’t considered doing another KSM push, and if I did, it was likely to either be a DPS again (Arms Warrior has been calling my name) or maybe my Priest as a healer. With gear catchup, I went a different route – I geared my Demon Hunter back up as a tank and have been tanking keys for PUGs, stretching the boundaries of my comfort zone a lot but gaining a lot from it (a 1,000 point rating increase in 6 days, for one, and then the whole thing where I gain more comfort tanking for randoms). I like my Demon Hunter, and only shelved her for Dragonflight so far because my raid could make better use of the Monk physical damage taken debuff since we had a DPS DH already, but she was my second level 70 of the expansion and after I did some M0 grinding on her to get item level into the 370 range, I shelved her. Having easy gear catchup has made playing her in interesting and exciting content more feasible, and the same goes for a lot of my alts. I spent the first week of the patch doing 11 sets of dungeon weeklies for Heroic caches (yes, that means I ran 44 keys minimum across 11 characters in 7 days) and using my Monk and DH as tanks to grind the War Creche on Forbidden Reach for gear tokens, and it didn’t take long for me to have alts up 20 or even 30 item levels. I even burned most of my Primal Chaos to have gear crafted, and now I have 6 Elemental Lariats across my account and some absurd total number of crafted pieces. Even as I write this, the first week of Turbulent Timeways just halfway through now, I’ve done 10 sets of Timewalking quests for the sake of caches, and I’m probably going to do that throughout the full 6 week event unless I hit a point of saturation on gear.

For Blizzard, the decision is an easy slam dunk – more active players doing more activities means groups form faster, people try alts and new roles, and the game has a liveliness restored to it that it was starting to lose, at least on my server (I could often count the people around the fountain in Valdrakken with just my two hands during prime play hours). It’s a move I almost fully have to applaud, because it has given a lot to the game that I didn’t even fully consider missing.

But, in true Blizzard fashion, there are a couple of warts worth discussing too.

First, Blizzard loves, absolutely loves, doing the dumb thing where gear catchup cannot be deterministic in a real sense. You can use Elemental Overflow, an existing currency that is now incredibly abundant via Forbidden Reach activities, to buy 359 base gear that was also a part of the Primal Storm events, and you can gamble that with the Dragonscale Expedition vendor in the Reach for a bag that has a chance to contain a gear token or one of the items to upgrade a 385 Primalist gear piece to 395. The tokens for 385 gear are locked in by armor type and slot, and which ones you receive are completely random, so there’s no really good way to deterministically just get the things you want. The closest is a vendor gamble to maybe get any token, but short of the 359 pieces, you have no choices – just keep farming and grinding and gambling. Even if the Overflow cost was premium as fuck, I would prefer to be able to buy the tokens flat-out. Charge me 5,000 Elemental Overflow for the smallest value gear slot and 10,000 for a weapon token (which is a thing!), or hell, even more, since a daily rare farm is worth like 12,000.

Secondly, the reward structure uses the existing Primal Storm gear, which is great, but the structure that is used on the Forbidden Reach has a problem – you can get a ton of Overflow, but 0 Storm Sigils from this content, which means the new zone flow is basically buying 359 pieces that could be upgraded to 385, getting 0 of the currency that upgrades them, and waiting for a token drop in the same slot to get the same upgrade rank 2 385 piece which you can then upgrade with a different, Reach-specific item, to hit 395. If I could buy 359 gear and then earn Storm Sigils for the upgrade to 385, the complaints I have with the tokens would be mostly gone, but instead, we’re stuck with this very strange and stilted mechanism. With that, there is some value to running to Primal Storms still for Sigils, but those have a weekly cap based on quests and possible number of Storms, so you’re not exactly going to be able to push more than a piece or two up to 385 per week. It’s a strange system that is very poorly explained in-game (i.e. not at all!) so I mean, hey, good luck figuring it out through gameplay – modern WoW, everybody!

Thirdly, there are an abundance of strange jutting edges that cut on the system as it stands. You can use the Revival Catalyst to make the Primal Storm gear into Tier pieces – hell yeah, cool – but not the 359 pieces. Why? Well, it’s blue quality. Should that matter? I don’t think it should, but I’m not Blizzard. The 385 gear tokens for necklaces, rings, and trinkets give you 389 gear instead, which is cool but also not clear from how the token tooltip reads prior to being converted into a piece of loot. The whole Forbidden Reach ecosystem of content is also kind of narrow and not super exciting – doing a circuit of rares reveals how few there are, the profession rares are the only interesting part of that whole idea, and while the zone has a fair bit of…reach (ha!), it also doesn’t have that much playable space. Imagine if Blizzard took a landmass about the size of Korthia and then just made it feel huge by slamming mountain ranges with nothing on top of them down in between the points of interest. If this kind of philosophy is the future of zones in Dragonflight, color me unimpressed – the illusion is quickly broken and hard to maintain past the first few hours of play there. It looks great and has the feeling of a real place, but on the gameplay side, it’s basically very simple to divide into POIs without even needing quests to show the way it divides up.

And then we have the Onyx Annulet.

This ring is an interesting experiment in upgrades for players and leans on interesting effects that can be customized over just a flat stat-stick ring. It has a base item level of 405 but only Stamina and 3 special sockets on it, and it can be enchanted like a standard ring but cannot have a normal gem socket added to it through the Great Vault token item that can normally add a ring socket. The stones slotted in will increase the ring’s item level to a maximum of 424, with the ring being a 411 item level once fully socketed and the stones can each be upgraded twice through a Jewelcrafter-made item that requires Work Orders unless you are a JC yourself.

So I’m of a few opinions on this ring. When it was first announced, a lot of people screamed about borrowed power making a comeback, which was ultimately premature. Is the ring borrowed power? In a limited sense, maybe, but it has almost none of the trappings, short of just being a piece of gear you can upgrade and swap around a few times before ultimately being done – and you can be done with it in even just one day of Forbidden Reach content. You can even get multiple rings and have rings set for each spec and activity you play, if you so desire, and farming to that level isn’t exactly hard. It’s not a long-tail goal by any stretch of the imagination – several of my guildies already have two or three rings with their preferred stones slotted and upgraded. It’s a fun thing to chase that adds a lot of power.

Now, prior to patch launch, the ring looked like a dud for players who already had decent rings from even Normal or Heroic raiding, and it took a week of constant, double-digit percentage hotfix buffs for the Annulet to be, y’know, good. Given Blizzard’s stated goal and how people on PTR were calling out that the ring would be a bust before it even came out, it’s baffling that Blizzard stuck to their baseline tuning and were even still saying in launch-week interviews that the ring was going to be everyone’s best choice, only for it to…not be that. Even post-buffs, there are still a handful of specs that have little use for the Annulet unless you have trash rings as it stands.

But the Annulet has ended up being a bit of interesting progression to me, just for how it offers these seemingly small buffs that do a lot. On Brewmaster, my maxed out 424 ring is 15% of my damage. On my Vengeance DH with a 424 ring, it’s similarly around 10-15% of total damage dealt in a dungeon, and adds a non-trivial bit of self-healing to my kit, albeit with no controls on how it will proc, meaning its usefulness is dubious in that way. I have, however, enjoyed seeing how the ring affects my power level in current content and how it has, with buffs, become an overall useful item to have.

The ring is irritating in some strange ways however. The random acquisition of stones you want, including a currency-based gambling mechanic, is just flat out dogshit, especially since an uneven number of stones are tied to each elemental school for the gambling, so you might have a 50/50 shot with one type only to need to buy 6 or more gambles to get your perfect Nature stone, and that is some garbage! The tooltips are completely unintuitive, where things like the Desirous Blood Stone has a central proc of damage, but because it also heals, is categorized as a healing effect when used with other stones that duplicate healing effects? The ring itself is a crapshoot too, because it behaves like a ring when it comes to enchanting, but then you cannot add a gem socket to it with the Season 1 socket adder item? And sure, fine, maybe it would be too powerful if I could slot in an Illimited Diamond or, god forbid, a maximum of 104 rating points in secondary stats, but it feels strange how it is limited in some ways but not in others. The item level scaling of the ring and the way you upgrade the stones is also, surprise surprise, completely unexplained by the game, as if Blizzard just gave up on making sure a player that doesn’t read Wowhead or guides could comprehend what is going on. Of course, the upgrade methodology is also a little obtuse – you use the same reagent that you need to buy duplicate rings and gamble for stones as part of a recipe for Jewelcrafters to make, which is BoP, so it has to be done via Work Orders, and oh, this patch, they also added the ability to submit a work order without non-soulbound reagents, so you can piss off your local JC today by submitting a work order without the necessary Silken Gemdust! Sounds great! Once you figure all of that out, it’s not hard, and I’m definitely exaggerating how bad it is, but I just hate that Blizzard has given up on explaining systems in game, instead making weirdly cumbersome and unintuitive gameplay design and expecting dataminers and guide writers to figure it out first and explain it for everyone else, when a large part of the playerbase doesn’t engage with outside-of-game content in the way they expect.

I also genuinely dislike that the ring requires these special work benches at the Forbidden Reach and doesn’t just let you do the basics at any time, and even when you are at the work benches, you don’t get a smooth or straightforward UI, instead you have to press an extra action button and clumsily open your character sheet and go to the ring to pop a stone out or open your bags and navigate to the gem you want to crush up. You have to stand in the correct spot, not too far away, in order to press the button and do the thing, assuming you even know that you can do these things in the first place, because the game doesn’t do a great job of explaining how it works! All of this, to me, speaks to a flawed central design with the Annulet – the people most able to benefit from it are casual players who don’t do a ton of endgame PvE content, but those players are also the least likely to read a guide outside the game for even their class basics, much less for a patch feature that is intended to be mostly replaceable in the next patch.

So while I think the borrowed power thing is hyperbole to a point with the Onyx Annulet, I also kind of get it. It’s unintuitive and borderline hostile in terms of understanding in the context of the game, it requires playing within a new and strange gameplay system, and it’s intended and specifically made to be replaced in a single patch. Outside of the issues I mentioned though, I do still kind of like the Onyx Annulet – ring stone effects go brrr, number go up, dopamine released. I just wish that for the player it is actually targeted squarely at, it was a better-explained and clearer system.

The Future

So with this all said, here’s my hope – I want this type of catchup to continue and be iterated upon. Having catchup gear mid-season is great, being able to dive into pool without having to wade in through the kiddie section is great, and having unique catchup mechanisms like the Onyx Annulet can be cool too, as can stuff like Turbulent Timeways and other ways of building interest in existing content. I do think there is room to improve as well – deterministic catchup tokens, straightforward single-zone sources of complete upgrade chains, explanations and context of stuff in-game, and then, I think the next step they should take is one FFXIV schedules in to build interest – a loot unlock for the raid so you can run as much as you want for gear. Maybe it happens on a staggered schedule by difficulty, with LFR unlocking super early and the rest in sequence after, but I think that over time, it makes sense to just let people play and all that weekly caps and forced funneling down a designed path do is limit how much people can play and feel rewarded.

Right now? The catchup model is very Blizzardy, and that’s kind of bad, but it also still sort of works, and it’s new to WoW in this timing, and that’s good. I like the impact it has had on playing the game midseason and I hope that Blizzard continues it into the future, with some changes to take the edge off.