In what could end up being one of the most popular decisions World of Warcraft has ever made, game director Ion Hazzikostas recently announced that the game intends to do away with the widely-unpopular Titanforging and Warforging mechanics that are dominant in the game.
The announcement came earlier today in an interview that Hazzikostas was giving with popular WoW streamer Sloot, who has been testing the alpha live. Asking about loot, Hazzikostas announced that they intend to tweak the loot system as a whole and remove the RNG-based forging system that’s in place at the moment.
If you haven’t been playing WoW recently, you may not be familiar with these systems. Essentially, when loot drops there’s a chance for it to become Warforged or Titanforged, which essentially just makes the gear more powerful. However, the chance is completely RNG-based, making it so that you might receive the same item a dozen times and not get it to be as powerful as you want it to be.
Many fans have been outspoken over hating this system, which felt like a cheap way to force players to continuously grind out endgame content. Players would finally see the item they wanted drop, only for it not to drop in a powerful enough form to be as useful as it needed to be.
Instead of continuing with this unpopular system, Hazzikostas said that the team intends to “let loot be loot,” with the gear that drops being the gear that drops instead of there being a chance of it being something greater. However, that naturally comes with a caveat.
With the Titanforge/Warforge mechanics removed, there still needs to be changes to the loot system overall, as this would make it so that players could luckily get the item they want right away and then never need to play that content again. To address this, the team is instead making it so that less loot will drop overall.
It’s unclear if Hazzikostas meant that gear will drop less frequently, or if less gear will drop. For example, if five members in a party run a dungeon, does everyone have an equal-but-low chance of getting an item, or will only one item drop for the whole group?
As the alpha moves forward, there are more and more changes being announced every day. Regardless of what changes may come, though, the removal of Titanforging and Warforging is certain to make the players happy.
