wow Shadowlands BoE Epics Item Levels and Their Effect on the Race

[Starym 3,800]

 

We might have another Ny'alotha BoE corruption sale bonanza on our hands for Castle Nathria, as Blizzard recently added many epic BoEs on the Shadowlands beta with Heroic raid item levels. As initially commented on by Russian top guild Exorsus (who recently swapped to Alliance after a decade of Horde), these items have the potential to massively disrupt the raid race going into Nathria:

Dear @WarcraftDevs @WatcherDev, you've recently added 7-10 BoE slots with heroic raid ilvl for every class. Unless you want to implement some sort of a "cap" (similar to craft slots), this will be worse than 8.3 BoE show. You can effectively buy full gear, are you ok with this??

— Exorsus (@ExorsusWoW) November 9, 2020

In case you aren't familiar with the previous raid race situation, the top guilds spend hundreds of millions of gold on Corrupted item BoEs, with Complexity Limit actually spending 257 million, as their final BoE purchase came exactly before their actual kill of N'Zoth. Now the Ny'alotha BoE situation was very special, due to the power of Corruption being so paramount, but it might still massively affect the way the Nathria race plays out, as you can basically buy pretty much full Heroic raid gear with gold. This is especially important for the top guilds, as having as many geared alts as possible is key (especially due to the recent multiboxing limitations), so they can try out very specific raid compositions and have specs ready and geared for any sort of stacking necessary.

Now comes the confusion, as it appeared Blizzard had seen the light and changed the BoE item levels down from 213 to 190 (aka from Heroic to LFR levels) earlier today, but as Complexity Limit's GM Max found out just now, that might not actually be the case:

JUST KIDDING someone elses downscaled to only 207. We dont know how it works pic.twitter.com/Wj8kdwGphC

— max (@maximum) November 12, 2020

So it seems things are still just weird on the beta, but there's a possibility that the BoEs will play a big factor in the Castle Nathria race!

This is just one of the behind the scenes changes that tend to happen around the Race to World First, as Blizzard tune things around the top guilds (although in this particular case, there might have been other considerations as well, it being beta and all). The most notable of these are the many, MANY stealth hotfixes they do on bosses all the time, that never see the light of actual hotfix notes, as not many aside from the few very top guilds actually get to experience the bosses before the many nerfs and changes.

In any case, we hope Blizzard will choose to reduce the item levels on the BoEs, as it will cause another round of gold spending havoc if they don't, and affect the race in a big way once more, since not all guilds have access to hundreds of millions of gold (not to mention the general effect on server economies).

[durdyenglish 298]

Token sales to support BOE purchasing will off set boost revenue now that leveling is so much faster.