Most World of Warcraft leveling gear has a wonderfully short career.
You kill a boss, celebrate the blue item, equip it immediately and replace it three zones later with something carrying two additional points of Strength. WoW Forever may be experimenting with a rather different idea: loot you find in an early dungeon could become relevant again at level 60.
Beta players have discovered a new ring called First Mate Band, currently reported to drop from Mr. Smite in The Deadmines. On its own it is a perfectly respectable level 17 ring with +6 Strength and +2 Stamina. The strange part appears when you look at the item set it belongs to.
Its partner is called Band of the Better Half.
And that one requires level 60.
A Level 17 Ring Is Paired With a Level 60 Epic
The two rings form a set called Partners in Crime. According to the current beta data documented by Wowhead's discovery of Forever's cross-level item sets, equipping both pieces grants two bonuses: +20 Strength and a chance on melee swings to become Angry, increasing Strength by another 50 for 10 seconds.
First Mate Band is item level 22 and requires level 17. Band of the Better Half is an item level 70 Epic ring requiring level 60, with +18 Strength, +10 Stamina and +12 Expertise.
We do not yet know where Band of the Better Half actually comes from. That is important. Nobody has discovered its source in-game yet, and Forever's beta is still deliberately hiding a considerable amount of loot information.
What we do know is that Blizzard has linked an early Deadmines reward directly to a level 60 item.
Suddenly that little blue ring you found while fighting Defias pirates may deserve a bank slot.
This Changes How We Think About Leveling Loot
The discovery fits perfectly with Blizzard's much larger rebuilding of hundreds of Classic dungeon drops. Every dungeon loot table has been re-examined, weaker items are being redesigned and new rewards have been scattered throughout familiar instances.
Until now, that mostly sounded like an attempt to make old dungeons exciting again while leveling.
Partners in Crime suggests something more ambitious.
If Blizzard creates multiple sets where one piece appears at level 20 and another appears at level 60, the gearing journey stops being a straight conveyor belt where every old item becomes vendor trash. Players may eventually discover that something they collected forty levels ago suddenly completes a powerful endgame combination.
That also makes Forever's decision to hide undiscovered loot information from databases considerably more interesting. You cannot simply open a complete level 60 Best in Slot spreadsheet on launch day and know every item worth keeping. Some apparently ordinary dungeon reward may have a partner nobody has discovered yet.
Blizzard Wants Dungeons to Matter Without Making You Grind Them
There is a nice contradiction here.
Blizzard recently reduced dungeon grinding XP in Forever specifically because it does not want players repeatedly farming instances as the fastest route from 1 to 60. Dungeon quests are supposed to make your first run valuable, while the outdoor world remains the main leveling experience.
Now the loot itself may provide a reason to remember those dungeons long after you have outleveled them.
That is considerably healthier than asking players to run Deadmines fifty times at level 20. You visit because the dungeon is part of the journey, find something unusual, and perhaps discover months later that the ring gathering dust in your bank was only half the story.
Do Not Vendor Everything Yet
This is still beta, and Blizzard can change the set, its bonuses or the items themselves before Forever launches. We also do not yet know whether Partners in Crime is a one-off curiosity or the beginning of an entire category of cross-level equipment.
But it fits an increasingly obvious pattern.
Forever does not just want better loot.
It wants loot with stories attached to it.
And for the first time in years, the sensible gearing advice may simply be: maybe keep that weird ring.
Post a Comment