You can’t swap gear in BfA Mythic+. Here’s why that’s not a big deal.

Wowhead noted today that in the latest Battle for Azeroth build, players in Mythic+ dungeons are prevented from swapping gear after the countdown timer has finished.

I’ve done my fair share of Mythic+ runs. Granted, I’m not in a group that does them every day, but I’m no stranger to DPSing or healing them. There’s plenty of people I’ve known that have speed sets for trash clearing, and then another set or two for bosses. That’s okay, but unless you’re really hitting the min/max game to the extreme, swapping gear sets in Mythic+ dungeons probably isn’t a huge thing, and that’s good. Once upon a time WoW had a set for nearly every dungeon boss. It was an extremely huge barrier to entry that doesn’t fit with modern game design paradigms of accessibility and useful grinding.

For the players that are swapping gear often this might seem like a targeted nerf — and they’d be correct. It’s stopping that behavior, and I suspect some will be rightly annoyed that they’re unable to tweak their strategy in this way. However, I’d argue that in the end it’s going to even the playing field a little bit and focus the Mythic+ game more on execution and strategic planning vs gearing. This isn’t to say that gear still won’t be a major factor — it certainly will, but the need to carry around a few sets in your bags will go away for everyone.

And that means, with all things equal, at the end of the day this likely isn’t going to be a big deal.

Note: Wowhead reports that you can still switch gear sets outside the instance, and correctly says that if this stays true Warlocks are going to become a must for some groups. However, I’d wager this is a bug that Blizzard will correct in an upcoming patch.