It is of my personal opinion, that commendations, such as the ones used in MOP, HAS to be released for the Unshackled and Rustbolt reputations. This should happen in the form of a BoA item (with some sort of cost), which you could apply to specific alts or an account wide item (Like it was in MOP). With essences from these two reputations being BiS, it feels super awkward playing on alts well knowingly, that you have a reputation grind that you’ve already completed ahead of you.
I’m currently sitting on every BiS essence for fury and protection on my warrior, yet every single alt i had from the previous patch, is now useless. (I had 4 up-to-par alts last patch, every single one of them able to do a m18+ or higher).
There is no skill involved in acquiring these essences. So what is the point of time-gating them for people that has ALREADY completed this content. I understand that gearing alts should be almost as hard as gearing your main, but this is honestly too much.
I understand that from blizzards perspective, time-gating these things forces players into logging in weekly and playing their game. In their flawed minds, this in turn increases player activity, but from my point of view, this is completely wrong. Player activity has never been lower and with people completely neglecting their alts and leaving them in the dirt, this makes it so that every community in every part of the game, whether that’s raiding, m+ or PvP, has taken a hit. People strictly do m+, etc. on their mains and has completely forgotten about their alts.
In previous expansions, the only thing you had to do when dinging max level on an alt, was gearing it. There was no time spend = power. There was no time-gated “you have to wait 4 weeks to get rank 3 iris before u can start pushing keys” bullsh*t. The only thing that determined your power, was your spells, your gear and how good you were at utilizing your class. It is unbearable playing an alt in a raid with others and you see yourself being outperformed by some idiot, simply because he has R3 in his best essences.
Should essences be BoA? No. But they should sure as hell not be time-gated. Hitting 120 on an alt and realizing which essences are BiS is the worst feeling. Need Vision of perfection? Great, you can have it R3 in 4 weeks, THEN and only THEN can you actually start performing and doing key pushes/raids on said alt. A fix for this could potentially be a 50 % decrease in the requirement for each essence. If you got the Unshackled follower essence, the next time around, you need 1500 instead of 3000 for R2 and 3000 instead of 6000 for R3. Blood of the enemy? Now its 25.000 instead of 50.000 Honor, etc.
TL;DR: Revamp the essence system or remove it entirely. The game did not suffer from gear and skill being the only determining factor in your characters power then and it will not now. If the system remains the way it is, people will deter from playing alts which has a negative effect on every part of the community. People don’t stop playing when they get the best gear/essences in the game, they simply gear alts.
Please.
