Please stop calling me dude I am not one and I hate that word with a passion .
I have explained the difference in epics but it seems to have gone over your head completely .
Nobody making fun of you at all so stop playing the victim card .
The game is very very alt unfriendly in so many way’s .
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I do not think anyone thinks gearing up is to hard, it takes some times but not much, problem for me is the freaking essences, I can not understand why I would need to get my rep up on an alt, when I already done it on my main, essences should be BOA, atleast up to rank 2.
though getting rank 2 aint that hard, it can be horribly boring, and oh god, if you have to pug to get it, then you might as well give up, specilay the raid ones.
You don’t play the game, at least not the current expansion and yet you’re saying things you don’t have a flying clue about.
The gear that people get from low level content is meaningless, yes you can get to about ~420 avarage item level pretty easy but then it gets harder and then when you finally get to the 430 range often the stats wouldn’t be the one that you need, the best gear atm especially trinkets and weapons (depends on the class) is from The Eternal Palace and M+, now, add to that the AP, Azerite pieces and Essences that you need to grind to be competitive and for people that do mainly PvP, mostly Arena that’s a huge problem because alternating between chars is fairly common for them.
Getting a single item from a world boss that is 415, WQ, LFR, Warfronts or getting the Benthic gear that can be upgraded up to 425 which is no joke, it takes 200 mana pearls per slot with Azerite pieces being twice as expensive still wouldn’t take you to 430+ unless you’re extremely lucky with WF/TF on every single slot which is unlikely or do some end game activities.
Another point is time, over time sure you can get up to an average item level of 430 even more but then it takes most people that do end game only few weeks to get to 440+ whereas it takes many other players months to get to 430+, bear in mind the cap is 455.
So when people scream that the game throws welfare gear at players they generally don’t know the full story.
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What I don’t like is the repetetiveness of the grind. Like for the nazjatar bodyguards there are like 5 different quests and you have to do 3 every day for 3 weeks. That just grinds the nerves. Or you get an emissary quest for the turtles and you have to complete 3, but there are only 5 available, 4 of them the same in different locations.
If for example the grind for an essence or allied race or whatever would simply be “complete 100 world quests”, that would be a lot better than “become exalted with faction x”, because I wouldn’t have to do the same 5 quests in the same zone again and again for weeks on all my characters.
Even story zones are just slaves to the numbers: ilvl, essence rank, reputation, and for blizzard playtime and login statistics. And the reason why we need all that “welfare gear” is simply because zones like nazjatar become unbearable with <420 ilvl. 8.1 just increased all ilvl by 30 and made everything 30% harder, what’s the point of things like that? It doesn’t make anything more interesting, it just means I have to regrind all the same content again on all my characters. I assume 8.3 will do the same again.
And leveling content doesn’t even exists. Levels 1-110 are completely abandoned, old buggy quests, badly scaled dungeons, stories that don’t make sense anymore. It’s no wonder addons like azeroth auto pilot exist and are popular. And it’s no different on classic, “no changes” means people saw it all already and similar addons are also very popular.
Your points are valid and well argued.
But you avoid mentioning the equally relevant disadvantages of catch-up.
I’ve gone back and forth on this over the years. I was against catch-up unttil I was for it. And then I changed my mind again. By now, at least I know that I don’t know what the right answer should be. I do know the right answer can not be a blanket decision for no catch-up at all, or a blanket automatic updating of everything for all alts, but some kind of carefully crafted mechanism that will probably affect different systems differently, to produce some overall level of acceptance. Have Blizzard achieved that in this expansion? Different people will give different answers. I think it’s also important to note that the last patch is typically when Blizzard turbo-charge catch-up, to put some kind of limit on the spoiling of older content.
Your post reminds me strongly of something Preach said in his latest, which makes me wonder whether that influenced you.
“When it comes to being effective, I need to get AP level 65, my three BiS essences, and gear in order to actually do damage. Gear is like the least thing. That’s like a week’s worth of play.”
I’m thinking that the problem is not that AP and essences need to be grinded, but that neither of those provide interesting gameplay, regardless of the player’s usual play level. (And, interjecting my own bias here, I have to mention how un-fun many specs inherently are to play on a second-by-second basis at the moment).
8 Likes
And does colour matter ? or is the problem really here some people do not feel awesome in front of AH anymore because now whole different things count as cool other than purples.
I’d have fun playing with all my characters.
As an RPG my characters all have their own story that I’ve made up, I’m sure others do the same.
It’s nice to alternate, an example I play paladin, then mage, then warrior, and by the time I’ve had my fill of warrior, I feel like playing paladin again renewed.
BfA doesn’t think so and punishes, telling me this is the wrong way to play.
Nope, not at all. Not even slightly.
To summarize OP; give me truck loads of convinience so i can become everything.
Convinience bring more demands for convinience until everything becomes extremely convinient to the point everything lose their meaning, which causes boredom and complaints about ‘‘no content’’.
Leveling is not a journey any longer, that’s why we have AP, essences… etc. There should be power imbalances between player A and B, between yesterday you and tomorrow you. Otherwise vast majority of people will not have the will to go for anything. This game isn’t DOTA.
At the moment wow actually needs more tediousness, so maybe people will adapt to a healthier way of playing instead of going full nolifer; such as having 1-2 maybe 3 chars at most, doing a little bit of that and a little bit of this. Going for an alt char is the boredom itself, not being able to keep it up to date is irrelevant except the fact that it is an obsession among players.
@op
Problem with essences is that they feel mandatory, are time gated and you need to do too many types of content to unlock them. I think making people expirience different content is good, but not everytime, i don’t like to farm time gated rep, don’t force me to do it, i don’t like doing the same 4 daily quests everyday, don’t force me to do it. It’s not fun and it’s also their excuse for a “fix” for the failure of azerite armor and class design as a Whole, so yes either remove the time gating, make them way easier to get or just make them account bound, they’re boring and way too impactful on dps to not get.
@daestra sick transmog.
I mean, you either release more content or make making alts less boring, otherwise i’m just gonna not play the game, patch 8.2.5 just came out, all the vaguely lasting content they released is a rep to farm (which is a really good rep to farm, no timegating and such bs). I already geared my main, i already raided with my main, i already expirienced as much m+ as i can take with my main, so i’m just not gonna play if i can’t make alts, easy as that and seeing as i would like to play i’m trying to tell blizzard what i think of this new system with a very good concept implemented very poorly.
Not feeling like proof reading this so i’m just gonna roll with it, dc if some things don’t make much sense.
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How do you come to that conclusion? I play alts for the variety, if I’m forced to play only the same character every day I will just quit the game and play other games for variety, not change my “unhealthy way of playing”.
And honestly people who play only one character are just as much obsessive “nolifers” if not more than people with many characters.
The very concept of this game is a constant treadmill, that woudn’t change just because I can chose to do that with different characters if I feel like it. I still will never be able to play more than one character at a time. (I know there are multiboxers but that is something entirely different)
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Even classic is alt friendly, by the time you level to 60 on a classic server with epic mount and profession, you would probably have 4-5 different retail characters with max neck AP in patch 8.2
I really can’t speak for other players but this game is utterly alt unfriendly for me.
This is because the content that I enjoy, mythic raiding, requires me to be in top form in every single aspect a character can be. Gear, Essences and AP.
In fact, I believe that all of this grinding that we are forced to do to stay competitive has a negative impact.
Since mage is, objectively worse in every aspect compared to what it was in Legion, I am left with a boring class doing repetitive content. In the end all the AP grind and other stuff accomplished is making me stop playing the game for 3 months, ever since EP came out.
I really hope they change these things moving forward. I am really hoping for a finite progression, one where you can actually reach a goal rather than having a carrot on a stick that you will never catch.
It really should be more alt friendly.
Let’s say you get a specific essence to lvl 4 on your main. Then when you bring your alt through and obtain that essence, you’ll see the purple splash box showing that it automatically upgraded to lvl 4 no problems.
Azerite necklaces should level up faster on alts as well, at least twice as fast. So if you’ve say maxed your necklace to 70. Then any alt will find their per level up exp requirement dropped by 50% or more.
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I had to take a break from the game in May and returned 3 weeks ago, so I’ve played everyday on my druid to get it as close to raid ready as I can so I can get back into guild raids.
I need another 6k or so with unshackled and around 9k or so with rustbolt, got my neck up to level 68 and rank 2 in the essences I need for raiding and M+ so I am nearly there, not far to go to get those rank 3’s and got 437ilvl, GREAT!
Guild wants me to roll back to my Monk……. no sodding chance, I am not doing all that crappy grind again.
People have been saying the essence’s shouldn’t be account bound, I really think they should be 100%, you can get gear yourself on alts, HoA practically levels itself if you do a few emissary’s . those boring islands or any other content you enjoy, but having to grind all that rep again to get essences? really???
they impact everything in game, I mean I was doing M+ 2 days ago, just a 10 to help a guildie get his weekly done, now he had lvl67 neck, 432 ilvl and done less dps than the DK tank because he only had CoF essence, I can see why most of my pals play classic and haven’t logged retail since its launch.
Gating stuff that IS essential to playing the game behind rep and like this is just utter B******T , who ever thought that was a good idea needs to be sacked ASAP, you are ruining the game.
Legion was epic, it had flaws but they were addressed and rectified to some extent, being able to by legendary tokens on main to mail to alts, the orderhall experience was amazing, why not introduce a quest line like that instead of farming 1m rep on X, Y and Z characters to get them??
When essences were first talked about I thought, nice, a step in the right direction and a good way to address the shoddy azerite armor problems.
I agree with the questlines to open the new zones etc, but seriously alts now are just there to fill your character selection screen, this is the worst patch I have ever seen!!
Ion and the dev team you suck!!
3 Likes
Nice post.
I agree with basically everything, even though my own reasoning for rolling alts is a little different:
First of all, I’m not really an alt player. I prefer focussing on my main character and getting as much as I can on that one (even more so; I usually tend to focus on a single spec). In WoW it’s just a case of that I like hunter gameplay more than any other, so having that be the only class I focus on is an easy decision for me; if BM hunter is 100% enjoyment, the next class/spec I enjoy would be mistweaver monk at maybe 60%. Yes; for me the difference in enjoyment is THAT big. And not only that but the enjoyment of spec is also a HUGE deciding factor for me; Again; if BM is 100%, SV is at 40% and MM at 10%.
Anyway, now that I’ve put some numbers on what I enjoy; there ARE reasons for me to roll other characters.
In Legion the reasons for that started out being that I wanted to experience and see all the other class content. And I loved a lot of it (only classes I didn’t roll alts for were priests, warlocks and warriors: Warriors because their class fantasy just doesn’t appeal to me and priests and warlocks because I really loathe their gameplay - I dislike casters; I didn’t enjoy mage gameplay either, but their lore and class fantasy does appeal to me greatly, so, like you said in your post; I found the trouble of doing it, worth it).
I did roll several other alts, all the other classes + some extra hunters (yes I like hunters that much). And I actually played many of them at max level because I was offered rewards that were worthwhile to me; class mounts and some extra goodies here and there and ultimately a very lucrative mission table. I was earning lots of gold because I had a nice number of alts.
In BfA I have zero reason to level an alt. Well, that’s not true; there’s a single reason to roll 1 alt of the opposite faction; to experience those zones and their war campaign.
But that’s it. To me having another class to play has zero appeal. I love my hunter.
So the ‘carrot’ needs to be there for me to enjoy alts and BfA doesn’t have any. In fact; instead of a carrot, they’re making having an alt MORE of a hassle than it was before; and for what?
Anyway, that was my story. Thanks for the post. 
5 Likes
You want variety because you are already bored and alt chars are are your boredom embodied in game. I’ve been there 10 years ago in wotlk.
The actual treadmill is the one that is created by the players. The moment you create an alt char, you already forced yourself into the same things you have already did that you already hated in the beginning and skipped all of it by rushing, and that is the actual treadmill. Many complainers have the mindset ‘‘i need BIS everything or i am nothing’’, and you will always and always have this mentality which creates another checklist of ‘‘works’’ you have to do everyday and every week, with each alt char these checklists will grow bigger. Because this is what you love, or you think you love but you don’t. Forcing yourself into game by creating new treadmills. (The reasons why Blizzard come with random item drops, so your treadmill never ends, as you wanted).
If there are different story lines for each class, then yeah go see all of them. If you like to try new class, go ahead. If different professions have different story lines, go ahead. If you want to enjoy story ines, go ahead. But being obsessed with BIS everything is something else. This is the treadmill that players created, not Blizzard.
Maybe you should do that, instead of forcing yourself into what you hate.
It’s incredibly fast to catch alts up to max level, things like pathfinder are account wide, you have account bound benthic gear that instantly gets alts to a reasonable level and the neck doesn’t need anywhere near the time investment artifacts and legendaries did in Legion. I’d say that’s pretty alt friendly! You can get several alts raid or mythic+ capable if that’s what you’re after.
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If you make easy to make high end alt you make high end character itself worthless. That is very against mmorpg. Every char should start from scratch. Your experience will make your way up shorter, that is more than enough.
If you want play game without character progression pick something else, because mmorpg is not for you.
Never a good phrase to use in an argument, don’t believe even for a second that you know what someone wants, you’re wrong 99% of the time. And this is proof of that, i love raiding and doing decent numbers, essences influence the numbers a LOT, if i want to play an alt i have to get the right essences, or some essences to level 3 even of they are not the Bis ones. They way they are given to us right now is TEDIOUS Beyond belief, so instead of doing what Activision/blizzard wants (play the game) i’ve started playing monster hunter and lol again.
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People exaggerate. With all the catch up mechanics, levelling nerfs etc you can be heroic raid ready in less than two weeks after hitting 120.
This character hit 120 just 8 days ago and has >420 ilvl and >60 neck. Also, I haven’t invested too much time into it because I’m busy with my main.
BFA isn’t any alt-unfriendlier than any other expansion (except end of cataclysm, which was a joke. Hit 85, run some heroic dungeons, buy some crafted gear, go farm 40% nerfed dragon soul). You basically get a neck level with each WQ until you hit 60ish and you get loot thrown at you at every corner of the game.