New Player creates a world of warcraft account Step One
Level a character from 1 to 120 without any heirlooms or assistance. Average Play style - 120 hours play time / 2 week requirement.
Step Two
Farm all required Essences - Gated and as such requires minimum of 3 weeks.
Step Three
Farm PVE content to aquire good enough gear - Sat in Que / Completing content - 4 weeks requirement to get to 470
Step Four
Farm countless hours for Echoes to empower your gear with corruption. Vendor are timegated - 2-4 week requirement.
Farm Cloak Level
Timegated unless using Echoes, in which time games Corruption, Corruption resistance time gated to 6+ per week, Total requirement 12 weeks minimum
Total required game time in order to catch up to a current player 12 WEEK MINIMUM playing an average of 15-20hours per week.
Current Player creates an Alt Step one
Level the character within 48 hours or pay Ā£50 to boost
Step Two
Farm 10,000 Echoes for 4 rank 3 essences
Farm 21,000 echoes to get rank 15 cloak in a week
Estimated Time - 72 hours gameplay
Step Three
Farm Mythic Plus to gather gear- Estimate time to 470 - 3 weeks.
Step Four
Farm Corruption resistance - Time required - 12 weeks.
Step five
Farm 20,000+ Echoes in order to empower your gear with corruption.
Estimated time required to level 2 character and gear them 12 weeks with 30-40 hours gameplay per week
Its only a full time job if you play it like one. I play for 1-2 hours a day right now. Finished normal raid, might try get a heroic group, and done up to +11.
And just throwing it out there. You dont need every essence. I play 2 specs and only ever use 8. And they were easy to get. Unless you are high ranked pvp you also probably dont need perfect corruptions either. And similarly full cloaks only needed for the highest level.
And i have some news. Its not going away in shadowlands. Since legion they clearly decided player retention is the most importamt number. So there will be more time gating, and there will be more grinding
probably any relevant content at this point youāre expected to be around that ilvl to reliably get into groups unless you only get carried by guildies and friends.
want to do weekly +15s? probably wanna be around 465-470 to get into groups.
want to push keys higher than that? definitely need to be a minimum of 470.
want to pvp? being 465-470 is probably the bare minimum for arenas at this point, on top of having good corruptions.
want to raid content relevant to your gear level? definitely want to be around the same level for mythic. heroic you can easily do with much less so long as you have a guild.
You donāt need 48h to get to 120 with heirlooms and the current 100% xp boost.
Considering how many echoes you get from assaults and emissaries, this is grossly over-estimated.
I was about 454 7 days after hitting 120. 10 days after hitting 120 I got 3/12 on Mythic and I hit close to 470 ilvl.
R15 cloak about roughly 18 days after hitting 120 I think. Only reason I canāt progress further with that is a time-gated catch-up (please blizz, fix thisā¦)
Iām currently over 8k echoes and itās been 20 days since my first M+ (22 days since 120). Granted, Iāve already wasted 4250 echoes (I think) on a gushing wounds that turned out to not be so awesome anymore.
12 weeks? Iām about 3 weeks into 120 and Iām ilvl 473, got my essences, got a fair amount of echoes gathered up, got my cloak at R15 (+6 resistance), and Iām pretty sure I havenāt put in 30~40h a week on this character.
My advantage is that Iāve been boosted by my guildies to get me kickstarted, and this speeds up things tremendously. Weāre talking about alts though, so anyone with a guild can practically do this to a certain level.
Well, at this stage of an expansion one could wait little of something exciting. I agree on that. But sad thing is that 8.3 design is not only scarse on exciting stuff it is also filled with annoying irking sh**. Iād be fine doing what I find entertaining but I AM BEING CONSTANTLY POKED AND PUNCHED with that cr***p they introduced. Out of a sudden my chars began look dirty, covered with these ink spots. I somewhat developed ptsd constantly anticipating the moment when my gear starts hurting me. ALways have to move your tush out of this damn eyeball circle. I am sick and tired of 3-loading-screen-to-the-chamber-of-heart to cleanse my armor. And then again every alt MUST undergo this torture to collect the minimum of the currency that u use to cleanse your gear.
Is this fun? Is this how a game should function?
At this point I want to see people who are responsible for 8.3 to be fired. Publicaly losing their job.
I thought the Nazjatar without flying was a spit in the face of players. Little did I know.
I donāt know what do you expect, you start playing 2 years after other people and you expect to catch them up quickly? Ever heard of progression? You canāt open book, read last page and sayā¦ yeah ive finished it. As others already stated, donāt bother now, SL will come, BFA will be thrown into darkest dungeon to forget about it asap.
The problem with this is that itās not like older expansion,
Older expansion had older content still running, so it didnāt matter if you was farming Sunwell or whether you was still doing Black Temple was guild still progressing on all levels of content and PVP Gearing was virtually separate from this.
I do expect in the modern day where content isnāt re-used but simply made obsolete that when a new player or a current player makes an alt that they can catch up to relative standards.
Yes if you played from day one you should have more, more achievements, more titles, more transmogs, unlockable parts of the game that are no longer available.
However, it shouldnāt be a case that if your a new player or wanting to freshen things up and start a alt, that you should be forced into a HUGE grind to actually play the content that will set you back weeks.
Now gear item level isnāt that bad, itās really not hard to hit 450-455 in BFA within a week if not higher than that, the problem is the classes themselves are gated because they do not work correctly without proper traits, Essences or Corruption which arenāt so readily available, especially if your a new player.
Most people, including me would be happy to have good reason to raid in older tiers, i forgot how does Gā huun look like because itās obsolete for so many time, i always think of that like Developers work is wasted if they have to prepare whole raid, with mechanics and balancing and all this is forgotten in 3 months, or even half a year. In my opinion bosses should drop gear which would scale like World Quest gear, so if i will kill Gāhuun mythic at ilvl 445 it should drop 450 items instead of 350 ones, ofc. Boss hp and damage should scale accordingly.
comparing retail to TBC, mate TBC came 13,5 years ago. And basically dropped all the raid content in the game on launch. Except for Sunwell patch.
Game has evolved a lot since then. Evloved in good and bad ways.
I had fun with 8.3 but now that iām pretty much BIS geared (except from really tough to get azerites from mythic capra and nzoth) i donāt see much reason to play. Im leveling a rogue on horde side because I never played horde. Going to gear him and harass people in random BGās.
Kinda sucks to play all this catch up but thatās how WoW is being designed nowadays.
Itās only a (full-time) job if you make it one. Wanting to min/max is a choice of playstyle.
You donāt need the best of the best in every gear slot in order to play the content.
All these steps you listed are from playing the content.
What do you do when you completed all steps?
And to be honest Iām not sure a new player would care so much about min/maxing every thing there is.
