Biggest QOL change would be account-wide everything

Community General Discussion
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Hey, as titles says, I think biggest Quality-of-Life improvement would be making account-wide everything. And I mean everything, from currencies to reputations (obviously not gear).

I’ll spend in the game probably even more time if I can use all my cosmics flux on all my alts from my main, same with Grateful Offerings, Valors and Honor points. People will at least stop complaining “oh I have 154 000 cosmics flux, and I have nothing to do with it”. I don’t see a single reason why I should farm 5000 cosmics flux to buy legendaries and make tier set on my alt if I have thousands on my main. It’s extremely unfriendly and it sucks.

I’m really not interested right now in gearing multiple characters with valors, it takes too long to farm and gear up. I have thousands of valors on my main, but I have nothing to upgrade and buying 236ilvl items for my alts isn’t solving this situation.

Same is it with (for example) Tol Barad Commendation, farming it with multiple characters is going to make buying everything from quatermaster faster, but time investment will be same. You need to do same amount of dailies, but you can do them at multiple characters so it takes less days to farm everything.

Why basically all other games doing this way better than WoW? These systems are outdated and unfriendly. There are way more grindy games and yet, they’re still making this right. You’re not respecting our time and with Dragonflight you should go this way. Your plan is not good enough, because as far I know, you’ll make account-wide nearly everything, but only from Dragonflight expansion.

/thoughts?

6 Likes
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If it is on all currencies, you’ll break gearing. Stuff like Valor and Conquest is time-gated early season for a reason. If you were to make those account-bound, then you would run into a situation where people are incentivised to have like 20 characters to do the cap on just so that they can funnel all the gear into their main and get it geared up to very high item level in a week.

Other than those rare scenarios though, I agree that more currencies should be account-bound. Same goes for reputations. No reason why we cannot move our flux or that ZM thing that gives 246 gear to alts. Just, keep in mind that there should be exceptions if we don’t want to completely break the gearing system. If something’s time-gated at the start of a season, it should definitely not be BoA until all caps are lifted. Alt friendliness should not come at the expense of main unfriendliness, and I don’t want to have to play alts to gear my main faster.

2 Likes
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What would be wrong with that? I know many games that allow this and it results in players having to grind less and rather play the content they actually want to play.

Why would it be “breaking gearing” if I, for example, grind all my Valor with my Paladin here and use the currency to gear up my alts so I don’t waste more time grinding on my alts to be able to play the endgame?

Too much grind can be also very discouraging to play a game, you know that, right?

And especially WoW is such a game. That’s the reason why I play only my Paladin here for any endgame relevant content and don’t even bother playing my other 3 high level alts. Because I have to gear again just to play the content I want to play.

1 Like
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You’re forgetting that currencies like valor and conquest have caps early season. Because of that, the reality is that even someone who just wants to main one character would have to maintain 10 alts so that they can funnel the currency into their main. Those who don’t do that will fall behind REALLY quickly considering that a single conquest cap won’t even get you a weapon week 1 while someone who alts like crazy will literally have BiS arena gear already.

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I’m all in for account wide stuff, although I don’t think anything power progression / gear related should be account wide as it would be abused too much, plus I don’t think reputation should be account wide - only access to vendor should be account wide once you hit exalted on 1 character.

It would make a too degenerate gameplay if these 2 options would be acc wide. Rest I wouldn’t mind.

1 Like
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These account wide topics are popping up a lot atm.

It would certainly make the game a lot more alt friendly if we didn’t have to repeatedly grind everything over and over.

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oh and I thought balancing would be the best qol change

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And what’s the problem? I farm these currencies anyway, but right now I can use them for literally nothing, so far I farmed 22 700 valors on my main this season and right now I’m upgrading items I’ll probably never use just to have them in my bag.

Time gating gearing is dumb, and we’re used to it because Blizzard has a habit of having long seasons. If they make seasons shorter, they don’t have to timegate gearing.

Let’s say every season is 6 months, but with mid-season refresh (for example new dungeon, some world content etc, something smaller). If they do this, you’ll have regular content flow every 3 months so time gating gear for a 2 months doesn’t have to be a thing. Why other games like Destiny can do this, but Blizzard is still doing it same way for 17 years?

And capping valors for 750/w is terrible, you have to wait 3 weeks to upgrade your 2h weapon twice, and in 3 weeks you can upgrade ONLY your weapon. That’s the worst part of time gating gearing.

1 Like
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Or, you know, give all players a maximum valor cap that is enough to upgrade 1 entire set to heroic difficulty til the mid-season increase.

So, that would be (afaik) around 8k Valor minimum.

Or you know, just remove the time-gating entirely because literally no one I ever met would care about someone having higher gear than yourself. Give Raids their exclusive strong tier sets, give mythic+ their own tier sets and be more like a fun grind game like Destiny 2 or Borderlands or Elder Scrolls Online.

Time-gating is what kills the content, not the content itself.

2 Likes
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Having two tier sets will broke the game balance even more, but hey… they need to finally understand that there is no PVP and PVE. What is good in battleground isn’t necessary good in arenas. Same with PVE, what is good in raid is not good in mythic plus, and vice versa.

Sadly they’re still focusing more on raids, which is funny, because raids is another topic for hours. It’s outdated and there needs to be hard rework of it. So many people are forced to do raid to get gear, and whole game is basically around raids - which shouldn’t be a thing. There are MMO that are not even have large scale raids for 20+ people and yet, it still work great.

For example as you mentioned Destiny. Releasing raids with (for example) 4 bosses for 6 people is great, every boss in the game is unique, Leviathan is by far coolest and badassest raid I have every been in any game. Very unique fights, tons of secrets, it’s just great in every aspect.

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Maybe it is time for a change.

WoW is the only MMO I know that completely runs on stats in general. Every other MMO I know has some sort of Perk or Trait System on their gear or Sets like ESO.

Sure, we have very rarely a drop that has stuff like “has a chance to deal 537 bleeding damage on hit” or something as trait on a mythic or raid weapon, but those are so irrelevant that I won’t count them.

Having more Sets in the game would give more gear variety for activities. Having even traits more consistently on gear would make gear even unique.

But that is just my perspective. Overall I think WoW has the most boring gearing system I know. It is all about GS and “what dungeon do I have to grind for my mythic+ stat gear?”

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Grinding gear is fun, time gating it is not. I remember running Maadim Subterrane on Mars in Destiny 2 for Right Side of Wrong weapon, I was there for like 40hrs in a week just to drop it with best perks, I hated it but at the same time I loved farming it. I know this is a bit extreme, but do something for having great gear is good. Doing it twice or thrice is not.

(In destiny you can put your weapon to vault and use it with your alt if you want so even this is alt friendly - but don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this should be implemented in WoW)

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For me it would be reputation. Which would also make vendors useful for alts and you would buy the gear they sell. Normally by the time you are exalted you skip that piece of gear and it will only be bought for tmog.

3 Likes
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Hence why we as players can now since Witch Queen craft weapons again, if we find specific versions of each weapon and level them up.

If we level 5 of them up, we get the pattern. With the pattern we can craft a version how we like it and leveling said version up open up new perk combinations.

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Whether there should be a cap is another question altogether. I’m all for some sort of larger rework to the gearing system that’ll make it more fun, but when asking for all the account-bound stuff you have to keep in mind that as of right now stuff is capped. Making everything accountwide without changing the way these caps work will break the game more than the current systems do.

You’ll replace a degree of alt unfriendliness with gearing a main being an absolutely miserable process. If you let every character keep its own valor cap, you’re forcing people to play multiple alts just so that they cap each of them and can gear the main faster. If you make the cap account-wide, that’ll leave you even less capable of gearing alts even if you had the time and motivation to grind on them since you’ll use up the cap with just one character.

Have you never seen item level requirements in LFG? If having a bunch of alts is the only way to efficiently gear early-season (which would happen if we introduce account-wide currencies without any other changes), those who don’t do that will very quickly fall behind and they won’t be getting invited into groups.

Reworking the gearing so that currencies are not capped at all would have to come first. Only then we can think about making those currencies account-wide to help alt gearing. Doing it the other way round will ruin the gearing process for mains.

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Having GS requirements in LFG is a different story. And honestly, even those requirements are mostly not used from my experience. I barely do see anyone using the GS requirement of LFG, unless the system excludes groups with a requirement you don’t met automatically.

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No, it’s not. Even if people don’t explicitly set a requirement, they usually won’t accept low-geared characters into their groups. And if it’s possible to earn gear that’s above heroic raid level week 1 or 2 of a season by alting like crazy, you can be sure that pugs will soon start setting the requirements to that level. In the case of PvP, you won’t even be able to compete with people who have maxed out PvP gear while you have one piece at most. Therefore, even people who only want to max out one character would be required to alt.

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I disagree personally.

If I compare the situation with Elder Scrolls Online, where you have Lvl 50 maximum + 160 CP for gear as maximum (since there was never a gear increase but that doesn’t matter for the comparison), you need 1 week to get to lvl 50 through questing and 2-3 days more to reach CP 160. And then you only need the gear that can be crafted or sold by other players or yourself.

9-10 days to get endgame ready and enjoy the content you want to enjoy.

In Destiny 2 the same. When Witch Queen came out February this year, my friends and I did play immediately the legendary campaign mode, got a 1520 power set for completing campaign in said mode and were 1550 Power (Edit: 1550 was Hard Cap) at the middle of the next week. Also roughly 10 days. And those were veteran characters.

A fresh character would need maybe 20 days before being able to raid and stuff.

Meanwhile in WoW it can take (depending on the time gating and your luck in M+) roughly 1 Month with a fresh toon to reach endgame heroic level WITHOUT trading and buying stuff from the AH. And this is for the average player.

Gladly they introduced account-wide packages with Korthia for catching up with gearing on alts. Imo that should be the standard each season!

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Gearing alts in wow is way harder now than it was before, because they reduced gear drop by 1 from dungeons and they removed titanforging, which was really RNG part of the game, but it helped with gearing A LOT.

On BFA I had my main with absolute best in slot gear, sockets everywhere, multiple gear sets with bis corruptions, and 4 alts with very decent gear to be able to reclear mythic Nzoth without any problems. Now I have my 275 BDK main plus monk at 264 and warr at 261 and I don’t want to gear them because it takes too long. Even with uncapped valor, it’s over 13 000 valors to get everything to 272ilvl (not counting legs and chest - those are the most expensive but you use 2 legendaries).

With 200 valors for each mythic plus run, it’s 66 runs. If each run takes 40 minutes (actual run of the dungeon plus grouping up), its 44hrs (2640minutes) to get best possible gear from mythic plus - if you’re lucky with drops. You can have a problem to even drop the items. I remember when I was gearing my protection warrior in season 1, I had to run De Other Side 24 times to get trinket, and I gave up (I actually drop it from mythic 0 with 4 of my friends which all were on tank specs to be able to trade it and I upgraded it 12 times).

And if you’re person who is not doing emissaries and raid, it really sucks to farm for 44hrs to get best possible gear for each character. Yes, you can get upgrades from weekly vault, but you only can, there is no guarantee - like my main, I can’t even take coins to get gems, because I already have gems everywhere I can.

Investing 44hrs to your alt (and imagine it’s your 2nd or 3rd alt) takes a lot of time. I’m working person, I have no family, only GF which isn’t even live with me, so I have plenty of time. But I still don’t want to invest this much time just to start to having fun in some end game content.

Oh and by the way, I’m talking here about 272 items, that’s really far from having BIS ilvl gear.

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That would necessitate account-wide lockouts for everything as well (except for gear). Otherwise you run into the age-old problem of people with more alts than you having massive advantage.

The problem isn’t that cosmic flux, archivist research, stygia, etc. aren’t account wide. The problem is that these currencies exist (and they only exist because Blizz is afraid of asking players to spend gold).