Changing Main - What do you lose, what to do in alts?

Community General Discussion
1

Hello everyone.

Yesterday I started playing around with Demon Hunter. I adored it.
Thing is, I played with this Shaman since WotLK. For those who are achievement collectors, what should I focus on my alt, and what should I keep doing on my main?

This game punish us too much for changing between characters. So I always kept everything to one. But the experience between DH Havoc and Shammy Enhancement are pretty cool.

For the achievements part, it is broken on Armory - but it’s soon to be fixed, so not a big deal since sooner or later most will jump to my DH too.

For the reputations, quest lines, explorer, what will move to DH, what doesn’t? In the long run, what should I keep focusing on my main (Shaman) and what am I free to keep playing on my DH - without affecting my collector’s progress?

With progress, I mean, I’m doing lore master for years, I don’t wanna leave that. Explorer done a long, long time ago. Some rare achievements, a lot of legacy’s, raid and dungeon glorys, etc. I need to keep those, after so much hours invested on this over a decade.

For those who are experienced with it, can you give me some advice?
Yes. Achievement Points are the reason I play this game. Always have been, and always will be. And I give it so much importance that if I lose “much” progress, I’ll give up the idea and stay on my Shaman even if I have less fun with.

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It’s a pity that now the forums just show the achievement points you’ve on the character you’re posting. I’ve 14k+ (not that many to be honest) but since I changed main now it only shows 8k.

If all the achievements work like the exploration achievements you should be able to unlock the ‘major’ ones even if you’re playing an alt. For example, yesterday I’ve got my explorer achievement even if I miss the Shadowmoon Valley (WoD) one on this character.
I’ve also got the mounts achievement as soon as I created a paladin so I guess it works.

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The most annoying one I can think of is the 100 wins in battlegrounds. This isn’t account wide progress so you start from 0.

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This also…I have 17k achiev points and just 240 here

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Is this intended on their side, and to stay, or it’s a bug?
In their support they say something about going into your Interface and disabling the “Only this account” thing, but so far, no successful results.

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I think it’s intended but I might be wrong.
Maybe they want to distinguish characters for some reason (to show that character is new or you’re ‘new’ to the game, but really doesn’t make sense since you’ve achievements showing you’re not a new player and also a new player would not have many achievements to being with…)

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I’ll be honest with you mate. Changing main is a nightmare if you care about the character journey and achievements. I’ll likely never be able to change main, whether I like it or not. Uruk and I will stay together until the day this game finally dies or I quit.

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With what I see, I think my DH will be left getting dust and that’s about it.
This Shammy have so much invested in reputations, quests and other content that just makes considering changing obsolete.

The AP’s thing could make me “consider” changing, since the number would jump out with me, but still. This way I’ll look like a new player. I’ll have to stay with this one until I get bored and eventually quit again.

Thank you for your help.

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As someone with all but Talon’s Vengence done on my main and heavily alted:

General achievements are all accountbound past their basic ranks. If all your remaining generals are blue ribbon, congratz, you’re done.

PVP: Focus it on one character as it doesn’t track over 2

Dungeons and Raids: All tracked across account. I actually used my DH to catch a firelands achievement when doing the meta I missed due to a mishap

Pet battles: Fully account wide, go ham

Quest achivements: Assign each zone to a character. There’s no loss going BFA on your DH if you’ve never tapped the content on either, but going back and farming cata achievements on your DH when you did it as your shammy would suck.

The achievement system is very alt friendly outside of PVP. As a DK it’s also required, because I can’t naturally get the Tier 1-6 appearance achievements!

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It’s totally doable Martwin, and very funny. I am an altoholic, mostly doing mythic+ with every single class:
I have 2 druid’s, my main resto on 1.6k and a guardian on 1.1
Also as repeated classes got 2 shamans (400ilvl, rarely played though), 2 palladins (400ilvl, rarely played too). For the rest of classes I got every of them on 120 characters, min 400ilvl, around 5 of them being frequently used.

Those 5 more used alts being a 435 war, 430 priest (also have a 2nd priest 400ilvl I forgot about), 430 rogue, 430 lock, 420 DH.
The classes not mentioned range around 410-420.

So you could say I hardcore main my resto, then submain guardian, fury, discipline, assassination, havoc, demonology and sometimes I play many others.

Besides of plain time requirements obviously, having many alts mostly requires awareness of the game overall and specially it’s gating.
When your main reaches some degree of progress you will have noticed the gates become really tougher (weekly chest, weekly raid, etc.) so that’s when I start putting hours on alts, specially after big patches bring catch-up and/or unlock major features like flying or benthic (this last one being responsible for my army of alts this patch).
What you need to know with an alt I how to skip stuff and get as fast as possible to what you want (in my case it’s gear to get into mythic +).

You have to be able to see how to be most efficient on the long run. Some of the alts I mentioned where mostly played few a hours a week or none at all, just logged them when it’s was efficient (bonus rep weeks, warfront, gear on emissary).
Just think of the weekly quest that requires you to finish 4 mythic dungeons for a 430 heroic piece. My min goal there would be a +5 at least and three 0’s. It’s around 2-3 hours in a week for 2 high ilvl pieces of gear. If there was to be a heroic warfront you can add another 430 piece.

Your don’t have to worry about stuff like loremaster or reputations, they count towards the general one, you could have 50 on your main and 30 on your alt and they will sum up towards the 100rep achievement (unique ones ofc), that works the same on every meta-achievement. Meta’s have their boxes blue so they’re easy to spot.
Just mind the story progression and main reputations (the ones for flight unlock).

Edit* Idk why post is in reply to Uruk, whas not intended ^^

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Hmm I think the problem OP has is not about alts or leveling/gearing alts. It’s more about how many achievements points that character shows on the forums/armory and getting those account-wide achievements done.
Some people care about achievement points and there’s nothing wrong with that.

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Then I really missed the point lol, sorry for that wall of off-topic then :slight_smile:
I agree there’s nothing wrong with caring for those points

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From someone Who has Been an altoholic since wotlk and never really having a Main, the achievement part is a night are, especially for pvp rep ones (IMO) so if achievements mean much to you, picking 1 char to farm them on is the move if ur able to :slight_smile:

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used to be pala main myself so can relate somewhat

welcome to our privileged club!
enjoy being relevant at any content :slight_smile:
don’t forget to hide your chest at Tmogs :wink:

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I stopped caring about achievement points when I logged in one day and found over 2000 had been taken off me and turned into Feats of Strength or Legacy… I still main this though for current expansion achievements, I would be very very annoyed if I woke up tomorrow and found all my questing and discovering achievements went the same way as a while crapload of my raiding ones. Im childishly proud of my up-to-date loremaster etc. Really proud of my meta rare kill achievements for TBC and Wrath. Snagging the Loque kill was a beast because I would always ask if there was any hunters nearby or if there was one nearby I’d let them tame it.

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Sorry for bringing this topic out again.

I was looking at my character armory (a minute ago, 11 PM) and I saw that they ’solve’ the achievement bug.
Now all my characters shows my account achievement points.

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I play one character and raid with other, and other than my time I see not much difference between the two. Only that my raid character has better new-transmogs. So i actively actually play ‘a main’ and ‘a raider’ that does raids now like 1 day a week.

As a collector it counts what you do on account, not on a character. Unless you aim to get those R4 essences and such, that you should do on one.

And PvP achievements progression goes by 1 character. Most parts, but honor and such is shared.

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I personally don’t think that they “Punish” you a lot for switching mains, i’ve been in your scenario before myself & i’ll usually just gear up my alt until the item lvl reaches a decent amount for me to adress it as my main.

What i think that you could be focusing on, on your main would be Achievements that are in progress & reputation. Reputation is probably the main thing i would focus on due to it taking ages & i would imagine that your main character already has a decent amount of reputation with certain factions & there is no reason to restart all of your grind.

But if you are looking to do Pve or PvP as your main priority on your current ALT, i wouldn’t start worrying about Achievements & Reputation, but instead focus on that, on your shammy :slight_smile:

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Now if we had something like a CLASS CHANGE this would not be a problem for you. You could simply change the class of you main to Demon Hunter and play with it until you got bored with it or wanted to try another class again and you could simply change your class again without loosing any of your rep, profession recipes/patterns, etc etc etc…

Ever since I started playing I have asked for a class change for this game and I have been shot down every time with “there is no need for it, just create another alt…”. I don’t want an alt army each one with some faction rep, recipe/pattern or some other thing I unlocked and I have to keep it around just for that one little piece of s#1t. I would just like some option to change the class on my main or existing alts to something else. I have 4 mages I would change almost immediately.

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It is a bit annoying and it is possible if you want to finish the story you have to play your previous story-main in the new patch.
Don’t try to worry about !'s on the map too :smile: And some missing flightpoints.