That might work for those who have the time to play a lot (even though it must be frustrating for them as well because the essence grind is obnoxious), but having to do all that if someone is not playing everyday is just stupid.
People can already get normal raid ilvl gear by doing 4 or 3 (tortollan) wq a day, and heroic raid gear by doing a heroic afkfront or by spamming 4 m0 when that’s the weekly quest. So there are already plenty of unnecessary catchup mechanic for alts, but for some reason they don’t want to give us something that we already earned on one (or more) characters that requires timegated grind, that’s stupid.
Sticking with one character would be fine if class design would be good, but it’s not tha hard to get bored of classes for some people if they play that character for more than a week.
So, no, there is no reason to not give us account wide essences.
In my opinion, one character should be isolated from another. And what you do as a player should only matter on the character you play – not those you don’t play.
Blizzard seems willing to bend over backwards to some extent, to accommodate people who want to play alts, and have subsequently created some overlap between the player, the character, and the account.
Fair enough, be that as it may be. But there’s a limit. At a certain point you’re not playing the alt as much as you’re reaping the benefits of your main. And I find that to go against the design intent of the game.
Just remove the reputation requirements for alts… I wanted to reroll to this char and it just hit me I’m held back by timegating and can’t grind them on my own pace…
If you have multiple, then rotate them each tier or expansion.
The game shouldn’t aim to accommodate alts, because that is a course doomed for failure.
If Blizzard creates the game experience around a time investment that allows you to play 2 characters, then the guy who only wants to play 1 has too little content available. And the guy who wants to play 10 characters still feels Blizzard aren’t being very “alt-friendly”.
So the most natural is to design the game around the play experience of a single character, and then leave it up to the individual players to evaluate whether they have the time or desire to play more.
This is already on every power level of the char. Azerite items, heart level, cloak levels, gear pieces. Actually, everything. So your statement is definitely also for wow true, but there has to be a limit somewhere. Probably the biggest problem is the way to acquire essences at this moment. When this is changed into something were PvP players should not go PvE and visa versa, or players should not grind reputation - hell, in areas that are not even current content anymore - then that is definitely for me also a solution.
Idk how much time you invest daily into the game but this logic really seem to come from someone that have a lot of time to dump into this game or have mind stuck in 2004.
Maybe when I was younger and used to play 12-15hrs i would have found your idea reasonable, today with still a lot of playtime I have to call this idea BS.
Too many daily chores to keep every character alone.
The legion start with all Artifact separated was a pain.
If they keep pushing daily things to do, they will have to increase account bound things.
Just log out on your main character and log in on your alt and start playing.
That’s not hard.
What seems to be the complaint, is not wanting to play certain aspects of the game on alts but still get the rewards that come from them.
And I object to that.
I don’t have much time, a few hours a day at best.
But I will advocate that WoW should stick – to the degree it can – to its old-school, character-driven design here.
I mean, I suppose the polar opposite if Blizzard’s own Diablo III where you have one giant stash that’s shared between all your characters and all your progression and currency and items and so on is almost entirely account-based.
If WoW had originally been designed that way, I wouldn’t have minded it one bit. But it wasn’t, and I don’t think it can transition to that design and still retain its character-driven RPG design at the same time.
You are not able to calculate it like this. There are people spamming having fun for 6 months spamming arenas on 1 char. And this is what they want to do and only want to do. Too many different players. You can not say “blizzard creates content for 2 characters”. or whatever number. It is not measurable.
But in Legion blizzard didn’t hide player power behind other types of content. Imagine if the decided to hide the major traits of the artifact behind reps, M+, PVP or even pet battles?
People look back to Legion as alt friendly because the overwhelming portion of your power gain was from artifacts and at this point in Legion you could go from 1 to 52 in a matter of 1-2WQs
No, but it is still a deliberate design choice to what degree the game should accommodate more than one playthrough.
There are some quests leading up to the Essence system. Is it reasonable that players can skip them if they’ve completed them once before? Sure, arguably. It’s almost entirely story-driven, and the only reward is the story, so there’s arguably no need to force the player through it multiple times since it arguably ceases to be rewarding after the first time.
But the Essences themselves, those are different. They’re not story-driven, they’re driven by progression and power. And since that is equally rewarding the second and third time, the investment of time and effort should also be equal the second and third time.
So Blizzard can accommodate alts as far as story and content is concerned. If you have done it before, then you don’t have to do it again, because it provides no reward except the experience itself.
But power and progression, that has a tangible character value, and so every character should of course acquire it through the same means.
Essences are the fix of a problem named azerite gear created by Blizzard. It should have stayed in 8.2 and they should have made neck and essences accound bound ages ago even reps. Legion had similar issue and they fixed it on last patch even without the fix , system was more forgiving because catch ups already existed.
Yes if you put 100 hours on a character it should reflect that 100 hours but no one here is asking 470 free ilvl gear. We are asking for a fix of a problem that they created themselfs to fix another problem.
Even now i’m almost done with this character. In a week or 2 i will complete my +15 achievement and i’m already geared. What i will do is just logging on twice a week to do a +15 and hc raid. On the other hand , i could play my army of alts , gear them do current content with them without burning myself even further with essence grind again.
If they are introducing a progression system that should be account wide regardless of what. Those d3 devs that are working on wow knows this already with d3 paragon system.
For example, if the entirety of progression was shared between characters, then the hypothetical person that wants to play only one character has the exact same amount of content as the hypothetical person that wants to play 2, 3 or 10.
There’s various degrees between this extreme and the other end of the spectrum to fine-tune the amount of effort needed for alt-maintenance.
The way I see it, if Blizzard thinks that players somehow enjoy the game more if they have less gameplay diversity in their already repetitive gameplay loop, then all I can do is to wish them good luck. I can only disagree fundamentally with that approach.
If the power creep wasn’t so bad in PVP…it wouldn’t feel too bad, but PVP right now is basically a mercy killing if you don’t have essences etc, let alone cloak & heart catch up.
Tbh it kinda is. Raiding is only fun when progression and first reclear. For m+ part , i said i will do it but i probably won’t. At the end of legion , i wasn’t bothering with dungeons on my main. But i had some alts that i can progress fresh. I cleared hc antorus with 5 classes.
I’m kinda scared that i will run out of the things to do in a month with this character and probably unsub till shadowlands.
Tip for next time(or well, maybe not since haha playing an alt) you could just do normal mythic then m+2 or some very low workshop and get vision in a couple dungeons, none harder than heroic.
I had a guildie farming it 51 times for it and then he quit the next day
