Legion system during the Antorus patch made going back to alts, and gearing them up catching up fun and easy.
But now, if I want to go back to playing my crappy warlock (with 400 ilvl and pretty much zero essences and neck level) I have to do a mindless rep grind again, a rep grind that I thought would end after I hit exalted on my main.
I doubt more than 50 peple on earth have the desire to re-do mindless grinds on their alts that they want to bring up to speed.
That’s the reason why I play wow classic 95% of the time and only do m+ on my 2 geared chars atm.
I personally think if it’s an “either or” scenario, where I’d have to decide between Bind on Account or have them be exactly as they are right now, I’d rather have them be bind on account.
But I also believe there’s no need for them to be bind on account, if there were things that would make farming them on characters past your first easier.
“Hey, my alter ego is going to visit your mechagon island soon, he’s basically me but another race, me being the savior of your island, be sure to give him a warm welcome” should work for giving my alt a mentionable boost in rep for mechagon. Same for Nazjatar and their “friends” over there.
For the raid essences? Make the items that create condensed life force or formless void drop after completing the rank 3 essences and bind on account after, importantly enough only after reaching rank 3, so there’d be no merit to grinding on several chars. Same would work for focusing iris / anima of life / lifebinders essence.
PvP essences I do not know how to make them any more bearable besides tying them to the achievement, which would essentially be BoA.
In general, there’s large improvement options that could’ve been made to make essences more bearable without them being bind on account. But they weren’t. There’s not going to be any more changes, so if you plan on gearing up another character, wait for the shadowlands prepatch, would be my suggestion.
Controversial opinion, but I don’t really mind them not being BOA.
However, they should be really easy to get on an alt, more like a formality. For example, the reputation ones. If there were commendations like MOP had for reps and BOA reputation tokens, then that’d be fine.
For the raid one, after your main completed the grind, you could get R3 on your alts in a single run, etc.
I’m on the same situation, before i was playing my hunter / DH tank / disco priest, now i’m resolve to play only my alliance worgen since i hate farming essence. Gearing is already hard for character with azerite trait so if you tell me i must do essence … i gonna still be main hunter for SL but if we got something that long to farm too in SL, i will play only MM hunter alliance / horde , no way i will alt again.
But mostly we forgot how legendary cloack take time too. I would like to do soo much thing but i worry i can do all these thing i want before SL with all my alt
It is good. It made me finally play this game less as I did not bother to log on alts anymore. I managed to do visions and stuff for a week with few alts, but novelty wore off there too. 8.2 was very-very good patch. 1st it did teach me to log much less, and 8.3 has now made me quit. I mean … my friend pays my game time for past 2-3 months so I’d not fully disappear, but definitely … essences were good for my spare time.
… i finally have washed dishes, and keeping my room clean and tidy.
rank 3 on main = rank 2 on alts as rank 4 is purely cosmetic.
Or an ‘essence rank token’ like they’ve done with the war resources etc. My main has 1.2k manapearls. If i could buy a rank 3 essence token (exalted needed ofc) and send it to an alt then id play that alt more.
I’d say that up to 4 characters it isn’t a problem, at least it wasn’t for me but for people with plenty of alts I guess it’s a major pain point, I also think that some people want to have every essence on their alts which is a bit weird but honestly I think that they could have relaxed things and gave people rank 1/2 on their alts for free, I mean, it’s the final patch for this expansion, let people have some fun.
All BFA.
Regrind essences on top of grinding neck AP and farm azerite was the nail on the coffin for my alts.
I’ll keep them just for farming purposes.
I think for the game it is probably bad because it is discourages players from playing their alts more. Some will grind it out, but I think the majority will just say “forget it”, which leads to a less active player base and possibly fewer subscriptions.
For me personally it is good, because it removes any temptation to play an alt, which is an approach I want to stick to anyway. I also believe it’s beneficial insofar that it discourages rampant FotM rerolling and strengthens character identity. In an RPG, I feel the focus should always be on the character and not on the account.
But strictly from a “community happiness” perspective, I think essences being account-wide would have been the better choice.
I’m if favour of reduced timegating and rep grinds but I’m against account wide essences as I worry about the future consequences it could have in the game. As you said,
Thus players are expecting to be able to keep 12 alts in shape with minimal efforts, which wasn’t realistic in previous expansions (oh sure you could, but it would take you ages).
Worst case scenario would be to have account wide progression on the main progression systems and having dozens of alts would just become the most optimized way to progress on your main. This was terrible with the benthic lottery, can’t see how it would be good in any way.
Setting a precedent for something I think would be unhealthy for the game is risky, especially when it is not required.
As I said above i’m all in favour of reduced rep grinds and timegating, I have nothing against that. But account wide can easily go out of hand.
For example even something as “harmless” like BoA expulsom. Sounds good right ?
But in reality the most efficient way to get expulsom is the daily expulsom transmut which cost what, 200g for 5 expulsom on my server ? On the other hand crafting it cost about 250 gold each.
The altholic goblins could easily set up dozens of alchemists across all servers, cherry pick the ones with the cheapest herbs and run this transmut every day for a 80% discount on their crafts. They can then craft on any server their items and crash the market. This becomes the cheapest way to craft thus become the norm and if you don’t have a dozen alts then you’re unable to compete.
This happened with the tool of the trade for alch and ench, and it already happens with server transferts (and you can be banned if you abuse it), this is bound to happen with BOA expulsom.
Ive gone this expac from alliance boomkin to horde lock now to horde shaman which im really enjoying but redoing cloak,neck and essences can be a burden .
I dont think i have ever had Fotm class and being a collector i can handle grinds . Just feels like they have said “we have listened and we agree but no for reasons”.
Am I then wrong to claim that this expectation is there since it was much easier before ? And is that really disrespectful to claim that they expect the grind to be easier ?
If the “keep 12 alts” bothers you then replace it with any number between 1 and 99999, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you would make it account wide for one system and players would then expect it for the next ones, and what I don’t want it see is what happens once we start applying it left and right
Still took longer to gear an alt back then than to get most essences now tho.
You can reach heroic quality gear with a fresh alt with pugs only in a week if you’re good enough. This is faster than it has ever been.