Is SL really more alt friendly?

PVP Arenas
1

Well in BFA I thought there was a lot to do and it was alt unfriendly with doing these every week,

Dailys in Uldum and MoP zone
Visions
1 +mythic 15 (don’t need to cap conquest bar since pvp gear was useless in bfa).

Whereas in SL every week you have to grind for,

Conduits (Dungeon journal shows which dung you get each 1 from). As well as having to redo that content to get the upgraded higher ilvl version of that conduit later.

Renoun
Do more than 1 mythic dung a week for more gear
Cap conquest bar for pvp gear since it’s useful now (BFA pvp gear was useless).
Torghast
The Maw (for sockets)

It seems it’s only more friendly to level alts faster but that wasn’t the problem for me, it was keeping up their gear every week with all the chores you had to do to have that char be decent in pvp or raiding. i was hoping for just gridning pvp for conquest gear but I need to farm torghast for legendaries and the maw for sockets on each alt to be decent.

Do you guys think SL is more alt friendly than BFA like the devs and alot of people are saying?

2

You don’t. You play the game, and conduits will eventually drop. By the time you unlock enough conduit slots, you’ll pretty much have the conduits you need. Then it’s just upgrading them, which comes naturally with playing the game as you normally would.

You don’t specifically grind conduits - you can’t, they don’t have a fixed drop location anyway. You play the game, and conduits drop.

You get renown from doing your covenant campaign, and for callings, which usually can be completed by doing the things you’d do anyway. You won’t even notice when you cap your weekly renown.

You don’t get more gear in the vault for running more m+. You get more options, but still a single choice. Besides, if you wanted to gear up, you’d run more than 1 m+ anyway. Unless of course you’re already decked out in m+15 gear, and the vault is your only upgrade, but… that’s going to take a good while.

Oh my, an hour a week. Such burden.

The Maw is actually daily, not weekly. Now this part is grindy, but the only grindy PvE part in your entire list. However, for an alt, you don’t need sockets. It’s okay if your alt is not as powerful as your main - then it’d be a second main, not an alt. So if you go to the maw once a week for 30 minutes on the alt, that’s still going to be okay. You will be able to participate in raids, m+, and pvp on your alt. Perhaps not at the level as your main, but the difference will not be nearly as huge as in BfA.

Also keep in mind, that all but one of the things you listed is weekly, whereas in BfA, most grinds were daily, or didn’t have catchup mechanisms. That’s a huge difference.

Mind you, keeping a second main up to date will be a whole lot easier too, because half the things you need, you get by just playing the game as you would, without having to go out of your way to grind them.

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I mean there seemed to be an outrage about needing renoun 7 to further upgrade pvp gear, and that renoun would be acquired by doing more pve content. Alot of people seemed very bothered about having to do this little thing, nevermind the rest.
The thing is I don’t want to have to do the covenant campaign and dailys and weekly grinds to cap renoun on alts.
" you’d run more than 1 m+ anyway" didn’t they say alot less gear would drop from mythic plus. And if you want more choices for that specific good upgrade, you probably will have to do more than 1 mythic + for more end of week choices.
“Oh my, an hour a week.” Been doing it on beta it’s abit longer than that, 2 hours I’d say but it’s not really that fun for me and to have to do it on multiple alts, it’s kind of the same time length as grinding the Uldum and MoP zone and the vision altogether, and I hated doing all those dailys quests and visions. But torghast doesn’t seem as bad as those thank god.
And the maw is daily? Thats even worse, " It’s okay if your alt is not as powerful as your main", thats to you but to alot of people each char has to be properly geared, just see alot of the rank 1’s who have 5 alts covered in sockets from doing visions and dailys all the time on each one. Plus I see the maw is for more than just sockets, you’ll need stygia for conduit upgrades and stuff from there too.
I just want to pvp and hoped all I had to do to gear up was pvp and cap conquest bar, but I have to do all these too to be decent in competing. Oh well those days of just capping in pvp ended with WoD I guess.

4

Oh, pvp gearing is currently broken, yes.

Well, the Covenant campaign also unlocks your soulbinds, and they take like an hour tops a week, probably less, and if you skip them for a few weeks, you can catch up in one sitting easily.

There are no daily grinds for renown. The weekly is super easy, and most of the time, you automatically complete it by just playing the game as you would. The only extra part is having to pick it up at your sanctum at the start of the week.

Not a lot less. One item less from the end chest.

Yep, which you’d do anyway if you would want to gear the alt, because of the dungeon loot. The vault is a nice extra in this case. If you wouldn’t run multiple m+ on the alt if it weren’t for the vault, then said alt doesn’t need multiple choices either.

You’re not forced to, it’s your choice how powerful you want to keep your alt.

It gets easier and faster with gear. I usually finished layer 5 of a wing in 30-40 minutes on a resto druid in ~heroic dungeon gear. That’s enough soul ash for a R1 legendary in two weeks, R2 in two more, at which point you’ll likely be able to clear layer 8 in the same time on an alt too. Slightly slower soul ash acquisition, but we’re talking alts, not second mains.

In contrast to Uldum and MoP zones, Torghast doesn’t require as much travel, and there are no dailies.

You can be geared enough to do raids, m+ and pvp at a reasonable level without your alt being at the same power level as your main.

Yeah, don’t be like those people. The vast majority of people don’t need to have 5 mains. If you do, then yes, you’ll have to put in more effort. Still less effort than in any of the prior expansions, mind you.

You don’t. Conduit upgrades come from doing harder content. The item you can buy for Stygia is for the late game when you can’t spend it on anything else, and you want to collect / upgrade all the conduits, even the ones you don’t use. That is its purpose. You can spam M+ endlessly, and get conduit upgrades far faster than doing your daily Maw grind (where you have limited time anyway).

Sadly, yes. From a PvP point of view, Shadowlands isn’t looking too bright right now, I’m afraid.

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No, Sl is same garbage as BFA. expect more systems with future patches.

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you also don’t need to come in to arena forums comment but here we are.

Any of your points is flawed.
The only grind a pvp’er should do is within the pvp aspect of the game.
If you think it’s fine, then i want to try a patch where pver’s need to farm as much pvp as we need to farm pve, lets see how it goes.

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7

SL will be alt friendly in the sense that it’s even less main friendly.
Want people to invite you to M+? Better switch to your other character of the same class, who’s in the M+ covenant.

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I wanted to answer but the biggest :clown_face: is already typing

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I don’t. The maw is starting to look like an endless daily grind. I like when you can complete a character. Get your bis and just know it’s done. Like classic.

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It’s a difficult design balance though, I imagine.

If the game is designed so you can adequately maintain 5-10 progression alts, then the person who just plays his main character is going to lack meaningful stuff to do.

That design balance is probably the constant crux of the issue, since people play the game in many different ways, from just focusing on a single character to having 50 alts and wanting even more, or wanting individual character progression versus account-shared progression.

11

No one is asking for this. I think all hardcore wow playerbase needs to get off its high horse because honestly it’s fu**ing sad that blizzard and some people actually want a video game to waste this much of their time. I would simply request that I can play 1 alt or maybe 2. But the amount of time they are asking for for this is disgusting. I play guitar, I have a life, I want to go see my friends and play 40k and paint and build my minis. This amount of time they are asking, and endless progression systems with daily resets meaning its easy to miss tons of days other people won’t have on their mains. Honestly, it’s predatory, manipulative and I find it abhorrent and disgusting that it infects and poisons our video games. Wow is absolutely the worst culprit for this, and having a faster levelling but then hiding all that grind behind end level content is disgusting. All we want is a reduced amount of time and not endless progressions systems because a lot of people do not want a game sucking all of their life away.

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Its not, if u have a lot of time - you must start at few alts, coz actually in SL no system to catch up. There will be lockout system in SL, so if you started at new alt for example 2-3 months after you will be never ever catch up your main or other players.

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OH F1CKING NO, I NEED TO DO STUFF IN ORDER TO STAY RELEVANT IN AN MMO. DAMN THE GRIND.

Seriously I am so tired of such autistic posts, go play BDO to comprehend what the word “Grinding” really entails in an MMO.

All that needs to be done is a PVP vendor with PVP stat in order to isolate strictly PVE gear from the arena process. The additional “systems” which you need to grind should not be a problem, it’s content that you do in an MMO.

Also remove PVE trinkets from arena.

14

Oh, for sure. I completely agree with this. I just don’t think that’s everyone’s expectation when they say alt-friendliness. And there are definitely people who desire to play more than 1-2 alts. And likewise, there are people who just want to play their main character and who therefore do want a lot of character progression. So alas, striking a balance between so many different types of players is not easy.

And yeah, Blizzard are definitely not good at respecting the player’s time. Their design tends to err too much toward excessive time-consuming tasks.
Out of the gate though, Shadowlands seems more approachable than current Battle for Azeroth at least, for whatever that’s worth.

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15

I agree with that. But the OP listed PvE parts as grindy - they aren’t. And compared to any recent expansions, even with the warts, SL is still going to be more alt friendly than those.

Perfect? Far from it. But much more alt friendly than the rest. I mean, Blizzard is pretty much dead set on making PvP players do PvE as well, so we’ll have to judge an expansion with that in mind. If you have to do PvE, Shadowlands is going to be the least grindy expansion to date.

That’s going to be perfectly possible in Shadowlands. It’s going to require much less work to maintain two characters than any recent expansion.

Uhhh…? There’s catchup for everything but Soul Ash and Stygia. Renown? There’s a catchup. Gear? You can spam M+, BGs, whatever. Of these, Soul Ash will be the most limited, and you can catch up on that in 5 weeks. (Assuming you only need 1 legendary for the alt at Rank 4)

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no there are conduits which come from mythic+, some come from raids and some are buyable from the pvp vendor. they are like normal loot they have drop places.

true to some extend also i heard you can only socket 6 items so it might not be too much of a disadvantage if you dont have them on twink.

i think i wont even farm them on main but we will see haha

17

Wrong.

Conduits can be acquired as rewards from playing max level content: Dungeons, PvP, Raids, Reputations, World Quests, etc. Most Conduits will be available from more than one source, allowing flexibility of acquisition across content types.

You do not need to do M+ to get conduits. You don’t need to do any PvE content to get them. As far as conduits go, the only PvE content you need to do is get enough Renown to unlock your Soulbind rows, so you can equip the conduits.

Granted, doing more content will net you conduits faster, but you don’t need to. You can stick to doing PvP, and you’ll still get the conduits.

You’re thinking of Legendary recipes, not conduits.

18

2-3 months after season starts come here and ask can people actually play 2-3 chars and catch up their main on alts when WoW not their job and they are not housewives with 8-10 hrs per day free time.

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19

Not at all. Just look at how many new systems we get. It seems like an endless grind 2.0, and I really don’t understand why the game continues to evolve towards being a full-time job…

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You wont fail a 15+ because of your Covenant choice. You will fail that one because you did not play it well.