They system hasn’t changed for S4. You may be less active in game and have to go out of your way to earn the flight stones but it is still infinitely better than the alternative of removing flightstones and halting progress because you don’t have enough crests when you get a new item. It would hinder gearing. People would be reluctant to put any currency in things that weren’t bis because it would penalise them later to try to catch up.
I would far rather see a higher flightstone cap so that when we do activities that earn them we aren’t just wasting them after hitting 2k.
I think blizzard set the flightstones cap low specifically to discourage hoarding in the first iteration, and kinda force people to engage with the system the way that’s ultimately most beneficial, because it worked the complete opposite way to Valor and initially very counter intuitive.
The cap should definitely be raised now we’ve had it a season or two.
The endless loot treadmill sapped my enthusiasm for the game in 10.1 so I did not engage in S4 in 10.2. My gear is still 463 for S3.
No sooner had I acquired and upgraded this gear with Superblooms, Researchers, Seed Planting, Feasts and whateve else was on the weekly rota I had to start again and I just couldn’t
Were I to bother with TWW I’d probably gear in S1, ignore S2 and S3 and gear again in S4.
But I have not regained enough enthusiasm in the game to get TWW.
VP was better as you did not need flightstones and then 4 different crests and stones being capped is so annoying. And to add the awaken gear from vendor so many levels of upgrade for just one item i agree with OP.
That was to combat the farming +2s syndrome. They didn’t like that players chose the easiest content to farm the currency in. So now they are spread out and required for different levels of upgrading.
Yeah the best thing about the valor system was the fact you could get a good item mabye BIS from a lower key and take that item all the way to being max item level that was cool and im sure casual players and the more hardcore players liked that
Yeah, this is what i really liked about it. It was bad to farm a specific trinket, not getting it from the high keys, and then helping out a guildgroup on a low key and getting it. I do think the current system is a bit better though with all pro’s and cons.
Yeah kinda. I mean its not because of flightstones (even though I think they aren’t needed), it’s because of crest costs. You need 15 of a kind to upgrade and you only get 12 per dungeon and 10 per raid boss kill, can’t it be 10 per upgrade and 10 per dungeon? Also the downgrade feature feels bad because its 1 to 1, I can run + 10s but I need to go back to 0s because I need drakes… And like I said the downgrading feels bad because I did a way more difficult version than it was required and got nothing out of it. Imo it should be 1 to 2 when downgrading.
I think all upgrade systems end up feeling like a chore, regardless of what they are tbh.
Like at the start of seasons when we are in full on gearing mode. I earn all the currencies without trying. But late on when I’m not really playing much, anything I need to upgrade is a chore because I have to go do the activities required to earn the currencies.
Regarding the Flighstone cap, you can dump them into reputation tokens, which means gold. 75 Flighstones → 50 reputation of any of the 6 big factions of Dragonflight. So in essence 11750 Flighstones amount to about 1000 gold, a random potion, some pet charms and some other items I don’t remember.
The amount of extra work / grind required by the player is what influences whether it feels like a chore or not. Compare getting a piece of gear and having it “evolved to its full potential” within (i) 30minutes of gameplay or (ii) 5 hours.
That is what I am thinking too. That the whole system deep down justifies our desire for a chore. DF got rid of too many, so they had to think up some new ones.
now with current dungeon change’s a +2 now is like a 12+ in old scale VP would be a god send.i used to like farming +2s was my idea of fun. I know some hated it but as usual had to wreck it for others.