For the average/casual player it takes a week or longer to get 7500 reputation together.
And all you get is useless stuff. I just opened a Maruukai reward satchel bag. I got:
1100 Gold (the most useful thing of all the items dropped) (not really useful tho with my current 200k gold)
8 pet bandages (irrelevant for people that don’t do pet battles)
25 pet tokens (irrelevant for people that don’t do pet battles)
250(?) Expedition Supplies (irrelevant since S1 because the rewards don’t scale with you, maybe Transmog and Achievement collectors have a use for it still)
For something that requires a full week (maybe even longer depending on your investment) it contains the most items. It feels incredibly unrewarding to keep grinding the experience every week. That’s the major reason why I stopped bothering to even do so. I only made this post because it happened by coincidence today that I got a reward bag for 7500 rep.
The Solution:
There isn’t much that needs to be done, actually. Just give each of those bags a 100% drop chance for an item from the Open World Set loot pool. (Those from the “Item Sets” page in the Adventurer Guide)
Those items should be also upgrade-able up to heroic level. Or perhaps go even so far as to making them completely scale based on your current item level (so, if you are for example max ilvl, the drop would be also max item level).
Why Blizzard should do this:
It keeps the Reputation grind and World Questing relevant even for endgame players
It gives a better feeling of being rewarded for your efforts
Casual players have another, reliable source to get powerful gear from their casual content, without invalidating endgame activities.
I’ve always found it awful that by the time we do most rep grinds, and even though I do them fast, 90% of the time the items are useless by the time I get them. I’ve got better. So they are just transmog purchases.
Old expansions rep grinds are the worst, legion has important achievements for mogs and druid forms tied behind rep grinds example and they felt like awful chore to grind from shadowlands. Never felt more bored in video game, grind world quests for days in old expansions for tmogs and druid forms that are still only behind old expansions unlocks.
I’m a casual scrub, i can (usually) get some use out of renown-equipment, but OP is right, the paragon chests are pretty useless, i don’t actively pursue them, they just occasionally pop up as i do some dailies, and even gained totally incidentally, are still underwhelming.
As long as the rewards aren’t unique to the paragon boxes (as you suggested open world gear is fine) then I’m fine with it. Having unique pets and mounts in previous expansions wasn’t good. I know the term Forced is probably a little over-used and slightly hyperbolic but it is probably fits well enough.
You know, I did a HC dungeon the other, utterly useless I tell ya!
Couldn’t even get an upgrade from it o.o
I recommend for HC dungeon rewards to cater to me so I feel rewarded for doing something optional.
In case you were wondering, that was sarcasm, if you don’t feel rewarded for doing something, and fun isn’t enough, i’d recommend not doing it, I know it’s a crazy idea.
Unfortunately the game doesn’t let you just “not do it”. Every time you do a WQ you get Rep points. At some point you get a reward chest. And that reward chest reminds you of how this system is in relevance in the first place again.
That is what happened to me today. That is why I made this topic.
I have 22million, and I would happily grind these if they gave out more gold.
But then, that is what Blizzard seems to want to avoid. It doesn’t take long to build up an army of alts with maxed rep and earning 5 or 6 paragon chests a day.
Blizz seems to have actively made Gold making harder this expansion, and put it into the hands of players who want to invest all of the time into it.
Tbh, alot of my outside world game play revolves around collecting these sets, and they really don’t take alot of effort to collect. I usually have most sets complete within a week or 2 of a patch, and if there is anything left over it’s pretty cheap to buy on AH.
Unique sets would be a more suitable reward. But then people would just moan about Paragon and RNG.
Personally I think more gold would be a better reward.
Sure, the blue variants are easy to get. But they don’t drop as epics on heroic level. Now imagine they could as a soulbound item from those reward bags/chests…
It would not just make those reward boxes more valuable, but also make alting more easier, since you get increased rep on alts for the faction ranks.
That’s your take, my take is that every now and again I get a bit of gold, for doing things i’d be doing anyway. Why does everything need some crazy reward to make people farm it.
Isn’t it enough that sometimes you get some small goodies for doing things you’d be doing anyway?
Then why tie it to a reputation number? Just make it a regular drop chance then? Would make it even easier and less predictable, increasing the surprise-reward factor in that experience.
Imagine instead of like 11 gold an Elite sometimes drops the 100x value of it (literally the 1100 Gold from the rep box). Wouldn’t it feel more rewarding for you then that you don’t have to go to a vendor/NPC every time?
It could just be a hidden counter you can’t see that grants these rewards whenever you reach the maximum and then resets back to 0.
Instead of 7500 rep it could be “kill XY amount of elites” or literally anything that contributes with tags to that meter.
In Destiny 2 the very same system I just described is used for certain stuff like ammo rewards in PvP (you have to earn your right to use a shotgun now these days, by making kills and assisting in kills/capturing zones), Prime Engrams (basically powerful drops that drop in periodic times with an increasing chance), etc.
It is just a good experience there. In WoW, it’s boring, bland and feels unrewarding.
Definitely should be better. They nerfed paragon box farm for DF. Gold down to 1k from 3.5k and also no mounts pets nothing in the boxes. No reason to do any wq again besides gold ones after you maxed out the reputation.
Probably an unpopular opinion but I’m fine with paragon boxes being fairly unrewarding in DF - I found having rare drops from them to be really obnoxious. Exalted/Max renown should be your reward, with paragons just being a small extra for those who mostly do WQs.
items. It feels incredibly unrewarding to keep grinding the experience every week. That’s the major reason why I stopped bothering to even do so. I only made this post because it happened by coincidence today that I got a reward bag for 7500 rep.