Zereth Mortis Reputation

Community WoW Community Council
1

Wanted to ask a fairly blunt question on this topic.

What’s the design intent in terms of pacing with the reputations in Zereth Mortis.

Enlightened: Revered in 3 weeks? Exalted in 5-6?
Automa: I have no idea what the pacing is for this. You could finally gain small amounts of rep with this faction this build.

The main reason for asking is due to the reputation gains on PTR have been varying quite a bit with each weekly build.

This week the reputation gained from world quests reduced from 225 to 100 (with 3 world quests up per day), but reputation is now awarded from killing rare elites.

Additionally, the campaign still doesn’t give any rep but was stated to be a major source. So there’s no gauge for what the intended pacing is meant to be.

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From the most recent rep changes as reported by wowhead, the ZM rep grind is starting to look like Death’s Advance looked in Korthia. This feels like a big mistake.

Based on their calculations, unless there are random drops and questline rep gains as well, it will take 26 days to reach revered assuming you do everything. Killing every rare, every day, doing every quest, everything.

Some players will absolutely do this.
Others just don’t have the time to sit around for 29 rares to spawn - assuming they can all spawn on any given day as well - and it will take these players even longer to reach revered. Having a daily cap on rep doesn’t feel good for anyone IMO.

The way I see it, there are players who will do whatever it takes to get the best early advantages possible, regardless of the time commitment.

There are players who will do everything reasonable in a day to get their own power upgrades and understandably fall slightly behind the players above them.

There are players who would rather progress their characters in other way early on in a tier, and won’t get to the rep grind until much later on. They will do the rep grind as it’s convenient for them.

And there are players who will never do the rep grind.

Having a daily cap on reputation doesn’t serve any of these players. If the goal is to time gate the rep, fine. But the players who miss a day are just straight up penalized. I wonder if a system similar to conquest points could be used here. Let there be a daily cap, but if you miss a day, the next day your available rep gain is higher so there is an opportunity to catch up. You still gain rep at the same rate, but maybe you can only get 2000 rep per day, to make Revered/Exalted happen at planned instances, while not punishing players who simply cannot spend the time in Zereth Mortis every day of the week.

In short, this new rep system feels like it caters to the hardcore player more than the casual one, and I don’t see many hardcore players looking forward to the grind; while I also see casual players simply saying “yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”

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Looking at this from the latest build:

This reputation got removed and the NPCs flagged as friendly.

This is still the case. What is also strange is that elite world quests also give 100?

Also the World Boss seems to be missing? How much rep is this meant to give? As the WQ before was never able to be completed (at least from my testing).

The campaign now gives rep but World Quests give more rep than the campaign… and that’s saying something!

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As an additional point. What demographic of player benefits from the Perma Augment Rune tied to exalted? By the time people are exalted the main bulk of users have either finished progression (thus dont need it) or are able to purchase runes for a dirt-cheap amount (see previous expansions where runes dropped from 200g each to 5g each at this point).

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It can benefit more casual players who progress much slower than others, but I do agree that many people will not benefit at all.
But in addition to that, how many casual players are going to sink that much gold into the perma rune?

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I think the worst change made on the PTR was moving a lot of the rep from the world quests to the rares, it has really made the reputation rates feel terrible, too. According to wowhead it went from 225 rep to 100 rep, and now rares grant you 15 rep. So while the total rate of acquisition actually (in theory) went up, you need to do a whole lot more work in order for the math to go up - because killing those 29 rares is going to take a lot of time and patience. You could argue that “it only rewards 15 rep, so you don’t need to kill all the rares”, but you also don’t need to farm most of this reputation in the first place.

Perhaps a controversial opinion: I don’t really think it’s bad that rep is daily capped. I do feel for the players who aren’t able to play every day and perhaps instead go hard on the game once or twice a week, but I don’t necessarily think reputation needs a catchup mechanism. This is largely because I do not think that reputation should reward anything that warrants a catchup mechanism in the first place. At least at exalted, revered is more debatable, but I think there had ought to be some forms of reputation boosts beyond simply doing daily content; such as more rep from the quests/campaign, and weekly quests that offer a big bulk of reputation. Players who play every day would stay ahead and get to unlock things faster, sure, but other players who don’t get to play every day won’t lag behind so far that they feel like they’re missing out.

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I think this is the ultimate problem. I doubt I came up with a perfect solution, but missing a day or two here or there shouldn’t completely screw you over when there are clear power gains tied to the rep.

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Idk about most people but making a job out of a game just for the sake of playing seems like poor design

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I have no issue with a grind for rep. Some reps should be easy to grind out, others more difficult and time consuming. The issue I have is the time gating of reps that have power gains tied behind them instead of just cosmetics, and no catchup metrics.

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Same I actually dont mind it but when its like required why make it painful for the people playing

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Wowhead reported on ZM campaign quest rep values, roughly 500 rep per week, except the first one which starts with three chapters. I think 500 rep is a little low, but it might be fine.

The weekly (or bi-weekly I guess) quest seems to offer very little reputation, IIRC. Perhaps that should be boosted, so the campaign values can remain as it is.

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2nding this as we have seen no real reason to timegate the rep

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So far the rep gain seems to be paced quite slow.

However with that said flying is a lot easier to get than originally planned and once I had it and had enough people logged into the PTR for an hour or so the rares are pretty quick kills and I think (but not certain) that it seemed you could get rep from multiple kills of the same rare per day. If that’s not the case it should be since there are only i think three daily quests.

I do think there should be 5 dailies available per day so that there is a choice for players to do their 5 dailies at a time when there is no one really on. I often do them early in the morning in Korthia before work and there is no real option of killing rares that early since no one else is really on. On the weekends I like to go on long rare killing sprees when there are enough people in the zone to do so; but there should be a viable way to pace rep for people who have to do their rep grind during low population times.

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This principle is a good one. People shouldn’t feel like they need to play every day and people shouldn’t feel like when they play, the incentives don’t steer people towards the fun. So yeah, we hear the community concerns with overweighting rares. When rares constitute the lion’s share of the total rep that you can get in a day, that can create a sense of obligation to pursue them all. Since there are so many, this turns the daily acquisition of rep into a time-consuming process rather than something you can target and complete (or mostly complete) in a reasonable play session. We want rares to feel like a bonus rather than an obligation, so the reputation earned from rares is being decreased from 15 or 30 rep each to 10 or 15 rep each.

Along with that change, because we don’t want to reduce the total incoming rep, we’re increasing the reputation of other sources to compensate: world quests will award 125 instead of 100; Antros, the world boss, will award 500 instead of 250; and the twice-weekly quest “Patterns Within Patterns” will award 500 instead up 250. The net effect of this is that this will be a small increase in the total potential rep gain each day, and rares will take up a much lower proportion of those gains. This will allow players to feel like they can be done for the day earlier without significant long-term cost, while still allowing those players who want to push harder some incentive to do so.

Players who feel the need to reach Revered by week 5 and get the legendary memory as soon as Chapter 7 ends should now be able to rest assured. Even without killing a single rare, it should be comfortably achievable to reach that level in that timeframe.

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These ratios feel much better, thank you for listening to our concerns :>

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Amazing. Simply amazing.

Thank you for this! I really like that there are ways to push the rep gain, but aren’t required. This feels way less punishing to miss a day occasionally!

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I’m curious if you have any thought on a catch-up system, or if the team feels like the changes are enough to prevent needing one?

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Run the numbers myself and can confirm this will be the case with the above adjustments (assuming world boss is available on raid release)

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One other thing I would add to this is that rares seem to have a different definition than they used to.

Ever since MoP with the Timeless Isle and Isle of Thunder the “rares” have been more like Named Elites that drop something along the lines of:

  • Small amount of gold
  • Reputation
  • Cosmetics
  • Mounts
  • Etc

My point is that rares don’t feel rare anymore.

Currently we have 3 types of creatures in the world, distinguishable by their portrait and whether or not there is a dragon around it and what color the dragon is.

  • Normal
  • Elite
  • Rare

Could we ever see a 4th implemented for these named elites we’re currently calling rares and make the silver dragons actually rare again with guaranteed drops? (Looking at you Time-Lost-Proto-Drake)

I always want more cosmetics, so obviously I wish there were more from these named NPCs, and I don’t want them to go away by any means, as a source of rep or cosmetics, but they just don’t feel rare anymore, and they haven’t for a long time.

(I know its a bit off topic for the thread, sorry!)

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Thanks alot for your this!