Obtaining Rank 3 Essences on Alts

UPDATE MARCH 17

To enable your characters to receive Echoes of Ny’alotha, you must first log into your other characters who have Rank 3 Essences. This will also unlock your Rank 3 Essences for purchase from MOTHER on eligible alts.

As we announced last Thursday, with scheduled weekly maintenance in each region, a new system will allow players who have Rank 3 Azerite essences on at least one character to more directly acquire those Essences on other characters. This will use a new currency called Echoes of Ny’alotha. Here are more details about the system.

If a Rank 3 Essence has been earned by another character on your account, MOTHER will offer that Rank 3 Essence for 500 Echoes of Ny’alotha. Any player who is eligible to purchase at least one Essence from MOTHER will now receive Echoes of Ny’alotha from a wide range of activities in current content. These are the values we’re planning per activity:

  • Black Empire Assault – 125 Echoes of Ny’alotha
  • Aqir/Amathet/Mantid/Mogu Assault – 75 Echoes of Ny’alotha
  • Horrific Visions – 50 Echoes of Ny’alotha, plus 25 per additional objective completed (i.e. 150 Echoes for a full clear)
  • Emissary Quest – 50 Echoes of Ny’alotha
  • Heroic Darkshore Warfront – 75 Echoes of Ny’alotha
  • Normal/Heroic/Mythic Ny’alotha raid bosses – 15-25 Echoes of Ny’alotha each, once per week per boss
  • Ny’alotha Raid Finder wings – 25 Echoes of Ny’alotha
  • Random Battleground wins – 15-25 Echoes of Ny’alotha
  • Rated Arena wins – 10-25 Echoes of Ny’alotha baseline, scaling up with PvP rank
  • Rated Battleground wins – 35 Echoes of Ny’alotha baseline, scaling up with PvP rank
  • Weekly PvP Cache – 175 to 300 Echoes of Ny’alotha, based on PvP rank
  • Mythic Keystone dungeon end-of-run chest – 3 Echoes of Ny’alotha per Keystone Level (i.e. 30 Echoes of Ny’alotha for a Mythic 10)
  • Weekly Mythic Keystone Cache – 20 Echoes of Ny’alotha per highest Keystone Level

The general goal here is that doing Assaults and associated Horrific Visions should provide enough to get at least one Rank 3 Essence of your choice per week. Doing other content you like (PvP, dungeons, or raids) will increase that significantly, depending on the level of content you’re doing. Of course, Essences can still be earned normally via their associated activities, so if you want to get your Essence of the Focusing Iris directly via Mythic Keystone dungeons and then buy others from MOTHER, that’s now an option. Within a couple of weeks of hitting max-level on your alt, you should be able to obtain your preferred Essences by playing the game as you usually would.

Please note: Echoes of Ny’alotha may appear to replace Azerite in the Emissary and PvP reward panes, however, it does not. Echoes of Ny’alotha are always additive with existing rewards. We believe that it is more important to release this update with a reward display issue than hold the change for a fix. We expect to fix the display issue in the next week or two.

We’ve seen discussion in the community wondering about the motivation for this change, especially considering that we previously signaled that we didn’t plan to make Essences account-wide. We’ve increasingly moved towards making cosmetics (mounts, pets, transmog, titles, etc.) and access to content (World Quest unlocks, dungeon attunements, etc.) account-wide, but we’ve tried to keep power (character levels, items, expansion-specific systems like artifacts or garrisons, etc.) character-specific.

We take this approach for two main reasons. First, a core part of the experience of playing an alt has always been gaining power as you see the game from a different vantage point, and setting your sights on a goal, whether that’s just reaching max level, or achieving a certain PvP rank, or raiding at a specific difficulty. Thus, every reward that’s account-wide becomes one fewer goal to strive for on alts. Second, while many players enjoy playing multiple characters, and while having alts offers a number of advantages, we’re wary of making it feel as though focusing on a single main character is objectively the wrong way to play the game. If more power rewards are multiplied across all characters on an account, not having multiple max-level alts would be inefficient.

That philosophy led us to initially decide against having Essences be an account-wide unlock, though it was the topic of significant and repeated internal discussion among the development team. The activities that reward Essences are all things that we believe are important to do at least once so that you become familiar with zones and stories, or to engage in aspects of the game that you may not have had a reason to try. If you are just returning to Battle for Azeroth or experiencing it for the first time, the goal of acquiring all of your Essences will lead you through many aspects of Warcraft’s endgame.

More recently, as we continued to revisit the subject, especially in light of ongoing Shadowlands design, we came to see subsequent playthroughs of the same content for the same player differently. While we still firmly believe that each character should have a progression arc of power gains, the player behind those characters understandably may not want to repeat the exact same arc multiple times when they feel they have exhausted the variety or rewards an activity might hold. So if you’ve thoroughly worked with Nazjatar followers to earn your Rank 3 Memory of Lucid Dreams, or delved into Battlegrounds and Island Expeditions enough to earn Rank 3 Blood of the Enemy, we understand why you might not want to feel required to repeat that experience. This is the same philosophy that’s informing our plans for leveling in Shadowlands, where alts can pick and choose their path through level-up content once you’ve completed the linear narrative experience once on a character.

Thank you again for your patience as we’ve worked through these questions, and for all of your feedback! You’ve helped guide us to these improvements to the system. This is the sort of conversation that we revisit every time we consider how upcoming systems will interact with multiple characters. We hope to get it right more quickly next time.

UPDATE MARCH 20

115 Likes

These numbers arent bad.

And it looks like you can just passively gain the currency from doing the things you already do.

38 Likes
31 Likes

How about you just save yourselves a lot of time and money in development and not even add a currency to acquire the essences on alts? This whole system for Echoes of Ny’alotha is completely unnecessary.

218 Likes

Seems like a fine compromise to me. :+1: for taking feedback into proper consideration.

24 Likes

Thank you for offering an explanation.

18 Likes

The numbers look good. I’d say you could easily get 2 rank 3’s in 1 week. But I’d say use the currency for the harder/more tedious ones and do the ones that are easy the regular way.

15 Likes

Remember the legendary currency from Legion? Its basically this but easier to get.

8 Likes

I just gave up on that whole portion of the game and went back to arbitrarily leveling alts. It’s more fun.

45 Likes

Just unlock essences on alts, no need to add another farm just to make alts playable blizzard! we are tired already

102 Likes

My only question after reading this post regarding the system is what happens with Echoes of Ny’alotha if a toon already has every rank 3 unlocked?

Do they disappear, do the just not drop anymore, or is there some conversion like if you have them all at rank 3 it gets turned into a bit of gold?

12 Likes

I don’t see a problem with this. The only part I’m not fully understanding is are we getting the Echoes on the main and sending it to alts or is it alts doing the content to buy it?

7 Likes

Thats what im trying to figure out

Can I send my alts essences?!?!?!

3 Likes

But can we earn this on our mains and send it to our alts? Cause if i have to do this all on my alts then wtf is this system even here for

29 Likes

Seems very balanced. Can easily acquire all 4 essences in a week. Good job Blizzard. You guys are awesome. Thank you for listening to us and making the end of BFA about having fun and allowing us to explore everything these systems have to offer. You guys get an A+ from me.

Thank you, Blizzard.

For those wondering, you have to do the content on your alt.

5 Likes

Regardless of all the incessant whining in this thread (of which there is sure to be a lot.) As someone that has grinded out numerous essences on multiple alts, this is still a welcome change. And the numbers are very fair and balanced. THANK YOU for finally listening.

Next time just listen earlier in the development process. We told you essences were problematic on PTR for 8.2

26 Likes

thanks blizz for getting me excited about actually being able to have alts then putting to high of a price on it because everyone has time to get all that done in a week if they are trying to actually enjoy raiding or pvping or mplus on 3-4 characters i mean this wouldnt be bad for 1 char here or there but catching up multiple quicky not so much or even trying to main swap beacuse boss requirements for your raid yea sure this will be quicker then grinding the rep but you know we should just be able to buy these things with gold or you know since acheivements are account wide why not just make the essences account wide its end tier and the world first race has closed no one cares anymore we just trying to enjoy alts not enjoy a different grind…i really hope you knock the next xpac out of the park before you kill this game.

15 Likes

So basically they are just switching one grind for another grind. I think the amount of Echoes required is kind of steep personally. We already grinded out the essences, why not just give them to us? I play like 2 toons actively currently, previous xpacs I played 7 or more. This is still kind of meh for me

54 Likes

you can do like 5-7 visions a week. You get enough for almost 3 right away

9 Likes