That is a relief, only doing 1 upgrade a week is way more manageable. I can’t believe I’m even going to be current though if I get the 6th tonight, cool 
Gives me more time to finish grinding mechagnome rep 
what amazes me about this expansion
the real cherry on top of all of it
is that no matter how many more ways they introduce to give us new armor, the amount of ways to get new weapons, rings and trinkets stays the same
and that is…rng? tbh I don’t even know anymore. my hunter has like 430 gear and 350 rings at this point im too tired to look
I have barely touched this patch and already I am hearing people telling me to log off and wait for Shadowlands.
Is it really as complicated and annoying as folks are making it out to be? Between a50+ hour week, writing campaign modules and fleshing out the homebrew world and sorting out my family’s messes, every hour between work and sleep is vital.
After starting the patch, I just feel really discouraged at the stretch ahead of me. I think I’ll wait until they implement more catch-up mechanics.
The most alluring thing for me is the prospect of a rumored new Allied Race. I’ll grind for that, but as far as the structure of the patch goes, it just doesn’t speak to me.
I feel like all the enthusiasm I’ve had is being chipped away.
Ah, well. Hopefully Bannerlord soon.
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No one on Blizzard’s design team must have any alts, because getting all of my characters to the point that they are able to get their cloak is just sadistic even with the ability to skip the solo scenarios.
Correction: with the ability to skip SOME of the solo scenarios. Because you have to do the one with Wrathion every single time for some ungodly reason.
and after going through it on three different characters so far, I’ve yet to get through the N’Zoth attack on the Heart Chamber without dying.
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All this just reaffirms my decision to opt out of WoW a year ago.
I’ve got 5.2 in FFXIV coming up next month, RE3 in April, Greymoor in ESO in May, and Bloodlines 2 later this year.
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Annoying? Yeah. Complicated? Not really. The introduction quest throws you a lot of ideas at once, but they’re all variations of existing ideas, and you cant do enough a day to really confuse you
I don’t really mind the extra steps and obstacles. More quests are good, in my opinion. Argus had like 4 quests in each zone and it was disappointing as heck. These intro quests have done N’zoth better justice than I was expecting. He’s actually doing… clever things and not just “rawr smash oh heroes blegh dead”.
My biggest complaint is the tuning. Who in their right mind made quest objectives shared? Who thought forcing players to compete and develop animosity towards one another was a good idea? Who thought flying around for 20 minutes looking for a single eyeball was a good idea?
Not to mention the obscene difficulty of quests with Classic levels of drop rates, which doesn’t help the competition for mobs at all. It takes me well over an hour to do my dailies. Most of that is flying around looking for mobs people have already scoured from the face of Azeroth.
There are also countless bugs across the board that are plain offensive. We literally could not do one daily because the quest items would not spawn for people who finished the Uldum assault. Apparently the auction house is having bugs that are costing players hundreds of thousands of gold.
I like the content here, in all honesty. I like the visions and I think the assaults are neat and visually interesting. It’s cool that you can just show up anywhere in the assault and do something to contribute to it. If they fixed the tuning and addressed the bugs (which should have been addressed in PTR) this would have been a solid patch for me personally.
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The same people who ran an ad campaign called “It Matters” and who think the toxic animosity between Horde and Alliance Players are a triumph of their storytelling and not a failure to moderate their own community.
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I understand that healthy competition is good for games. It gives us a spark of motivation to strive for more.
But this isn’t how it’s done. I don’t just feel resentment towards opposite faction players, I feel resentment towards everyone who is trying to get my quest nodes.
I really hope for Shadowlands they take a good look at MMORPGs and the social aspect that makes it unique and desirable.
On a positive note, I love that people communicate about rares right now. And not just calling out locations, but sharing information. The alpaca hunts have been extremely wonderful social experiences for me with people being helpful and supportive of other players. They need more stuff like this.
Don’t worry, they wont
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It’s in my nature to worry and hope 
mechagon sparked a need for communication within us all
we need to know when rustfeather spawns, gosh dangit
Seriously, Mechagon was a blessing. I’ve made some good memories there that remind me of my days first playing in BC/WotLK.
I get that, I wish I had any hope whatsoever that Blizzard was going to change, I do miss my characters on some level.
Unfortunately this seems to be a company unable to acknowledge any real failure. Of course their goals simply aren’t the same as they once were, Blizzard Entertainment seemed to genuinely desire to make fun engaging games. Activision Blizzard wants nothing but to make as much money as possible and please their shareholders.
I can hardly remember an issue that the community was more united on than this.
There are a lot of really controversial things that the devs take a hard line on (e.g. Pathfinder), but usually there are some players who take the dev’s side
But I’ve literally never heard anyone say “yeah I really enjoy collecting these items independently on alts thanks for preserving this gameplay Ion”
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I’m surprised that they haven’t settled on a middle ground with essences, something like ‘rank 1 automatically unlocked across the whole account, but alts have to upgrade them by themselves’, or like the good old MoP reputation boosters, ‘alts progress twice as fast/only pay 50% of the cost for upgrades’.
I can see why they wouldn’t want to make the essence grind a once-per-account thing, but making it completely separated by character seems just as weird in the opposite direction.
the grind is on each alt because they want your playtime to be artificially inflated.
it’s not about what they consider fun or engaging… it’s just more corporate nonsense
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Honestly, I would be fine with essences as they are if the game didn’t keep reminding me “HEY YOU HAVE AN EMPTY SLOT” every single time I bring up a window on one of my alts
I want to ignore them so badly, but that notification pop-up literally won’t let me
“Noitsnot” addon is a nice little fix for that annoying reminder.
And essences are really the only gripe I have with the expansion so far. And I think that is mostly a personal quibble cause the character I am most advanced on with them is the wrong rogue instead of my main rogue.
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