The pearls are not account-wide?
You still have to work to upgrade your initial gear bought with the pearls.
The gear is account bound before you use it, but it’s only 385 Item Level (weaker than normal raiding gear).
So what was the joke again? 
I understand wanting your characters to be at their best, but is anyone actually checking essence levels before inviting someone to a pug?
That seems like way too much trouble unless maybe there’s an addon that adds it in a tooltip when you mouse over applicant names. Even then, I’d expect stuff like ilvl, achieve and/or io to have more impact than a level 2 vs. 3 essence.
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Corrected that to benthic gear.
In answer to your question, for cutting edge raiding DPS, benthic gear is considered highly useful if it has the right attributes and a socket. That requires opening a lot of benthic gear to get the perfect piece for each slot, so most of the cost is in the initial gear - the account bound part - not the BOP upgrades.
System will hopefully work as intended. I prefer the concept of a main over an alt.
Aye. I like world quests, honestly, and I don’t mind grinding, but I would just about KILL for more variety in world quests, for some OPTIONS. The other day I was doing the Order of Embers emissary, and there were six world quests up in the entire zone. Six, and one was a pet battle.
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100,000% AGREE!!! people are quitting this game because of this garbage patch and its system due to the essences you have to grind on every toon
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BfA = the death of competitive alts
bliz just couldn’t remove azurite gear grinding to unlock our abilities, without adding and equal alternate grind that also blocks us from using our abilities
sometimes they just don’t get it, big disconnect
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The problem is simply how boring the acquisition of most the essences are. I wouldn’t mind having to accomplish 10s or raid progression, but spending weeks doing boring dailies or grinding honor is tedious and I won’t do it on more than 1 character. Nevermind that for a lot of the essences, getting the achievement is only half the cost. The other half being a large number of manapearls or mechagon parts.
I’m not saying that it should be account-wide. I’m saying it should be fun to unlock these things, not an exercise in how much you are willing to put up with.
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As people continually point out if you don’t raid - what do you need gear for. Gear chasing does give people something to do when they can use gear but at this point in the expansion my characters have no problems with killing things so spending time farming benthic gear is sort of pointless. I hate dungeons so no I don’t normally do those either.
I normally do spend a lot of time on crafted gear professions but that really is sort of useless this patch since creating a lot of 370 gear when people can easily get 385 gear for their alts is pointless.
So that leaves me working on essences. I really would stop playing right now if I didn’t have them to work on.
Yes lets keep it the way it is so people who spend time trying to have any type of fun in this game by spicing it up and playing a new class have to go through miserable grind again. Your viewpoint cannot be the majority of the playerbase. Its so anti-fun it makes me wonder if you are secretly a game dev.
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If you’re just picking up a new class for fun and to kill time, why do they need rank 3 BiS essences? What would you even do with them?
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My alt shouldn’t be a wet noodle either and unable to do anything meaningful until I’ve redone every bit of the grind/timegated stuff my main did which by the time its done my main will now be behind. Also hurts for raiding where you aren’t going to be able to swap in an alt for a fight because its always going to suck more than your main (who most likely has the socketed pieces of the good benthic gear) even if the class is what you need for the particular fight. Yeah I shouldn’t be AS strong but I shouldn’t also be at this hard of a disadvantage either, there’s a balance to maintain.
This expansion has made having an alt just feel horrible and has been way more effort to the point where I’m just using my alts as manapearl farmers to funnel benthic to my main for another go at the slot machine.
Also forgot to add how mind numbingly boring acquiring a lot of these essences is as well
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Easily limited. There are already some achievements that are tracked per character but become account bound upon completion. Take PvP achievements like winning 100 Warsong Gulches. That achievement counts account wide for the Conqueror title but the progress to getting those 100 wins is made per character. My shaman could have 50 but my Pally could have 40, and they would not combine I would have to get 100 on a single toon.
its not for fun for everyone. I am constantly asked by my guild to switch classes because they know of my flexibility in raids. You are basically telling me and others like me cause I am sure I am not alone that “we dont care we want your game experience to be miserable.”
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A lot of these are painfully mind-numbing to obtain though…
I’d rather not have to hit exalted on every toon just to be able to compete in raids on my alt.
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I actually find raiding to be more mind numbing. I would rather not have to raid to get the raid essence either but I doubt blizzard will accommodate either of us nor should they.
Just no. It takes less than 2 weeks of minimal playtime to get every rk1 essence and even some rk2 essences.
I had every intention of focussing on my shaman and druid this tier. It’s not that I think it’s too difficult to maintain two characters, it’s just that it’s too much of a hassel. Largely because of the arbitrary time gates for certain essences.
Gravitic Oscillators aren’t really a currency as you can only expect to get one a day, so in reality it’s just a time gate disguised as such. There are other pain points but I’ll leave it there. Ion will co.e out and say that they may jave gone too far, and that they agree they need to relax some of the requirements (it was planned) and everyone will rejoice.
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Gonna vote no on this, not every character someone is leveling needs equal access to what should be the main characters progress. We already share close to too much as is.
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Then maybe they shouldn’t make the grind as tedious. I am not grinding out 55 neck level and more just cus i feel like keeping up my warlock. Thats just insane. Whats it to you if people keep competitive alts without giving an arm and a leg. I’m interested to hear. Cus this sounds like a personal issue for you rather than a sensible one.
You got my vote OP.
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