My hot take on BfA as a player who has done various parts of the game throughout its entire life. This is going to be long, and covering a lot of things so that’s your warning.
I’d like to put a mixture of my thoughts and frustration out there, not to get an army or to argue with people but simply to vent. I have played every expansion of this game, have been a raider of some form since Burning Crusade, do achievement hunting, gold making, alt playing, some PvP (I admit not my strongest!) and general just having fun!
Here’s my problem though, after Legion which in my personal opinion, was one of the most fun and alt friendly expansions (Not at the start, trust me, I remember that nightmare) going into BfA I was bright eyed and excited! Why? Because throughout Legion we watched not only a fantastic story, but a fantastic learning experience seen by Blizzard to its player base! Start off a bit rough, but as time went on they saw okay… We need Artifact Knowledge, this will help alts. Yay! Okay, grinding legendaries sucks, here’s a way to get a new currency that will let you buy BoA items to send to your alts, double yay! Oh look my weapon is super powerful but I can continue to put points in that wont make or break it, but still feels good to do, yet if I don’t have time to do on my alts… No big deal, they’re still strong! Triple yay!
So… What happened guys?
Now in BfA, we have azerite gear… Big pain in the rear end but certainly do-able, although if you’re not a raider I could see it being a problem. Especially if you have bad luck and want to save 200,000 Titan Residuum in order to buy a specific piece, which usually by the time you actually save that insane amount you don’t need it and it feels bad, plus would only buy 1/3 of the pieces we wear.
More importantly though, and yes of course I’m going to go there… The dreaded essence grinding. Now, if you’re a person who plays a single toon you may not know why people are so mad. It’s because even if you play a single alt for raiding or otherwise, the nightmare is real. I’ll use myself as an example.
So, I dont hate pvp but its not where I spend a lot of time. In order to be a mythic raider though I need to keep up with my raid mates or else I’ll be benched, so Im going to be using the word need here (Do not argue “You dont have/need to”). So I need to get this essence from raid, okay! I’m a raider who’s pure dps (warlock) Ezpz! (There’s one per spec, so if you have 3 specs it’ll take way longer). Second essence, 30,000 honor… Crap. Really? Fine… I guess I’ll spend a bunch of time on BG weeks or something but not awesome… I’d much rather spend my time elsewhere. Then last but not least, a rep at exalted but this is my main so again, not really a huge problem. On top of that, since I do want to do keys on my main since Raider. IO is a huge thing that will make or break you getting into pugs, I need to do M+ for the beam of doom. Oh, don’t forget the essence from Mechagon! Got to run that for 6 weeks for rank 3!
So far so good right? Now lets step into an alt.
Prot Pally! I know these can be a bit more mix and matchy, but even so. One essence comes from doing a +10 for 3 weeks basically. Not too bad right? But again, an alt, so that adds the number of toons that need to do a +10 to 2. Another fantastically strong essence is where you need to get 6000 follower rep, which at lets say 3 dailies per day, 300 rep a day, will take you approx. 20 days unless you happen to have extra time to grind the other items which could take 5 minutes, or if you have bad luck days like me, 30 minutes per toon, some of which require pure RNG (The tree rares, and I fully admit I only do 3 of them a day since the 4th one is a nightmare to summon.) Last incredibly strong essence also comes to exalted with a brand new rep, so my time is now onto needing to do many dailies, story lines, etc on 2 toons per day.
Then, because Im a nutjob and usually play many toons, onto the next alt!
A rogue! I love Outlaw rogue in M+ so I decided to only worry about M+ because I didn’t want to grind extra essences on another alt because this is starting to get crazy… So already my third alt is “Forced” down to minimal content, but moving on!
So if I’m considering pushing keys I need to get the best possible options right? Well lets start… Ah crap, 30,000 honor, again. But why? I already did it /cry. And then the realization that not only do I need to grind that honor again, but it won’t count towards the rank 4 essence together… So I’m going to have 1 toon at 30/100k, another toon at 30/100k, and by the point I’m typing this, I could easily have 100k total, but instead… I only have 10-30k between multiple toons. Ouch. My next best essence is, yet again, getting 6000 rep with followers. Ugh. Refer to my last rant. My third essence requires I run mechagon once a week for a total of 6 weeks A dungeon my alt does not need anything else from to get an essence that’s incredibly strong for her, and it’s not a short dungeon either! (especially if you pug it, you all know those runs…), and a 4th essence for weeks where I need stronger aoe, boom another toon that needs a +10!
So if I want to play 3 toons at a decent level before everyone starts quitting for the tier, I’ve got 2 that need 30k honor, Ive got 2 that need 20 days of work (or less if you have lots of extra time to grind items, that are still gated behind a daily cash in), 3 +10 runs for the week, at least two Mechagon runs per week, and all the Unshackled/Waveblade (depends on faction) dailies… This takes a lot of damn time trying to get it all done at the same time.
I’ll stop there on listing my alts essence frustrations, but that’s mostly because I simply don’t play my alts because I can’t bring myself to re-grind a story, re-grind reps, and re-grind essences I’ve already grinded multiple times.
I’m a player who’s an altoholic, I love playing every single class! I always find one spec that’s a blast, and play it well. In Legion I was able to keep up with a total of twelve toons, that’s twelve keys a week, and 1-2 stepping into the raid at least on heroic. I am now down to comfortably playing 4-5. I do have more time then the average person, a lot more, and that’s a huge point of this. If you want people to have a feeling of replayability you need to give them fun stuff for their alts because playing the same toon day in and day out without dabling elsewhere causes hardcore burnout.
If you’re someone with a typical 9-5 job (or even more, as minimum wage in a lot of places is garbage and forces people into a second job) and you only have a couple hours a day to play if you’re lucky, how the heck are you supposed to keep up to raid time on the weekend? Its tough and feels like job number 3 now except you don’t get paid for the third, and we start to confuse relief of being done, with joy which is not a good feeling!
There were days where your friends could ask you to log on a healer and you go “Sure, no problem!” but now a days the answer more commonly is “Uhh their neck is low, I haven’t had time to play my main let alone my alt so they have no essences anyways, and their azerite gear is only good for the tank spec and terrible for healing…”
Before Legion there was no AP grinding what so ever, and yet Burning crusade was a blast! The dungeons were tough, the raids were exciting, and doing the various reps took a lot of our time. Lich King… Such a good fun time. Between Wintergrasp just being so fun and getting all your friends together like “It starts in 20 minutes! Let’s group so we can go to the raid after!” was exciting! The zones were fun, the raids were fantastic (in my opinion) and I just kept playing alts and enjoying myself! I wont go expansion by expansion but you get the idea. I felt we had more content overall and now our content just feels like “Okay, grind more and more and more AP or else I cant keep up, my numbers fall behind, and I cant raid”.
I personally miss the days of “Get gear, get rep, professions actually mean something so make sure to work on those, farm stuff in the meantime for consumables or gold making, and oh hey, more time to play another alt!”. Now a days, it’s more like "If you don’t play your main to grind grind grind essences and AP and Azerite gear, then you’re wasting your time and actually falling behind significantly.
Or the best way I’ve found it is… “I feel like playing an alt is abandoning my main until they don’t need anything”. That is a terrible feeling and this is the first time throughout my entire WoW career where that felt so strongly.
Another huge issue with essences, is why the heck can PvP essences be absolute BiS for PvE?! (and vice versa). You want someone who ONLY logs on daily to PvP be forced into the raid? LFR doesn’t drop enough fragments of the essence to make the frustration worth it, so they’re then forced to pug. Pugs often go… south. So you’re lucky if you get 1-2 bosses that drop them since its every third boss. As a PvE’er, I had to grind 30k honor just to get an essence that is a DPS boost in mythic raiding and keys which feels awkward.
This is another place of “Make our lives easier” by maybe saying “Instead of 36 fragments for rank 3, you only need 16!” or “Instead of 30k honor for rank 3, you need 15k!” after we’ve already gotten it on our account.
On the flip side, if I could grind 30k honor on a healer (the main role I enjoy in PvP) and then get rank 3 on my warlock? Awesome! But no. Thats not how any of this works currently.
I feel like if things were far more account wide to give players options instead of force, we wouldn’t be seeing the absolute insane amount of players constantly quitting due to grind burnout. This absolutely includes reputations. I’m not saying “I get exalted on one toon and my accounts exalted” but lets go back to Pandaria where if you get exalted on a toon, then you got a huge boost to the rest of your account! This was highly encouraging and made the grind much more manageable! As much as I would love account wide reputations, I can also see the problems… so long as we have an artifact power system. Please, no more grinding systems…
Another point to reputations is, why is everything useless by the time the average player can actually get exalted? It takes a long while even if you do an entire zones quest to get to exalted right? And usually by the time you get there, the only “useful” things you can buy are maybe a toy, tabard, and a re-skinned mount where there are 8 other re-skinned versions of it, some for free, some RNG, some BoE… There were days where getting exalted with a faction was exciting because you knew it had an amazing BiS piece for you, or super unique rewards where others knew exactly where that came from. (Cloud Serpents!) Now-a-days its simply another green bar to fill and another time gate, and another thing to grind on toon after toon after toon.
That’s another problem with alts right there. Getting to exalted for paragon caches that gives 2,500 AP per turn in is a huge boost… but getting to exalted with all the reps takes a long, damn, time. Map clearing on multiple toons leads to what? Burnout. Even just focusing on emissaries day to day I feel burnout after 5-6 characters. I’ve had to completely abandon some alts I would love to play due to just not wanting to grind their neck, their essences, their reps, their azerite specific gear. I understand that “that’s what playing a new toon is like” but alts aren’t supposed to feel like a brand new toon, they’re supposed to feel like an alternate.
Opening things up in the future for us as players can and will help. Look at Legion when things became way easier around the time of Mage Tower Challenge. I’m one of those nutjobs that did 36/36 challenges and it was so frustrating but also so much fun!! It was easy to get the weapons to all the abilities and just hit the point of a small boost per point. It was easy enough to get gear and of course sending legendaries from my main who got lots of currency through dailies and raiding and all that to buy the tokens was great! I wanted to play, I wanted to play multiple toons, and I had so much fun doing it!
A big reason to me that Legion did feel so alt friendly was the fact that you’re handed a weapon and don’t need to rely on RNG to get one, or 3 depending on your class. As a former Prot pally main who also enjoyed playing both ret and holy, the fact I could swap most of my gear over and already have a holy weapon in my bags felt so good! Even getting AP between 3 weapons was incredibly manageable and didn’t feel so horrifying as doing it now.
Then when BfA hit, and time went on… I stayed optimistic at first. “Okay, Legion started rough too for alts, maybe they’ll learn!”
Now, suddenly we’re at a point where you, Blizzard, have dug your heels in the sand and refuse to even give us a good reason why you wont make essences account wide. We’ve asked, we’ve asked in droves, we have the numbers that are all chanting the same thing and telling you “This will make us want to play more and have more fun! Why won’t you do it?” … and the answer we get is “No.”. Not an explanation, not even a “we’ll think about it”. Just a “No” and that’s probably the most frustrating thing out of all of this. Give us a reason why! Is it almost impossible to do in the system? Is it because its not your “vision”? Whats going on? We’re your player base, we’re the ones paying to play, we want an answer!
At this point it all simply feels forced on us for “player retention” and that’s the most frustrating thing ever. Why not make a decision based on the joys of your players? You’re losing people all over the place trying to force us to keep grinding.
Just think of how to grind AP right now. Once a week per current raid boss. If you don’t raid, that’s a huge loss, if you don’t know people and are forced to do LFR I feel bad for you… A huge chunk from doing IE’s each week… IE’s feel forced, not a “fun” thing on the side to do, and even then the amount of AP you get is pitiful after you’ve cashed in the weekly yet players who need to grind their neck feel forced. Some WQ’s will reward AP, but that’s a hard one to judge since its different per day and that takes a long time to do even all of those between 8 zones. Paragon caches, again, more grinding! You get where I’m coming from here? Please stop with the grinding mentality… Most of us hate it.
Also lets talk about you guys actually obviously not communicating with each other. Remember the interview where they said after neck level 70 we were done? I was so excited, go into a patch already maxed out not even having to think about it WOOOOOO! It was going to be an encouragement to work on alts’ neck, continue doing WQ’s not for necessity, but for myself wanting to get the paragon caches for bonus gold! That’s my choice!
Then the next big interview we get told its upgrading, again, to level 80. Uhhhh what?! You told us we were done! Why even announce that in the first place? Did you guys talk to each other and change your mind? Why didn’t you reference the first time and say so? It just looks like no one talks to each other and confuses the hell out of us as your players.
This is the first time I’ve ever felt the need to vent my frustrations of this game to this degree. Has it always been perfect? Of course not! But it also never felt this bad. As a player who has been here since the days of Vanilla, ventured through space in Burning Crusade, saved the souls from the Lich King, fought with the Dragon aspects to take down Deathwing, stomped Garrosh’s evil Sha face, kept Archimonde from causing too much more chaos in Warlords, stomped the INCREDIBLY challenging Argus the Unmaker (Didn’t stop the world from being stabbed, my bad), and now… For the first time through all of that, I feel unheard, I feel forced, and I feel we as players are simply ignored and told “You don’t know what you’re talking about” which just tells me how few people who work on our game actually play live (hint, not many!) and that makes us feel uncared for.
These are my views but I also chat with a lot of players and I know I am far from alone. I’ve talked to people who quit, people who still play, people who are hardcore and casual and a lot of these viewpoints were felt together. Again, this entire rant isn’t to fight anyone or an attack against anyone, I simply feel we need to be heard as a whole again and make sure Blizzard knows our frustrations so hopefully the same issues don’t happen again moving forward. If you disagree as a player, that’s perfectly fine, voice your opinions too!
Don’t get me wrong, even through all this I enjoy my achievements, my gold making and my WQ’s, my raiding, and the people I get to play with… but the force to be able to do progression has become almost unbearable, and the feeling for alts has become painful. Now my toons that are 120 and will be boosted up in neck level I don’t even touch yet because… why do stuff on them? why grind AP when they’re going to be pushed forward? That’s a nice thought, it really is, but at the same time it shouldn’t feel necessary… yet it is.
So let me finally end this rant with a thought. I’ve seen more of my friends and otherwise quit this game this expansion then I ever have before and I’ve asked the majority “why”. The answers I got was “If I wanted to pay someone else to feel like I’m working I’d at least do something more fun” and they moved onto other games for the first time in 10+ years. Listen to your players, I know we’re not always right, but neither are you.