The issue is that it shouldn’t be a core character power mechanic.
We should be able to hit level cap and play fully fleshed out specs that gain power through gear.
Rented power is one of the reasons class design went into the dumpster this expansion.
Which hurts people who run LFR.
Which hurts anyone who do dungeons/raids.
I don’t really see how this correlates since Retail isn’t Classic.
Which hurts Mythic Raiders.
I understand differing opinions, I understand compromising, and I understand what you are saying.
What I don’t understand is how account wide essences specifically affect anyone. The only thing I’ve seen brought up is that it would bring about more demands for QoL features or somehow equate to throwing out character progression entirely.
If you woke up tomorrow and essences were account-wide, how would that affect you? Nothing hyperbolic just flat out what does it do to you.
Me personally? Nothing. I don’t get this heated about small things.
Objectively? It invalidates character progression. It encourages fotm re-rolling, it goes against core tenets of mmorpg games. Any change has positive and negative impact. The choice is what we are acceptable taking.
Most the complaints about this game are the result of catering to players wants. More often that not the game gets worse as a result. Because humans are by nature short sighted.
Player housing is the best example. Garrisons sounded great on paper. But in reality it kills the world. As cool as player housing sounds, having a vibrant world is more important.
I wholeheartedly agree that a lot of what people complain about are things they requested in earnest earlier.
I disagree that BoA essences would create that considering it’s a BFA only feature.
Also FOTM rerolling has literally been a thing in this game for 15 years so I doubt this is doing anything but aggravate the situation.
I disagree as well that MMORPG games have a core tenet of single character progression as plenty of games have account wide progression systems that people enjoy.
But there is a line drawn where progression is not carried over. No matter where the line is drawn people will be unhappy. WoW draws the line on the conservative side with character power. It might not be perfect but its better than qoling us into the ground.
It’s a player created problem. Players are perfectly happy playing alts without horrible gear, wrong talents or rotations and other character power mechanics that leave them as alts not mains. But suddenly without bis essences the game is unplayable.
Except it’s not even about BiS essences it’s just that you have never had this sort of delayed gearing baked into the game.
For one I still think it’s absurd to equate essences to gearing anymore than you’d consider talents to gearing.
Two essences aren’t something you can just knock out at your own pace it is set strictly by Blizzard which is probably 90% of the reason people wish it was account bound. You can’t just get Lucid in a weekend, it requires weeks of doing specific dailies. Reputation has played a part in character development before, but never to this magnitude and never across all characters as a requirement for something like this.
I personally see no downside in letting essences be one less thing to worry about as it were because when you want to pick up a secondary character it’s not weeks of looming dailies.
Above everything else though I’d still like to state that nowhere is it written in stone that swapping mains should be some ordeal and with how certain classes can be nerfed or buffed at the drop of a hat it’s unrealistic to just force people into one character and almost punish them for wanting to do otherwise.
The only thing your main should have above any other character you wish to play is active time spent, not the fact you spent weeks doing dailies on it and feel obligated to do weeks worth of dailies across any character you may potentially want to play.
But then character progression is meaningless. For no effort I can go from warrior to a monk for free.
Some of the essences literally can be knocked out at your own pace. Bote is honor. I farmed in a few hours during a bg bonus weekend. That is the point of them all being from different areas of the game.
If you argument is that some are too strong, and feel required then that is a valid criticism. Hopefully the changes they are making are addressing that.
How is character progression meaningless when you still have to actually go gear your character?
That isn’t going anyway in any of these scenarios yet you are acting like it is.
I mean hell imagine being a new player coming to 8.3 and wanting to play an Allied Race.
This hasn’t been a thing for over a decade. If a character wanted to return in the last patch of MoP they weren’t tasked with going to Isle of Thunder to do reputation dailies to feel adequate in Siege of Orgrimmar.
Why is this suddenly okay?
Edit: Not to mention everyone wanted attunements gone for this very reason.
Catchup mechanics have always existed. But they exist at the end of the tier or the end of the xpac. They don’t exist while the content is still current.
Benthic Gear lets you skip a majority of gearing a new 120 would face and is BoA.
I’d argue that is literally a current patch catch up mechanic.
In the context of non-gear related things, what about MoP letting you get revered bonus to all reputations? Imagine if we still had that bonus nowadays.
But was it fun?
84% of the playerbase finds them not fun. But you want people to have to do stuff they don’t enjoy because…reasons?
Imagine thinking grinding essences is character progression.
You win the award for most delusional person in this thread. It has to just be trolling at this point.
Character progression is as follows:
Get some gear → Do harder content → get some better gear → do harder content.
You need the power from the previous content to progress to the next stage.
Essences are not this. None of them are challenging. They are all just gigantic time sinks you have to slog through before you can start ACTUALLY progressing your character.
Yes, it was fun.
Citation on 84% of the player base.
I mean, if it means nothing progression wise, don’t do it ?
Gear stopped being the only form of progression all the way back in patch 5.0, maybe even earlier. Valor for Item upgrades much ?
So get them. They’re still a form of character progression.
Uh… seeing how you do Mythic 10s to get Rank 3 Focusing Beam, you get 430 gear while you obtain the essence. So you don’t have to wait before progressing at all.
Don’t forget about having to at some point grind rep/dailies to unlock flight, too. And assuming you’re a new or returning player, you probably don’t know about that, so you definitely will just level your boosted character to max to farm rep, wonder how to buy flying, see that you have to farm rep for it, and that includes rep in 8.2, and then feel pressured to grind that rep in 8.2 so you can unlock flying to have it ready for your AR character. Then have to do the 8.2 rep grinding all over again on your AR character.
It’s like time gated rep grind on top of time gated rep grind. It’s common for people to spend time unlocking ARs/flying, and then not even bother actually leveling them or playing them because they’re burnt out and they realize their end game would just be the same time gated rep grinds all over again.
So much fun, sure wish we had account wide reputation or essences. But we can’t have that because muh character progression. Burn out? Psh who gets that.
Yeah god forbid they do all of this then decide they want to try another class lmao.
Oof dude at that point I’d just throw my hands up and quit lol. I already got fed up just from unlocking flying/ARs. I can’t even imagine at the end of that not even liking the class I picked for my AR jesus.
I always find it funny when people complain about having to do things in game, and then ask for things to be opened/removed/shortened … but then we had WoD.
You guys really want WoD back do you.
I would rather have Wrath/MoP, 2 expansions that were actually popular.
WoD with Mythic+?
Sign me up.
I still didn’t like WoD because it had Pathfinder, but WoD dungeons would actually be really cool for Mythic+.