Account bound essences would be a net positive for the game

Community General Discussion
451

Fair

Not true

Gear is a core part of an mmo’s progression system. It is what defines virtually anything in the game.

Essences don’t come even close to that. Essences are just bad content, a temporary fix for a disaster of a system. The way they are acquired are similar to mounts and pets, not gear. Would you want to regrind every mount and pets you have on every character?

The reality is BFA is an open wound. 8.3 solves a lot of problems by bringing better content than 8.2’s, this new content being very alt-friendly (aka the complete opposite of 8.2’s), making the end of the AP grind much easier (we’ve all heard the screams of joy at blizzcon when they announced that AP is gone in 9.0), and so on.

Knowing this, they need to make BFA as little of a pain as they can by prioritizing the quality of life for returning players and alts.

Making the essences acquisition far easier is one way to go to solve this.

Account bound would realistically only solve this for alts. For returning players, making the acquisition of the 8.2 essences far easier is a good solution. The current nerfs of some essences’ acquisition on the PTR are not nearly enough. Point being that having to do the entirety of 8.2 and 8.3 at the same time is atrociously time consuming for a returning/new player, and will inevitably push some of them to quit the game. We don’t want that, right?

The character progression you want, and the long term goals, have been there since before essences existed.
Character progression being literal gear, and the AP grind being on the side somewhat for 2 expansions now.

A long term goal should not be a 5% power increase from a temporary band-aid system, that is acquired by doing 3 dailies a day for 2 weeks, doing world quests for a month to get exalted, being forced to do arenas for a month when you hate it, and so on.

It should rather be an actual goal! Be it something simple like clearing the latest raiding content, achieving a certain bracket in rated arenas, or simply focusing on improving your own play, in whatever part of the game you prefer.

Being forced to do content outside of what you like isn’t interesting, player agency on the other hand is interesting. And what a surprise, it is the main focus for the Shadowlands expansion, who would’ve thought after the essence and azerite system, right?!

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452

This is unfortunately spot on.

I’m curious how many alts do you have? I could only find Onlypath who is level 64 neck with Visions 2 and Focusing Iris 3.

Surely you wouldn’t be against a system you haven’t done yourself would you?

That’d be a little ridiculous no?

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Essences are like gear, it doesn’t matter which way you want to twist it. We don’t have account-wide gear so we won’t have account-wide essences. I enjoy goals and the feeling of accomplishment, I also enjoy working on alts. Working on essences gives me a reason to keep logging in.

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What are the similarities between essences and gear ?

These are the differences that we all know of :

  1. Essences do not use any equipment slot, that alone makes it fundamentally different from gear;
  2. Essences are acquired in different ways from gear;
  3. To get essences, you have to participate in activities that you might despise, find dull or boring, and actually waste your time. Gear is the complete opposite: You participate in the content you prefer, and get the gear corresponding to the level of play (increasingly higher item level based on rating for pvp, or difficulty for dungeons/raids)

Can you list in what way they are similar so we can better understand your argument?

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I’ve pre-purchased my ticket waiting for Yesuna to respond I’m so excited I can barely contain myself.

Also, don’t use this as a strawman but there is account bound gear… to help alts… pepelaugh

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Essences are a form of character progression; in the same way as gear or AP. Your argument is that you shouldn’t have to put as much time into your alts as you did your main to get all those fancy essences, but the fact is you don’t need them on your alt. Rank 1/2 essences would do just fine.

Complaining that you can’t have your alt as well equipped and progressed as your main without putting in the same effort is nonsensical - you may as well suggest all alts spawning at instant 120 and 450 ilvl gear.

457

This all depends on the content you do

For mythic raiding, you want your characters to be optimised as much as you can, otherwise it just shows your lack of interest or care for it.

This is a fact indeed, that applies to a portion of the playerbase, not all of it.

You can see my alt for yourself

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the big thing about essences that make them honestly a waste of time to me is that there is no long-term payoff for all the work/grind to get them. their a temporary power boost that is going to be erased come next expa. theres no reason to NOT make them BoA and available.

at least with gear once i do the work i get the item AND its transmog to use later with other characters, so even when the item is long replaced i still have a pretty mog to use should i choose to.

i took one look at the entire essence system and said ‘forget it’ and just mostly unsubbed for a bit. now i just get alts to 120 and stop them there. once i get them up to 120 im gonna just unsub until next expa for the most part. sick of ‘temporary powers’ that are just tacked on for an expa and gone again (i liked the concept and visual/mogs for legion weapons, but HATED the way the power system worked, and hated the crucible even moreso. didnt even BOTHER with it after a short time).

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if you don’t put the effort into optimising your essences for your alts, why should you be rewarded with optimal (Mythic) gear for them?

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Your mains neck is level 58, maybe you should get off the thread and focus more on the in game content.

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They are tied to our necklace, which has always been an equipment slot until BfA where we got an upgrade-able neck.

Gear is obtained in many ways. You don’t earn PvP gear the same way you do raid gear.

That’s part of the mmorpg genre a a whole, it always has been and always will be. There are times when players have to do stuff they don’t find enjoyable, just ask the pvper’s about that. If the end reward isn’t worth the work then don’t do it.

Plain and simple, both gear and essences are a form of power progression and are being treated as such by the developers. I also firmly believe that alts are not mains and if players want their alts to be equal to their mains then they should have to put in equal work.

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462

So, let me preface that I agree with the OP — essences should be account wide. Right now essences feel like a massive hurdle to playing alts, which isn’t very fun in an expansion where one of the main selling features is unlocking new races to play as alts after you’ve reached major content milestones on your main character.

Keeping essences locked on an achievement basis would be fine if your essence rank wasn’t such a huge barrier that you need to overcome in order to play the content that you want. In just about every avenue of the game, the Heart of Azeroth’s game play loops (azerite traits, essences, and artifact power) all act as a measure of personal progress for your character, true, but no aspect of the game currently takes your progress into account when you’re trying to interact with it. PvP certainly doesn’t sort teams based on Heart Levels / Essence Ranks, and unless you’re a cutting edge player (ie Method or the like), your Heart Level and Essence is a hard cap to what kind of PvP content you can do. It’s debatable whether this is a problem for the azerite system since that’s achievement based, but for essences a huge number of them are simply “Do an activity for a month” without any real catch-up system.

This wouldn’t be an issue if the game wasn’t balanced assuming the average player had a certain number of preservation essences or a certain essence level, but it is. A system that rewards you for the time you put into it is great. If that same system rewards you with power, then that system inevitably becomes a stop gap for future content unless adjusted.

If Blizzard is planning to tune Ny’alotha assuming everyone has the Rank 3 essences from 8.2, then they need to design the content systems so that people can quickly acquire the basic tools they need to do that content.

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Whoa thanks for explaining that you’ve really cleared things up for everyone.

Hey everyone the thread is over you get gear from many ways. It’s actually DIFFERENT !

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This is precisely the type of outlash you could expect to accompany such a sense of entitlement. It’s a perfectly cromulent point to make that both gear and essences can acquired in multiple ways; and nothing about your abysmal post did anything to refute this or any other of his points.

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Those are common posts from him in any thread, instead of having a discussion he just lashes out and spams sarcastic nonsense. I’m not sure how he can still post, tbh.

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It’s because I’ve got 3 characters that have BIS essences and working on my 4th and you have 0.

Please bring up entitlement some more.

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We disagree here on the first part.

But this is strawmaning on the actual point of what started this all: making essences easier to acquire. I think it’s important to go back on this issue.

Boa essences still don’t actually have any downsides to them, but they are not an ideal solution overall.

I think the better solution would be something along those lines: a vendor with every 8.2 essences that sells them for a 8.3 currency.

This way you hit all the marks to make essences an “endurable” system until it’s gone forever in 9.0:

  1. Returning players aren’t spreading themselves too thin trying to do the entire content at once (8.2 and 8.3 together is absurdly time consuming);
  2. Alts or even mains that were not maintained very well or that did not bother with certain essences now have a simplified access to them;
  3. The time gating is finally gone, provided that 8.3 currency would not be time-gated by anything, which in my opinion is one of the strongest defaults of the essence system.
    If people want to grind, let them actually grind, doing dailies for 15min a day for a month is not a grind, it is just tedious, boring and ineffective in introducing this feeling of accomplishment. Player agency and all that stuff.

With this, boa essences are avoided, which would actually do nothing for returning players or unmaintained mains, and the time-gating is finally gone. I think this hits a compromise that makes both sides happy.

Thoughts?

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468

They need to do something sooner rather than later to keep people interested.
That’s really whatnot boils down to.

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If it’s a year, that gives you more then enough time to earn rewards on your alts by playing those alts.

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I’ll pass on doing nasjatar follower quests to level up followers for an 8th time. I’ll just play something else or watch a movie in my recreational time instead.

Time played is a metric they care about. Mine will be lower in 8.3 than it was in 8.1

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