I was about to give in and grind some essences on alts but when I got the mission for worldvein resonance I realized I’d need to grind out the campaign for followers 
No alts for me.
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The cloak grind is taking their place. There seems to be a pattern of fixing one annoyance as they add a worse.
They ease the level restrictions on azerite armor but add the neck grind. Remove the neck grind add the cloak grind.
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They aren’t like gear at all though. You earn gear from doing the challenging content that is the reason you play the game to begin with.
You earn essences from doing boring, unchallenging, repetitive content that nobody likes.
You’ve never had to grind rep or dailies for BIS gear ever before in the history of the game.
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Bingo. Used to play a ton of alts, now I play zero and my “time played” has also gone to zero.
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Con would be it devalues the grind other ppl have done over their characters over the patch.
It would also mean considering account wide reputation which they have never done. At most they will give you a rep buff for your alts like they did in MoP or bring the reward one tier lower requiring revered like they do with World quests.
I’ve done the grind 3.5 time sand im fine with it.
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Why stop at essences? Let’s have account bound levels. That way you don’t need to do a tedious boring grind to get to max level. Let’s have account bound rep. Everyone would love that. Account bound AP. So you can level your neck no matter which toon you’re currently playing. Account bound gear. Your alts ilvl is linked to whichever toon is highest. Account bound professions. I already leveled herbalism to 175, my alt’s mining should also be 175. There’s literally no downside and everyone will be happy!
Or better yet, just put in a trainer that will allow me to switch my main’s class to whatever fotm I want to play today.
This is honestly the dumbest argument ever
people are crying about essences being awful to grind
this argument that says “Why stop there? Make everything Account wide!!” is so ridiculously short sighted it’s not even funny at this point
where are the people complaining about levels not being account-wide
where are the people complaining about reputation not being account-wide
where are the people complaining about ap not being account-wide
where are the people complaining about professions not being account-wide
Should there be any, their presence would be infinitely smaller, thankfully there is none though.
The community wants essences to be accessible in a reasonable amount of time.
Account-wide Essences has clear issues, in that it doesn’t solves every problems with essences. This doesn’t mean essences should be left with how they currently are.
Introduce a strong catch-up, without any time-gating. This way the people screeching “YoU ShOuLd WoRk fOr iT” towards the players who’ve done it 5 times already can be satisfied, and returning players aren’t stuck playing old bad content.
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Yeah, but if you give a mouse a cookie it will ask for a glass of milk. It’s just facts.
The MOP tokens were a decent mechanic for that. I think it should have been 300-400% for alts grind reps once your main is exalted, but I hate replaying meaningless grinds personally.
I don’t understand why we lost the when one character hits exalted it lets you get an account wide boost to rep gains thing.
I don’t understand why we lost tabards for rep, or more available options for BoA tokens. The amount of rep the new BoA tokens give is pitiful for the cost, and the Mechagon one (that gives 100 whooping rep) is a paragon cache reward!
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They allowed players to put in the effort at their own pace. Blizz would rather you consume content on their schedule.
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How dare you say something so truthful yet so depressing.
Yeah, my bad.
It’s disheartening to see the game change for the worse with every patch. Until Ion is gone I doubt it gets any better.
I hope there is enough of a healthy player base left when that happens for them to rebuild.
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My namesake aside I still am of the mindset WoW has some of the better if not best PvE content in today’s market.
If Shadowlands does anything to make classes “feel” better I’d be overall a happy camper. Though I do miss the grand spectacle that is FFXIV encounters.
The people want it.
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Please make account wide essences a thing. The system is abysmal right now. Grinding the same reputations time and again is one of the most tedious and infuriating things I’ve dealt with (in game).
I’ve abandoned most of my characters at this point for this reason.
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MoP comes to mind during the start of the expansion. There were a few BiS-pre raid items that came from reps. Which was a major factor towards the outcry about them. Even more so if one of those items came from reps like Shado-pan or August Celestials. Which you needed to be revered with the Golden Lotus to access their dailies.
So with that, you are incorrect with that point.
Perhaps huge power disparity is not the correct way for me to frame the issue. Perhaps the better way to frame it is class fixing essences. Many classes have felt broken in more ways than one this whole expansion. Essences were not part of Blizzards plan going into BFA but they noticed that they needed to provide some kind of fix to address the issues many classes faced. To that end putting in any essence on any class/spec is not the be all and end all one size fits all solution.
To that end they are now working on unpruning the classes and give us more baseline abilities. I have a strong belief that this essence system could be vastly improved by allowing players to farm the essences in ways the players choose would help players much more than restricting them to specific grinds that are not fun and in most cases, not a challenge. Just a time sink.
Essences are not trinkets or gear. You have said yourself that the rng element is removed from essences which is welcome but then the time gating and content restriction was added to force players to specific content that they have no choice in doing if they want the essence that “fixes” their class or is what they need.
Blizzard could alleviate much of the issues with rep by providing rep tabbards and just letting players grind away without the time gating.
We have enough time gating via gear acquisition. Asking players to grind up essences once is enough. The players always do the rep grinds at least once for pathfinder. However asking them to grind up pathfinder part 2 again and again and pvp for 30K kills on every alt they want to pursue the gear curve with is seen for what it is - a blatantly clear time sink for Blizzards investors.
The thing is that I do not mind sinking a bunch of time to the game. But when Blizzard tells me that X essence can only be acquired by doing the same daily quest for 21 days in a row its an issue because I do not feel like I have achieved anything at the end of the grind. I do not feel like I accomplished anything great like it does to kill a heroic raid boss that your team has been in progression for a few weeks. It just feels like I filled a bar and was awarded a “everyone gets a trophy” prize.
There is no challenge aside from the time sink.
Its caused afkers in bgs because they are just there for the essences not the win. Its caused many players to not even bother with alts so there are less tanks and healers in the games pug communities. Its caused many players I know to just call it quits after aotc.
The laundry list keeps piling up to be relevant at end game and the worst part of it is that we are not being entertained by this daily quest nonsense. Mythic plus and raiding make me put down the netflix and youtube and pay attention to everything. Thats why I play interactive entertainment ie games. Its because I want to be glued to my screen for every moment.
I do not think they should remove daily quests but they should definitely relax the amount required for power progression.
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BIS pre-raid is not the same thing as BIS. You don’t need to have pre-raid BIS to enter a raid, and once you are in the raid you upgrade it anyway.
Essences are still BIS for character after 10 weeks of farming Mythic EP.
So no, actually I’m not incorrect at all, you just strangely think “BIS” and “pre-raid BIS” are equivalent, when actually they are not, in any way.
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