The m+ essence isn’t as bad at rank 3 but it doesn’t scale well and does nothing for your throughput if you don’t need the extra cd, the raid essence is terrible. Heroic is irrelevent after the first few weeks anyway, if I wanted to push this character into serious content I would have to grind those essences or I would fall behind every other healer. This is a fact :.
And that’s my point. 1% of the population is doing serious content that really need to even bother with the grind. Typically, if you’re doing that level of content you don’t care what you have to do, you’re doing to do what you have to do get whatever edge you can. I’ve personally done both the naz and mech grind to revered 4 times to prep the characters for next patch. I had no aspirations of doing mythic raiding or keys over 10 this patch so I didn’t bother. And no, it hasn’t bothered me in the slightest because I enjoy seeing progression in my characters. Never has WoW had account wide power progression and I’m incredibly unsure why people expect it now. Putting in catchup mechanics as we’re getting was the right call imo.
Never has WoW had insane power progression tide to rep grinding. Before 8.2 I didn’t bother with reputations on other characters. Even my raiding toon didn’t have exalted because I would do all my reputations/achievements on another character.
We really shouldn’t have to do the same dull content over and over again in order to push our characters into something we want to do. Essences aren’t comparable to gear because you naturally get gear by doing the content you enjoy. The throughput gain from having ideal essences is huge as a healer, many people defending this are dps mains who don’t understand why people are frustrated with this.
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That’s not true. Not entirely anyway. Do you not recall the Scryer/Aldor grind? Sons of Hodir? Those were required, however they offered boa tokens for alts. That’s a fair argument though, unlike “I don’t want to do work, game too hard” like most boa essence posts. That never got nerfed to revered though, which would you consider a better route?
My main is a guardian druid that uses both rep essences. I also play as resto much more than I dps these days. The character I’m working on now is a MW monk. You can probably guess which essences I’m going to use. I don’t want to say that I’m defending it either, it just doesn’t bother me. It feels very much like gear progression to me, even with a massive grind stapled to it, which to me makes it less dull. If they made it boa tomorrow I wouldn’t care, if they stuck to their guns and just nerfed it little by little, I wouldn’t care either. I’m still doing my grinds, I’m actually in game right now on my DH doing my mech daily before it resets. All I’ve been saying is that it’s not as necessary as people seem to think it is.
About to be done on my third alt and although I would have preferred them to be account wide, besides essences there isn’t much else to ‘grind’ anymore anyway. Azerite neck goes up pretty easily passively now to 70.
Yup which is what the terrible 7.3.5 changes were forced into the game and designed to do.
Those eventually became BOA, and even then those were small enchants that weren’t as important as essences were. I’d rather not bring up expansions that are over 10 years old anyway, game balance was a mess back then with unbalanced racials, profession bonuses, and class balance etc.
This is the problem I have with it though. It’s not like gear progression whatsoever. I can run mythic 10s and get gear, I can run the current raid and get geared up, I can farm benthic tokens and pvp to get geared up, I’ll never be able to get lucid dreams unless I do my dailies in Nazjatar. There are a 1000 ways to gear but only 1 way to get a specific essence? Why is this even a thing?
It wouldn’t matter as much if the essences were balanced accordingly, but like you and I both know the other healer essences are absolute dog mess compared to the 3 reputation ones. I just don’t understand what was wrong with us playing the game… Why did we need something like this? 
Why is it I’ve seen healers heal 15 keys 2 weeks into the season with only a single essence, not the Rep one at that, and yet on GD, some people insist that you cannot have a healer without the Rep essence somehow.