Without ranks my 184 covenant set would be like 154 which is useless and I’d be stuck grinding normals still for gear.
That makes things worse, I know you said pvp but it also effects pve and removes a catch up mechanic.
It’s more alt friendly than BfA and Legion, though I wouldn’t call it alt friendly in general. As long as player power and progression are directly tied to external systems, especially gated ones, this is going to be a problem to varying extents.
This didn’t seem to happen until later in the expansion.
In fact, the first time it happened to me is still burned into my brain. I remember exactly where I was, and what I was doing.
I was farming a rare in NE Vale, and I came across another player. He attacked me (Before BFA War Mode, I never attack first), and I laughed to myself because I knew I was going to win. But then I melted.
That was a bad day for me, and it still bugs me. When I looked at his profile and saw he was wearing PvE gear, I logged off and didn’t log back in until late WoD.
I was mainly talking about PvP gear the way it was in WoD.
That gear has been totally useless to me, but I think ranks on Covenant gear are probably a good idea for more casual players. I think you’re right; it’s good for the game.
Now, apparently it’s slower, but I immediately went ToF on my alt. Didn’t have to sit through the campaign again, immediately joined the faction I wanted. Immdiately started doing side quests in that area whicb made it a different experience instead of just repeating things over and over
We’ve got renown catchups, only have to farm 1k anima a week - doing one world boss gives you 1/4 of it for basically nothing.
The only real hindrance I see is soul ash. I actually like running Torghast on my main, which I know a lot of people don’t, but I really don’t care to do it on my alt. So my alt just doesn’t have legendaries. That’s fine with me I’m not as invested in my alt.
My response was to your blanket statement to remove ranks overall. Its working in pve quite well, and to be honest wouldn’t the covenant set at 184 be better than the ranked up pvp gear? I avoid pvp like the plague so its not like I would know.
And I do agree with bringing back wod pvp system, its not an alt friendly situation per say but their gear system worked best imo. (I dabbled in pvp back then)
yeah i don’t see the renown catchup as a big deal at all. my monk is at 15 and I’ve done basically nothing on her. literally haven’t set foot in a dungeon with her this expansion.
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A lot of people dabbled in PvP then. The gearing system was the reason why.
Let’s face it. The PvE side of the game is always going to be a grind - even if it’s not an endless grind like we had in BfA and Legion. Doing it on more than one character has always been difficult.
That’s where PvP came in. You could play alts in PvP when you weren’t on your main. It’s incredibly difficult to maintain more than one raid schedule, but the nature of PvP gearing in WoD made it so you could play the alts even if you weren’t raiding with all of them.
It also provided a place to go when people burned out on the grind.
Now that they decided that PvP gearing is going to be a grind in itself, that option is no longer available.
In a sense, I’m suggesting that they:
- Reduce the PvE grind a little bit to give people more time to play alts
- Give people more ways to play alts without committing to multiple raid schedules.
Personally I disagree with comparing a release patch to the final patch of the expansion. Every final patch in the history of WoW has incorporated additional catch up mechanics to make it easier to get back into end game.
And no doubt you are not only thinking 8.3, but 8.3 after essences were made account wide and the cloak levelling was reduced significantly, or perhaps you don’t recall how getting from rank 14 to rank 15 took 9 runs to collect 18 pages at 2 pages per run max.
Even 8.3 required you to do 3 assaults per week, 5 dailies per day, N’zoth on normal or higher (not exactly sure how you can consider that alt friendly), and as many visions as you could afford to do (because taking in relativity if you are staying stygia is required for gems then so was multiple vision runs).
That’s on top of at least doing the weekly M+ cache, plus the PvP cache.
SL still comes down to one simple campaign quest, collect 5+ souls from the Maw which takes like 5 minutes, and the anima quest which you can complete just from doing whatever content you do for the week.
2 Torghast runs, which honestly have a finite lifespan, I don’t care how competitive you feel you need to be there is a point when you still don’t need new legendaries.
Plus the Maw, which again takes like 30 minutes before you are forcibly kicked out.
PvP, M+, and Raid cache is all the same thing so you don’t need to do additional content if you don’t want to.
What is competitive to you?
Trust me, if you aren’t doing top 100 cutting edge mythic or currently pushing 18+ in M+ you really don’t need that +16 haste gem on your alt. Just saying.
If you are doing those things, chances are WoW already is a priority in your life and you’re already spending 6+ hours on it a day at which point the ~2 hours it takes to do all the other requirements is nothing.
I’d say for 95% of the playerbase doing the Maw dailies and grinding sockets is a luxury at best on their main, never mind on their 3rd, 4th, 5th alt.
You can go down this absurdly reductionist “It’s Optional” argument, and you know what? It is optional. Like logging in or paying a sub is optional.
But optional in no way has any bearing on the argument. What makes something alt friendly is that for whatever level of achievement you’re aiming for it’s easier to achieve it on your alt then it was on your main. You’ve done it already, don’t have to completely do it again.
There is almost nothing in this expansion that is alt friendly. For what ever level of achievement, it’s almost completely, do it all again.
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It’s more alt friendly then BFA and so far the better xpac, but like the latter that ain’t saying much. Shadowlands 5/10
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I can’t complain about the wait for DPS, Its been popping decent for when I am on.
But yeah…I don’t see me doing this again. I keep seeing the same 3 dungeons in random. And you need to run random for the XP. I dislike ToP usually…I’d pay gold to see it right now. It be different lol.
I feel like I am in a dungeon, literally…lol
Level 57 on the test I ahve here. So maybe a few hours more tonight than I will be done. Then Go meet my fellow players of wow…and kill them upon the fields of wintergrasp and ashran lol.
yeah, alt friendly isn’t binary. it’s a spectrum. alt friendly doesn’t necessarily mean “you can have 6 220+ ilvl characters in 3 hours a week”
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I got my lock from 50-60 in less than a weekend while also playing some on two other toons while just watching TV and questing mostly. I ran 3 dungeons the whole way. It’s far from slow.
I’m not asking for 6 alt toons mythic geared, I just want most of my progression like covenant renown, achievements etc to be acc wide and some better catch up gear for alts. But gearing is super slow, I’ve went almost 12 mythics and almost the same with bosses with loot drops, and a lot of the time when I did get loot it wasn’t an upgrade or it was same slot.
Yea it sucks I leveled a bunch of my alts to 60 to find I wasn’t able to keep up with all the chores. I wish Blizzard would realize that if they stopped making these artificial grinds people would love to just be finished with their tasks and could actually play the game. I feel like I never get off the treadmill to actually get a chance to enjoy a character.
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although, give it a few weeks/months and alts that pvp with players that are able to get 1800 rating on them inside of 3 hours could~~~
Having a really hard time catching up to this week’s cap of renown. I’ve done every quest I can do that rewards renown (Maw souls, anima, emissary quests) and I’m still stuck on renown 19. Completed all of my covenant story quests and now I’m spamming dungeons trying to get renown to drop.
This renown catch-up system is supposed to be alt-friendly, but it seems kinda broken. If this is working as intended, then yikes.
I don’t want to wait until next Tuesday to get my last 2 pieces of covenant armor…
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This game is working exactly how they intended it too. S-T-R-E-T-C-H-I-N-G content for the lack of content to keep people subs.
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yeah
also conduit energy is the most lol system blizzards ever added
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