I know countless people have made these kind of posts, but this deeply breaks my heart and I also need to express how sad this makes me.
In Legion, I had about 7 different classes all at a decent ilvl and I was able to play & enjoy all of them. I felt like I had too many alts, but it was a good feeling. For some reason, I like having to stare at my character screen for a few minutes trying to decide what class I wanna dabble with for a few hours until I get bored and play another for a bit, because they made so many important aspects account wide such as artifact knowledge, unlocking the netherlight crucible on 1 toon and you have it open on them all, etc.
Currently, in the time I have grinded out 1 character for essence farming and ranking, legendary cloak leveling, is equivalent to the time I spent for 7 alts in Legion. This is WAY too much grinding for 1 character especially as someone who loves multi-classing. I really REALLY want to play my other classes, but the fact I have to catch up on nearly 8 weeks of content on about 4 alts each that I want to play, such as leveling the cloak, and leveling the essences to rank 3, is the most discouraging feeling I have ever experienced.
If Blizz is refusing to do this because they believe its “too easy”… not really. I’m fine with putting a few hours into alts of catching up like it was in legion, but not WEEKS.
Here’s how they can fix this:
For essences, we’d still have to farm them as if we’d need the first rank. However, make it so when we learn the first rank, it’d instantly be rank 2, 3, or 4, depending on its highest rank achieved on any one of your characters that had already grinded that out.
Same goes for the cloak. We still have to do the quest to get it, however, once we complete the quest, the rank is instantly leveled up to the highest rank that any character on your account has achieved. That way, you only have to play 1 character to do horrific visions with to level them instead of every alt.
Oh, and make that 25k momento item BoA that allows you to put a socket into a piece of gear so you can mail it to your alts.
TL;DR: Just make essences & leggo cloak ranks/levels account wide similar to how they did the prestige/honor levels.