A lot of people say they want the best rewards to be from the most challenging content. You think you do, but you likely don’t.
In WoW’s distant past, and other MMORPG’S there were typicaly two paths to equivalent level power rewards. Skill based rewards and time based rewards.
People in vanilla got the best PvP rewards in the game based on time played. Many rank 14’s went into TBC arena and got stomped. It was a time based reward.
I think there should be extreme, long, hardcore grinds to get the best gear in the game. Not taking away anything from mythic raiding rewards, but ADDING the option to do an insane level time sync to get equivalent rewards.
This is an MMO and it’s supposed to make you want to waste your time. The best rewards from the most challenging content is fine, but there should be grinds that are easy by comparison, but VERY time consuming.
Want to mythic raid? Cool. Prefer to grind 8 hours a day for 6 week for equivalent level rewards? That should be an option too.
It might be an older mmo design philosophy but it doesn’t work well in the modern age. People are very put off by having to grind for gear. The modern player based optimizes their play time to get the most out of it in terms of fun or progression.
Having along grind would make the players feel like they would have to no life the content, because people play to get gear. So if there is a time consuming braindead path to getting it, you would most likely see the majority of the player base doing that grind.
Not everyone is a mythic raider or a rank 1 pvp player. The reality is if you put less than that time in learning the game this wouldn’t be a problem. You could probably get at least 1600 and heroic, which for casual player seems to be a huge feat.
Yes! This exactly. If I want to no life for a day, a week, a month it should be my business. Or if its something I work toward slowly over the course of an expansion.
Talking power gain rewards here too btw, not cosmetics.
The issue is this: what use is the gear after the long grind? Even this long, long wait for the patch - by the time you’d get the gear, it would be so much harder to then find the groups to use the gear.
Agree, although I don’t know that the Rank 14 grind is necessarily a good expression of this concept.
I think something more like Valor tokens in Legion is a better way to accomplish this. You can get there eventually by putting in the work, but someone who does the hardest content (or puts in more time) will get there sooner.
In about 2 months 15s will be casual content. Even if you start at 10s (which 100% can be 3 manned even with current gear) if you are willing to grind up the instances you will get the gear to get into the instances and get to do the content.
There is a reason BC and Wrath were significantly more popular than Vanilla and it was not just that the game actually started to have a cohesive narrative. You could get the best rewards pretty easily, but it was not free. You could grind your justice points and get gear and make that gear into something but it took time and was not free. Even the vanilla BGs if you were not good you were not going to hit max rank no matter how hard you tried. You had to be both good and willing to grind.
The option should be there, but IMO is should be super, super slow. Like over the course of the entire xpac slow, so most participants will only start getting geared during the last patch.
That way players who like chipping away at progression over time can do so without patch resets screwing it all up, and high end content fanatics get to keep their advantage of nice gear for the majority of the expansion’s lifecycle.