BFA kills the game for alt lovers

Community General Discussion
121

Well I do agree somethings are less alt friendly for people who like to play multiple toons, and gears them up equally. But if things are too easy to get then people who only play one character will run out of things to do.

The only reason I have a lot of high level toons, all classes at max level in legion, only six in BfA, is because I didn’t really have anything to really do on my main.

So I think there should be some sort of balance in place. I guess making things more account wide would “fix” both issues. But I’m sure there a lot of people who would hate that too. I mean people who actually enjoy long grinds on each character.

Just my two cents on the matter.

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122

This.

/10char

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123

You still speak of multiple mains.

When you want an “alt” to be as geared, as progressed, hell basically on equal footing as your main…then that is no longer an alt.

And I don’t think anyone is really being dismissive. It’s just simple logic. In every expansion, some work has had to be done in order to have multiple mains. Essences are also a lot easier and quicker to acquire than previous expansion things. Or would you prefer to go back to the WoD ring model or MoP cloak model where you had to run raids for weeks on end, only to run the raid for more weeks on end. Adding in dungeons along the way. Oh, lets not also forget you needed to grind Black Prince rep for the cloak.

I understand wanting alts to be viable. But there is a big grey area between “viable alt” and “on equal footing as my main”. One is an alt. The other is a second main. Most of the power in essences is from rank 1 and 2. Which those ranks honestly aren’t bad to get.

If you are wanting rank 3 on everything, or heaven forbid rank 4, along with that “alt” doing every single thing your main does. I’m sorry but that is no longer an alt. And as such, appropriate work getting it to that point should be required.

That said, earlier in the thread I openly said it’d be nice if the MoP Commendation system came back, thus alleviating some of the grind associated with reps.

I’ll even add to that, perhaps once you get the rank 3 raid essence, future characters on the account get double Aqueous Reliquary or something. Again, to alleviate some of the grind. Do the same for the PvP ones. Still require some work, but yield more drops to go towards rank 2 and 3. The Battleground one requiring Honor, add a modifier to make Honor gains count as double towards the essence. Oscillators and stuff from Mech? Give those a blueprint, make it cost like 5 Energy Cells and a couple Crates. Something, you know? Again, to make it easier to get those essences but still require some effort from those characters.

I don’t mind them easing the reigns a bit to make it easier for alts/multiple mains, but I do not think it should be account wide.

124

When all I worried about was gear back in LK and such, I would raid with many different characters each week in different roles and I had a blast. The game does not feel like that anymore.

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125

It would be great if AP could just be account wide. It’s hard enough finding time for AP grinding having a full time job and a family.

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126

Believe it or not, it was never an issue till now with all these grinds. There was a natural gear progression and that was basically all we had to truly worry about. If you wanted to min/max with professions and such, ehh, you could but gear was the overall hurdle for “gearing” an alt. Now? Rep grinds, AP grinds, Essence grinds on top of gear grinds. And the grind never ends so therefore it makes you feel as if you are truly wasting time on an alt instead of your main.

Before all this grind I did not feel like I was leaving my main in the dust. Now? If I am not on my main I am not moving it forward even when blizzard says they have put walls in front of us to keep from moving forward.

It is physical and psychological hurdles they have put in place that makes playing an alt feel terrible at this point.

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127

i agree. and it’s not so much the AP or rep, but the recollecting of essences that’s making me regret wanting to play my alts.

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129

Didn’t really need to put “for alt lovers” in the title OP. BFA just kills this game, period.

130

Actually, the Rank 1 Essences do get thrown at you. But if you want that Alt to be competitive you need at least Rank 2, better 3.
For some Essences this is ok, like the Essence you get from your Mythic + Dungeons or Weekly Mythic + Cache, the Raiding Essence … the PvP Essences.
But if you are like me, i not want to do Arena, or BGs … or World PvP.

The main thing i dislike is that at some point you do need additional Essences, for the Passive Effect, and Rank 3 does have some more power then Rank 1 or 2.
And then locking several Essences behind a Rep Grind to Exalted … ugh. Not to forget for some reason the PvP Essences are among the better ones for Tanks too …

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131

Don’t compare WoD to this piece of garbage, WoD was way better.

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132

Alts dont need to be in BiS gear thats the bottom line hence “alt”

So many ppl want their “alts” to be raid ready and on par with their main ready to go at a moments notice and i dont agree they should be able to.

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133

<3

thanks for addressing this as well. :smiley:

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134

Why though?

It’s been like this for more expansions then less. Why does it bother you a player can have multiple options? I enjoy playing more then one class. One of the big reasons is my friends play different toons and it gives us more options.

In wrath, I had a dk that we used as an alt tank in raids. Some fights worked well for a third tank so I geared up that dk from our alt run and would take him to the main raid as needed. I also had a healer in addition to my tank and dps. While my ‘main’ was the most geared, my healer and tank werent far behind. To keep both my healer and tank relevant, I only had to focus on the alt raid each week. Depending on the tier, this usually meant 2-4 hours per toon.

The beauty of it was you didn’t have anything else to consider. No azerite. No essences… nothing. In ICC you could earn rep for your ring, but the rep could be earned from doing a raid. This was my experience all the way until legion. Legion did make alts harder at first, but as the expansion ‘relaxed’ some with legendaries, alts were again a big part of my play experience.

Now we are basically midway into the expansion and instead of it getting easier or more simple, it actually got more complicated.

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136

You can get to 420 (heroic level) by spamming mid tier m+'s which is braindead content. Our main tank in my old guild went off the deepend with this and created 5 heroic raid level (420+) characters in the first 2 weeks of the tier while working. Multiple other members had 2-3 (some including essences depending on BiS) at 420+.

If your looking to gear past heroic and gear mythic casually than yeah, the system isn’t and was never designed for that but if you want to gear heroic level then you can get 2-3 fairly easily. If you want 4+ your main is going to be heroic/mythic then your alts are going to be normal geared until catch-up inevitably pushes them to heroic.

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The gear grind is not bad at all, m+ is such a good gearing route right now, combined with pearl grinding. It’s essences that are the real issue, grinding to revered with Mechagon on multiple toons for your BiS essence is terrible.

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138

My alts have never been as geared as my main, and still won’t be for one simple reason:

Artifact Power.

My alts will pretty much always be behind my main in HoA level. This means less secondary slots unlocks (that second secondary will be huge - when I reach it), less stamina unlocks, and a slight de-powering of essences since their effects do scale with HoA level in many cases.

Account wide essences doesn’t instantly bring my alt on par with my main. It’s a complete strawman to say so. Just like Benthic gear doesn’t bring my alt on part with my main. I’d have to farm soulbound manapearls to upgrade every piece and still not be on the same level.

As long as there’s a secondary farm required, but the major pressure is alleviated, it’s fine. It’s okay for “alts” to be a half-step behind mains, and they should be. If you want two mains it shouldn’t be effortless. My wife has an alt hunter who is on par with her main mage in ilvl, or was until this patch, but it didn’t fall into her lap: she basically played the toon nearly as much as her main, did ton of farming and instance runs. But now, thanks to 8.2, that hunter doesn’t ever get logged in.

The issue is simply that essences make the gap between an alt and a main a country mile instead of a half-step. The gap is too large. There are other “gaps” (gear ilvl, manapearls, AP and HoA levels). Those should be sufficient that we don’t need a chasm.

Edit: And a lot of that gap is the reputation grinds of Mechagon and Nazjatar. My “alts” could trivially get the +7 mythic essences for every spec.

Edit #2: And PvP. Love you guys.

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M+ gear will carry you a bit through Eternal Palace, but the stats on Benthic gear are very powerful, and often BiS with a socket, for that content. Winning that lottery and leveling it up is something of a grind. A full set is well over 2000 Prismatic Manapearls, where you only get 55 a day, max. I’d rather do M+.

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For pvp, it kinda was. Of the friends I play with these days, a lot still play casually and want todo just pvp. Trying to gear through arena or rbgs is a nightmare.

But even for PVE, casual play is much more time consuming than it once was. Trying to get essences and farm if a little azerite just adds another time sink. If the end game content alone was enough to keep people geared (as it has been for most of the life of this game), then the majority of my friends would have no issue.

141

WOD was incredible for alts because there was absolutely nothing to do in end game :rofl:

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142

It is enough, idk what your friends are doing wrong but they are having self created issues. Do m+ for 3-4 days, get full heroic gear, done. If you do the math it’s even quicker now than old PvP gear if you take into account that each week you were hard-capped on honor after 2 pieces or 3 if you chose the cheapest least upgrades. I can easily get 2-3 pieces a day doing m+ not a week. Your only hold up is going to be azerite but that’s irrelvant because if you do a +10 (easy to do) it’s going to give you 2 free heroic azerite at the end of the week in titan residuum.

If you don’t want to do the faster way to gear then that is fine but you cannot then also say gearing is bad just because you don’t want to gear properly. The only gear restriction currently in-game is essences and if your friends are just doing casual bgs then having rank 3 essences is completely overkill and not needed.