The essence grind should not exist at all. I shouldn’t have to do it once. I shouldn’t need to do 2 months of unchallenging daily quests in order to be competitive in actually challenging PvE content.
What is so wrong about just letting people actually do the content they like, and not punishing them for not enjoying island expeditions/PvP/Pet Battles etc? And the same goes for AP, btw.
All the gear I need to do dungeons and raids should come from dungeons and raids. The end.
Pretty sure you said it, not me, but what do i know, I’m just an elitist troll /shrug
The thing is, the same 5 or 10 people are making threads every day on the forums saying that blizz doesn’t value you’re play time and you gotta do things you don’t like, but there’s just as many if not more of us who enjoy having something to do during downtime and you’re basically trying to tell us how to enjoy our play time, which means filing it with nothing to do, just so you can better enjoy yours, which will be logged off? Don’t you see the problem here?
There are other ways to “progress” your character that are unrelated to your strength. Getting mythic boss kills, pvp rating, and keystone pushing are all fun types of progression that are unrelated to character strength. Why do you need an endless treadmill of character strength? Getting a gear upgrade feels good, but so does timing a +20 key or killing a mythic raid boss. It’s all about having fun, and you have fun doing those activities, so why does it bother you?
I wish people would stop comparing essences to gear already. Gearing (unless getting carried) requires knowledge of the class/role in either pvp, raiding, or m+. It’s always a different experience from class to class for endgame content. This is not the case for rep grinding. You don’t have to have knowledge, you don’t have to put in any effort, you aren’t learning much, and it’s the exact same experience with the exact same quests and setup from character to character. This is why we hate it. It’s not about grinding, it’s about wtf we’re grinding. I play WoW as a healer to challenge myself and keep my group alive, so why am I forced to jump on jellyfish and play Bejeweled?
I stopped playing shortly after Uldir, because the game was entirely unengaging.
I came back for a bit in whatever the new zones came out in, but ultimately it was still boring.
8.3 looks interesting, and I’ll probably stay subbed long enough to level a new dk or allied race something, but there is no freaking way I will be grinding essences as an entry point to doing more M+ or raids.
Regardless of the quality of the content that comes out in 8.3, I have no interest in grinding old content to do it that I already avoided playing because I didn’t like.
The reality is that there are an absolute tonne of players who stopped playing at various times during BfA, it was not and is not a popular expansion. The essences are a hard lock on people coming back who skipped the current patch. This has not been the modus operandi of WoW for a very long time.
Alts are a problem in and of themselves, and I can’t imagine the boredom of doing this twice, but even just making the essences account wide will not address the accessibility of 8.3 to people who didn’t play 8.2+, who are likely to just not bother if they are anything like me (transient subscribers rather than full-time subscribers).
Yep, this is the issue exactly. Account wide essences won’t fix it. They just need to admit they were wrong, make the rank 3 essences available from a vendor, and try better next time.
Leave the grind to people who really want the cosmetic effects. Let people who just want to play the game, play the game.
Yes, yes they should.
I’d L O V E if I could just get all classes in a single char.
I’m forced to swap because I can’t. And having to regrind stuff I already did just for a class change is a humongous pain in the ***.
As far as I am concerned, all my chars are ‘main’.
I didn’t say it was challenging, i said it was something to do during downtime. And only 2 (arguably 3) are rep grinds. I’m just saying i have no interest in paying a sub to have nothing better to do than to not play. If someone chooses not to play because they don’t want to do anything it’s exactly that, a choice. I imagine we’re going to get the same group of people complaining that they have to grind rep for their covenant and grind anima in shadowlands. I mean if it were that detrimental for the game do you think they’d keep doing it? It’s obviously a successful model.
Yes people will complain, it’s weird you don’t understand why.
The things you have to do to grind this rep just aren’t fun. Nobody minded grinding rep when you could do it by doing things that were enjoyable, like running dungeons.
Farming AP was much less of a chore in Legion when you could farm it by running a lot of M+.
But having to do mindless dailies day after day is just not fun. It’s not engaging. It’s just a chore. And it’s a chore that takes a significant amount of time at the moment, so much so that most people don’t have time to do it on more than 1 character.
Honestly because it doesn’t feel worse than any other we’ve had to do, granted this definitely feels more like the beginning of an expansion than the end. But wrath and cata the rep grinds were too easy, you’d hit exalted before you even realized you were grinding them. I think mop had the best approach imo
Its not about handing out free stuff, an essence is essential to your rotation. The gear, the neck are just extra % on your primary and secondary stats. You can be a 440 geared person but if you miss that one essence your rotation and actual damage is still limited.
^This
The analogy to ilvl and neck level is simply not the same. iLVL and neck level are a grind in the truest sense; I don’t like them in particular, but they are simply more of the same stats and come in regular intervals.
Essences are not just a grind, they are a grind that offers you effectively nothing until you reach a new tier, and as people have said, the first two tiers are very much lower than the third.
I could log on with ilvl 400 catch up gear and a 50 neck and while my damage would be lower, I could make steady progression toward those 445 ilvl and 70 neck that you mention doing things I want to do. I won’t ever naturally acquire the essences unless I actively engage in specific content for a long time before I can even begin to use them in things I want to take part in.
Come on man! COME ON!
Well MoP reps were totally irrelevant to raids and dungeons so yeah. You didn’t have to do them at all. Like almost all previous rep grinds, they were just for profession recipes and cosmetic items. That is not the case with Nazjatar/Mechagon rep, and that is the problem.
You’ve never before had the situation where you had to grind time-gated rep in order to obtain BIS raid and dungeon gear. Never.
Please dear baby green Jesus, all I want for Christmas is account wide essences.
I gave you an example earlier in bc and you completely looked over it lol. I get what you’re saying, all I’m really trying to push here is that I’m not upset with the system, especially once the patch drops and the things i don’t have will practically fall in my lap because I’m at least that far on probably 4 or 5 characters already. Spend a couple hours or so on the ptr and see if you like it before you competely count it out. I was on the fence about it too, with my own frustrations with essences, listening to bellular and preach talk about their frustrations, then i played on the ptr and I’m where I’m at now. The changes just in the last few weeks have been pretty settling.
Except that example was false. Earthwarden was pre-raid BIS, sure. But it wasn’t BIS for the whole expansion. It was replaced in SSC which was available at launch. And it dropped from trash, a lot of people got it before they even killed a single boss in SSC.
So you got your BIS raid gear from raids. Not rep. You could take a fresh 70 into SSC and gear them up without doing any rep grinding at all. No rep grind required to enter the raid. (you only needed enough to enter heroic slave pens which you would have had from leveling up). No rep required to loot the items. AFAIK the only gear/upgrade you needed rep for in TBC were the Aldor/Scryer enchants. And you could obtain that rep from the auction house.
And finally, even if your example was a real one, let’s say for argument’s sake that Earthwarden was BIS for feral for the entire expansion, the rep grind you needed to do to get it, you got from running Heroic Dungeons. Something you would have been doing anyway while gearing up for entry level raids. Very different to having to do completely unrelated daily quests that provided nothing except a specific piece of gear.
Any other examples there chief?
Your server must have liked carrying people because on mine if you weren’t geared in t4 you sure as hell weren’t getting into a t5 guild, and no, you definitely couldn’t do that as 25 fresh 70’s. That’s definitely not how progression worked.
Or you know, didn’t really have to carry anyone because there was a very good BOE world drop staff that was plenty good enough for T4 content.
You’ve never needed preraid BIS to actually clear a raid. This is besides the fact that it’s a completely different argument that you still aren’t getting.
Yes, carrying alts to gear them up is a fact and has always been a fact in WoW. That’s part of the whole point. Of course my guild is perfectly happy to carry my Resto Shaman that I just rerolled because we needed an extra bloodlust. I could go into that raid in greens and come out in BIS gear. Something that has always been possible until 8.2. Because now your BIS gear doesn’t come from raids, it comes from doing 2 months worth of dailies and there’s no way to speed it up.
I’m not responding further until you quit disregarding the same point I’ve made repeatedly. If it takes you 2 months to grind 21000 rep in a zone that’s intro quests take you almost halfway there, you should probably get into tetris. I hear it’s got good graphics these days. I’m done trying to have a conversation while you want nothing more to argue. I’ll continue to enjoy wow, and you’ll continue to be miserable. Works for me. Peace, I’m going to bed.
Good. You’re just writing drivel anyway.
Thank god.
I’ll continue to enjoy wow, and you’ll continue to be miserable. Works for me
What works for you is completely irrelevant. The point is what is good for the game. And the essence system which is absolutely driving players away from the game, and preventing players from coming back, is certainly not good for the game.
The fact that you have all the time in the world, and the motivation to grind out essences for multiple characters is totally irrelevant. Most people do not. And that will result in less people playing.