You get your BIS from raiding or from M+. This is literally the only thing the game has ever required. I’ve never before had to do a month of daily quests to get gear.
There have been times where you could have, for example, elected to do some PvP to get gear that was equivalent to raid gear, but it’s certainly never been required. There’s no other way I can get Memory Of Lucid dreams rank 3 without doing a month’s worth of terminally boring repeatable daily quests.
Gear has never been the issue. It is the grind for every alt, over and over again.
Why play an alt? Because blizzard changes what class and spec is valuable to bring to a raid/M+ every tier and if you did not guess right with the toon you were grinding, you are stuck doing old content to get your neck and now essences up to a level that is acceptable.
The grind is on purpose and even lowering some rep grinds is a horrible way to treat your customers.
8.3 is DOA thanks to essences. Ain’t no one gonna be arsed to get what you need to get in 8.3 when you have to deal with the trash that 8.2 introduced to get to it. Just delete essences.
I get my alts to 120…then stop playing them because I no longer want to grind essences and/or reps. I’ve done it twice on two characters and now i just ignore it. Blizz will make it all irrelevant soon and I can always unsub and save some money while I wait for them to make something worth doing.
If it wasn’t easily worth 20%+ performance, it wouldn’t be an issue.
The problem is not just that they’re annoying, but that they’re annoying and mandatory. If you don’t get them, you’re gimping yourself, and by consequence you’re gimping whatever group you’re in.
I’d much prefer the neck to not exist at all. Take the azerite pieces, too. Alts should have trouble getting gear due lower playtime, not being gated out of the equivalent to 40 sheet iLvls “just because”.
The catch up bonus for gear and set bonuses is that everyone else already has them. You join your friends for M+ or raids and they just hand out the crap that they’d vendor. This has always been the case, even before personal loot.
Most people have one preferred thing they do in game. If you like to PvP, you don’t want to PvE or grind rep, if you like to raid or M+, you don’t want to PvP or grind rep.
When time spent in game starts to be mostly crap you don’t enjoy a lot of people just quit.
I think that’s why 8.2 flopped for a lot of people, if you liked Mechagon and Nazjatar it was probably great for you, but if you just wanted to arena during your limited playtime but had to put in weeks of dailies you weren’t interested in it really wasn’t a very appealing patch.
I agree. I think the biggest issues are in the acquisition ie player choice in the content to obtain these essences and how these essences can be BIS for content the player does not do (PvP/PvE).
Blizzard would be better off creating a currency that you can get certain essences from that you can farm from any content. Let say for every 100 currency you can buy an essence but can only farm up to 10 a day.
So if you want Conflict and Strife Essence you can farm 5 pvp matches a day and fill up the bar. After 10 days of matches you can buy the essence. Same thing if you do a mythic plus, island, raid boss, etc.
Give power back to the players to do the content they love and be rewarded for it.
So what happens in 9.0 when you find out we have something new to work towards? because we will. Gonna just wait until 10.0 to play because you don’t want to work for something? Grinds have been part of this genre since it started.
I am more in the camp that says progression rating is about the encounter and overcoming the encounter. Not overcoming your work and real life schedule to log in every single day to process a daily quest requirement. To me progression is tied to how well you learn the encounter, each phase, how buffs help/hurt classes, how certain items and positioning help, etc.
I do not consider a world quest champion on the same level of progression as a person who has been raiding and learned the encounter mechanics. They are nowhere near close to each other no matter how many world quests the Azeroth WQ Champion has done.
Even as a part to progression, this is basically the return of attunements. No one needs this to be forced on them. People just want to raid and enjoy the content they pay for without a boring grind outside the actual encounter. If the encounter is difficult more encounter experience should be obtained, maybe a higher hoa level, maybe more traits, maybe more raid starting bosses gear. I do not think there should be a required grind for content the player has no choice in.
I would have preferred if they went with currencies that drops from all content that once you get the required amount you can just buy what you want.
I am not against grinding. But if you will force me to grind trivial content at least let me choose the trivial content to grind, especially after I did it once on my main.
The only thing that can kill WoW is WoW. The people have proven in BfA they won’t stay subbed if the game is just grinding braindead tedious content.
If 9.0 is more of the same and they don’t learn their lesson then yeah tons of people will quit again and wait for 10.0, or more likely, just quit forever.
If you want to grind rep, that’s fantastic. Rep should exist, and have cool cosmetic and profession oriented rewards. They should not have a mandatory item you need to play your character tied to them, as millions of people do NOT enjoy grinding rep.
Saying the game was always like this is just false. I have played since vanilla. It has never been this bad.
In BC I spent 90% of my time in arenas with my friends having fun.
In BFA I spend 90% of my time doing garbage chores to get my characters ready for “the fun stuff”.
It hasn’t always been like this, and it’s not a mystery why so many people are saying F this and quitting.
I am really hoping that the leadership at blizz is actually listening to this sentiment and is just too embarrassed to come out and admit that they made some bad choices. I hope they get it right in SL.