The flightstones idea by itself was fine. “We can get valor from everything we do now?” I thought to myself. Sick idea! But since blizzard just can’t help themselves, thanks to someone that doesn’t play the game having a nifty idea we have to cheerfully run the level of mythic key corresponding to the tier of crest we want over and over and over and over to get enough of the stupid things to level our gear up because the drop rates for things are a complete waste of time and the vault will carry you one week and screw you the next week. I think they coulda massively improved things by just removing the cap because it was stupid and scaling valor gains with key level so you’re still rewarded for farming, just not blasting through low stuff for 4 hours so you can add +6 ilvl to your neck.
This weird unnecessary way of timegating combined with really gross meta slave behavior, an overall story that’s kinda meandering and soulless at the moment, and the profession system bogged down by tedium and randomness, people just put the game down and play something else that actually wants to be satisfying instead of being mathematically formulated and perfected to force you to play a long time to progress. They’re so close to making the game feel special again. Just get better writing. Stop being so determined to make the game tedious and impeding in some way at every turn. Make us believe the devs actually play instead of stare at analytics to make every decision in the game. It is not hard.
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I will say overall the crest system was a success. It’s not perfect and my main gripe is that it’s a hard currency that clogs your inventory and you can’t send crests to alts. There’s also nothing to do with the crests once you have all your gear upgraded.
Just with my 2 alts I’ve geared: the crest + crafting system is incredibly fast. It takes 20-30 M+ dungeon competitions (about 15-20 hours of work) and you shoot up to iLvl 440+ easily.
With needing to cap the amount of tokens at the season start: that’s pretty much necessary otherwise people would just slam out 40+ dungeons in a week and get a 20 iLvl boost. They’d have to tune the raid taking this into consideration because usually the first 1-4 bosses in a raid are tuned around people being 5-10 levels below Mythic iLvl.
Early season it forces you to make choices between what to pick from the vault and what to craft. By mid season you have so many shadowflame crests you can full craft a 447 gear set on a new alt and just need to farm +17s for crests.
I think we are looking at it from different angles
I don’t see why crests exist at all. Not how many you can get and how quickly. I would rather they not exist because we already have more than enough materials and currencies being thrown into our bags.
I can do it, because I play this game enough to figure it out and deal with it. But just because its doable doesn’t justify its own existence.
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In one of the dev interviews they said they were going to look at converting it into a currency come 10.2.
That would imply it still exists, so that would leave its place and function effectively unchanged other than me having some extra space in my reagent bag
Its kind of dumb to make a player have to slam out dungeons (that they already have to do for flightstones/shadowflame/whatever ends up dropping natty during the week) of the correct bracket to snap together enough crests for an upgrade. Its a needless extra step and makes you have to refarm a lot for no IO gain so you can get the fragments and stones. I guess to keep people from just forgetting about raiding entirely?
I don’t think the idea is that players will be looking to farm crests of a specific bracket to get an upgrade, but rather that players will naturally get the appropriate crests while doing the dungeons of their natural bracket to begin with.
Remember, one of the things they were looking to solve going into 10.1 was players looking to grind currency by doing lower-level dungeons. Given that, someone who’s around the +15’s pushing into the ASpect brackets feeling like they’d benefit from going into +11’s to farm Wyrm Crests, or someone in +20’s or higher downgrading to +16 to farm Aspect Crests is more like a glitch or flaw in the system, not something actually desired.
In terms of raiding, raiding has had an inverse relationship with a lot of their gearing systems for a while now. Whether it’s Vault, or Crests, people starting off at a given level are set up to be in a drought for what they actually want, with no real way in raids to get them. It’s when you’ve finished your progression that you really have the proper interaction with some of these systems in the first place. That’s the sort of thing Blizzard need to look into when they eventually decide to update raid gearing to the 2020’s instead of 2007.
It makes it so you have to do difficult content to get good gear. It prevents people from grinding +2s after they get 2400 rating. People were even buying carries to 2400 for this purpose.
The crest system is fantastic.
So now we have to spam +11’s and +15’s instead to get our upgrade materials. I don’t see how its a big difference. That level of key quickly becomes a cakewalk
Well there is a big difference.
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you don’t have everyone joining +2s this makes it so fresh characters have a place to start and aren’t being pushed out by higher geared players.
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Since there are upgrade bands, if you want to just farm crests, you go to the lowest level on your band. So since there are multiple bands you have players farming crests spread across many different keys.
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When farming crests you have incentives to not do the lowest in your band. E.g. you could run 16s for aspect crests or you could bump that up to a 17s to get aspect crests and a shot at hero gear at the end of the dungeon.
This crest system is a significant improvement.