Bag bloat has been weird. Even if we didn’t have full crests, and just fragments would’ve cut down the inventory space by half, which would’ve felt good. I also think the amount of currencies across and the amount of tiers feel bad. Current thoughts on the system:
Pros:
- Similar to M+ S1 valor upgrades, I don’t feel like I’m losing out on items I get in raid OR most dungeons. I can ‘upgrade anything’. Usually, normal items from raid are invalidated because of the previous mythic tier in terms of an item level comparison. Knowing I can upgrade normal loot to be still better than the previous tier mythic we clear feels really good, and bridges the gap between getting it in heroic vs normal. So that just feels wonderful.
- For the average joe, upgrading even regular gear in the world has felt good - This is feedback from two friends of mine. I don’t have a huge grasp on this yet, haven’t started my alts.
Cons:
- Unlike Season 1 M+, I have no reason to run lower m+ on my main with friends other than to carry them. I don’t get crests that I’ll logically use, and any special/key items I get if I wanna min-max can’t really be upgraded to the item level I want, so I have to farm the keys on the higher end still.
- The upgrade system is still just so confusing with how many currencies there are, but it’s a decent start since everything is malleable
I think to address the first con my original thought was “What if there was a reagent that can upgrade an item from tier to tier, something that we can only do once a week like with a catalyst system on a really good item”, but that just keeps muddying the waters with how complex the entire crafting system is. Then I thought, “What if we just used the flightstones to upgrade item level to a certain range/rank, then only used the crests to upgrade that to another range/rank”. I think this would work out far better, and gives us some incentive to still farm lower end keys - realistically, you can get a key from a +5 and upgrade it to the highest item level, instead of “welp, I still gotta farm a high-end key to upgrade this”.
What I’m getting at is: I had a guildie who got a Fragment from halls in a +11 at the start of the season, and he was happy - but he still knew he had to keep grinding halls to eventually replace it with the same thing. It feels counter-productive to have a system encouraging us to upgrade our gear, but being required to re-farm the same item if you want it at the highest item level that we’re being encouraged to obtain.