The system has so far been a welcome addition, at least for me; it’s useful for getting alts up to speed, it’s put raiding, M+ and outdoor content in the same currency, and the discounted prices when upgrading slots that you already have higher item levels for is extremely welcome. Now if only this could apply across alts too then we’d be really in business.
I agree with previous concerns that it is yet another set of multiple items that could have maybe been currencies instead, as Crest shards+the crests themselves+the reagents we’re gathering throughout the expansion have weighed down heavily on reagent bag space. These “gather 10 of an item, then click it to make 1x whole item” items could maybe do with an overhaul of some kind to prevent bloating bags further, but at the same time I’m not sure what the solution could be.
I’ve personally not found the upgrade path all that confusing. It’s maybe a controversial opinion, but I believe the many charts and explanations that were given out prior to the release may have muddied the waters far more and it made it appear far more complex than it really is. It doesn’t require much to see how it works through simply using it, as it the costs and items required for the upgrades are spelled out in the upgrade window.
Let me start by saying I think this upgrade system is such a huge leap forward. I’ve loved the ease of farming the materials required and being able to get some sort of discount for alts is a welcome change.
There are a couple things that I feel could use another look, though.
Inventory space - In a world where bags are flooded with profession materials and ranks 1-3 of all sorts of items, having to use 8 more inventory spaces for crests and fragments feels bad. Perhaps another unique bag slot like a coin purse for these materials in the future?
Farming lower-tiers - Having to go back and farm lower-tier content when you’re farming Aspect Crests feels pretty bad. Once you’re capped on Aspect Crests, I think Wyrm Crests should begin to drop instead, and so on and so forth throughout the tiers.
One more extremely minor note that I just noticed before I hit the post button, but is it too much of an economy-buster to make the crests vendor for different prices? Feels weird that my Aspect Crests are worth the same as Whelplings.
(+)You can get the currency to upgrade items from any type of content. Finally it isn’t only M+ with Valor. Being able to still find upgrades after you’ve beaten a difficulty of raid but not quite there for progressing through higher difficulties is so nice.
(+)Crest discount for having a high ilvl item of that slot already. Sometimes from M+ secondary stats or special effects make another item strong but you can’t justify spending resources on it to beat our your higher ilvl piece. No that doesn’t matter.
(-)Limited crests. Just uncap this stuff from the start. The previous point kind of alleviates some of this in the crest system vs M+ valor but it is still annoying. Let people grind if they want to. It doesn’t hurt anyone. If I have a whole day of game playing, which I don’t usually have, let me grind it out if I want to. The seasons always felt better once valor was uncapped.
(-)Bag bloat. I don’t know why every expansion needs more and more junk that goes in our bags. This is compounded but the strange decision that was made to have qualities for materials. Just as another game got rid of that for a lot of materials, Blizzard brings it to us in WoW to torment us. Crests should really be a currency. You used the Currency tab for Flightstones, why not crests too? Just make every upgrade take 15 crests to upgrade instead of making us turn 15 fragments into a crest itself. Save us from the bag bloat!
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.
The existing crest and fragment arrangement certainly contributes to inventory management concerns. While I can’t promise anything at this early stage, moving crests to the Currency tab is under serious consideration and I think it’s more likely to happen than not for next season. Additionally, having players capped on a given tier of crest getting the next tier down as fallback rewards is under discussion.
And yes, I did implicitly reveal that our current tentative plans are that this system will be iterated on for Season Three.
I can understand incentivizing players to do lower keys so other players aren’t finding it so difficult to get groups for 2-15 level keys, but players who max out their Aspect crests can just as easily choose to do easier dungeons for the same currency rewards if they want to.
Just feels bad to do content that awards worse gear to keep up with the currencies.
Wasn’t one of the reasons this system got implemented to prevent people from farming easier content for rewards? Because this is exactly what is happening. The conversion rate should be 1 Aspect Shadowflame’s Crest for 2 Wyrm’s Shadowflame Crest.
It starts to become a chore if we need to do mythic key 11-15s (ofc you’ll pick an 11 for speed) just to upgrade our heroic raid gear.
Yes. It should be in the currency tab. Shards should just automatically convert to a full crest, but even having just the shards in the bag which the crests getting put into currency tab when complete would help.
Yeah, I feel like with the 3rd party resources and stuff people post in discord, it makes it really easy. For someone who is more casual and doesn’t use anything like that, I can see it being rather convoluted.
100% biggest gripe is that if I’m doing 16+ and get capped on one currency, I have to go do 11-15 instead for the other currency once I run out, despite needing the higher ilvl gear I am targetting in 16+ keys.
I have found absolutely 0 use for whelp rank crests on my main past week 1, and can’t even send them to alts. We should be able to trade upward and not just downward for these.
What they are saying here is that if you are capped on rewards you would receive for doing say a +15 that the next time you do a +15 you get the next tier crest fragment down. So you’d be doing harder content than the crest you are receiving.
I don’t think you understand. I will try to rephrase it. If you do understand, I apologize.
Say you were doing +15 keystones. +15s drop Wyrm crests. You’ve capped out on Wyrm crests already. You cannot get anymore for the week. Instead of no crest dropping after completing another +15, people want the 15 to drop the next lower tier crest. In this case you would get a Drake crest for completing a +15 since you are capped on Wyrm crests.
The new System feels overall very great and is a welcome addition. You can upgrade a non-BiS replacement without woring about losing out ressources while you farming your BiS. For my personal experience it felt a bit to fast in terms of gearing, which is general great if you enjoy having twinks but also cost longterm motivation on the main. The best part of a season is getting new gear (atleast for me).
Possible Solutions
10 crests for the higher tier (Wyrm/Aspect) seems like too much per week. I’d really like to see this halved going on to make gearing a bit slower and still allow heroic gear to be an upgrade through raid week 4.
This also prevents the equipment curve between people with lots of time and people with little time from being as wide as it is now (423 - 440 atm. from my observation in m+). If you pursue getting all crests per week you in for alot of M+ and Raiding, which I personally don’t have an issue with but I can imagine some might have.
I personally liked the old system a little better because of a single currency. This system also when you first start out can be kind of confusing to understand with how many different tokens there are. If I just came back to WoW after taking a long break this system would confuse me and might overwhelm me at first. However after doing the proper reading mind you outside of the game, I rather like this new system and so do a few of my friends and guild mates.
Maybe if there was a way to simplify it a little bit perhaps by getting rid of the part where you have to gather 15 of the little tokens to turn it into the main component it would free up some bag space and make it easier for people to understand without having to exit the game and go to a guide.
We have an issue with one of my players, I hope I will translate it well.
He actually does 15/16 M+ (and gets wyrm crests I think).
His stuff upgrades currently requires drake crests.
To get drake crests he should farm rare (slow and even nerfed recently have I heard), do 10/11 M+ (feels wrong), downgrade wyrm crests (feels even worse) or do the heroic quest (once per week).
I really like the new upgrade system. The complexity isn’t as bad as it sounds when you actually just engage with the system in practise. The big graphs and tables made by many members of the community (and your explanation post itself) tend to overcomplicate something which is simply put: Do Content → Get Crests → Upgrade Gear.
A few things I would like to see changed:
Currency tab exists for a reason, but you (Blizzard) have already posted that you’re provisionally looking at doing this for Season 3.
I would like to see it possible to earn lower tier ranks once you’re capped. Making people feel incentivised to do content which is ‘beneath’ them isn’t too fun for a lot of people and also I think makes finding groups for people who should be in the 11-15 range harder, as now they are competing with people who are in their 430s who really should be doing 16s+. (Edit: I also know that you’ve posted about this as well!)
I would also like to potentially see Whelpling Crests become Bind on Account. Being able to kit out a fresh character with enchanted whelpling crest gear would give a bonus to professions whilst also making my whelpling crests on my main not a complete waste of inventory space/5 gold.
Implement into the base game the weakaura that exists to put in grey the possible upgrade levels of each crest and on gear. This isn’t included properly on all the tooltips by default. For example, the tooltip by default simply reads “Item Level 424, 4/8 Champion” - the weakaura I use has "Item Level 424, 4/8 Champion (415-437) which makes understanding what each rank is easier at a glance. I’ve also seen the suggestion of using the crafting star system from 1-5 in addition to this. It also adds the item level brackets for each of the crests.
Overall, I vastly prefer this system over the former Valor upgrades. I didn’t enjoy hoarding Valor in case I made a wrong choice because it was capped, and when uncapped, I don’t think it’s a good gameplay experience to spam the easiest content in the ecosystem (+2s) to get (non vault) Best in Slot, so that being changed is healthy for the game.
There was a similar suggestion (now turned into an addon) on Twitter about adding the same quality icons from materials to the ranks (as well as the item level brackets), and it looked fairly clean. The names of the ranks and how they relate to quality are the one thing I would say isn’t super clear at the moment, and this would help clear it up some.
Here to add my opinions about the current systems and what can be improved moving forward (some might be repeated from earlier posts).
Things I like:
An upgrade path for raid items
A reason to raid HC when normally doing M+ keys that give better gear
Unified system for all content (PvE)
A decent way to gear up through World Content (for those who don’t do m+/raid)
The “free upgrade” system where if you have a higher item level item available, you don’t need to pay with crests to upgrade.
Things that needs to be improved:
Readability for new and returning players. The fact that I had to pin an image explaining which type of content gives which type of level of gear/fragment in our WoW Discord indicates that even veteran players have issues with this.
Things that could be improved:
Crests and fragments being two things. Perhaps have a craft/upgrade cost 15 fragments and remove crests altogether?
Move above said solution to currency tab (looking forward to seeing the solution you’re working on)
As stated before, removes all incentive to do lower level content as it provides no benefit other than being helpful. Valor, as flawed as it was, did provide an incentive to help with lower keys.
Having the “Enchanted” version of crests for crafting
Overall, my opinion is that this feels like a downgrade for those players who only play M+, an upgrade for raiders and a huge leap for Open World players. I look forward to seeing the future iterations of this system.
