Easy post to make but Flightstones are a currency that has no purpose and should not exist in the game.
Crests already gate your progression, and to craft gear with crests you also need to upgrade them by combining them with other expenses via a crafter… Flightstones are literally just an arbitrary extra layer of friction to get through but they don’t actually serve their own purpose well, nor do they serve a purpose at all since the friction to upgrade is already there.
My proposal is literally just to delete the flightstone mechanic. It’d have essentially zero impact on the game and progression and nobody at all would miss them in the slightest. In fact, I think it’d improve the experience of upgrading slightly because when you don’t have enough flightstones it’s frustrating and when you have enough you have more than enough.
Anyway, yup, just get rid of them. They’re the only superfluous aspect of the upgrade system as it stands and they should just go. Thanks for reading, hopefully this post or others like it can get enough upvotes and attention that Blizzard sees that this particular idea of theirs sucks even though the rest of the system is pretty good and they change it.
GL in season 4, pandaland remix and the war within down the road everyone.
Agreed. It’d also have meant I could have upgraded my gear last night for xmog. Or even leave upgrading last seasons gear in place since they wouldn’t have to get rid of last seasons crests. It would let people do things in their own time.
Stacking currencies like we have to in order to upgrade items is a ridiculous design. 1 currency for purchase or upgrade. If you want multiple currencies, cool but follow wrath by designing conversions that make more sense.
Flightstones being capped at 2k, while needing 250 for every splinter merge AND needing flightstones for every rank upgrade coupled with another currency is the type of bloat that just annoys players. Especially newcomers.
Also, grinding for more flightstones has to be the most boring experience in a while.
Their never going to let a previous patches currency apply to new new things. They have been doing it this way going back to badges in the burning crusade. It is intended to prevent the people who are ahead from getting further and further ahead. Taking those currencies away and making you start over actually serves as a catchup mechanic for the casual players who play less.
I think flightstones are there just for the dopamine drip of at least getting something from doing stuff. Mmorpg’s are notorious for this type of psychological manipulation.
This whole gear upgrade system has been somewhat of an improvement but still has huge problems.
Firstly, you just don’t earn enough flightstones. You don’t.
Second, the whole process of enchanting crests needs to go. It’s annoying and completely unnecesssary. It’s creating friction to give enchanters value. Just get rid of it. Everybody will be happy. I promise you.
Third, the discounts for already having higher ilvl in that socket and/or on a different toon on your account simply aren’t enough.
What we have now is really a complicated watermark system reminiscent of Amazon’s New World. Each slot has a “highest ilvl” stat. There’s an account-level highest ilvl per slot modifier. Crests exist to unlock new ilvls on a per slot basis. The type of crest caps that ilvl by gating certain cactivities (eg certain keys or raid tiers).
Grinding out flightstones to get up to an ilvl you’ve already achieved just isn’t fun. Crests are correlated with flighstones. OP is right: we just don’t need flighstones. But get rid of enchanting crests too. Please.
I have to say what we have here is leaps and bounds better than the dumpster fire that was New Worlds watermark system and mutation system.
Having played WoW before they had upgrade paths and before New World, then returning to it after playing New World. I much prefer the way WoW does both M+ and item upgrades over the watermark progression system New World uses.
Even more annoying to me are the stealth currencies that take up space in my bags - dreamsurge coalescence, seed blooms, all the little bricks/coins from the Niffem and more. I strongly suspect they made a conscious decision to put them in our bags after the backlash from the sheer number of currencies in the last two expansions.
I am not in love with flightstones because I never seem to have enough of them., so I find myself grinding them out in open world content and doing old storylines.
On the other hand it is like one of the most old school MMO things they’ve put in the game in years so I don’t really understand people pointing back to WOTLK as if it didn’t have out of instance grinds attached to player power.
True, players would not miss Flightstones if removed.
Players always want to get things done faster, but Blizzard interest is completely opposite - slowing down players. It is never ending battle, just like with timegating and rng.
