I wish blizzard would focus on gameplay, class design, and balance instead of ways to keep our characters logged in for multiple hours a day. Unfortunately they appear to want to please shareholders more than consumers. Please can we go back to the time when your character had an end point? Where I could log on and say, “My character is done gearing I am officially BiS!” This whole idea of paragon leveling is extremely obviously just a way to keep your playerbase logged in. It is sad to see blizzard start to rely on this system more and more. Let’s go back to the time where seeing the blizzard logo meant you were going to play a badass game with rewarding breakpoints and not an everlasting grind to gain more power. ( If you didn’t know the cape and neck level forever and give your essences more power and allow you to wear more corrupted items. That is the current paragon system in place. )
hits rank 80 on the neck
sees to my horror that the AP bar didn’t disappear
They give you the option.
It’s up to you (and me) to exercise self control.
I hit 80 around 2 weeks ago, give or take. I will hit 82 some time in the next few days.
I haven’t done much world questing since hitting 80, and just enough islands to get the weekly cap for the mission.
There really is no benefit to grinding my neck at this point. So I stopped at 80. The rest has been incidental.
The cape grind has been less that 40 minutes per day…
The most bizarre part of WoW’s swerve into trying to milk every minute of daily gameplay it can out of us in the last few expansions is that it doesn’t actually benefit them in any way. We pay a flat monthly rate to play, not dollars per minute of live game time. Forcing us to keep actively playing longer and longer is, if anything, detrimental to their profits because it fuels burnout and drives people away as they give up on keeping up with the grinds or get sick of the repetition.
What option was I given? If I want my character to be the best it can be there is literally no option for me. You physically cannot come to an end point in the game. You cannot get BiS gear unless you are literally the RnG god. ( Good luck getting 6 seperate slots of gushing wound corruption on your best statted gear…literally impossible) There is no end point to the neck giving your essences 1% damage each level. There is NO endpoint therefore there is no option right? Not sure what you are trying to say with your argument.
I stopped going out of my way for AP as soon as I hit 75. You know just cos you see a bar doesn’t mean you need to fill it up.
The point is to give people some small insignificant reward if they want to keep going.
You’re the one telling yourself you have to keep going.
You don’t.
And sees to my horror that the following emissary still gives AP instead of gold
Regarding this, sometimes I do feel like I’m playing a mobile game, with all the candy crush, matching game, turtles stuff. I wonder how do you all tolerate that “try to remember the path and follow it!” and the “you can fly in these bubbles!”.
I never touched legion WQ again after getting my pathfinder.
When you said RNG God I instantly thought of Neo from the Matrix…
Random Saturday Thoughts
Getting BiS gear and having the ability to wear more corrupted pcs via continually leveling the cloak is small and insignificant? Look at warcraft logs and tell me that having the best corruption from being lucky is small and insignificant and that it won’t just get worse with people being able to put on two t3 infinite stars instead of one eventually etc. Getting lucky rewards you more than having skill and the 2 of the 3 paragons in place reinforce that concept even more.
i have been wondering this for quite a while. the extreme alt unfriendliness to perpetuate their linear story line, and time played metric doesn’t make a bit of sense on a subscription based game.
It’s never like that since the beginning at Vanilla.
You might be in a wrong game. BTW, MMO has no ending.
What are you talking about? Legion was the first expansion it wasn’t possible to get bis gear because of titanforging. If you remove titanforging and corruption BiS gear is 100% accessible.
I actually looked forward to this system. I grind a lot. And this is more to compensate for my lack of skill in PvP. So an infinite neck that I can keep getting levels to have a bit of an edge really helps. I just hit 83 neck level today.
The neck concept is fine by itself. It isn’t enough power to warrant farming mindlessly but it still gives something to players who wish to do so. It is only mentioned because it is paired with the other mindlessly farming ideas in the game. ( doing 400 mythic plus until you get 6 gushing wound corruptions )
It benefits them in China and makes them look good on analyst calls.
I wish their stance was the same that SquareEnix has in this regard. Basically, “we hope you’ll have fun and play our game, but you should also take breaks and play other stuff too, it’s not healthy to only play one game all the time.”
A new patch comes out, you play the content, you get as far as your character can go/as far as you want to, then you unsub and play something else for awhile.
I have two days left. I find leveling necks and capes to be unacceptable.
There may be no definitive end to the game, but the game is broken up into smaller chunks that do. There is an end to each expansion, an end to each patch, an end to the week, etc. These smaller endings give players metrics by which to judge when they’re “done” with everything they feel they need to do in a given time period. They can feel they’re “done” with the expansion or a patch once they’ve cleared the latest raid, or gotten as geared as they’re reasonably going to get. They can feel they’re “done” with the week once they’ve earned all the rewards they can earn that week. Etc.
At least, we used to have those smaller endings. The numerous avenues to increasing character power through AP grinds, daily grinds, RNG gear upgrades, etc., etc., all layered on top of each other have created a system where it gets harder and harder to ever feel done on a character for more than a day or two. This was really at its worst in Legion with stuff like the random drop legendaries and titanforging.
BFA was striking a better balance of this for a while. The infinitely upgrading neck is much easier to stop caring about at a certain point than our Legion weapons were, and the lower caps on warforging make fishing for them feel much less necessary. It gave us those smaller end points that we could identify by reaching a point of diminishing returns on continuing to pursue that particular power creep, while still leaving the door open for those with the inclination to keep creeping to do so.
But the addition of corruptions and the cloak grind are bringing a lot of that bad old “never finished” feeling from Legion back. They’re such a massive boost to character power that they can’t be ignored without falling far behind the game’s power curve, getting them is multiple layers of RNG (getting a corruption, getting a good corruption, getting a high rank of a good corruption), and using them without killing yourself requires grinding souls to buy vessels to grind visions to upgrade your artifact. It’s still not as bad as Legion, but…
It’s still just…
Exhausting.
I have other stuff to do.