With the recent announcement that AK is frozen until the new raid, I have to say that this is hot garbage. The balance should be for your average player (that’s prob like 30?) to have the defensive traits unlocked 3 weeks, at most, after the release of the raid. It’s fine to grind for a few more weeks after that to get the +5. On that note, with an extra ring the +5 will be more meaningful than it is now.
Now, if there’s some wizardry of balancing things that means you need to stop AK for some overall game reason? Ok, fine. So be it. But you better reduce the requirements on the new armor to meet that new balance point as well.
No one wants to regrind AP for 2 months every tier just to unlock the same damn powers they’ve been using for months. That would be just like in Legion if every tier when we were farming AP we weren’t getting anything new. Instead they had just disabled our Gold Dragon traits and we were re-earning those. Yeah, sounds freaking stupid doesn’t it? That’s the same thing Blizzard is doing with Azerite right now, and yeah it’s freaking stupid.
I dunno. I took two months off, barely play due to work, never push anything, don’t even have the first part of the War Campaign done, don’t have Pathfinder Part 1 yet, and I’m already 31. I didn’t even try.
I guess it depends on what you consider average. I have 6 120s. We have done no dungeons almost no islands. I do world quest and then warfronts to gear up. I have done world bosses and stuff. But all 6 are 23-27.
Just depends on what normal is for you. If you do islands and wq that reward AP when they were up I would expect even a casual player would be higher. And if they only ran 1-2 characters I would expect them to be running away from me.
As far as I’m concerned I love ak cap, it was the best time for me in legion because you felt that grinding was meaningful from that point, grinding before cap means that next week what you farmed will means less.
It’s also their way to keep ap relevant and reducing the level needed of ap between raids.
I dont even bother to do any quest. LOL, I am at 26 pushing mythic for mythic raids on my rogue and my alt. Cant be bothered to farm it. Rather farm rep to get a mount or something that I can always use over farming AP.
Yeah no. High 30’s is only for mythic raiders, low 40’s isn’t required for anyone. Normal raiders will only need around 32 and Heroic raiders only around 34 to unlock ALL of their dps traits… even Mythic raiders will not need 38 until the second week of raid.
In addition knowledge will resume progressing when the heroic raid opens.
If they had not frozen it many players, myself included, would have been low or mid 40’s when the raid opened. This would cause there to be very little to work towards for that entire patch where it is relevant lol.
The defensive tier of traits requires 43 for Mythic raiders, and the +5 ilvl is 48 or 49? I believe it’s 39 and 45 for heroic. Just because I’m a mythic raider doesn’t make it feel better to regrind traits I’ve been using.
And again, I’m fine with grinding out the +5 item level trait for several weeks, I’m even fine with the defensive trait maybe being 2-3 weeks after release if you haven’t been going too hard.
Let’s say at this exact moment you have a level 35 heart (higher than average). I think a level 38 heart takes 90k AP at these levels to get? That’s multiple weeks even for someone getting a pretty good amount of AP every week, just for that one level. So maybe you’ll be 38 when the raid releases, maybe. If you grind it a lot.
Now, even when AK kicks back in because you are now operating at a base of like 120k? it will take several weeks even when AK kicks back in to get it back down in the 30-40k per week to actually let you level up in a reasonable way without it still taking multiple weeks.