It feels really bad that after acquiring hero gear you then have to go back to 11-15s to farm wyrm crests to upgrade that gear. Being forced to run content that is not challenging, that you’ve already progressed past, is not fun. It’s bad design.
If you’re gonna have different levels of upgrade tokens, they should drop with the gear that they upgrade. So, for example, make it so content that drops champion gear drops wyrm crests and champion gear is upgraded by wyrm crests. That way, you can keep running content that is challenging and fun, that’s appropriate to your gear level, and get rewarded for it.
Essentially, the problem is created by having upgrade tracks that are upgraded by two different levels of upgrade tokens. This creates a disconnect between acquiring gear and acquiring tokens to upgrade that gear. Which doesn’t make sense. It’s bad design. The ability to downgrade crests does not ameliorate this problem, because downgrading crests also feels bad, especially at the start of a season when there’s a cap on crests.
It’s just pointless to ever do lower keys for crests. Once you cap on crests it gives you the next lowest crest. So early on, it’s best to just push as high as possible and keep doing Aspect’s crests, cap that, then continue to go for BiS drops and get heroic crests. Zero reason to ever do lower crests or downgrade crests early on.
It is currently the best gearing has ever been and the best design. You never have to leave the content you’re pushing.
The WoW Dev team, going back years now, has been making the game NEEDLESSLY complicated and convoluted. The insane number of currencies and materials that we have to collect is not good game design, nor is it “FUN”.
As long as we have people in charge who view the game through spreadsheet data instead of actual gameplay, WoW will continue its downward spiral and continue to lose players to other, more enjoyable games.
It would’ve been better if gear had a single track but exponential costs to upgrade per rank and the game tracks where you started and prices accordingly. This way, Johnny McCasual can eek his way up to good gear doing his babymode content but will effectively never reach what Timmy McTryhard can accomplish is far less time since Timmy McTryhard will start with gear much more along the track to begin with and need far less of said currency to upgrade it to maximum.
It’s worse when you need to run 6’s for drake crests. I only go to 476 on any character. But if I get a champion piece that’s below 4/8, I need drake crests. So sometimes alts have tons of wyrms from farming 11’s but I can’t upgrade a piece until I get drakes… and I can’t exactly downgrade and I will use the wyrms once I get the piece to 4/8 lol
You don’t have to farm them, you can trade down any crests you get or you can just keep running higher keys until gear drops in that slot. And if the gear doesn’t drop, then you take the coins and buy the wrym crests.
No because the expotential cost means if you farmed low keys, you started very low on the track and thus took a LOT more grind to get that item up. Exponential cost with a way for the game to track where the start is.
In the Valor system people still had to complete high keys for IO just as your suggest means they would be pressured to complete high keys for gears. But in either scenario once the first objective is done then the easiest way to get upgrade currency is spam the lowest key that awards that currency.
Edit: this also would make players hesitant to spend any currency until they have heroic gear (or whatever their goal is). This also occurred with Valor.
This is somewhat like what I wish we had, only instead of tracking where you started, it’s just the current system but veteran to myth track are all merged into one. You still need the flightstones, you still need the crests, you just don’t need to farm the gear at a higher level. While people would still be going into low keys to farm the items, they could adjust the amount of flightstones and crests to slow down the speed at which people can upgrade. And with the time gating of crests that they already have at the start of the season, people who are doing content where they need hero/myth gear so early on would still need to do the high keys to bypass the timegating from starting with a lower levels piece.
The point is that players can get heroic level gear, and eventually upgrade it enough that it requires aspects to become mythic level gear. The upgrade system allows you to get into the next tier level.
It makes no sense that aspect crests can’t just act like the lower tiered crests. The crest system is ridiculous. A bunch of tier’s of them AND you need flightstones. What’s wrong with just one thing? They could’ve just uncapped valor and it would’ve been the same thing but less stupid.