Title, I really don’t understand why this extra currency is linked to upgrading items. You have reduced the number of valorstones needed to upgrade gear on alts if another character has a higher item level slot on your account and you’ve also increased drops from raids and mythic plus. Sounds like obvious indicators that it is a useless currency. You’re already limited on how much you can upgrade items on crests but there is this other weird capped currency that has no place in the game.
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I think they had a purpose but that purpose has long since been outgrown.
Originally, before we had crests, we just had valor. Valor let you upgrade items from Mythic+ and was capped each week for how much you could earn. The best thing to do with valor was hoard it until you got an item you were 100% going to keep and then and only then spend it to upgrade that item.
Then along came crests which, between having 4 separate tiers and upgrading the item slot instead of just the item, behaved very differently. The best way to use crests was to spend them aggressively, upgrading whatever you have as soon as possible.
Players needed to unlearn their old habit of hoarding, so valor / flightstones having a low cap and also being needed helped encourage people to spend to avoid over capping them.
At this point though, everyone either already knows this or wasn’t around to have experienced valor. So yeah they’ve outgrown their usefulness and should just be removed.
Yes! I love these posts because there’s ZERO ANSWER that makes sense or is acceptable. Valorstones need to die.
There is NO reason for them. Upgrading your gear should simply reflect the content you clear. “I killed a heroic boss and got heroic crests, so I should be able to upgrade any gear up to heroic.” Is WAYYY better than “oh I need the crest and the stones… better go farm stones to waste my time with content I don’t want to do.”
Need to be removed from the game, just another case of wasting our time. You can even argue why crests exist. If I kill heroic Gally, just let that be the requirement to upgrade all my gear to max heroic track rather than a time gated crest wait. Let the upgrades be skill based rather than time gating.
Complete a m+ 12? Max mythic track upgrades unlocked.
Regardless… delete valorstones there is no need for them and they should be uncapped and acquisition should be multiplied by 100 and warbound if they want to keep them. But they shouldn’t because valorstones are stupid and so unnecessary.
2 Likes
Crests exist to offset M+ gear being farmable. That’s why we used to have valor too.
The original purpse of Flightstones was to get people out into the world and not sitting in instances. No idea how that works for the M+ or raiding crowd nowadays.
For me, it has me doing more than just Delves, so I’m always doing world content for more Valorstones as I spend them all the time.
It’s this. Valorstones exist to make sure you’re doing the Theater Troupe.
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No the real question is WHY put a cap on it
Because Blizzard wanted you to be able to do other content and not be overly punished for it.
To get people to spend their crests instead of hoard them like they would have with the old system.
Valorstones, Crests and the gear upgrade system were all introduced in 10.2. There was no gear upgrading system before, there was no valor in S1 of DF. You just had to get lucky on drops.
In the past, back in Wrath, we had a currency called valor and it was the raid currency used to purchase items with the same ilvl from the raids at the time.
You are completely incorrect. Valor existed for M+ items throughout shadowlands and DF season 1. You got 750 a week and you could spend it on items that dropped from M+ across 12 upgrade ranks.
I feel like it was from when they were still trying to get higher level players into low keys before the squish. Cause thats a thing they were really into the start of DF when low keys and 0s were dead, having higher level players carry lower ones or people alts.
While crests are weekly capped and come from approriate tiers compared the the gear they drop the stones were bests to farm from low level content since it was quicker and the difference in drops between levels wasnt much.
So you might have done your weekly 16s to get all the crests for the week but to use all those upgrades youd need stones and the best way to get those was helping that guy stuck in 4s through a quick clear.
Just gonna spitball questions and ideas to deepen the discussion. So what changes if they make the raid farmable? No lockout once per week? Just farm the raid, which takes less time to clear 8 bosses than it does to clear 8 m+.
Both sets of content would be farmable which would remove the need for crests right? But then I ask why do we need to farm the same thing maybe 50 times to get a piece of gear? The content is clearing the new raid or m+ and if we can clear it why do we need to be lucky to get the reward WE want for clearing that content?
I always look at resident evil games for how replayability is done really well. You have a new game file where you’re freshly going through it and then you have NG+ where you just blast with everything you acquired in your first playthrough and you go for other cool unlocks.
In WoW, that doesn’t exist, challenges with guaranteed rewards. So the replayability feels like your time is being cheated. This is why I say you can make an argument crests don’t need to exist.
I played M+ throughout SL and DF and quite honest this completely eludes me. I don’t remember it at all.
Either way, Valorstones are dumb, or at the very least the cap is dumb.
I constantly have 2000/2000 capped, if I spend some I’m back up to the limit without trying in a few hours.
Right now I have a few of the Red and Purple Valorstone stacks in my inventory from Renown. I’m literally bypassing the cap with these in my inventory because I have no need for them. The Crest cap also annoys me, I have Weathered/Carved/Runed at cap and I don’t want to blow them on Champion Gear but at least it serves a purpose to effectively timegate.
Because people want to progress the raid, not rekill bosses they’ve already done for a full night til everyone has the drops. M+ is a very puggable activity, progression raiding is not. Most people who do higher level raiding set aside an average of 8~ hours a week. They want to spend that time moving forward not farming items.
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Valorstones exist to make people engage with content.
Why though? Champion gear goes up to 658 so you can use your crests to upgrade what you have. Even just to 4/8 champion so you dont spend runed crests. The whole system is set up to let you spend aggressively without it setting you back any noticeable amount.
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They do feel vestigial… if you have the crests the valor stones feel redundant. I think its to get people into world events.
Hero gear and transmutation, don’t know what part gets replaced until vault. Rather not blow Runed crests that could be transmuated into Gilded on what might be replaced by a Hero item from a Mythic dungeon tonight or vault 2 days.