The azerite essences and AP are the major factor now. Two people can have the same iLvl and skill yet have nearly a 10K difference in DPS based on the essence level and neck ap level as you can socket more essences the hogher neck level you are.
This is leading to WoW feeling like a part time job. If you do not have flying you are required to farm ap every day for about 2 hours to get your reputation and ap up. Then you want to do a seperate item level grind as well by doing dungeons, mythic plus, normal/heroic raids, maybe a warfront, a mechagon run, oh and islands also. Oh did you also hear that benthic gear is better than mythic raiding gear if it has a socket? Yea you want those mana pearls also.
This is a second job now and I am paying them to play it.
2 Likes
As soon as they added scaling and Ilvl scaling power progression disappeared. Now essences make it even worse.
8 Likes
The only neck level that matters is 55 and later the other minor power at 65 or so. If your being badly outdpsed outside of those 2 levels, you need to wowanalzyer your stuff because it’s not the neck level. I also haven’t found getting my best essences difficult at all. Especially for warlock (assuming since your posting on a lock), it’s the simplest. You get the rank 2 iris from doing your weekly 10 and you get free rank 2 crucible for being 54 which should have BEEN done.
As someone who often only gets an hour a day to get these things done, I don’t feel like it was a big grind what so ever. Benthic gear is also not as relevant as people complain about it to be if you sim it out compared to the time required to farm it out.
1 Like
Not to mention its worthless in M+ since the effects are only for Naz and EP.
Scaling ilvl was a terrible move and killed a lot of the feeling of power progression.
5 Likes
All by design - they have added these throw away and never ending power systems along with the TF loot lottery specifically to keep players on a never ending treadmill.
While you may not have gotten a full set of BiS from a raid tier in the past, it was possible, and the delta between having BiS and having nearly BiS by completing the hardest content was not that great.
Now one not only needs to complete the most difficult content, they also need to put in hours grinding AP plus complete all kinds of content for chances at TF as the difference between someone just raid logging with mediocre luck and someone grinding for hours every day and having good luck can be quite large.
So then get flying? Also I actively avoid AP quests and am still almost 53.
I’m at 54 on 3 toons and have never went out to do any azurite WQ. I only do the rep missions on the boat and only do the daily mech mission with the daily emissary on my toons. I never do mythic anything or any type of raid.
I am really enjoying essences on my main albeit it’sa bit frontloaded. Haven’t touched alts yet but I can imagine it’s not designed well for them and probably needs something done.
I have found myself rather unimpressed with scaling while leveling, but the belief that power scaling with gear is gone due to ilevel scaling is patently false. You outpace mobs so the difference between my main and my alts is extremely noticable.
Are essences that strong really? I haven’t really given them a second thought
I should start doing the boat missions. I have like 40k resources, just not really interested in any more mission boards.
For raiding and mythic+ they give you the extra but for everyone else it’s not needed.
You get a ton of rep and i’m also getting mana pearls and timewarp badge after the patch. If you do the island each week you also have a chance at a 5k gold mission that I have got 4 in a week sometimes.