I opened yet another cache today and got nothing of note.
Now don’t get me wrong. 10-20 caches is fine, but 500 caches for an item is WAY too much. Add in bad luck protection on these things so I can get them within 50-100 caches instead of 350-500 caches. Which is how many I had to open for most of the legion factions.
I have every single Legion paragon mount. Took me months of grinding on several toons. I would be 100% fine with letting people buy them for gold so they wouldn’t have to go through the stupid grind I did.
I really dislike the paragon thing, but I still keep trying for the mount from The Stormheim guys and that Dolly and Dot toy from the Voldun foxes.
Back at the end of Legion, some devs gave an interview where they said they weren’t going to be putting mounts into paragon chests anymore in BFA because it “felt bad” when you had put months into it and still couldn’t get the drop. Here’s the clip (with the paragon statement at the 10:00 min mark):
I was pretty happy to see this interview, especially when the one guy said that paragon chests would now largely have rewards of the “power” variety - azerite power, resources, gold, etc. That’s the part about paragon chests that works well, a small intermittent nice reward, instead of an intermittent source of disappointment.
Then I saw when BFA came out that they still put toys in them. Didn’t think that was great. One would think that maybe they could have extrapolated that the thing that “feels bad” wasn’t unique to mounts, it’s simply using paragon chests as an RNG delivery mechanism (in Legion, the paragon box that probably gave me the most trouble was actually the warden paragon cache toy).
Paragon chests feel bad when they get used for soulbound collectibles. Going months grinding 10k rep over and over without getting the relevant item is not a fun mechanism no matter what type of item is put in the paragon chest. The only thing to me that’s ever seemed fitting to paragon chests was pets, because those can be bought and sold, making the personal lucky RNG not a necessity to get the item.
Of course… they couldn’t even stick to not putting mounts back in, hence the Nazjatar paragon chest mount, which has eluded me for something like 25 paragon chests at this point (250,000 rep past exalted). Oh, and their new collectible reward for BFA of Rank 4 Essences. They actually have an achievement for getting them all, and while most come from deterministic skill sources, a few were put behind RNG, including the Nazjatar and Mechagon paragon chests. There are some people who have gotten all the Rank 4 essences requiring high end skill, but still haven’t been able to get the RNG paragon ones, and they’re cursing paragon chests up. I’m pretty annoyed myself, even though I’m not really pursuing the highest end skill-based ones, that after all the paragon chests I’ve opened in Nazjatar, I’m still missing Rank 4 Unbound Force (though the missing mount is more annoying).
Obviously they heard the complaints during Legion. It’s one thing to wonder if feedback is landing on deaf ears. It’s a weirder thing when you see devs actually learning from feedback, giving an interview acknowledging it and saying they’ll act on it, and then just kind of forgetting what they learned a few content patches later and reverting back to their crappiest designer impulses.
It’d be nice to see them actually address this type of stuff again. But I’ve never seen Blizzard post about it on the forums, and that was probably the only interview it ever got mentioned in. Don’t think Muffinus, Watcherdev or Warcraftdevs ever talked about it once on twitter either through all the Legion complaints (though maybe they read what people tweet to them more than they read these forums these days).
I got all my legion mounts and toys prior to 150 caches - most within 50 caches. To claim you have had to do 350 to 500 for each faction is a very hard to believe.
Thats RNG baby. Could be 1 cache, could be a million.
Bad luck protection should exist. But at the same time there comes a point where we are just asking them to mail everything to it. The idea, as unpopular as it is, is that some things are rare.
RNG is RNG I got my Ironhoof Destroyer in 2 solo attempts. Should I discredit anyone that has tried several hundred solo attempts just because I got it in 2.
Yeah, but rarity can be implemented in the game under a wide array of different conditions. The real question isn’t whether things should be rare, it’s whether a repeating 10k rep grind is a good mechanism for delivering rarity.
This mechanism for delivery has felt awful since they started using it in Legion. If paragon chests were just about the extra gold and resource power, I’d just think about them as this nice, positive occasional thing. Instead when I open them, I don’t think “yay, 5k gold,” I think “damn it, another failure.”
I’d be happy with them keeping paragon chests as a thing if they either stopped using it to try to deliver rarity or if they put serious bad luck protection into the things (I’d probably put a cap of 20 chests - 200k rep seems enough of a grind to reward whatever toy or mount or Rank 4 essence or whatever other collectible they’d come up with)
Which they have no business being. Not everything in this game needs to be rare, not everything needs to be hidden behind hundreds of hours of grinding and not everything Blizzard does needs someone to defend it.
Curious coins, damn it. I’ve got everything but that unicorn and Khadgar’s head in a ball.
I never got the quest for the Wondrous Wisdom Ball. Now if I get it, it won’t be any sort of challenge. Stuff like that should at least pop before the expac runs out.
I got one of the Paragon mounts and the Wardens toy in all of my time farming. Some of this stuff I feel will take until I’m eligible for the AARP. 
They need bad luck protection. But like you said, they give resources and gold and rare things as a bonus.
The majority of things in this game aren’t rare. Its your opinion that toys shouldn’t be, its my opinion that cosmetic items should the rare rng items since they have no impact on performance.
I’d love it if they dropped BoA Benthic-like items. It would be a great way to gear alts.
Or if the caches had dropped a currency - oh, like the curious coins they DID drop - so that either you got a mount, or you got currency you could use to just BUY the mounts you were missing. That way, getting a mount still would have been a genuine “hooray” moment, but no matter what players could have felt like they were making progress toward the mount they wanted.
My suspicion is that not enough players were doing world quests once they got to exalted (or even revered), and so in an effort to push those time played metrics, they ignored what they learned about paragon caches and “sweetened the pot” with things players would feel bad for not getting.
As someone who likes world quests, and likes that little hit of “hey, I got a goodie box!” when I reach another paragon cache, I wish they hadn’t gone back on their promise to limit the rewards to gold and resources. All that does is turn the player base against the concept and make it more likely that paragon caches will be removed from the game entirely, rather than remaining periodic rewards for people who enjoy world content.
That is one item. He is talking about what 6 different factions.
And everything in the game isn’t rare. There is no reason everything should be on a vendor or guaranteed with an achievement.
I didn’t say that there shouldn’t be rare toys or that there shouldn’t be rare cosmetic items. What I said was this:
You can have rare RNG items in the game. It’s not like rare RNG cosmetics only came into existence in Legion. Paragon chests are a very recent invention. But the delivery mechanism of a 10k repeating rep grind being attached to rarity is a terrible system. (My only point about the toys was that the same principal that applies to mounts applies to them when judging whether a system is good, as they’re all basically different forms of cosmetic rewards).
The question really is not whether rare things should exist, or whether RNG should ever be used, it’s whether this particular method is a good method to utilize RNG in (without bad luck protection).
This repeating 10k rep grind system feels like a terrible thing to combine with RNG. It’s disappointing that they’re still doing it.
I have lost track of how many Rustbolt caches I’ve turned in. Still no rank 4.
I’m confused… the mounts arent worth the grind… but you are grinding for them. Arent you telling them that the mounts ARE worth the grind? You seem to be perpetuating your own source of frustration. Sorry if that doesnt come across right… no offense meant.