Reality Check for those who don't believe Anima is a problem

Community General Discussion
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Now before I begin, I’m not going to discuss the topic with people who aren’t invested in needing Anima and think that this is not important because it’s just cosmetics. Obviously, our goals in game are different, and I respect that. But, if collecting things is not a priority for you, then I don’t need anyone coming in here and invalidating the real and valid complaints for those of us who actually do care. I’ll just probably mute you.

Here’s an article that does the math on how long it would take to grind Anima. I’m aware that this may have been written before the Achievement upgrades, and before news about the Renown upgrades. But, by the time you get to the really good upgrades, it’s not really an issue anymore. Although, I understand they exist, it’s only after Anima is used to upgrade buildings. And, my concern is my desire to want the Covenant features, cosmetics, and mounts on alts. So, the extra Anima I am getting on my main is not helpful to trying to get them on my alts, which will take just as long.

If you don’t want to read the entire article, I’ll give you the main point here:

Doing the math, it would literally take 24 weeks to get all of the Covenant upgrades, cosmetics, toys, and mounts for one covenant. This is assuming you do everything that is available to you to get them: world quests, pvp, raiding, and dungeons. And, one also has to understand that if you do actually participate in all of these things, you’re basically spending all of your waking time grinding for Anima. So, I don’t want to hear about people that want to say it’s quicker. It’s not. I’ve done it, and you’re lying. So, please, don’t pretend otherwise.

So…one character, constant playing = 6 months. Let’s say you want to do the same thing for each covenant that = 2 years. Let’s say you want to actually get everything in the game and want to run one of each armor type through = 8 years.

Let me repeat that: 8 years.

Again, if you want to pretend that this is not an issue, or pretend that it can be done faster, or if this is not something you’re interested in acquiring, your opinion is not welcome.

If you believe that we will have extremely significant increases in Anima, or extremely significant decreases in pricing - that may be true. But, we don’t know, and this is only about how it is right now. If something does change…and changes drastically, then a new discussion can be had. But, again, this is not like Azerite or Artifact power. In order for Anima acquisition to be on par with that…we need extreme increases in the ability to acquire Anima.

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Thank god everything for the Necrolords looks like garbage.

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Yeah some of the anima requirements are indeed over the top. Makes me feel like Blizzard is trying to start a trend of “anima farming” like transmog farming through expansions which is bad. Like real bad.

Also obligatory white knight response before they come in:

“Lol don’t farm it if you don’t want to. It’s optional stop crying and quit or unsub”.

etc. etc. etc.

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Yeah I won’t be getting many of those appearances/recolors. To expensive.

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It wouldn’t surprise me. And, if that’s the case, forget it, they’ve lost me forever.

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That place is suppose to be made of garbage :rofl:

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I’m doing my part. Only my main has built every building (level one) all my alts just farm renown for power.

Hopefully if enough of us completely ignore the grind they’ll reduce it to increase play time.

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Yeah, I did it on my main, and it was enough to last a life time. It broke me. lol. I definitely have ignored them on all my alts. It’s insane and ridiculous. I honestly don’t understand how the devs think this is ok.

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Bad math. You’re counting some of the same toys and mounts 16 times in your analysis.

Anyways, realistically we’re going to see certain aspects of Covenants being made account-wide. I would guess Sanctum buildings (but maybe specific to each Covenant). If so, that’s still slicing off a ton of anima from this “16 characters fully upgrading their sanctum” figure.

The problem with Anima isn’t this absurd “I want everything” scenario, because I suspect Blizzard will be making adjustments. It’s also definitely a long-tail reward to get all of the Covenant stuff, an expansion-long grind.

The problem, in my opinion, is the simple and realistic scenario of “I want to play some content, but it is gated by 30k anima”. We’re in the middle of a content drought and there’s perfectly good content on the other side of the fence, but we can’t get to it because of this anima gate.

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Ok, well, subtract a bit, and we’re still talking about years of constant anima grinding - more than the run cycle of an expansion. Remember, this number is only valid if you do everything, which is basically playing WoW and grinding Anima when you’re not sleeping or working.

Edited to add: I actually do hope people are right when they predict significant changes. I’m all for that, obviously. It’s just that we don’t know yet because Blizzard refuses to tell us.

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I wouldn’t count on that. One of the interviews talked about making Covenants “mEaNiNgFuL cHoIcEs” past Shadowlands.

If they don’t unlock my cosmetics… I’m absolutely done with this game, 100%.

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If you just do 10 M+ a week, plus a full clear of Nathraia, plus the 500 anima from souls each week, that’s more than 3k anima from just doing the stuff you normally do every week, and you can definitely do that on more than 1 character a week while fully enjoying the actual video game. If you have 2 mains doing that concurrently, you’re accruing Anima at the combined rate at their projected maximum essentially “passively” (I don’t consider it work to play the fun doing the stuff you want to do - M+s and raids).

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I am trying to get all the mogs, pets & mounts and fully understand how daunting my current goals are. I really hope something changes.

By tomorrow I will have 16 max levels one of each armor type/covenant. I have 1 that has one of the level 3 sanctum upgrades and rest are still at 2. 3 characters that in the last 2 weeks finally got all their level 2 sanctum upgrades complete. 4 characters that have unlocked all their level 1 upgrades. I just got 4 characters to 60 last night and have 4 more at 59 that wili reach 60 tonight and leveling all of them at the same time allowed me to collect enough anima to unlock all the level 1 sanctums immediately so at least that’s a plus. None of them have yet to start collecting anima for mogs and we are supposedly 1/4 of the way through the expansion at this point assuming the usual 2 year life.

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Yeah, if you participate in all that stuff, which I don’t. Or, at least I don’t do Mythics. I do LFR, which is equivalent to every other raid level in terms of Anima. I also do enough BG’s to get me to maximum conquest, but victory is obviously not assured each time you go in, so it can be quite time consuming. And, then I did World quests. Lots and lots of world quests, and I think that was the worst part of it. I might have occasionally done some treasure chests, but that wasn’t regularly because many of them are just a pain to get to. So, some of it’s passively, some of it’s not. I also can’t say the Mission tables are reliable because the Adventures are a little OP imo. So, with all of that, it took me a little over 5 months to get everything on one character. And, when I say one character, I literally mean, that’s all I had time to play and I did nothing else except the stuff where I acquired Anima.

That’s a pretty big chunk of time which didn’t allow me to do that on alts. In hindsight, I could have done things differently. Like, at the beginning, I was healing my mission table. That was a mistake! haha. Luckily, I only really did that for a week or so. And, I could have done things concurrently in a “passive” sense. So, yeah, there are definitely some adjustments I would have made if I knew what I know now. But, I think most people really didn’t know a lot of the ways to maximize the Anima grind to the most efficient way possible. Unfortunately, there weren’t any guides on how to do that.

So, I fully admit that in the long run, I could have done this in less time. But, it’s still very significant and not to be taken lightly if one wanted to collect and upgrade everything. I definitely still think this was a huge miss on Blizzard’s part, and it’s very frustrating that they chose to do this. It leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

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This just made me realize something.

When this expansion is over and done with, you’ll be able to come back to this expansion and speed-run through all 3 raids for probably in the neighborhood of like 4.5k anima each week to finish up your mog grinds.

Mog farmers are definitely a demographic Blizzard seems to be attentive to recently, and I can see Blizzard planting seeds for the future for more “gameplay” for these players.

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I’d be very curious to see how long it takes you to do all of it. I think there should be a “world first” contest for this. The time consumption is daunting and anyone who does that has my deepest respect! IMO, this is a greater achievement than downing Mythic Denathrius. lol

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I might think that but then you see all the trouble people are still having with Legion raids let alone BFA raids and it could be years past the end of Shadowlands.

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I doubt I would be close. I have not interest in raids, mythics or bgs and only collect anima through WQs, weeklies & adventure table. Also I still plan on leveling another 20 characters eventually for one of each spec. In the end though that might be helpful as I won’t do anything with the sanctum and instead just focus purely on anima collecting for mogs for those characters.

As far as the adventure table goes I found it’s better to not take the adventure campaign past 30. You still get a ton of anima missions but they aren’t as brutal especially for Revendreth & Bastion.

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This is a good point. I, too, was thinking about being able to solo some stuff after this expansion is over. So, Blizzard would really need to do something about that, too. But, it seems as if they’re not budging on the Legion raids. So, that’s just another bad decision on their part. They’re making this extremely difficult and not really worth the trouble. I think it’s great that they’re giving us so many mogs. But, their concept of how long this should take is completely unrealistic.

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