[Retail] [Feedback] - The amount of Crest/Flightstones you gain should increase on alts

Community WoW Community Council
1

The Problem

Starting out an Alt or just swapping the Main is a grind sore. It means you are being behind 540 Crests per Type (Whelpling/Drake/Wyrm/Aspect), which is 45 Dungeons or 54 Raid Encounters. This means a lot of effort and time to catch up to the progress of your main. Therefore, I would like to advise introducing a catch-up system for alts to progress towards the power level of mains which is reasonable.

Prerequisite Achievement to unlock increased rate of earning Crests

Currently, there is already a possibility to up rank Crests on Mains. These Achievements should also unlock an account-wide buff similar to the Worthy Ally Renown Buffs to provide a head start for alts.

The following examples take dungeons as base, but should apply to any content providing crests.

Dreaming of Drakes

Getting the Dreaming of Drakes Achievement should provide you with a 100% Buff (stacking up to 200%) to Whelpling and Drake Crest earned per activity on your account till you reach 75% of the current Season Maximum.

Earning Dreaming of Wyrm and Aspects increase this earning Rate by 50% per Achievement.

You would gain 24 (30/36) Crests per Dungeon or 10 (15/20) per untimed Dungeon just with the Achievement.

Dreaming of Wyrms

Getting the Dreaming of Wyrms Achievement should provide you with a 100% Buff (stacking up to 150%) to Wyrms Crest earned per activity on your account till you reach 75% of the current Season Maximum.

Additionally, unlocking at least the Dreaming Wyrms Achievement provides you with a 50% earn rate increase of Flightstones.

Earning Dreaming of Aspects increase this earning Rate by 50%.

You would gain 24 (30) Crests per Dungeon or 10 (15) per untimed Dungeon just with the Achievement.

Dreaming of Aspects

Getting the Dreaming of Aspects Achievement should provide you with a 100% Buff to Aspect Crest earned per activity on your account till you reach 75% of the current Season Maximum.

You would gain 24 Crests per Dungeon or 10 per untimed Dungeon just with the Achievement.

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I would like to add here a recent discussion topic from the council discord

Flightstones feel like a Feast or Famine resource, if you have an alt you have done casual content on but now you want to play a bit more you’re drowning in flightstones from the passive things you did. However, progressing a character further as you complete harder levels of content or even a main flightstones are the bottleneck to getting upgrades.

From example, today I gained my first mythic 2h from the raid from my vault, I had enough crests to immediately get it to 489 but I needed over 1000 flight stones. So now I have had to go and do content that is completely irrelevant to me to just to earn these stones. The amount that drop from trivial content is between 10-15 and when I need 1000 for 1 item this feels super grindy. I like the way crests have panned out because I need to do relevant content to upgrade relevant gear to the levels where they are a good upgrade but the flight stones feel to completely detract from this style of play.

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I do wonder how much of this is fully intentional because they want people to fill out those low-end world content events otherwise the open world doesn’t really function too well. I think back to Legion or BfA and basically every world quest had a good few people there doing it, Invasions were active all because of AP, now that AP is gone they believe that something else is needed to keep that content alive and semi-relevant for everyone. Flightstones are absolutely the lesser evil between the two but it still feels a bit bad to have to go slog out trivial content that isn’t too fun in order to grind a pitiful amount of flightstones.

One of the first things I would change would be to make turning Sparks into Crafted items not require 250 flightstones - I guess this is their way of trying to tie the crafting system into the upgrade system even more than the crests required for the Enchanted Crest, but it’s just an extra wall that I don’t think benefits the system. The player already has to pay for high quality materials and if they are without guild crafters then they will also likely have to spend a few thousand for the craft. Combined with actually acquiring the crests from dungeons or raids, is that not earned enough?

I’d also maybe look at particular slot upgrade costs, weapons seem especially egregious - I understand that due to them being far more powerful items that the cost may be higher but it still feels a teeny bit excessive.

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