Professions Professions gave powerful equipment, with recipes frequently gated behind various content, and the best stuff was usually BoP. Invest in the right professions and you received a significant power advantage. This was further imbalanced because investing in a gathering profession would seriously set you back in power. Mains and raiding alts were double crafters. The advantage to players gifted in making money was obscene in all areas of the game.
Reputation Gear Every expansion until I think…WoD? Had powerful gear locked behind reputation. Every new tier had a new rep just about where you could grind out rep and buy very good gear and other bonuses. Heck many enchants and other mandatory power items could only be self-applied and had to be obtained through rep.
Rated PVP You pointed out classic pvp but are you forgetting the rated pvp system everywhere but legion basically? Hell in BC gladiator gear was basically the way to gear up if your character wasn’t already raid ready, since everyone wanted raiders for their dungeon runs.
Well, my only +15 I did, our healer only had 1 Essence, Rank 1, our Rogue (was an alt) was also 421, I only had 2 essences back then, neck 57, and only 430ish gear.
So I’d say if someone like me who doesn’t really care about Mythic+ beyond the weekly cache can do it, sure.
But at the same time, why are you expecting to be doing +15 day 1 of hitting 120 on your alt ?
What benefit does it add to the game by making you grind up wrath glyph slots rather then just making them base line?
I don’t care about cosmetics being tied to grinds keep rank 4s as they are but make everyone have access to what are effectively talent points once 8.3 hits.
You responded to a post about essences. Your first and second paragraph were about essences. You concluded by saying BIS gear…
If you mean to say people want all gear handed to them once their alt hits 120 that is an even crazier claim that no one is actually making and which I would like to see evidence for.
Just because you are doing it does not mean its good game design, fun, or acceptable to others. I can post plenty other people hating the grind because its a huge time sink for almost no fun or challenge. So we do not feel like its a great achievement of sorts. Its just a participation award for doing the mindless time sink. Yay?
Id rather progress up via mythic plus on alts. You know the alternative method that Blizzard introduced that has scaling difficulty and can be grinded up for an endless challenge? Yea thats my thing. Instead Blizzard says I need to do the same 21 day grind over and over and over again just to get what I need with the time I have. Then once I finish it I can go enjoy the content that earns my $15. No I would prefer agree with the premise that I can gear up the way I enjoy gearing up without feeling required to do other content I do not enjoy for BIS.
Its the same reason I have asked for PVP vendors and a backwards scaling from pvp- raiding - dungeons -world quest gear to keep people doing things that they love and give them power progression and therefore status in the content they love.
The current essences systems smells of being an afterthought (because it was) I and most people I play with are huge fans of the system. Pre 8.2 I was able to comfortably manage 3 alts with alot of time investment and grinding. The essences system has arbiltrarilly added another 21 hours to that spread out over 21 days which makes playing them no longer worth it. Which makes the game value go down for me and many around me.
BFA has been called Beta For Azeroth. Blizzard shills have just accepted that a new system of 8.2 will be accepted as normal as 8.0 and 8.1 were. Except the lipstick on the pig does not hide the fact that rep grinds, pvp grinds, daily grinds all are still boring to do on your Nth character. Many would prefer comfort and joy in playing the content they love.
I was getting at the point that you do not see that happening because its a huge dps loss to do so. I do not know what group you ran with bit I would be interested to see the numbers and the M+ link as I would like to get more information on this key you say you ran. I tried to find it but it shows that you only completed +10s on your character in raider io
You only need to do pathfinder on 1 character and your whole account has access to its rewards. So why include that in your “EVERY ALT NEEDS TO DO X” rant?
Secondly, not every alt NEEDS to do pvp to be viable. Not even daily quests. Not even the mechagon dungeon unless one of your BiS essences is VoP. Even the rep essences are not needed unless they are one of your BiS essences.
Some Guilds were clearing mythic EP when most of their essences were either rank 1 or rank 2 and only had 1 or 2 of them in their neck.
And if you have so many alts to the point that it is tedious, that is on you and not on blizzard.
I don’t think it would be wise to just remove them would just anger people who have spent the time to grind them out. Catchup mechanic would be the way to go.