👺 Sounds like you want a 2nd Main!

[Azreluna-mannoroth (Azreluna)]

@Marshmellowg-shattered-hand

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This post says it’s an hour old, but it seems to be from 6 months ago?

[Jaacs-greymane]

The OP is asking why alts in 8.2 are such a grind, and require so much time put in. I responded by implying it’s because of money.

[Melantin-bonechewer]

Well, we probably have around a year of BFA left. Part of me feels like not a whole lot is going to get done on this front so probably the best thing to do at this point is to target the main issue here: rent-a-class systems that get thrown out each expansion.

This AP, Essense, Azerite, etc. crap needs to stop. We need normal gearing with a normal gear progression path, not this trash that we borrow for an expansion that only fulfills what might resemble a complete class at the end of the expansion, only to trash the entire thing on the next.

[Timboslizzle-frostmourne]

@Mistwynd-lightbringer

It takes something like 10 minutes to get the easy essences. You are pretty much given the first one for free just for unlocking Nazjatar.

Heard it here first guys, why are you complaining about essences it takes 10 minutes to get rank 1 you should all be happy. What’s the big deal?

[Marshmellowg-shattered-hand]

@Draé-frostmourne

If people tell me legion is more alt friendly than BFA I’m gonna tell them they’re either kidding themselves or haven’t played legion when it was launch.

1. Artifact knowledge - you want to be max level at week 1 so you can start rolling work order for your artifact knowledge or you will miss out for the week
2. AP Grind - if you’re playing all spec of your class guess what you’re gonna have to grind every single weapon (Maw of Soul anyone?)
3. Legendaries - legendary make or break the class especially at the start. They had a soft 4 legendary cap at the start and everything still rng. If you get sephuz as your legendary well tough.

Some may want to focus in on that but this is how I am looking at it. The essence system is basically bringing back the worst of all those poor design choices.

1. “You want to be max level at week 1 so you can start rolling work order for your artifact knowledge or you will miss out for the week”
   — This is the essence system because you cannot farm io effectively without having them maxed out. Not having IO makes farming your alt harder. Not farming enough mythic keys results in less gear and a lower M+ box that affects the weekly ilvl and the amount of Residuum you can obtain. Thus decreasing your progression due to a rep, instance locked/honor kill, quest follower xp locked, etc.

2. If you’re playing all spec of your class guess what you’re gonna have to grind every single weapon (Maw of Soul anyone?)
   —The essence equivalent of this is doing your class sets and your dps/healer/tank essences quest on top of doing everything else you need to do. I can do this once my first go around much like the Flying Pathfinder achievement but after that doing world quests becomes an extreme chore.

3. Legendary/Essences make or break the class especially at the start. They had a soft 4 legendary cap at the start and everything still rng. If you get sephuz as your legendary well tough.
   —The rng factor vs the time locked factor is a similar issue. Except with time locked quests against your standard work life makes it a requirement to log in every single day to get the essences grind done. Then after all that you will have very little time to do what you think is fun. Like Mythic plus farming, raiding, attacking the hard and challenging content where the rest of the player base is. Not where the player base is not (which is world quests, and thanks for removing the find a pug world quest finder from legion which would make this better Blizzard).

[Ed-grizzly-hills (Ed)]

Your mistweaver’s neck is 64 after a week? How are you guys doing this? I know you’re all posturing as casuals, but that isn’t possible without heavy play-time daily.

[Draé-frostmourne]

@Marshmellowg-shattered-hand

— This is the essence system because you cannot farm io effectively without having them maxed out. Not having IO makes farming your alt harder. Not farming enough mythic keys results in less gear and a lower M+ box that affects the weekly ilvl and the amount of Residuum you can obtain. Thus decreasing your progression due to a rep, instance locked/honor kill, quest follower xp locked, etc.

Not having enough IO wont stop you from doing your own key

@Marshmellowg-shattered-hand

—The essence equivalent of this is doing your class sets and your dps/healer/tank essences quest on top of doing everything else you need to do.

I will agree but it’s still far simpler than a monotonous grind for your artifact power just to get the 23 lvls after you max out all the skill tree

@Marshmellowg-shattered-hand

—The rng factor vs the time locked factor is a similar issue. Except with time locked quests against your standard work life makes it a requirement to log in every single day to get the essences grind done.

Why? You dont have to do all of it at once. Especially on an alt. Hell I dont even have my full essence on my main unlock. I dont like to do pvp so I just skip it all together. I do high level content and I’m just doing fine

[Beaupeep-draka (Beaupeep)]

@Mistwynd-lightbringer

If none of your alts have any essences at all, that’s on you. It’s not the games’ fault you chose to skip easy and quick content.

I wouldn’t call it “quick and easy” but yeah, i know it’s entirely on me. Until recently my play time was limited anyway, and I’m still trying to reclaim some of that time even now, but it’s coming.

As far as the Legion legendaries… eh. I got pretty lucky with those early off on all my alts so I wasn’t hurting with those, then they out in the mechanic to buy them and I played enough then that getting the tokens for them came pretty fast too.

I don’t think leveling alts is that hard when you’re not needing to spend time on your main.

[Timbaeslice-frostmourne]

@Ed-grizzly-hills

Your mistweaver’s neck is 64 after a week? How are you guys doing this? I know you’re all posturing as casuals, but that isn’t possible without heavy play-time daily.

This Shaman hit 120 on Saturday morning, I’m almost 62 neck and I’ve already done a heroic palace.

But I need to do 3 weeks of Mechagon to get my essence because? Then I need to do dailies for a month because??? Then I have to redo content I don’t want to do (PvP) because?

[Orctang-area-52 (Orctang)]

@Mistwynd-lightbringer

Back in Legion it took 100x as much effort to get decent Legendaries than it does in BFA to get essences.

No, it didn’t all of my alts had Legiondaries!

[Torvald-deathwing (Torvald)]

Legion at launch was brutal for alts. Legion in its latter half was a lot kinder to them. I think most of my alts in Legion got most of their legendaries as a result of me mailing them account-bound legendary tokens from my main, plus they could earn their own currency to supplement legendary item purchases, on top of the random drop legendaries (where they also changed the “bad luck protection” algorithm to treat the “bad luck” cap separately between your specs, which allowed for more drops in your main spec, where if you switched loot specs on a particular night to build up some off-spec gearset and got a legendary, it didn’t reset the bad luck protection of your next main spec legendary drop).

Legion also made playing alts less of a chore since they had unique content and unique rewards with different classes. That has a real psychological effect of playing down the sense of repetition (along with artifact weapons and legendaries themselves just making every spec FEEL more unique to play, even if a lot of that was just aesthetic, aesthetics matter).

Back to BFA, I can understand having each alt go through a bit of an unlock process for essences, but only to a minimal degree. Personally, I think the optimal system would be that each alt has to unlock Rank 1 of an essence on their own (usually a low requirement on Rank 1’s), but after they do, all ranks above that are account bound or function on an account-wide acquisition system. For instance, having a vendor that sells (for a cheap gold price) the highest rank of any essence upgrade you’ve unlocked on your account (including rank 4 - cosmetics have always been the easiest thing to justify treating as account bound in the game, and these cosmetics are not class-specific).

Anyway, that’s how I’d approach it. Not totally account-bound, but an account-wide catch-up as soon as you unlocked the first level of an essence. I think it would walk a nice middle-ground between giving the alts a variety of pursuits to target that feel reasonably achievable, while not feeling punishingly restrictive and repetitive.

[anon46919885]

@Wuzeh-wyrmrest-accord

If I want to play a shallow grind game, I’ll play BDO.

I heard that game has auto grinding. It’ll grind for you. Maybe one day WoW will be as advanced…

[Lillyann-llane (Lillyann)]

This thread is partly why I only play one character. Leveling is one thing (That I don’t enjoy anyways). Getting those needed essences up on an alt is something I wouldn’t do while maintaining this main character. I have other stuff I like to do too in life.

[Wuzeh-wyrmrest-accord]

That must be a new feature ._.

[Maizou-proudmoore (Maizou)]

@Mistwynd-lightbringer

@Lanastrin-proudmoore

She isn’t talking about AP! What is with all this selective reading comprehension? AP is easy to get. I jut got a mistweaver to 120 a week ago and his neck is 64. But the essences! I’m still doing dailies for my BiS essence(pearl). Something my former main has had for over s month. Playing alts, switching mains, all of it is held back by the essence grind that has no catchup mechanism at all.

It isn’t critical to have BiS essences in every slot for your alt.

And it doesn’t take much effort at all to get Rank 2 in three different essences so you don’t have empty slots.

Good luck finding groups with those crappy essences now that people have addons like raider io and others that tell you what essences you have socketed.

I have been denied on alts simply because I have only crucible. And yes, the leaders outright told me it was because I only had Crucible.

So, try again.

And STOP HAVING SELECTIVE READING. Seriously, half of your replies you ignore 90% of people’s replies. Your first reply in this thread you ignored the main point of the thread with “SEEMS FINE TO ME” and list how you have plenty of artifact power on your alts. The issue isn’t artifact power, it’s the essences. It’s ENTIRELY the essences.

---

And I can 1000% guarantee that any group in their right mind would take a healer probably up to 30 ilvls lower that has a rank 3 Rustbolt Essence over my alt that doesn’t have it. Storing overhealing and using it as actual healing is insanely powerful.

Some essences are just TOO powerful. Period. The Rustbolt healing essence is one of the main ones, and it’s locked behind Exalted with Rustbolt, on top of a month of dailies for the Galvanic Oscillators, as well as a crapton of Spare Parts.

Likewise, there are DPS and Tank Essences that are JUST as strong as the Rustbolt Healing Essence that groups will take significantly less geared DPS over my MUCH higher geared alt simply because they have the essence and I don’t.

Whereas I’m not going to do a crapton of grinding I ALREADY did on my main just to get it again on my alt. Considering I actively play 6+ toons. Other mechanics like this have catchup mechanics. Why don’t essences?

Even if they DIDN’T make them account wide, they could make a catchup mechanic, it’s not hard to comprehend.

For Instance, they could:

1. Make rank 1/2/3 ALL require only Friendly with Rustbolt/Ankoan/Unshackled on other toons if you have obtained Rank 3 on a character, and reduce the cost of them to only require 1-2 Galvanic Oscillators each. (that way it’s 1-2 Dailies each rank. As hybrids still have to buy 2-3 essences, that’s 6-9 essences total, that’d be up to 12-18 oscillators which is still a lot of dailies)

2. Reduce the amount of honor you need to obtain Blood of the Enemy on alts, based on what rank you have on your main. (So if you have rank 2 on your main for instance, up to rank 2 on alts will be reduced on alts)

3. Reduce how many pieces of the raid essence you need to collect on alts based on your main. So instead of 9/18/27, it could be 3/9/12. That would be 1/3/4 weeks of LFR on alts. (Hell, my main still only has rank 1 because I cant bring myself to play the game because of essences being so alt unfriendly)

Things like that. They have the ability to add catchup mechanics for alts, but they just won’t add them and that’s why we’re complaining.

As I said, it’s even killed a lot of my interest in my main because without catchup for alts, there’s not much reason to chase it on my main either.

[Dondon-malganis]

@Mistwynd-lightbringer

It isn’t critical to have BiS essences in every slot for your alt.

And it doesn’t take much effort at all to get Rank 2 in three different essences so you don’t have empty slots.

You have got to be kidding me… Nobody is obligated to carry you in difficult content because you refuse to get the required essence needed to make a reasonable contribution to the group!!!

Healers can’t run crucible, lifebinders, and vitality conduit rank 1 in mythic, they just can’t. Anyone who says otherwise is the biggest liar I’ve ever seen. We all HAVE to grind Nazjatar if we want to reasonably contribute to the group.

Guess what I had to do last patch for my alts? Just gear and AP. Oof. Imagine that? They added an entire new system that destroyed alts, and the fact that any kind of raider defends it just puts a sour taste in my mouth.

[Marshmellowg-shattered-hand]

@Draé-frostmourne

Why? You dont have to do all of it at once. Especially on an alt. Hell I dont even have my full essence on my main unlock. I dont like to do pvp so I just skip it all together. I do high level content and I’m just doing fine

Because I like playing hard content with my friends. Its fun to run around doing world quests for the same few weeks but then the game becomes just end game dungeons (M+) and Raiding. And to get them to a point where I am not a liability for my essence issue is a point that is not helped by the current system. I dedicate certain time for my main to get the stuff done but then want to play that end game stuff. I already maxed out on my main and want to progress with the content difficulty not a time locked one imposed by rep, honor kills, and follower xp requirements to name a few since I already did that. I cannot dedicate 3 weeks of time to each character to do the same quest I already did for the 100000x just to let them get the chance of getting gear in a raid or M+. If chance and skill is already a factor in a raid why also impose these re-quest restrictions on alts. Just let the M+ and raiding content itself be the challenge and gear the reward. But the problem is by the time I get my alt to “geared enough” level the season is over and the grind starts anew for gear which again takes weeks if not months. There is already a grind here. Adding essences to it makes alts undesirable. Who knew doing the same quest for the 1000th time would be annoying. Very few group of people
get excited to do the same world quest with friends for the 1000th time.

But you know what does? Fun challenging content like Mythic plus and Raiding. Like doing PVP with friends. But you know what ?

Ms. Puffs needs the pvp essence to do PVE Mythic plus and raiding and she wont join us (the general wow population) until she feels that she has earned this essence again on another alt. So she may play PVP poorly and be the cause of losses but shes there for the HK!!!

Spongebob hates raiding and loves to PVP but he needs this essence and will raid instead. He doesnt pull great raiding numbers, clearly he loves to pvp with the talents build and trinkets he has, but he will just raid poorly until he has what he needs and leaves.

Mr. Krabs needs the nazjatar essence but he would rather be raiding or doing mythic plus.

Thus the community is continually split in their progression paths. Leading to those who want to play alts to deviate from the Mythic Plus and Raiding formula for something that is needed but ultimately single player content. Thus dividing the community and giving the players participating a bad experience while doing so.

[Draé-frostmourne]

@Marshmellowg-shattered-hand

I cannot dedicate 3 weeks of time to each character to do the same quest I already did for the 100000x just to let them get the chance of getting gear in a raid or M+

Again nothing stopping you from starting your own group. And no you dont need all of the essence. It sound like you want to have legendary essence on all your alts and main

[Timboslizzle-frostmourne]

@Draé-frostmourne

Again nothing stopping you from starting your own group. And no you dont need all of the essence. It sound like you want to have legendary essence on all your alts and main

No idea how you’re getting this from the OP, Maybe you should read the actual words than spout the same nonsensical response.

[Drâe-barthilas]

@Marshmellowg-shattered-hand

Because I like playing hard content with my friends. Its fun to run around doing world quests for the same few weeks but then the game becomes just end game dungeons (M+) and Raiding.

Jumping on this toon to show you. You can do minimum content and still be able to do things on alt. This toon doesn’t have a full level 3 essence. And guess what I’ve killed hard boss on this as well and do +10 keys