There has been an ongoing theme which started with Legion where there are a bunch of systems that seemingly exist with the sole intent on making people keep logging in daily without considering how this affects the game or the players.
In legion we had:
Farm AP for each weapon/spec every single patch
Spec-based legendaries (most of which were not even comparable to the best ones)
Crucible to some degree and maybe the antorus trinket (spec based).
In BFA we had:
Neck AP farm (at least you do this one once per character)
Azerite gear farm, or rather weekly casino roll (different specs use different ones mostly or you have to reforge every time you swap specs)
Neck essence farm if your offspecs happened to not use the same one(s).
Corruptions (spec based most of the time depending on the amp you needed)
In shadowlands AP is gone, instead we have:
Renown (spec based unless youâre lucky and use the same covenant)
Legendaries again, which instead of being random cost very large sums of gold. Also having to do torghast to be able to craft them to begin with for each leggo.
Conduits which are again rng with which one you get (252 token) and how much you need to grind. At least they roll based on spec after the âfixâ.
(CURRENTLY) Domination gear and Gems which is hopefully first and last time.
The biggest problem with all of these systems is how unfriendly they are towards offspecs, let alone alts. Doing this once or twice is not that big of an issue, but every patch always adds ontop of the previous progression so you have to keep redoing it over and over for every spec. And unless you are one of the lucky ones that use the same covenant you have to do 2/3/4 times the grind. This is just one character.
Itâs also basically the same amount of effort to level a whole new character as clicking N to swap spec because youâre doing the same thing anyway. All this fluff and you havenât even started any endgame pve/pvp activities. You can do the shadowlands stuff almost passively once while gearing, albeit very gimped, but thatâs about it.
I like doing M+, I like the raids, I would EVEN go back to doing some casual pvp or mog runs, but alas thereâs a million chores you have to complete which suck most of the free time I have leaving me with dedicating the rest to the necessary dungeons for vault and the actual raids. And when youâre done doing them it just makes me not want to play the game anymore.
Personally I would like to see either less systems/chores or at the very least make them shared across specs (same character XD!) and alt catchups from the get go instead of waiting for the last patch for the expansion to finally be in an enjoyable state after 2 years, if even.
I would also like to hear some developer thoughts as to why this has been designed like this since legion. The game was great, you didnât need a mandatory grind outside of endgame to find a reason to login. Why was this change necessary?
I think Shadowlands is overall better than BFA and Legion, but I agree with you all the way, itâs a lot to do in order to get caught up. Pre-Legion you really just had to catch up on gear and then youâd be more or less ready - and we have tons of catchup mechanisms for gear already.
I think renown is probably one of my least favorite ways of âprogressingâ thatâs been tried out so far. Itâs fairly trivial to earn but you could only earn two per week (or three if the campaign quests were still active). Locking the soulbind upgrades behind it felt like a long waiting game, and once it was fully unlocked you never really had to think much about renown ever again.
I think the legendaries is my personal biggest pain point, most of my alts are stuck with a 190 legendary because Iâm trying to save up on gold, and some of them donât even have it at all because I canât justify spending gold on it if I donât play them very often. Granted, I am a casual player that doesnât do much endgame content, but it feels bad to have part of my class design locked behind a gate.
The 200-ilevel conduit item fixed most of my grievances with conduits, I donât necessarily need them to be max rank, I just hated having to wait for the right world quests to get the conduits I needed.
I donât really mean to be overly negative about this, it ultimately hasnât actually affected me all that much since Iâm a casual player. I like the idea of character progression even after youâve reached max level, it means youâve got something to work towards and it adds to the experience of getting stronger - but maybe it could be done in better ways, at the very least so that it doesnât lock class features behind it. I donât even mind if there were still a lot of things you had to do on your main to progress, as long as you only really had to go through the hassle once.
If we really need to have a progression system in endgame, how about a box-of-many-things-like progression system every new patch, that would affect us only in that patch and its features? New raid tier, new raid âtalentsâ. New mythic+ season, new m+ âtalentsâ. New PvP season⌠new PvP talents? I dunno about that one. Make it account-wide, so you wouldnât have to build it up again on every single character, but with weekly caps so that you donât need to play all your alts to fully max it out for a week.
Agreed. And I donât really care for the âcatch upâ mechanics that are implemented a year later. I want to play my second or third character when the expansion is release - not 1 year later when sheâs 60 item levels behind and has barely made progress into this expansionâs FOTM ~borrowed power~ :T MoP and prior (even though MoP did have a âborrowed powerâ) felt a LOT more alt-friendly and less time-consuming.
YEP. This is why I gave up this expansion and just stuck with xmog/mount farming. Granted, I have great friends and have been able to m+ to KSM both seasons this expac but itâs a LOT less time consuming to put 3-4 hours of m+ in on a weekend when you have a solid group of friends who are CE raiders or push keys, and extra great if you win the RNG lottery w/ a vault reward that is actually useful.
I personally would LOVE to never again see borrowed power locked behind hours upon hours of time-wasting grind!!
Yes.
This hits the nail right on the head for me. The game is not enjoyable for me, as a âcasualâ player who multi-alts, until the very end when the âborrowed powerâ is mostly not relevant and catch-up mechanics have been implemented.
I donât expect a fresh 60 to walk into a 16 Halls of Atonement and be competitive in DPS, but I would love to even be open to the though of playing an alt at higher level because Iâm not instantly overwhelmed by all the BS I have to do in order to get to a place where I can even start signing up for pug keys.
