The .3 Grinds need to go

Community General Discussion
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TLDR: At this late in the expansion, returning players shouldn’t have weeks of grinds just to be viable on top of current content grinds.

Hi All,

I returned back to WoW in October 2019. I had originally taken a break in sometimes towards the start of 8.2.

When I returned, I found a new system in place that required grinding that I really didn’t want to do. The main reason, it seemed daunting. Eventually, I came to realize it wasn’t so bad and I eventually grinded out most of my essences between December to February 2020.

Then we had 8.3 Drop which comes with a cloak, a cloak grind, and a corruption grind.

Most of my buddies were okay with totally skipping BFA.

Then, with all the Shadowlands news over the last month or two, I suddenly found my friends reactivating accounts and starting to play WoW again. This is great because for the first time in a while, I’ve got more people on my friends list who I can chat and do things with and I didn’t even need to go out and find a guild to get some interaction.

Then we get to the real problem.

I fear my returning friends aren’t going to last long in 8.3.

From their perspective, they’ve got the following grinds:

Gear (Acceptable)
Cloak (Acceptable)
Corruptions (Acceptable)

These three are acceptable because they’re new systems. New Cloak, New Gear, New Corrptions.

Then they also have got:

Pathfinder part 2 (Not acceptable)
Essences (Not Acceptable)

If Pathfinder and Essences were a grind that took a few hours, they’d be acceptable. The problem is some of these BIS essences are difficult to acquire, especially if you don’t already have essences.

Blood of the Enemy for example, you’re immediately at a disadvantage in PvP without this essence, especially if it is a BiS and you need to go do PvP to acquire it.

Mechagon and Nazjatar are just awful zones, especially without flying. I’ve gone around and flown my friends around to help do their dailies, but the amount of time it takes really blows.

At this stage in the expansion, all these grinds do is serve to gatekeep. Originally, I was someone who thought the Essence grind was justified because it wasn’t bad. I had a lot of time on my hands and I was committed to playing the expansion out.

My friends who have decided to re-up right now, well they aren’t as committed to sticking to WoW and having these older content grinds REQUIRED for new content / end of expansion content is just insane.

My suggestions:
Remove Pathfinder – It served it’s purpose early in the expansion. Now that everyone should be flying, disable that requirement in the content patch after it’s a requirement.

Make Echoes of Nya’lotha able to purchase an essence regardless of whether or not they already own it. – Going to be real here, I would be willing to help my buddies farm out Echoes much more than I’d be willing to help him farm 30,000 honor or Weeks of Mythic+ and PvP and 8.2 Raids. It’s insane that at this point in the expansion, we don’t have a better catchup mechanic than, get it in your main and then go ahead and grind it out on alts with echos.

My friends have been having a hard time deciding and sticking to a main at this point in the expansion and getting some of these essence will fundamentally change how some of these classes play.

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Welcome to the mmorpg genre, you’re about to find out that there will be tons of stuff you might not necessarily want to do but have to because we still have character progression here. This isn’t Fortnite where you can just log in and do the content you want then log out, you have to work for things here.

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Honestly I feel differently, I also started this character as of late (as you could see I reached 120 on the 4th of this month and I took a bit of time to learn the class).

The essences aren’t too bad, but actually catching up the cloak will take me 6 more weeks. I could get Pathfinder and essences in a small portion of that time.

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Thanks for taking one little thing out of context of the entire post and spewing your mouth off.

I eventually did it. When I first came back, didn’t really care for the essence grind and I actually thought it was worse than it was because people on the forums were so vocal about how awful the grind was.

It wasn’t bad. At the time.

Why is it bad now? Because we’ve got an entirely new system of grinds on top of those grinds.

We want people to actually play this game and not to come back and see a daunting set of tasks to even begin to make them viable after having skipped out on a crap expansion and then turning around going, lol nope, and not returning.

I actually think the fact the added the ability for additional vessels isn’t bad. My buddy has been back for three weeks and I think he skipped out a week because he was playing a druid instead of a warrior and his cloak is currently sitting at 11 after those two weeks. This being a new week, I’m sure he will hit rank 15 this week.

The thing is though, that’s a current content grind.

Essences and Pathfinder are not current and are grinds ON TOP of the cloak grind.

It’s a bit ridiculous to have this amount of grinding being forced onto returning players at the end of an expac.

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If anything the Pathfinder grind is not mandatory as far as power go. And you don’t need it to fly in 8.3 zones.

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The essence system is a real system shock to anyone getting into the game because there’s you need at least 4 of them just to have all slots covered and they drastically impact your performance to the point where you’re going to feel like garbage until you get them, and that’s also assuming you’re going to roll with four and let it be. It’s not really a system that has aged well unless you’re a returning player who had most or all of them and are now grinding them out on your alt.

Pathfinder Grind, P1 or P2, is totally fine in my book since they’re not power related and the grind doesn’t get worse as the espansion goes on. It’s just there and if you ignored it or came to the game late there is some catch up for you. The problem with essences is that they kept adding new ones to the game, they have ranks, and then added a slot on top of that.

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Honestly, they kind of made it mandatory by changing the Echoes of Nya’lotha to a currency that needs to be grinded for current corruptions and making a source of that currency old emissary quests in zones.

Sure, you can say it’s not technically required because you can use flight points and ground mounts and your flight whistle. But let’s be real, it’s a pain and pointless now.

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I mean after he and yourself reaches 15. I reached 15 last week.

The catchup is killing N’zoth. Available once per week. A character made tommorow will need to grind 9 or 10 weeks depending how diligent you are.

You would have overkilled Heroic/Normal N’zoth by then and gotten everything you’d have wanted from them.

I agree with you - although I appreciate the extra vessels it does seem like a bit of a grind.

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He actually ran into this. He came back, did his cloak. Did his assaults. Did his assault dailies. Did his visions. You know, the current content grinds. He played 2-4 hours a night, sometimes a little more on the weekends to get all the current content grinds done.

Then he found himself with a rank 80 necklace and two level 1 essences.

Ah, yeah. I forgot about this one. I was a little disappointed when I found out I couldn’t just keep running 5 masks to get a core until I was caught up.

This would be a qol change imo. 5 Mask runs are still difficult on most of my toons with like 465 ilvl at times. I’ve failed a few of them over BS mechanics and it can suck.

Due to the fact this content is still difficult and somewhat time gated, they should allow you to do more than 1 5 mask vision in a week to acquire more than 1 core until you’re caught up.

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Except we’ve never had multiple systems stacked on top of each other to grind. Many…MANY grinds in the past were for cosmetics and not related to character power. So stop with this nonsense.

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If you care that much about flying then just go get it, it takes about 3-4 weeks and we had rep bonus before to make it even faster. Which your friends should have grinded back then, you can’t really blame Blizzard here.

I still feel essences main problem is them not being truly account wide, earning them once is really easy. You can get most of them if not all of them in 3 weeks also at worse.

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The problem is these are two 3-4 week grinds ON TOP of current content grinds. Getting Gear and getting a cloak all the way to rank 15 and starting to earn the cores and running 5 mask visions.

3-4 weeks grinding out rep for flying on top of 3-4 weeks earning essences all while needing to farm out Echos of Nya’lotha to get good corruptions.

It’s A LOT to do right now for new/returning players.

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I normally scoff at these threads, but I give credit to the OP. I thought he put a lot of thought and common sense into it.

Still, I have to disagree. R1 essences are easy to acquire, and R2 aren’t mouth harder. If they feel the need to get BiS, that’s their choice. PF2 is terrible, but will only take a few weeks and they can grind out essences while they get it. The rep ones have been halved, and there’s a new currency to buy them.

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Doing Uldum/Vale dailies without a flying mount would be game over for me.

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Getting gear is a joke nowadays. Getting your cloak to rank 15 is doable without too much hassle just by doing weekly assaults. Sure if you start farming the terrible dailies you’re in for a bad time.

And yes it’s a lot of time for returning players, I guess they get to play the game more? Is it so terrible? xd

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I agree.

Launch Shadowlands right now so I have something else to complain about!

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Problem is that BFA power grinds are layered on top of each other. None of these systems are particularly awful on their own, but you have neck leveling (pretty easy these days though), azerite gear, essences, and cloak farming to do when you log in. It is a tad bit overwhelming.

If Blizzard didn’t give us essence catchup for alts I wouldn’t be doing anything with my alts, period. Only reason I’m playing my alts past max level is because my main has most of the essences unlocked so I can reasonably dink around with them. Otherwise I’d be spending more of my time in Classic or other games.

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Thanks man. I was a big anti-account wide essences person a few months back. But with current content grinds and seeing some of my friends finally returning to the game and seeing how far behind they are in power and how much left they have to grind out to get on my level. It honestly kind of stresses me out a bit, lol.

I think the biggest thing is what I’m doing now, like on my hunter that I’m posting on. Outside of doing my 5 mask runs, mythic nya’lotha (I really don’t need anything from heroic nyalotha at this point) and other tasks like Echoes grinds and PvP, there isn’t much for my hunter to do and I’ve found myself playing around on alts a lot. haha

Yup. Neck farming used to be such a hassle but it was required because of Azerite. When they decided that it wasn’t a good system, they made it practically passive. My buddy hit neck level 85 before he unlocked his third rank 1 essence because he was too busy doing cloak, horrific visions, and uldum/vale dailies.

They need to do the same with Essences at this point. I actually thought with this last group of changes, we were gonna get word that essences could be purchased for Echoes without the need to have acquired them on another character.

Was kind of sad to see they didn’t announce that change.

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I think it’s mostly that you have to understand how each of those systems work the problem, for a new player just understanding the amount of stuff he got to learn about those can be overwhelming. I think that’s mostly the problem. It’s a deeper problem for me than “having to do stuff”.

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LOL, yes. I felt dumb trying to explain everything to one of my buddies recently when he came back.

I eventually told him, just follow me and it will all make more sense.

I will say, I am glad for party sync because I was able to walk him through the cloak quests each step of the way.