The Essence Grind on Alts is Worse than Forced Pathfinder Part 2

You know this is a very casual raiding mindset that would fit well in normal and some but not all heroic fights. But man I am an adult now with things to do. I think about how everyone else in my team probably has to do other things also. There is a noticeable difference in a group that can push an extra 5k dmg and 5k healing per member in Heroic raids. Then we ask is this person truly a worse player? No of course not they are good but this is their alt and because its their alt its doing poorly on something everyone else has as baseline on their mains. So the group has a harder time and the encounters last longer and possibly that person might be too much of an anchor.

When the reason for this becomes essences it makes the players choose.

  • Do the essence grind

Of which you will get this response from the community

  • Or do something else. Play only on your main or play a different game. Ask why? ā€œBecause its always been like this ever since the dawn of 8.2!!!ā€

Iā€™m sure they have ways to parse the data in percentages (E.g. proportion of players with more than 1 character on their account with > x number of essences).

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It is your choice to bring your alt into a raid - nothing requires you to do that. Normal is good enough for alts.

What type of nonsense is this? Your view is that people should be made to grind out overly time gated things repeatedly on some type of fantasy purposeful design around choice.

Iā€™ve never heard anything so ridiculous in the forums.

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Guys, it took me 6 weeks to get out of Boralus. Iā€™m an average consumer. 6 weeks!

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Ok lets back up for a second and look at this another way. I will get to the raw completion point just after this.

Activision Blizzard accepts as a game design philosophy that not everything in the game should be designed around the top 1% of gamers. This has historically been used to argue for different difficulties, tiers of gear and sources of gear acquisition. I could even extend that to all the people that consider themselves Mythic caliber. There is a number that Blizzard knows that they can see how much time the average person spends on the game against a mythic caliber person yet still balance the game around several tiers and consumer time spent habits. They do not just look at the mythic data and then apply a blanket mythic grind to normal/heroic people. This is why AK became a thing. This is why world quests level up with you. This is why flying is a thing. This is why (and I may disagree with this) LFR is a thing. Blizzard knows there is an average time spent on the game by the Mythic and Non Mythic people and they balance the game around both.

So back to the point of taking ā€œraw timeā€ to complete to balance Essences. The raw time is the raw data. The user time invested is the amount of time people have to do these dailies every single day on every singe reset. The average time is the average user that Blizzard would know how much time they spend in the game and what they do with their time in game. Blizzard have already mentioned that they look exactly at this in determining if you are having ā€œfunā€ or not. So you can vote for Blizzard doing a good job via your wallet and game habits. They should know if the average player has the time to do this totally new daily grind on every character they have or if its fun. I am doing my part in not playing my alts in protest of this rep system for gear which was never a thing. The Raw time needs to be converted based on the average users time spent in game.

The Raw time may say that its 10 days meaning morning and evening runs of quests and dailies (without mentioning Islands, PVP weeklies, Mythic Plus, Raiding, helping others).

A Mythic caliber World Quest Champion can do this stuff easy. No problem. 10 days of farming morning and night no problem.

What about a normal user who can only log in 3x a week? Lets say for 3 hours each only for either morning or night. They would end up spending much longer than the person logging in each day and night for the quest.

Should Blizzard balance the game after the raw data after the mythic world first world quest champion or the average consumer?

There is a fine line. For the last few years the fine line has been managed with catch up mechanics as the season drags along. Not having one for essences is a shame and an abandonment of the philosophy that made the other grinds manageable. Furthermore none of the other grinds required rep and dailies.

There is an innate fun in doing more challenging content and it brings people together in special ways. Being gated to doing so because of essences creates your type of response. Alts can raid at heroic level and rival mains due to skill. But gating that skill behind a rep grind that was never required before is bad game design, especially when this NEW design does not have a catch up mechanic.

I have heavy disagreements with him also.

Yea and people do not get this. They want all content to be designed around the 5% of users that have all the time in the world.

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By the time people start bring in alts to heroic raids, there no longer is real challenge to that content. It is only artifical challenge created by people bringing in undergeared alts.

Also, I donā€™t believe in your reason for bringing your alt to heroic raid - it is to gear them, not for ā€˜funā€™ which you can do on your main.

I havenā€™t grind it even on my mainā€¦

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This is getting off topic. This statement of yours has nothing to do with the essence grind requiring dailies, questing, pvp, etc and how it relates to the average time a consumer spends on the game. Its just an opinion on a raid situation rather than a point against what I am making.

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I ordered a new stove I was told it would take at least 5 Mondays until I get it. I was so Glad it would only take 5 days so I could cook again.

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Oh look, a new goalpost position.

A ā€œgrindā€ with a total rep could take you 15 years (Iā€™m looking at you Insane title). You can artificially make everything take forever. gg

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You are the one who insisted you have to bring your alt to a heroic raid, thus needing to have the ā€˜bestā€™ essence. I am just questioning your reasoning as to why having the ā€˜bestā€™ essence really is necessary.

It appears to me you wanting to bring your alt to a raid is because you want to have a fast and easy method of gearing it which falls into the same pattern of why you donā€™t want to earn these essences on your alts, i.e. donā€™t want to devote the time to doing it but want the rewards.

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First, I was never talking about the essences or the grinds required for those. I completely agree that those systems should be account wide, as is the Pathfinder achievement of which I was talking about.

Second, the ā€œraw completion timeā€ thatā€™s was mentioned is not the ā€œraw dataā€ but rather the time the grind takes assuming all sources of rep are completed every day. The minimum time taken. I can agree that most people take longer than this, but how much longer varies greatly. And grinding rep to revered is hardly mythic raider levels of commitment.

Regrinding exalted and whatever else for the essences does suck though and completely removed any of my desire to play alts. Same with azerite levels, though to a much lesser extent. Would have liked else kinds of systems to be account-wide.

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Nobody cares what someone else thinks is good enough for them, though. You donā€™t, I donā€™t, nobody does. We care what feels good to us subjectively. Looking at a purple essence on one character and the same essence in green on another character feels bad (not for you, but for most people) and knowing it will take weeks of drip-feeding progress towards getting it feels worse.

Idk how people are defending essences, they are literally a super washed down artifact weapon that on top of being a downgrade from legionā€™s artifact progression requires you to do a whole bunch of timegated nonsense to even use. They literally crapped in your mouth twice and your like ā€œYes, this is good, keep it comingā€

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You know people complained they wanted to be able to ā€˜earnā€™ things for the first 6 months or so of this expansion. RNG was bad. So blizzard puts in systems with various methods to earn power upgrades and people complain yet again.

Thatā€™s not the point, though. The ā€œgrindā€ takes weeks because Blizzard artificially limited the rate at which it can be done. You can only get 300 Nazjatar follower rep per day outside of the Mrrl items and tree bark once a week, for example. You can only get a certain number of tokens towards Conflict and Strife each week. You can only get a certain amount of rep each day, and so on.

So yeah, in terms of physically sitting in front of the computer and playing, some items donā€™t take all that much time. Maybe 15 mins a day for follower rep, for example. But in real-world time there will be weeks between the beginning and the end of your grind.

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Doing garbage content and time-gated content isnā€™t actually most people definition of earningā€¦ I would rather you tell me I have to 500 keys in time then tell me you have to wait for a weekly chest each week making it so at minimum you wonā€™t get your full essence for 3 weeks no matter how hard you try. Thatā€™s not earningā€¦thatā€™s a handout with extra steps. Thatā€™s a timed handout.

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I used heroic as an example. It can be mythic plus or anything else. You are the one who wants to box alts into Normal where clearly you think they belong. As if its a crime to want to engage in higher difficulty content without doing a rep grind on each alt (the standard up to 8.2).

Yea I think I more or less understood you. It was a good comment which is why I dedicated a long response to it. But in terms of grinding rep to revered and the mythic raider example I was using was just that. It is meant to explain the average player versus the world quest champion who knocks them off each day and is content. I was merely trying to make the difference known.

lmaooo oh boy at least I got this one laugh from this annoying grind.

A new grind without a catchup mechanic on alts is a poorly designed one that goes against all other systems they currently have.

This is also false. The key to Naz is to do the pet battle world quests. I did mine in 9 days, < 1 hour per day. Mechagon took me longer, still got done in 12 days, again <1 per day.

The argument youā€™re seeing in this thread is Pathfinder takes weeks to complete. Itā€™s not true. The same argument is being used for essences. Yes, some do take forever: they are exclusive. Keyword is exclusive. The PvP essences arenā€™t for everyone, Pathfinder 2 is accessible to everyone, not exclusive.