Just play a human so you can be inefficient and still get exalted before your friends.
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It’s a cost efficient way with little efffort to keep people somewhat engaged. I suspect that if things went their way, they would of done something much better. Heck I imagine 8.3 would of been something else entirely. Rumors were that the idea of a Legendary Cape wasn’t even planned 'till later on and they ‘might’ of had 8.3 unlock Ny’alotha as a zone.
So I’m mostly focused on time maximization…so doing the most bang for time content across multiple toons.
Daily quests can be skipped, and i recommend skipping them. They are unrewarding and garbage design. Just do the puzzle games and assaults.
The cloak is capped each week, making the daily lesser visions completely optional.
There is no other required daily content.
I’m not even sure why they did the dailies. I wish we had gotten like a Mechagon-esque meta daily thing for the assault zones instead of rounding up a bunch of quests.
Oh well.
I wouldn’t say that this was something that gamers are developing. It’s actually an extremely normal psychological trait that’s already present in the general population. It’s a trait that game designers generally leverage knowingly. Back when “dailies” were introduced for the first time back in Burning Crusade, it struck me as a design very clearly meant by the developers to take advantage of that specific psychological trait.
It’s like talking about the “sunk cost” mindset or “gambler’s fallacy.” You can count on basically everyone having such traits to varying degrees, and when it seems like a game is playing upon those particular psychological traits, you can usually count on it being intentional by the developers.
All that said, I think most of the 8.3 dailies actually fall into the exception of not really being intended to matter much. However, because of how dailies hubs for endgame zones have been treated in the past, players are kind of trained to think of them as all being important unless they look closely at the numbers and see differently.
In a lot of other patches, your feeling about falling behind wouldn’t really be wrong. But I think it’s not widely realized just HOW insignificant the rewards from the 8.3 dailies are by the players, because they were in such a flurry the first day going through the quest chains that they probably didn’t notice how the numbers for the assaults match up against the numbers for the dailies.
Most of the dailies only offer a mere 75 rep and 50 of the Coalescing Visions (which you need 10,000 for to purchase a vision run item). The reputation is minuscule compared to what you get for simply doing the weekly / bi-weekly assault (weekly for Black Empire rewarding 1,500 rep, bi-weekly for the non-Black Empire attacks, which reward 500 rep a piece).
The Coalescing Visions you get from dailies (with one exception) are practically meaningless compared to the thousands you get from doing the assaults. The ONLY daily that actually matters is the one to run the mini-vision (in the zone being attacked by the Black Empire), since that daily rewards like 2,000 of the Coalescing Visions your first time in the week, and 1,000 each day for the rest of the week. Meanwhile, doing ALL the other dailies in both zones will only get you about 300. Over the course of the week, all the other dailies combined will result in something around 2,100 Coalescing Visions, while doing the mini-Vision daily every day will result in 8,000.
You can ignore basically every daily but the daily quest for the mini-vision and you’ll only miss out on a slim fraction of the Coalescing Visions required to buy a Horrifying Vision run. And it will barely set you back on the reputation front. Frankly, 75 rep for these dailies is kind of surprisingly paltry.
So in a week, for outdoor content, the list is like this:
Significant benefits:
Assaults (on a weekly / bi-weekly timer).
Minor Benefit:
The vision daily.
A fraction of a sliver of a speck of a benefit:
Every other daily.
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As mentioned, not topping a meter isn’t getting carried, if you miss a day or two you’ll be just fine. If you still have rank 2 essences no one is going to care as long as you’re showing you are trying to improve. We’ll have this content for a little while. I’ll be doing the same things on alts I haven’t even started the process with in the next month or so and I’m not going to feel bad doing relevant content with them. For some reason people think they should be progressing content with your alts and that’s not how this game works. I’m going to be clearing the new raid on normal next week and hopefully getting around 9 or 10 in m+. In a month from now I’m hoping to be clearing heroic and doing 15+'s while at that point some of my alts will be getting their cloaks together and farming essences while doing the raid on normal and doing 5’s or so. By the end of the expansion I expect my alts to be almost on par with my main. That’s how this works.
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You can absolutely, 100% enjoy the game on an alt that doesn’t have BiS Essence or the best gear or the latest rep or a fully upgraded legendary cloak. My Shaman has been my PVP character all expansion, he is perpetually undergeared. I still have fun and do pretty well.
People can play their alts. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to have a respectably geared alt. The argument I see a lot is that people want to have 3-4 alts with as many rank 3 essences as their main, and top notch gear to compete with their main, and a similar HoA and now cloak to their main, while being able to skip most of the leg work on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc time through. Almost by definition, an alt is a character that has lesser gear / stats and usually lags behind the main character. People have been alt crazy in BfA about how hard it is to keep their battalion up to snuff. That isn’t how MMOs have ever treated multiple characters, and WoW is really pretty forgiving in letting you streamline the experience on alt characters.
I agree with concepts like essences should be account bound, because they should, but it is not nearly as hard to keep a few alts relevant as people want to make it seem.
We are going to have this content for a while. Pacing oneself and maybe saving an alt or two for later is a good idea. There is no reason other than personal compulsion to try and have 3 characters cleared through the content by this weekend.
It’s because even though they aren’t, most players want to feel like they’re hardcore and so they act accordingly. Even though improving user input would give them a bigger performance increase than gear that gave them a 0.15% increase and took 100 hours to farm.
In my guild, I always have the highest heart of Azeroth, usually by more than 3 levels to the second highest. I know full well that the heart will explode when patch 9 hits and it’s all for nothing, but until then—I have earned my spot as number 1 by working hard and logging in every day to do world quests and dailies that apply AP.
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After playing for a week or so, I can say I like doing the horrific visions. Missing dailies means less horrific visions, so less getting to play the “actual” content of the patch.
I am past the initial excitement phase and already fallen back into the “yeah whatever” phase… I think this is mostly because I have been forcing myself to log in every day, where as typically I would log in every 1-3 days. This just makes me feel burnt out quicker.
I understand this is 100% NOT blizzards fault, this is just how I like to play games or advance tasks. To feel arbitrarily gated or restricted is something that just irritates me and I do not get enjoyment out of.
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