I find SL to be very alt friendly and think some of your points are misleading.
You can transfer soul ash between toons and cinders only provide a barrier to max level legendaries. You don’t need any cinders for a 235 legendary and the difference between a 235 and 262 legendary is pretty small. Even if you think acquiring a max legendary is mandatory, that’s still only a couple hours in torghast playing at a leisurely pace.
You only need 40 renown and in practice I think you are only really grinding about 20 or so renown. When you make a brand new alt, assuming you have done the content on another character, you will get renown just for accepting your soulbinds. If you spend a couple hours doing the weekly tasks such as 1k anima, 20 lost souls, world bosses, shaping fate etc, you will easily be in the 50+ range.
I find it interesting that you didn’t mention the grindiest part of alts and that is maxing out conduits. You start off with all the conduits at 200 and even if you want to max out your conduit specs this is only a couple weeks. Once again, the power gained from max level conduits isn’t that much.
I don’t really understand what the people who complain that SL is horrible for alts actually want. Do you want to create a toon and instantly be able to do end game content? The way it is now, assuming you have a main that you have invested a decent amount of time in, you can create an alt, be at 200 ilvl (korthian armaments), have all conduits at 200 lvl, have all your anima from your main, and have soul ash to make 235 legendaries. You can even have mythic dungeon gear without ever having step foot in a dungeon.
Literally within several hours you are ready for endgame content such as mythic+ and raiding.
Looks to me this depends on how you define an alt…for me I have more capped alts this expansion then any before it. But then again alts I use for professions and just the joy of variety from a designated main.
So yes its alt friendly for me this way .
for the same reasons as always. Some people like for their characters to be isolated from the rest of their account and I believe that can and should be respected
If there is an account wide allegiance that your alts can join then everyone can continue to play as they currently do and those that want more account wide benefits can stick their characters in the allegiance.
You first have to ask a person what is alt friendly as it means something different to everyone. To me alt friendliness starts with skips if I were making expansions that maw intro would have had a skip on launch.
4 out of 6 of things you list have some kind of transfer mechanism. 1 of the others can be bought and I don’t even know what “farm rift for sockets” even means…do you mean domination sockets? They aren’t even that impactful. Farm gear? Level up? Do you just not want to play the game?
I’m really not. Print doesn’t convey tone very well and I realized afterward that it may have come across as combative. I was trying to convey surprise/incredulity.
Let me tell you a little secret; they have been lying to us for a very long time. In fact, they lied about player power being time gated in 9.2. I don’t think they lying will stop until Ion is gone. I don’t even know if they’re trying to lie or not they probably think that it’s alt friendly to them.
This expansion killed casual old fart progression with the following issues.
More and more difficult mechanics.
Glacial progression if you just raid log.
Power systems requiring more dedication than raid logging ( torghast, conduit grind, domination socket upgrade grind )
M+ gear scaling to m15’s. Guild carries got a lot harder to do.
The vault taking so much more time with needing 4 or 10 of your highest keys to be optimal instead of just one. This combines with scaling to 15’s make it simultaneously take more time while needing more time to get guild carries in.
They always say expansions are alt friendly. Shadowlands was in no way “alt-friendly” until 9.1.5. And giving us tokens for 40 renown was an insult. They should have made them 60.
I define it as how much less work does it take to get an alt to the same point as your main. Are there short cuts or is it like that line from Contact “The first rule of government spending is why buy one when you can buy two for twice as much.”
Until 9.1.5 it took the same amount of work.
Another way to define it is how much extraneous activities do you have to do besides the end game activities of M+, raiding and PvP. Again, there was substantial amount of non end game activities that were required and until 9.1.5 there was no relief. Just multiply everything by the number of alts.
You can get all this done while mindlessly farming and watching something. Struggle to see the problem with a grind in an MMO.
Why is this even here? Sockets don’t add enough to force you to grind if you hate it, especially if it’s for an ALTERNATE character. Even now in 1,5, research rep is thrown at you from all directions, making that rep grind much shorter.
if I were making expansions that maw intro would have had a skip on launch.