I am all for a good grind here and there, but 11.1 really dialed it up to 11 between factions and items. As of this week, which is week 6 of the patch, I am rank 20 with Cartels of Undermine. But the four other cartels (not including Darkfuse) are still Friendly/Honored, because I changed my focus every week.
Some players who focused on one cartel and did extra CHETT farming on alts have reached max. So it takes 6 to 8 weeks per cartel to reach Exalted.
If it’s 6 weeks each with maximum effort (added CHETTs), that brings us to August 12 to finish all four.
If it takes 8 weeks each, which is more reasonable for most players, that brings us to November 4 — well into the expected time for 11.2 and, going by the year ahead image that we saw at the beginning of the year, possibly into pre-patch territory.
It’s also worth noting that RNG Paragon boxes with mounts are back, which means even more time spent dedicated to Undermine.
Blizzard, what is the logic for this beyond “inflate playtime hours”? How is this at all reasonable? A patch cycle does not have a 36-week life span. It’s obscene.
And this is just for rep! The grind for Market Research is stupidly long too, and Miscellaneous Mechanica are so few and far between that I’ve gotten 5 total despite playing hours every day. Now we’re getting another patch in a couple of weeks with more currency to grind through horrific visions.
PLEASE add some sort of rep buff, like getting to renown 20 adds a % bonus for individual cartels, or hitting exalted with one speeds up the rest. The current setup is extreme and the opposite of fun.
It’s getting harder and harder to justify being a completionist and collector. It used to be a fun thing to do. Not anymore. After 18 years, my collecting days may finally be over.
I am confused why the undermine cartel rep doesn’t work like booty bay/blood sail pirates. I think if you gain reputation with one cartel, you should lose with the others, and not be able to swap unless you become a real killing machine of the cartel you used to be a part of. I also think killing enemy goblins should give you good rep and be infinitely farmable (no more weekly lockouts - waiting is not content).
Grind is great but grind with so much waiting I don’t bother, time is my enemy
Yeah, those reps are a hard pass for me. I don’t want to spend any more time in Undermine than I have to and those reps just being huge grinds is awful.
Wanted to add, I haven’t seen a single CHETT card drop in five weeks of weeklies, WQs, and delves. So I feel like expecting people to farm 40 of them to get one extra list for 500 rep is absolutely bonkers. Edit -apparently CHETT cards don’t drop if you have a CHETT list in your bags already. So that’s cool and fun!! /s Would explain why I haven’t seen one yet.
I saw another poster who has managed to reduce time to exalted to 3 weeks, but they are playing on 22 (!!) alts for CHETT lists. Very few players have 22+ max-level alts.
By the end of this week, I’ll have 3 Cartels at around 4/ 21k Revered. So all told it should take another 5-6 weeks?
In no way will it take as long as the OP is saying. ofc, that’s going to vary a lot with number of alts/ Chett cards.
Blizzard seems to be leaning into a new paradigm of making Joe Casual simply make a choice that requires a BIT of effort (just ONE cartel); but it’s done in such a way that if you’re a hardcore collector, you’re going to be MISERABLE by comparison.
I’m still collecting xmog from DF, because of having to collect 500 different shells, rocks, threads, random nonsense just to get different items. It’s absurd.
But if you just want any ONE of those items, it’s pretty easy.
I wish Blizz would know that when they make the grind too high a lot of people won’t bother with it. I just assume when they put stuff like this in the game it’s not made for me. It’s for the people that complain about no content a week after the patch drops
All fun is being slowly ripped out of the game in favor of manipulating people to play more hours and trying to control what content players enjoy.
If you don’t like it, just don’t do it. They can put endless pressures in place, but none of them actually matter. If you’re having more fun doing something else, just go do that instead.
I agree with how much Blizzard is adding in for completionists, especially for mount collecting, time gating, grinding and store mounts. Seems like every time I turn around there’s something new on the store.
And with how long these cartel mounts will take and the new mini patch coming out, it’s going to be busy busy busy.
My favorite faction is barely mentioned in the story. Everything is clearly tuned to maximize my time spent, not any kind of perceived value from the experience. A mount at the end when I could get mounts just as good for logging into the game and doing a few basic tasks for the Trading Post feels like a waste of time.
It’d be different if I was invested in the story.
It’d be different if the mounts were somehow unique.
The trading post mounts are mostly better than anything in the rest of the game anyway, and I get them handed to me more or less free by logging in.
Feels like Blizzard is going for quantity over quality, especially with the cartel rep / paragon mounts, the Vision mounts and the new boss rush mode mount. I guess they spent this season’s unique points on the Big G and the ASMR mounts, lol.
While I 100% agree with your post, you have to realize that Modern Blizz (for whatever reason) does not want the average player collecting everything in a given category/slice of the game.
I strongly disagree with and dislike this stance, but it’s the reality of WoW and once I forced myself to accept that I was only ever going to be able to collect most things in WoW and just have to let the rest go, I’ve been much less stressed out while playing - no more FOMO “oh crap, I gotta X done in Y timeframe!” self-induced nonsense hanging over my head all the time.
Yeah, in the beginning, things like the Ebony Turtle and the Coral Stalker Waveray annoyed me, but I’ve let them go, knowing it’s not worth it (to me) to spend money on those things.
At least every year I can try for the Heartbreaker and if it doesn’t drop, oh well.
Maybe Blizzard will readjust the drop rates for things during this patch - they did for the rare from the junk heaps, but I wouldn’t keep up my hopes.
I just won’t bother with that. Like I didn’t in shadowlands that had some grinds that we’re extremely long. I got what I wanted from the zone. I still enjoy the area, but I’m not going to endlessly grind it lol.
I’d understand if the cartel reps were required for content or meaningful unlocks (as in content in undermine was locked behind them or there were BiS items on each rep vendor), but it’s literally just cosmetics and toys behind them. There’s no time limit; there are no forced group requirements, as none of the reputation grinds require you to kill the rares that can’t easily be solo’d.
This is something you can come back to at your leisure, or not, depending on how you feel about the rep grind. There is absolutely no rush. So take your time and relax.
That was probably the most toxic idea they ever came up with. Needing random arbitrary numbers of physical space consuming objects to buy things off of rep vendors.
There’s cosmetics I could have from DF that I just never bothered to get because of that nonsense.
What if you just didn’t worry about trying to get all four to exalted? Maybe you could just pick which cartel you want to be a part of and work on that each week until you finish it, and then not really worry about the rest. Almost like choosing a faction in an RPG.
what pisses me off is that before the galileo garbage buffs, you would only see this rare spawn once every 40-60 trash piles. sometimes more. both me and my wife farmed him for almost 2 weeks on release. we finally got the mount.
then blizzard buffs him and the mount drop. now he is almost guaranteed to spawn and the mount is at least 50% drop rate from what i seen.
but the point of this reply is that they only decided to make these stupid market research items drop around week 3 or 4? and the best way to get them is those trash piles. i honestly cannot be bothered after farming over 1k+ of those trash piles already. they know what they are doing and it is moronic and sly.
“There’s this rare wool that only drops off every 69th sheep you farm. You only need 3 to get these awseome cosmetic shoulders! And 3 to get the reddish recolor. And three to get the bluish recolor. And three to… uh… why are you unsheathing your unnervingly large sword?”