I would be far more likely to play Mists of Pandaria again (did it twice on private servers) because I love to play alts and let’s be completely honest: it does get exhausting.
Most of the mandatory grinds are time-gated, but you have to be actively playing your alts each with without taking long breaks.
Warband-transferable bonus roll charms, Warbound gear that gets reduced in item level, Warband Legendary Quest progress and reputations would be the big ones.
Unlock the cloaks on your main and when you’re ready to play your alt, you can get caught up much faster.
Blizzard used a system in Season 4 of Dragonflight with the raid dinars where after a certain point, they weren’t gated and they dropped at a much higher rate without restrictions for your alts.
If they’re going to do it, they should just do it right. I don’t see a problem with account-wide transferrable bonus rolls. It still requires you to do the tedious daily quests to earn them.
I think Warbound gear is one of the best additions to the game. You kill a boss on normal and have a low chance of dropping a random LFR item that’s bound on equipped across your account.
In my experience in retail, Warbands has made me play far more than I have in past expansions because I’m more motivated to start a new alt when I have a few starter epics banked for them.
It won’t be as fast as gearing an alt in retail because Warbands is just one aspect. Retail has numerous weekly world events, catch up systems and delves that give free raid loot very fast.
I mean they dont need warband for the legendary quests, just let your main buy the cloak, gems and sockets and make them boa. I understand people concern with charms and I’m not sure what would be best as there is many ways to tune them to be easier on alts, a big way would simply be to cut the weekly quest in half.
Warband is an extensive system with a shared bank and a bunch of features like warbound gear, in itself we don’t need the full extensive feature moreover when it comes to reputations the game is simply not tuned with it in mind as quests got switched to only reward once reputations same as dailies only giving rep once a day.
Dinars are a poisoned gift, they are useful but also they remove a lot of reason to progress or keep farming content. Retail gearing personally has been a big let down and one of the reason I have been less interested in retail.
Warbands as a feature was a W for retail. It would be a W for classic if they put in the time (which could be another W for retail if the updates were ported over somehow).
It isn’t hugely needed for MoP Classic because, as Zoumz has said. The real main benefit in MoP Classic would be the legendary cloak and gems. Which could just be made BoA… aka warbound.
I would love having a universal bank and a reagent bank all my characters could just access though.
Warbands would fix so many issues and pain points in most versions of wow.
We might still have borrowed power systems if blizzard hadn’t made them the worst character specific grind in all of history.
Even being able to transfer honor is huge when I think back to all the times I wanted to pvp on an alt but didn’t feel like grinding through honor gear in bgs again.
It’s an interesting thing… pretty much every grievance someone has with WoW is “fixed” in Retail, and no doubt some will love the Retail changes, and some won’t.
I don’t think many who are playing MoP “Classic” are classic purists by this point, so not sure if anyone would actually complain about changes, but I’d question whether the devs have the bandwidth, or if there is enough perceived value in allocating the resources required to develop addition features. If they did, we’d probably already see them on beta.
The retail community focuses on playing multiple alts each season. It’s a big reason why people stick around for 6-7 month seasons. The gearing is designed so that you have a smooth transition onto a new alt.
The dinars are overwhelmingly one of the more popular systems they’ve done. It doesn’t really remove the incentive to raid because you still have to kill the bosses on mythic to buy their items from the vendor.
Also, dinars are timegated. It takes three weeks to get a single item this expansion.
Classic from wotlk to wod is very alt friendly, the difference is you have to raid. And that gearing is not something you can simply grind in 2 weeks with crafting, m+ and dinars. The problem with deterministic loot is that it’s a curse as you can be done much faster and it makes content less relevant faster. Even if dinars are timegated a couple weeks is not much to be guaranteed your bis moreover when on retail those items you would buy would be the only ones that are elusive. They make it so someone that has 1 kill of a boss can get the same rewards as someone that has 9 kills of it which I feel there is something wrong a bit with that.
My opinion on retail gearing is still that it’s a broken system. There is simply not much point other than arbitrary timegating to it once you hit mythic track and the upgrade system is one of the most overcomplicated, boring and terrible system as it only really serves to keep propelling people up way higher than the difficulty of content they’re doing the same as titanforging without the rng.
And it’s not like a system can make raid loot much worse than what M+ did to raiding, for most of it you can spam the same dungeons which can easily be done week 1 to gear a character which will be around 1-3 ilvl lower than the cap. So even if it’s true for dinars it won’t have much more negative effect when the system is rigged.
Seems like you are underestimating the amount of time and effort to get full myth track. It’s not easy unless you no-life one toon. Most of us play 4-5 alts.
It may not be for you but retail gearing is very popular.
I wouldn’t agree with that statement, gearing is still very controversial and many people dislike current upgrade system. Just with dinars we had a lot of drama coming from it.
First I don’t understand how you can make this statement and then say you play 4-5 alts. Moreover, I don’t call around 2 weeks of playtime “no-lifing” when seasons last around 6 months.
Gearing has never been quicker and meaningless to a point where I simply don’t find it much fun anymore and would rather they remove it as it has mostly became a grind outside of raids of content with next to no progression in them and somewhat easy for the level of rewards they give.
I’m sure people that are propelled by this kind of system likes it more but just with crafting being so strong it also has made people aware how gold could make their game worse when gearing up and how costly playing alts could be. This has been a reason for me why in more recent expansions that I haven’t played many alts, the cost was simply not worth.
Lots of issues with your responses here and no offense man, but it sounds like it’s coming from someone who reads about retail online but isn’t actually playing it.
The vast majority of complaints toward the dinars was from the M+ community and that Blizzard was forcing them to raid to buy the raid rare cantrip items. Blizzard slightly pivoted from their original proposal and not only gave us 3 Cartel Chips to buy our first item day 1 of the patch, they also added M+ items to the vendor only requiring +12 Resilient clears for all dungeons to buy the items on Mythic.
For everyone else, they can buy all heroic items for just clearing 4 LFR bosses or 4 m+2 dungeons. Additionally, they extended both the heroic and myth tracks by +6 item levels and uncapped crests, made valor Warbound and some other stuff that gave us an insane amount of “free” power.
The majority of people were complaining because the dinars were timegated and required them to actually kill the bosses. I have a big problem with the general sentiment the community has toward gear because most people are entitled and just want free gear to push content.
But for the vast majority of casual players (which is 80% of the community) we love the current state of gearing. Delves and Warbands have been a massive success. Probably the most favorable system added to retail since m+.
You really cannot take the vocal minority who complain online. They will complain no matter what Blizzard does. Either the game is too rewarding or not rewarding enough. I think retail is in a really good spot right now. The focus is playing your character, not slowly farming mediocre gear with RNG each week just to get caught up.
That’s why I don’t think MoP is going to be very fun for those of us that like to play alts. Starting over in the last patch with very little catch-up systems is terrible.
I just have a hard time believing anyone could have played this season or last and not known how highly regarded the gearing systems have been.
It’s been non-stop praise for the current alt-friendly nature. Being able to accumulate a set of LFR equivalent gear in the bank inspires players to try new alts which is great for player retention.
If it weren’t for Warbands, I would have quit the expansion a long time ago.
The problem is you don’t see how it can be both. Yes some players can praise it, like I said it makes sense for more casual players to praise it when it propels them way higher than the difficulty of content they do. Which is also why many liked titanforging, that doesn’t mean that it’s a good design. I’m sure if you offered players to get mailed their bis a lot would say yes and praise it.
Of course it’s a great design. It has been extremely popular amongst all types of players, casuals aren’t the only people who play alts btw.
The comparison to Titanforging is not good. TF was bad because it turned end-game-BiS into a lottery ticket. This isn’t that.
That’s not what Warbands does, either. Warband gear is the opposite of what you described. How do you get better gear than the content difficulty you’re doing when Warbound gear is always a lower item level that what drops from the boss you killed?
Casual players have delves, btw. It’s mostly just Veteran track gear that gets you into delves so you can skip the meaningless content like LFR and Normal raid that you’ve already done.
I’m talking about the upgrade system mainly, warbound gear or boa/boe gear has existed for very long. Warbound mostly has streamlined it.
It also made the higher level of content worthless time ot time, if you had a good titanforge then when you killed a mythic raid boss rewards could be useless to you even the first time you killed it. The upgrade system doesn’t do the same thing but it diminish the difference between difficulties hence making those gains less important.
There’s nothing wrong with the upgrade system. The people that complain about it do so because they aren’t playing the game.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not hard to earn valoratones. People are just lazy and don’t want to do some easy world content that takes 10 minutes or a single T11 bountiful delve that can give 300 valor + 27 gilded crests each week.
Seriously, they’ve improved the upgrade system a TON this season with crest discounts, uncapped crests, weekly gilded T11 delves and BoA valor.
It’s definitely not hard and that’s my point, it’s a boring grind. You mostly spam m+ for valorstones and crests, it’s made to focus on engagement not player fun.
It sounds like you just don’t have the right mindset. You’re acting like playing the content is a chore and you are farming the dungeons to get the resources.
You farm the dungeons and raid bosses because you’re supposed to enjoy playing your class and chasing upgrades. The resources come secondary.
You can go do a single World Soul with a party if 5 in Undermine and earn 500 valor for 5 minutes of killing. If that’s too much to work, perhaps it’s time to find a new game.
All versions of WoW have weekly chores to stay ahead. MoP is far more offensive on the chores than retail is.
