What are crest designed to accomplish?

Community General Discussion
1

I very much enjoy the ability to upgrade gear with crests, but the changes to how they are earned in TWW make me wonder if I have incorrectly assumed what they are designed to accomplish. To start, my question assumes two facts are understood: 1.) M+ was changed to have essentially two separate target audiences. One focused on running what we are apparently to consider lower keys (KSM to portal crowd). This would include MOST players (I believe this is what we are meant to assume). One would include players looking for an elite challenge - 12+.

2.) Completing keys in the 9-10 range is the pinnacle of the PVE experience in that game mode - we assume this because any content above a 10 grants no additional player power. Progress beyond this grants the same rewards as a 10.

IF these assumptions are correct, the rewarding of the most advanced level crests at a 9 and 10 is confusing. I would assume crests are to be used to upgrade gear to assist in a player gaining power to be better able to achieve their season goals. This reasoning fits very well with a players progress that only raids - they begin to receive these upgrade items on the last two bosses in the raid, and from each boss in the mythic raid. Unquestionably the difficulty of an early boss on mythic in the raid is much lower than the later bosses, but players are granted these upgrade items to build power through the raid to be better able to accomplish their seasonal goal.

As an aside, the raid also has a self nerfing mechanic to assist players in accomplishing their goals, m+ doesnt have this.

This is completely different for m+ focused players. They cannot access this power increase until they are running 9-10s. If our earlier assumptions are correct, this essentially means they cannot access the power increase items until they have already reached the point where they can accomplish their seasonal goal without them. This would be true for all players absent those who are running those 12+ keys, which we are to assume is a fairly small portion of the player base.

The closest parallel we could use to a raid reward system would be if mythic raid only dropped the highest level crests from the final two bosses. I think at that point we would all agree that power increase would not assist players significantly in accomplishing their seasonal goals, and the power increase would be largely cosmetic, not functional.

I wonder if perhaps the reward system in M+ does not currently match the design structure for how we assume players approach that pve experience?

If crests are not designed to grant player power in accordance with the goals of players focusing on that pve game mode, and are instead just a cosmetic power reward, the current system is likely working exactly as it should in M+ - but that most likely makes M+ a much less desirable mode for most players.

2

Discussing crests doesn’t require a treatise friend. Brevity is the soul of wit.

3

Game modes don’t exist in a vacuum in-of-themselves.

Delves, M+, and Raiding are all part of the same endgame gearing experience and Blizzard balances around them so each mode doesn’t invalidate another as a reasonable gear track, with difficulty in mind.

It’s possible that crest rewards for myth track need to be adjusted in M+, but not for the reasons you verbosely give.

4

Crests are made as a way to increase gear over time, to give you a small edge into going into harder content. Because gear simply can’t do that anymore because gear is obtainable way faster (you can blame M+ and crafting for most of that).

Gear in mythic raids will be used to clear a raid tier and then it will be used to farm that raid tier faster, as you don’t want to spend as much time farming as it did when you were progging that content because raids are very time consuming.

Same goes for M+, you can time +9 with 605 and +10s with around 610 gear but you can upgrade your gear up to 619. You can also run those untimed and still get some level of rewards, you shouldn’t forget that and that’s what most people did early on for +10s because that still fill your vault with mythic track gear.

We did have that before with last bosses offering simply better loot than everything else, I’m personally a fan of this as this make last bosses even more rewarding. But again, what we have right now is a compromise on all grounds. M+ items from the vault can be the same ilvl as those from the last bosses from mythic because of the upgrade system.

5

Unlimited tracks in S4 say that crests and split tracks are just a gating mechanic.

6

I appreciate this entire response, thank you. It really does become a matter of what your goals are if this is the case. If all you are shooting for is to time 10s for portals as an example - this entire tier of currency is sort of pointless to you if it is rewarded at a 9-10. By the time you can get it, you have enough player power to accomplish those goals. Then you are just relying on tuning to allow for that to happen.

I can see that possibly being the design decision, I dont personally love it, but it does seem to fit the current structure.

Good thoughts!