What Should Blizzard do about Gearing and Alts?

Community General Discussion
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I just wanted to have a discussion about this. I am curious to hear from people of all different levels.
For me, I am no longer a Cutting Edge Raider (I very occasionally raid Normal/Heroic with old friends from a long time ago in a guild that I used to be in during Wotlk)
Mostly I M+, so my PoV will mostly be from that angle. I don’t really pug or anything.

Personally, I love playing alts, I have mained mage since Vanilla WoW so the lack of being able to do any other role to help my group, or just experience a different role in WoW usually leads me to run a tank as my 1st alt and also a healer somewhere in the mix.

Part of me wants to say “well Blizzard did make some pretty strong strides in regards to alt gearing; namely with the Warband stuff and how it affects crest/valorstone discounts.” However, M+ participation is going down (based on a weekly chart that I see on reddit) and a lot of the time i see people site things like this:

Every time I want to play an alt it goes this way.
Get basic gear, reach more or less 580. Lfr, delves, let’s say 590 at the end.
M+ doing +2-4 600, 605.
From there you start normal raid, better m+, it’s fun.
Then you craft with the free crests, chest reward, maybe a bit of luck and you are 615.
Now you are screwed.
Want to craft? 8 m+ of level 8+ timed. What the hell?
Want best in slot trinket? Probably raid.
The amount of grind is cumbersome and I just don’t play anymore instead of playing alts

I sympathize with this for sure. I think a big part of that is that M+ isnt as fun after awhile because Tanks are moderately fun after the self sufficiency nerfs coming into TWW and definitely Healers are not fun to play (I want to make a post on this soon because I have a very spicy take on this)

However, I want to look at the overall picture. If you are feeling the same way and see a problem, what would you change? If you think it is fine please share that and give that feedback. If you are one of the people that think it is fine, i’d like to hear a little more about how much you currently play and what content usually (I know for sure raiders will not feel the heartburn as much because crests are a lot easier to come by if you weekly raid).

What’s the solution here? I think for sure the valorstone/flightstone thing has to go. It’s just annoying, you are either capped or have none. Then you can be capped for awhile, with nothing to spend them on, so you just overcap on them then you get a nice upgrade or something. You get the crests for it and upgrade it all the way up, then maybe you get something from your vault the next week and you have no valorstones. So how do you get more quickly? you can do a worldquest for like 30 lol. I don’t think they really serve a purpose.

How easy should it be to gear other alts so that you can do similar content as your main?

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  1. Scrap coffer keys.
  2. Make bountiful delves guarantee a drop of Veteran track gear at level 3s or above.
  3. Offer more crests the higher the delve.
  4. Veteran gear can come upgraded the higher the delve.
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In my opinion it should be a bit faster, but not as much to make it so you don’t have to put any efforts in them.

Something that might not be considered is how 8M+ to do weekly on all of your alts is simply too much, changing the great vault to 4 weekly M+ would be way better.

Making raids drop double the crests would also help reduce the “M+ grind”, as of right now to the only way to catchup realistically is M+ and that means doing the same content a lot. Offering some diversity at least with raids would make it much better to me.

Then the crests problem, they should let you catchup based on your character that has earned the most crests rather than require an achievement. If your main got 200 gilded crests then your alts should earn up to 200 crests 30-50% faster. Current system which reduce cost of upgrade gear doesn’t even reduce cost of crafting.

Fixing the upgrade tracks would also help but that’s another issue.

I don’t really have a strong opinion on valorstone/flightstones. They certainly have a reason to exist which to give you some incentive to do world content or etc. if you’re missing some. They act like a good luck protection system which I guess makes sense when some level of gear or crests is way too easy to get, so they make it take more time some other way.

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I wouldn’t mind seeing valorstones dumpstered, but overall, gearing alts feels fine. It’s fair to expect to have to actually play an alt, at least a little, to gear them. Especially if you want best in slot.

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Or “how to make delves unappealing”

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You sure love following me around.

Want my Btag?

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I think they should put catch up gear in the in-game shop tbh. I’m not even trolling / joking. I would pay $100 for a full hero track set that gets me ready for 8+ keys.

It’s something I’d love to have to save myself time. As things are, I only have time to play one main. The plethora of chores and levels needed to gear an alt is far too cumbersome.

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Little arrogant don’t you think? This is a public forum.

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So…

You want my btag?

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it is interesting that you mention this. Beyond just the great vault, in order to try and cap on crests each week, you would have to time 8 m+ keys as well. So that is another reason beyond just filling your great vault.

I do think this could help. Honestly more sources of getting comparable crests like delves or even world content (as long as it was a limited weekly resource) could help and maybe fill the void from losing valorstones.

This would be really nice. Just accelerated crest catch up on all alts until they are at your main’s cap.
I am going to add here that I would like to see the crafted gilded crest requirement come back down from 90. I was gonna say 75 but honestly 60 seems fair too. 90 is just too much. Or honestly, I wouldnt mind the thing you use for crafting to be something else entirely; maybe that is currency bloat, but it feels a little bad sometimes choosing between upgrading and crafting something.

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I’d rather you answer the question I asked you in the other topic.

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Presumably the design philosophy is that you shouldn’t be able to have a fast track to BiS level gear on an alt because you have to prove you’re consistently good at your class enough to earn it. Realistically though, it’s kind of just draining to level and gear alts as it stands.

Here are my thoughts:

  1. More discounts to valor/crests for alts
  2. Reduce the amount of activities needed to unlock vault slots for alts
  3. Maybe increase the amount of crests/stones dropped from content and make them warband transferrable, maybe at a small tax

I think part of it is managing expectations also. Play the alt to have fun with it, not necessarily to chase the best gear. You don’t need to best gear to have fun most of the time. As it is right now, it’s super easy to get alts to 600 and from there jump into content that you like.

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No for sure. You should have to play them but I think there is a bit of a problem when people who “want” to play alts would rather quit the game for the season, than be faced with this wall of stuff to do just to enjoy playing their alt at a level that would be similar to their main.

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This would be about the upgrade tracks part, currently myth track is inflated so 90 crests is actually a good deal still for what it is right now. But realistically, upgrade tracks shouldn’t overlaps and should only use their own level of crest. The whole upgrade tracks system is a mess. If mythic gear was to be only a 13 ilvl difference then it would need 4 upgrade tracks worth of crests which would reduce the cost of crafting a lot but currently it’s considered to be 6 upgrade tracks worth of upgrades to craft myth track gear.

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that is a spicy take my friend. im not 100% opposed to this but I do believe this introduces a whole slew of problems if implemented lol.

I think they should take a look at delves for sure. We already know they are aware of the issue where you get hero track gear from delves then in order to progress to the “next step” you have to jump into 7’s which is not necessarily the same skill requirement. Hopefully they do find a way to keep delves relevant gear wise (i am not a huge fan of delves myself or anything, I actually find them quite boring)

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And you wouldn’t say this is pay to win?

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With less extra steps than buying wowtoken and paying to get carried.

Arguably, if the wowtoken goal is to eliminate the black market selling gear directly from the shop would be doubling down on that. Because gold from carries often goes back to rmt.

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Yeah, I see what you are saying. I did forget about that. However, crafted gear is also only 636 not 639. So 5/6 on mythic track. So at the very least it should be 75.

Also, they should probably look at crests rewards from higher keys. I know that has been brought up before. But, if nothing else gets looked at on that front, keys should reward 15 crests for completion. Enough with this 12 nonsense. Everything is a multiple of 15 lol.

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Too much alting is what drives people to only play the meta class. They shouldn’t make it even easier.

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It should be the way it is now. You work up to your gear on every character.

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