The treasures don’t really offer any substantial player power though. They offer Cypher and comparable anima gains to other content. I don’t see the harm in a player having the opportunity to hard-core farm treasure chests since it doesn’t really provide them with any actual advantage to other players. Nerfing the treasure gains does not really have an impact on us.
7 Likes
A bit more feedback:
I’m doing the Finding Tahli quest chain, I finished it on my main but doing it on some other alts also.
This is the quest chain you get after Sopranian Understanding is completed that unlocks the mount crafting.
It is a quest chain recommended for a group of 3. You’re killing a bunch of Elites and there’s two or three Elite quest bosses.
The fact of the matter is that due to all of the time gating there aren’t groups of people in a position to do this all at once and you either solo it (and hope someone else drops in where you are to help kill the Elite quest bosses) or it doesn’t get done.
I have 5 chars I want to open this up on. I’ve done it on a druid and a pally so far in tank spec and had some people drop in by chance to add some DPS.
My understanding is that ZM is mostly meant as a solo play content zone. The rares are pretty easy obviously for people to just all gang up on since there is no gating to access them.
In any case I’ll be doing this three more times today on a mage, shaman and war and I’m sure I’ll get it done. It’s an aggravating pain in the butt for me but likely a real issue for a lot of other solo players (people who for whatever reason are not necessarily in guilds or playing with friends). Not sure why this needs to be set up as a group quest chain for content that is from my understanding solo content.
On a side note: Why is there not a shadowlands option under the drop down in “h” → “Dungeons & Raids” → “Premade Groups” - > “Questing” → “Start Group” ?
Side note #2: The quest “Mysterious Greenery” also opens up upon completion of Sopranian Understanding. The quest giver isn’t at the location indicated on the map. It doesn’t exist at all. This is by my count the 4th major bug associated with the cypher system that has been discovered by the player base on live after almost two weeks of waiting for these items to unlock from behind the time gating. A lot of this couldn’t easily be tested on the PTR because it was constantly changing (albeit for the better!) and was also double gated (currency and time) on the PTR which meant you had to do what we have all done for the first two weeks of live on the PTR to test it. This is not what I would call a “fun” roll out of the cypher system.
5 Likes
Thank you!!
2 Likes
EDIT: Treasures seem fine now, as mentioned in later post.
Well as you noted the rares provide some other incentives which differ from the chests, and considering there is no detriment or advantage to the player base from farming either content, I don’t believe Blizzard should waste time and resources into evaluating and/or alternating the chests.
To be more blunt, it doesn’t “feed bad” to kill a rare or to loot a chest. You can easily do both. Therefore, I don’t believe a change is required.
1 Like
This is some pretty good 9.2 feedback that I think is worth a read.
3 Likes
It’s not specifically Zereth Mortis, but it is 9.2, and indirectly is affected by Zereth Mortis:
Legendaries. I get that you have to keep increasing the ilvl for legendaries, but why is the system that was used in Legion not used here?
In Legion, things were tuned around people having legendaries of a certain ilvl, like they are now. Unlike in Legion however, there’s no quick or cheap way to upgrade your legendaries. In Legion, if you started with an ilvl895 legendary, at one point in the expansion, those legendaries automatically upgraded to ilvl 910. You didn’t have to do anything. They just automatically upgraded, because you guys understood that being that far behind was detrimental. Then when you added new updates to the ilvls, you made a quick and easy way to upgrade legendaries, so people who had old legendaries were not immediately weaker than those who crafted new ones.
In Shadowlands, this is a bigger problem. The legendary base items cost gold. A lot of it. A LOT of it. Rank 7s aren’t out yet, but just based on the AH prices, on most realms, it’s easily going to be 600k per item. Most people will not pay that much, and will stick with a lower ilvl legendary. However, therein lies the problem.
The lowest ilvl legendary is 190. Rank 7s are 291. That’s over a 100 ilvl difference. That’s a LOT of player power.
So even if I were to want 2 patch outdated ilvl235 legendaries right now? That’s still about 100k a pop. And in most servers, they’re actually more expensive than rank 6 legendaries, because no one buys rank 4s anymore. Even rank 1 legendaries are still 10-20k on my server for most slots. But that’s acceptable and I’ll buy them normally.
So I ask: Why not have it so any ilvl190, 210, and 225 legendary upgrade automatically to 235? This will let us choose the cheapest legendary base item of the 4 ranks at the time and craft a somewhat useable 235 legendary. Simply make it so 190/210/225 legendaries no longer exist. If you use a 190 base item? When it becomes a legendary, it becomes 235.
Even if you can’t retroactively apply this to existing 190 legendaries, I imagine the majority would just be happy they could break down their 190, buy a relatively cheap base item, and get a 235 in exchange.
Otherwise, a lot of people, myself included, are going to go legendary-less on their non-mains (and there’s been people on the forums saying they will on their mains) because their 190 legendaries just can’t compete with the stats of a 252, even with the effect.
2 Likes
The problem with doing this (just to play devil’s advocate for a minute) - while I do agree the system is not a good one - is leveling up the crafting of legendaries. That system just wouldn’t work anymore (as much as I would love to see it go)
Someone in general chat brought up a good option as well - reduce the crafting cost of legendary base items by 90%.
Not the 5/6/7 items that upgrade the recipe. Just the base recipe. This would create more crafters as well as drive down the prices to somewhat reasonable.
So the current crafters aren’t screwed over, give a month warning of it happening so they can offload their stock to those who aren’t willing to wait.
4 Likes
This is a great idea IMO. Right now it’s much too cost prohibitive to level up legendary crafting if you didn’t already do it a long time ago.
For some personal context here, I’m currently bringing 5 chars to Enlightened Honored specifically for crafting purposes. I’m not a big player in the crafting scene but used to have a small glyph business going in WotLK (1k g/day) and now craft armor, enchanting and jewel crafting for enough gold to not have to worry about gold.
2 Likes
Yeah, the legendary crafting system is my least favorite thing about Shadowlands–and I’m a crafter who has ranked up quite a few of them to max. It’s a system that is punishing to almost everyone involved.
Crafters have to make a huge initial investment (200-500k gold) to rank up the craft, and then they have to sell the max-rank item at a hugely inflated price to recover the initial investment. Sales are slow, and in order to get the sales you have to cancel scan all day, which is extremely not fun gameplay that consists of hitting the same button over and over again, all day, on a second account. I flat-out refuse to do it, so all my legendary crafts have been money losers for me. I rank them up to help my guild get their legendaries, and I just eat the loss. I finance it through a small army of mission table alts.
The system is also super not fun for buyers, who have to pay exorbitant prices for the base items. This makes it hard for them to craft multiple legendaries for different specs and situations, or to move a legendary to a new slot.
The only people who might be having fun are a small number of power goblins who make crafting these things and cancel scanning the focus of their gameplay. For all the rest of us who like doing raids and dungeons and arenas and such, it’s punishing and not fun.
10 Likes
I mostly agree with Mornnah here, especially after having a chance to play around with it a bit. There’s still incentives to kill rares besides the things listed, such as rep and the 236 gear with transmog appearances - although, I do think that cypher gear should also drop from rares, cypher gear still feels to rare even after the latest hotfixes.
I also like that I don’t feel like I have to do the rares to get cyphers and anima, because it softens the blow a lot when you’re trying to run to a rare and find it dead already. You probably didn’t miss out on much, unless it was one of the rares that actually dropped something cool, and if you got the rare, the rewards are more than sufficient imo.
On another note; cypher gear upgrading is not particularly intuitive, for example, when you’re at cypher level 3 you don’t always seem to get the correct ilevel from drops. And I don’t like that it only applies to new drops, as cypher gear is quite hard to get. I’d love to have the ability to upgrade cypher gear by using cyphers, so I can at least stockpile a few pieces for the future.
That’s because for some reason I can’t fathom, Cypher gear is secondarily gated by enlightened reputation.
A lot of us hit the rep threshold already to get 252s at 6/6 but not everyone has.
1 Like
I don’t really understand why. I guess it’s put in place to delay letting everyone get the highest ilevel cypher gear so that endgame players don’t feel forced to farm it… but isn’t that why it was gated by the cypher system in the first place? Seems weird to have two gates, and only show one of them in-game. (Unless it’s written somewhere and I’ve just not seen it!)
4 Likes
I find myself just annoyed with the research times for the cipher system. Actually, I don’t understand the appeal of research times at all. What is gained by the player waiting for days to actually gain the benefit?
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I think it’s just a way of timegating, which in some instances is fine.
IMO it would feel worse to have 5 second research time and not be able to do it until X day, than having a long time to research and the next level being locked behind it. Watching that research progress is important from an immersion standpoint.
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They just need to lay off the timegating sauce
4 Likes
It worked when ZM was new, (I know not everyone agrees, but I think making us take ZM in all at once would have been very overwhelming, but the pace we had because of the timegated cyphers felt nice) but I feel like they should have reduced the time for those researches to 5 seconds (like it is for alts after you finish) the week after the first people would have finished it.
Timegating is fine in moderation, but only when those timegates are removed once they served their purpose of slowing down the initial progress.
Anyway, came here for three things:
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I deleted my post about the Treasures spawning too fast. They either adjusted it the next day, or I was on right at the hotfix and every treasure mass-spawned or such, because the treasures feel good now. They’re easier to get than when ZM first launched, but they aren’t popping up every 5 seconds like when I made that post.
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Please lower the spawning requirements for Helmix. I had a raid group of I believe 12 killing worms for about 40 minutes before he spawned. We had the worms at hyper spawn. And it still took that long. To add insult to injury, he spawned a second time 10 minutes later. The RNG of Helmix is ridiculous, and most people won’t fight him except when that specific WQ to kill the worms is up.
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On that note, can you go through and make the non-elite rares into Elites? This is a minor issue, but the nerf to Toxicalic was only for Elites. So for non-elites, you still do 6% of their health regardless of how much health you have. This makes some rares, like Otiosen and Orixal die very fast. This also makes Helmix even worse, as there’s 3 of him that share health. So… yea, you do 18% of their health every 15 seconds. And if another person is there with that power? He’s dead in like 10 seconds in combination with actual damaging moves.
My only concern with that, is please lower the level of the rares you make elites to 60, so that hunters can still tame them. I’d also like to see a taming pass of the rares, as being unable to tame rares like Garudeon, but being able to tame Tahkwitz is a bit weird. (Also, we can tame the non-hooded Viperids, but there isn’t a single tameable hooded Viperid, which is really weird) I know in the PTR, there were books to learn to tame Garudeon, Orixal, and I believe two others, but those seem to have never made it to live, as Orixal is tameable without a book. Garudeon and Chitali are the only 2 I believe that aren’t tameable, but I might be forgetting one? The Sand Matriarch also needs a fix to retain her name after being tamed. She’s the only rare that doesn’t - she reverts to basic Beetle.
And before someone says hunters taming rares is bad - it’s no different than if they killed it without announcing it, stopping a tame is very easy, as the hunter has to have threat to tame. So a taunt will stop the tame, doing pretty much any damage will usually stop it, as very few hunters tame after doing damage, etc. The only reason rares like Soundless were tamed while people were fighting it, is because people weren’t very smart and would spam stun and other CC like Polymorph on it to try to heal it. Unfortunately, if a mob is CCed, they have no target, so if people chain CCd it in such a way, the hunter could get the tame off. This seems to have been fixed in Shadowlands though.
1 Like
I have given it a couple weeks because I prefer to get a better feel for it than the first day impressions. I am a casual player who has not done group content for several expansions. I was going into ZM with some Korthia items, but none full upgraded. I needed some of the catch up gear to even start. So, that is the perspective. Char chosen was Venthyr Assassination Rogue.
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The catch up gear is great. If you have been leveling an alt you have Anima already just from leveling so can pretty quickly get geared. Those tokens are also Account bound so your main can easily fully gear an alt.
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I found the mobs a bit hard at first, I won’t lie. However, that changed pretty fast as I got gear. I am now around 240 and doing just fine.
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Cyphers and cypher research is pretty cool because while it does not give you player power in raids, it gives you a really nice boost as a solo player in open world. I can have several buffs from the buff stations, the Wellspring buff, Poco to help me in a variety of ways + Poco friends, and the buffs from the Provis Chest we can do each day. Those buffs stack up fast!
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Pacing is comfortable. I don’t feel that I HAVE to do more than the 3 World Quests and 2 Daily quests. Those take about 45 mins. If I want to, I can stick around and do some rares if one has an item I want. Treasure chests spawn so nicely though that those are more efficent.
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I love the puzzles. I just wish we had the matching one from BfA again.
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Zone art is beautiful and such a relief from the Maw and Korthia. The little details constantly delight me. It is worth taking the time to just zoom in and look closely at things.
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I do like the crafting of pets and mounts! Nice idea and I am looking forward to making things.
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I am really glad flying is not going to be a multi month thing.
Negatives? Not a whole lot I guess. I wish rare spawns were on some sort of predictable timer like we had in the SL pre expansion event. That was fun to just move around the zone with the pack and down the bosses. We had 10 mins between which was time to easily move to the next spawn point. I also see why movement and jumping might be an issue. I selected a Venthyr char just for the movement so I can quickly get things done. The gear with the teleport is at least a help on that for anyone without the movement skill.
Will have other thoughts as we go.
5 Likes
Right now my biggest gripe with Zereth Mortis is Cosmic Flux.
What’s the point in a currency that has no value. I can’t spend this on anything. We’re also missing a socket item which has had a trend to come from this type of world content in the past.