I think the worst change made on the PTR was moving a lot of the rep from the world quests to the rares, it has really made the reputation rates feel terrible, too. According to wowhead it went from 225 rep to 100 rep, and now rares grant you 15 rep. So while the total rate of acquisition actually (in theory) went up, you need to do a whole lot more work in order for the math to go up - because killing those 29 rares is going to take a lot of time and patience. You could argue that “it only rewards 15 rep, so you don’t need to kill all the rares”, but you also don’t need to farm most of this reputation in the first place.
Perhaps a controversial opinion: I don’t really think it’s bad that rep is daily capped. I do feel for the players who aren’t able to play every day and perhaps instead go hard on the game once or twice a week, but I don’t necessarily think reputation needs a catchup mechanism. This is largely because I do not think that reputation should reward anything that warrants a catchup mechanism in the first place. At least at exalted, revered is more debatable, but I think there had ought to be some forms of reputation boosts beyond simply doing daily content; such as more rep from the quests/campaign, and weekly quests that offer a big bulk of reputation. Players who play every day would stay ahead and get to unlock things faster, sure, but other players who don’t get to play every day won’t lag behind so far that they feel like they’re missing out.
I think this is the ultimate problem. I doubt I came up with a perfect solution, but missing a day or two here or there shouldn’t completely screw you over when there are clear power gains tied to the rep.
I have no issue with a grind for rep. Some reps should be easy to grind out, others more difficult and time consuming. The issue I have is the time gating of reps that have power gains tied behind them instead of just cosmetics, and no catchup metrics.
Wowhead reported on ZM campaign quest rep values, roughly 500 rep per week, except the first one which starts with three chapters. I think 500 rep is a little low, but it might be fine.
The weekly (or bi-weekly I guess) quest seems to offer very little reputation, IIRC. Perhaps that should be boosted, so the campaign values can remain as it is.
However with that said flying is a lot easier to get than originally planned and once I had it and had enough people logged into the PTR for an hour or so the rares are pretty quick kills and I think (but not certain) that it seemed you could get rep from multiple kills of the same rare per day. If that’s not the case it should be since there are only i think three daily quests.
I do think there should be 5 dailies available per day so that there is a choice for players to do their 5 dailies at a time when there is no one really on. I often do them early in the morning in Korthia before work and there is no real option of killing rares that early since no one else is really on. On the weekends I like to go on long rare killing sprees when there are enough people in the zone to do so; but there should be a viable way to pace rep for people who have to do their rep grind during low population times.
This principle is a good one. People shouldn’t feel like they need to play every day and people shouldn’t feel like when they play, the incentives don’t steer people towards the fun. So yeah, we hear the community concerns with overweighting rares. When rares constitute the lion’s share of the total rep that you can get in a day, that can create a sense of obligation to pursue them all. Since there are so many, this turns the daily acquisition of rep into a time-consuming process rather than something you can target and complete (or mostly complete) in a reasonable play session. We want rares to feel like a bonus rather than an obligation, so the reputation earned from rares is being decreased from 15 or 30 rep each to 10 or 15 rep each.
Along with that change, because we don’t want to reduce the total incoming rep, we’re increasing the reputation of other sources to compensate: world quests will award 125 instead of 100; Antros, the world boss, will award 500 instead of 250; and the twice-weekly quest “Patterns Within Patterns” will award 500 instead up 250. The net effect of this is that this will be a small increase in the total potential rep gain each day, and rares will take up a much lower proportion of those gains. This will allow players to feel like they can be done for the day earlier without significant long-term cost, while still allowing those players who want to push harder some incentive to do so.
Players who feel the need to reach Revered by week 5 and get the legendary memory as soon as Chapter 7 ends should now be able to rest assured. Even without killing a single rare, it should be comfortably achievable to reach that level in that timeframe.
Thank you for this! I really like that there are ways to push the rep gain, but aren’t required. This feels way less punishing to miss a day occasionally!
One other thing I would add to this is that rares seem to have a different definition than they used to.
Ever since MoP with the Timeless Isle and Isle of Thunder the “rares” have been more like Named Elites that drop something along the lines of:
Small amount of gold
Reputation
Cosmetics
Mounts
Etc
My point is that rares don’t feel rare anymore.
Currently we have 3 types of creatures in the world, distinguishable by their portrait and whether or not there is a dragon around it and what color the dragon is.
Normal
Elite
Rare
Could we ever see a 4th implemented for these named elites we’re currently calling rares and make the silver dragons actually rare again with guaranteed drops? (Looking at you Time-Lost-Proto-Drake)
I always want more cosmetics, so obviously I wish there were more from these named NPCs, and I don’t want them to go away by any means, as a source of rep or cosmetics, but they just don’t feel rare anymore, and they haven’t for a long time.
(I know its a bit off topic for the thread, sorry!)
Strictly speaking, what we usually refer to as ‘rares’ these days are sometimes called vignettes, and have their own separate definition. I do agree that they shouldn’t really have the silver ‘rare’ border, but should still have some means of identifying them as different. The map markers help with that, of course.
On the PTR, there was a chance to get a 75 Rep token from dailies, but for some reason these were removed when transitioning from PTR to live.
But yeah, I haven’t done dailies since I finished the Cypher system. I’m swimming in Flux and I get enough Cyphers to purchase 1-2 Olea Caches per week without needing to go out of my way for dailies. I think returning rep tokens to dailies would be a good idea, if anything, to make it worth my time to look at them for the chance hehe
I’ve mentioned this in the Zereth Mortis feedback post:
I don’t think they should add rep to dailies, dailies already give cyphers, flux, gear and sandworn relics, there’s plenty of incentives to do them. If the problem is that reputation feels too slow, I don’t think the solution is to add new sources to it, but increase the gain from existing sources - particularly looking at that weekly quest; 1250 is less than a calling and it takes much longer to complete.