Legion is going to be the most alt-friendly expansion ever

[Frolk]

Legion will the most alt-friendly except it takes 65 million artifact power to max an artifact for a single spec, not even character. If there is any alt friendliness in all this i'm not seeing it at least.

Ye, if u dont have that +10% dmg on an alt that alt is 100% useless right?

[Mad_Murdock]

Ye, if u dont have that +10% dmg on an alt that alt is 100% useless right?

We all know that the pug groups are going to require 20/20 AP (or whatever the number is) for normals.

[Frolk]

We all know that the pug groups are going to require 20/20 AP (or whatever the number is) for normals.

Well, i dont pug, so i really dont care, make ur own group then if its to horrible

[Maudib]

Ye, if u dont have that +10% dmg on an alt that alt is 100% useless right?

What it means is simply this... any time you spend on your alts is detrimental to your main's progression.

This isn't much different than being in a progression raiding guild and being asked "Why don't you have your XXX yet?" and you reply:

"Sorry dude.. I've been playing Overwatch a lot lately."

Eventually though, this is going to backfire on Blizzard. People will realize that you reach a "feasible limit" and the rest just seems stupid. This is when resentment for the design will start.

[BloodyPoptart]

"Legion is going to be the most alt-friendly expansion in terms of the diversity and replayability of the content."

That's what he said. That's not what you responded to, at all. In fact, you made the argument that it shouldn't be diverse amongst alts so that you can continue to log on and play fort/farm every day like in the last two expansions.

He said there will be more to do so that it doesn't get stale as fast in terms of content. I'm in beta, and that's quite true compared to previous expansions. There's content diversity.

Learn to read, stop building strawman arguments against fragments of sentences that you take out of context just to have something to whine about, pleb.

[Maudib]

"Legion is going to be the most alt-friendly expansion in terms of the diversity and replayability of the content."

He said there will be more to do so that it doesn't get stale as fast in terms of content. I'm in beta, and that's quite true compared to previous expansions. There's content diversity.

I am in beta too, and the diversity stops after you gather your artifact and open your garrri.. I mean Order Hall.

Pretty much that starts the leveling and AP grind. So yeah if you do all three questlines... you have maybe 3-4 hours of diversity per class.

[Frolk]

What it means is simply this... any time you spend on your alts is detrimental to your main's progression.

This isn't much different than being in a progression raiding guild and being asked "Why don't you have your XXX yet?" and you reply:

"Sorry dude.. I've been playing Overwatch a lot lately."

Eventually though, this is going to backfire on Blizzard. People will realize that you reach a "feasible limit" and the rest just seems stupid. This is when resentment for the design will start.

Unless u play in an top 30 guild, ur not gon lose ur raid spot if u only got +2% dmg and not +5%

[Deleted]

If you read the quote you provided, they were using a different definition for 'alt-friendliness'. Their provided are 'variability of experience when playing alts', your terms are 'how quickly can i get an alt to the same progression as my main'.

And this is why Blizzard has another view of alt-friendly vs the community.

[metzger84]

Go punch a wall, or better yet, use your head, repeatedly.

[BiggestNoob]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...rgthock/simple

That doesn't refute what I said. No alts, terrible play (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking.../19544/latest/), unupgraded pieces, did LFR once, way behind the curve even for a 12 hour a week guild (very casual raiding). Only plays a single character with a single spec, and is healing at that so has the simplest job in raids with the lowest gear requirement, especially when you're months behind the curve.

So yes, he doesn't actually play this game because the way he's designing it is a detriment to anyone who doesn't play it exactly the way he does. Imagine a mayor of a city who only funnels funding into repairing and improving roads that he uses to get to work while all the other roads in the city crumble and cause major accidents. That mayor doesn't drive on those roads. Ion doesn't play this game. He gets carried through content.

If you read the quote you provided, they were using a different definition for 'alt-friendliness'. Their provided are 'variability of experience when playing alts', your terms are 'how quickly can i get an alt to the same progression as my main'.

That's like saying "hey every character starts in a different zone, therefore this game encourages alts and you're not punished for playing them." Yeah there's like an hour of unique content per character, but every second you play an alt is a loss on your main, so it's not alt friendly not even for one second.

Cries about lack of content , cries about content. Hard to win this one.

AP grind != content.

a good majority is post upgrades where your farming for 20 upgrades for a total of 10% damage boost

That depends on the spec, some get huge upgrades until 25+, and doing 25+ on 2 separate characters or two separate specs (for pure DPS classes) is going to take an enormous amount of time relative to what was required in previous expansions (get gear, switch specs, done).

Of course not, just the headline and then he felt an uncontrollable urge to come bitch about it.

Both you and him are idiots and clearly haven't played the beta. You get an intro quest that leads to Dalaran, then like 3 quests to get your artifact, then you're out in BI like everyone else. Woah I have a zone only I can go to. That's not what "alt friendly" means. You can't just make up your own definition and say "Legion is the most alt friendly expansion ever".

The longer it takes to max out the artifact, the better for the game tbh. If you want instant graification, Legion might not be for you. Good riddance

Nice straw man. Did you put it together all by yourself?

Babies cry. It's what they do.

Alt friendly is a very vague term. Alt friendly as in, "super easy to power level to raid" or alt friendly as in "fun to play through the content more than once on different characters"?

Legion is neither of those things, so clearly it's "alt friendly". That's also a nice position you have, people want to play the game in a way you don't like or you don't engage in, so clearly fuck them.

So alt-friendly to them = having new experiences with other characters than your main and having lots of meaningful stuff to do.

Except that's also a lie. You have a total of a single tiny zone with a garrison table in it and some NPCs, a couple of quests, and a class hall quest chain which is dominated mostly by just doing dungeons or going out in BI or waiting on missions and that's the "unique content".

If you play a character for 1000 hours, 99.9% of that time will be spent doing the exact same content as every other class.

So no, it's not really different than WoD. It's just also worse now because they're going to be absolute shit tier because there's no catch-up mechanics and this expansion is all about the grind.

There might be a point to what Ion is saying, people sometimes want to play different alts not just to level up a healer to do high end raiding then a tank , (which is the die hard fan spectrum) but to actually just enjoy another class or spec, .... all those people, including myself find legion the most alt-friendly spec becasue for the first time ever, if i switch class i have a little bit of my experience that is totally different because i'm in a new class, i have new quests i never had before, different progression path than from my first toon.

That's actually a bit of a lie. As someone who's actually gone through this "unique content" on 8 different classes on the beta, it's really not like you think it is, and nothing like what Ion claims. But he doesn't play alts. At all.

SOME of the customers. I'll take actual content over the ability to easily progress many characters (WoD).

What content?

WoD was super alt unfriendly, as was MoP because of the stupid legendary quest lines it doesn't matter if you're fully kitted out in 650+ gear when 20% of your dps comes from having a ring gated behind a several month long grind

Except you had a weekly cap on progress towards your ring which could be completed in a very short period of time (several hours) which meant you could actually maintain 10 alts if you were playing 40-50 hours a week (which is lowball for hardcore players) and still have lots of time to fish for warforged pieces on your main.

If your AP gains were capped per week and you could hit that cap in 2 hours, and it was shared between all your artifacts, Legion would be comparable to WoD. It's very very far from that case though.

Alternate title: Proof that Ion Hazzikostas plays WoW at a level I never will.

Clearly.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...stkin/advanced -> https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking...501677/latest/
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...stics/advanced -> https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking...515920/latest/

And I have a 720 warlock, quite a few other 100s in varying classes, and I'm working on gearing a Shaman for Legion. No, Ion doesn't do shit in this game, and I play casually as fuck.

How fast do you want alt artifacts to level? Whatever Blizzard does +1? Since you have no clue how fast it will end up being.

I want at the minimum for there to be a hard cap per week, or for it to take less than a month to finish each weapon. If we're going to have to finish multiple weapons per character (4 = Druid, 2 = DH, already imbalanced) and that time takes away from alt character progression, it shouldn't take an exorbitant amount of time. If there's a cap, it can still take months but it wouldn't be punishing to play alts.

Nobody here is advocating for fully unlocked artifact weapons on day 1. It's not a matter of "it's not fast enough." It's a matter of it being punishing to play alts or even off-specs on the same character. It's a bad design.

But if anything, the difficulty of having multiple raid-efficient toons (IE double-maining) is far more difficult and like the old "hardcore" times.

+9000

You, and the OP forget the Artifact Research Notes.

No, even factoring these in, the time investment required is absurd, and these don't change how much time is going to be required to maintain alts at the start of the expansion.

THe class hall campaign most certainly takes far more than an hour (not counting any timegates or time to gather mats for the quests at all). And each class hall also has content beyond the class hall campaign; small things like minigames, NPCs to interact or unique buffs. All these things are content. Also we have no reason to believe the class hall campaigns will not continue in patches; most of them end in such a way that there is tons of room for them to continue

It's mostly missions and going out to do dungeons or pick up crafting things off the AH. It's not really "unique content" or anything. It's just stuff you already do.. but a slightly different order of that stuff for each class. And it's mostly time gated behind missions. It's mostly the missions really. That's like 90% of the time.

There's a trivial amount of unique content per class in Legion. There's your class hall and artifact quests, and that's about it.

That still doesn't make Legion alt-friendly.

I chuckled when they made fun of their own sad state of quests when Ion said: "So no... no more apexis crystal quests. Ha ha"

You also have a mana grind to get Suramar rep and doing that on multiple characters will be the real cancer.

They also confirmed they'll be nerfing it down the line as a catch up system.

They've confirmed lots of things about Legion that have turned out not to be true. There is no catch up planned, and I've already outlined multiple times how no catch-up could work aside from just handing new characters millions of AP later in the expansion.

Exactly. Alts arise when there is not enough to do for your main. More content = Less time for alts. Easy as that.

Uh, it's not due to having too much content. It's because I've exhausted all the content on multiple characters in Legion already (on beta) and the complaint is that you have to do dailies and grind AP, and doing that on alts takes away time from your main. It's alt unfriendly, not "loaded with content." Legion has very very little content and anyone claiming otherwise isn't playing the beta or is playing like 1 hour a day or just.. not playing and standing around acting like they're playing, because it took a fucking week to finish everything and be stuck at the "let's just spam mythic+ dungeons and stand around in Dalaran doing heroics."

I mean that alternate title could work if you just gloss over the fact that he is the guildmaster of Elitist Jerks and have killed Mythic Archimonde 22 times.. But hey lets just turn the blind eye to the facts right?

There are some absolute shitcans who have killed Archimonde 22 times. Every piece of data we have suggests Ion was carried through HFC like an anchor.

What I don't get is why people judge the "alt-friendlyness" of Legion by the amount ou time it takes to have a fully maxed artifact weapon. It's an alt, you can't expect to have full progression on multiple characters and lots of meaningful content to do at the same time.

Sure I can. I could have competitive alts in every previous expansion.

Ye, if u dont have that +10% dmg on an alt that alt is 100% useless right?

Ye because nerfs don't happen and classes don't become useless. DKs are absolute dogshit in HFC right now you know. Wouldn't it be nice to have something that isn't a hindrance to your raid instead, and not to have to invest months of work to make it happen? You know, to play the game, not to be defined by the character you chose back before the devs decided to arbitrarily nerf shit or design content in a way that makes your class basically garbage? Hm. No it makes sense, alts = bad, nobody should do that. Just pick a class and fuck it, YOLO.

Go punch a wall, or better yet, use your head, repeatedly.

Thanks for that insightful post.

[Blur4stuff]

Since we don't know how fast it's going to end up being maybe it's premature to throw a fit?

[metzger84]

Thanks for that insightful post.

Get fucked.

Practice what you preach.

[Queen of Hamsters]

What content?
t.

Haha, you're funny. Let me guess, you're one of those people that equal "I don't want to do anything because I'm a Negative Nate" to "There's no content for anyone TO do!!".

Meanwhile, others WILL be doing their leveling, Class Order Halls, artifact weapons, world quests, dungeons, raids, professions, pet battles, world bosses, exploration, reputations etc etc...

[Fenderxx]

Personally, I like the fact that if I really focus on my main, I can become more powerful than someone who splits their time over 3-4 characters. It makes all of my time on my main meaningful without gating his power. They said alts or alt specs can pretty easily be kept at 80% power. That to me seems completely fine. Will that make a few Min/Max 'ers with several characters mad? Maybe, but is there really anyway around that without gating player power? At least this system gives you a choice. High end raiders will do whatever it takes to get an edge.. if that means having 3-4 equally geared alts and running split raids, they will. If that means focusing on one main spec and maximizing it, they will. So you cannot balance a game around that.

[BiggestNoob]

Since we don't know how fast it's going to end up being maybe it's premature to throw a fit?

We do, unless they are going to massively change things in the next few weeks, which will only happen if we throw a fit. Or if the game launches and rightfully subs plummet after everyone realizes what shit this system is (who aren't experiencing it) and then Blizzard decides to fix the problem then, after the damage is done.

Practice what you preach.

Yep because clearly I was just telling someone to go bash their head into a wall and not paraphrasing what someone else said in their response. Nice context you gave there.

Haha, you're funny. Let me guess, you're one of those people that equal "I don't want to do anything because I'm a Negative Nate" to "There's no content for anyone TO do!!".

Meanwhile, others WILL be doing their leveling, Class Order Halls, artifact weapons, world quests, dungeons, raids, professions, pet battles, world bosses, exploration, reputations etc etc...

No, I'm one of those people who actually does the content and finds there not much to actually do. It takes a fairly short period of time, and then if your "content" is just repeat queuing or repeating pet battles over and over, then you're not really talking about the same thing here. There's not just "so much stuff to do" that is the problem here. The problem is there isn't "so much stuff to do." The problem is that you are penalized for playing on an alt at all. You could enjoy playing alts and doing all the content again on another character, but you do that and you get behind on your main. That's the problem. It has nothing to do with the content in the game, how much or how little there is. It has everything to do with Legion being a terrible expansion for alts because of the grind based progression Blizzard has decided to implement (continuing to follow that rabbit hole of bad decisions mobile games have already tried and which have pervaded that market to the point of ruining every single game in it, effectively killing mobile gaming).

Personally, I like the fact that if I really focus on my main, I can become more powerful than someone who splits their time over 3-4 characters. It makes all of my time on my main meaningful without gating his power. They said alts or alt specs can pretty easily be kept at 80% power. That to me seems completely fine. Will that make a few Min/Max 'ers with several characters mad? Maybe, but is there really anyway around that without gating player power? At least this system gives you a choice. High end raiders will do whatever it takes to get an edge.. if that means having 3-4 equally geared alts and running split raids, they will. If that means focusing on one main spec and maximizing it, they will. So you cannot balance a game around that.

There was no problem when player power came from gear and you earned that by doing content. There was always progression, you'd just go do the harder content or the next raid. This type of "you'll just get stronger over time" system and "just grind out the same content for RNG titanforged stuff" is explicitly designed to alleviate the need of producing content. See, doing that other content for drops required content to do, like more dungeons, progression through dungeons (tiered or otherwise), many raid tiers, etc. The focus is being taken off of "more content" and put on "grind the same content and maybe you'll get better stuff".

You want less stuff to do, but want to just do it over and over and over. Why? What's the point of character growth if there isn't content to match?

[Fenderxx]

I do not view it as doing the same content over and over, but more doing different content. I think it is cool to run 5-man dungeons to get gear and artifact power, then turn around and PvP on the same character and still progress in some small way, and finally cap it off with a weekly raid. Doing higher difficulty raids such as Heroic or Mythic, and now the new Mythic + dungeons are all ways to get some re-playability out of the content. Everyone wants new content as fast as possible, but I do not think any MMO has ever done this at a satisfactory level, so they have to provide some re-playability to the content. I do not view this as a bad thing by nature. It can be grossly overused, but only time will tell on that front.

[Tharkkun]

What it means is simply this... any time you spend on your alts is detrimental to your main's progression.

This isn't much different than being in a progression raiding guild and being asked "Why don't you have your XXX yet?" and you reply:

"Sorry dude.. I've been playing Overwatch a lot lately."

Eventually though, this is going to backfire on Blizzard. People will realize that you reach a "feasible limit" and the rest just seems stupid. This is when resentment for the design will start.

How will it backfire on Blizzard? If you choose not to play WoW and expect to be progressed further than people that do then something's wrong here. Especially in the competitive raid environment. Reaching that 10% artifact goal is not something most people will ever see. The math has already been done.

Plus artifact gain will be boosted for everyone in the game as time passes so those alts will catch up faster. Back in Vanilla, BC and LK we cried over 20-30% differences in class power. Now we're splitting hairs over 1-2%. It's kinda ridiculous.

[nelxqt]

Im having bout 20 lvl 100 chars atm.I dont even think i have a main anymore.I coulndt be happier Legion wont be an alt friendly exp.Beeing forced to play lots of alts due to lack of content/easy shit ton of gold is what killing the game,imo.When he said it i was "wtf" aswell but he ment it on another way

[Mytheros]

Man you people (well to be fair I do NOT mean everyone, in this case I mean people that agree with the OP).....are thick in the head. You guys are the type that should probably go into mainstream "journalism" for a big 3 channel news team....because I have a feeling you do the same as they do -- you discard any thought into what author/subject is talking about and you just take words out of context to write your own story.....

He meant there's more options and systems in place to aid alt progression *IN LINE WITH THE CONTENT OF LEGION* as opposed to the level options and systems to aid alt progression for the content of past expansions. You can't bitch because there's MORE to do in Legion than the previous expansion and then say "how is alt friendly I have all this stuff to do".....

And btw Ion does play WoW he played it before YOU did putz!

[Venziir]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...rgthock/simple

Huh, he plays a shaman eh? Elemental even... I'm quite surprised that Elemental, and shamans in general, are so utterly screwed in Legion then, I mean sure, he isn't the chief of that department, but still...