Alt improvements announced for 7.1

[Deleted]

Hopefully the sky is falling crowd will beat it now.

[NerfDPS]

It's your main. Your main SHOULD be more powerful than your alt. If you wanted them to be equally powerful, should've leveled them up at the same time and done equal amounts of dungeons on both

As per above, If I played 90 hours right now on my alt, the play times would be the same but i would still be wayy behind.

What If I purchase legion tomorrow? That alone guarantee's you will never be part of a good raid team. (which I understand is a very low percentage of players, but its what I do)

[Twilight Cultist]

As per above, If I played 90 hours right now on my alt, the play times would be the same but i would still be wayy behind.

What If I purchase legion tomorrow? That alone guarantee's you will never be part of a good raid team. (which I understand is a very low percentage of players, but its what I do)

How? In the time you played on your main, it took 5 days per artifact research. If you put the same amount of hours played on your alt that you did on your main, with artifact research taking 3-4 days per, then it would be on pretty much the same footing,

[NerfDPS]

How? In the time you played on your main, it took 5 days per artifact research. If you put the same amount of hours played on your alt that you did on your main, with artifact research taking 3-4 days per, then it would be on pretty much the same footing,

90 hours at about 16hours a day = 5 1/2 days = 1.5 knowledge level gain on an alt.

You would also be forgetting that my main never stops researching. At which point is now also +1 levels.

To enforce my point, PLAYED TIME is not the gating. Its just TIME, I am stuck behind timers before I can progress...

Like I said, I am happy for the set back to be played time, it makes sense to me... I have to farm/grind what I want if I want it. But being arbitrarily locked behind a clock just because a character is starting now shouldn't be a thing.

[Temp name]

As per above, If I played 90 hours right now on my alt, the play times would be the same but i would still be wayy behind.

What If I purchase legion tomorrow? That alone guarantee's you will never be part of a good raid team. (which I understand is a very low percentage of players, but its what I do)

I started playing about 2 weeks ago at this point, and I'm really not that far behind the raiders in my guild, to the point where I could probably come in and hold my own on Nythendra mythic if I wanted to (and the RL let me in). True, I'm missing some artifact points, but right now it doesn't matter as the last points are fairly useless for my spec. That said, when the last 20 points come in, I'll be a bit more behind

This is just dishonest. There is no way you're friendly with every single faction and you're still just 103. I'm usually a good chunk into 110 before I hit friendly on everything, usually as there's atleast 1,5 zones left when you ding 110. Even when focusing on getting rep to friendly, then just leaving for the next zone, you're still gonna be a higher level than that, and that's if we ignore nightfallen, which is still 110 content exclusively.

My first characters I needed to finish the last half of Highmountain before I got friendly, on my alt I was friendly with everything at level 109 (With the obvious exception of the Nightfallen). That said, I purposely went slow on my alt.

[kamuimac]

The Arcway / Court of Stars : account wide unlock

World Quests: No longer need friendly for any faction on alts. I assume they'll handle this by making your first whistle unlock the whistle on the account.

Nice changes IMO

- no account wide AK
- no heirlooms out for legion
- no flying
-no acount wide reps for proffesions

shitty pr move not real change

[aziras]

It's your main. Your main SHOULD be more powerful than your alt. If you wanted them to be equally powerful, should've leveled them up at the same time and done equal amounts of dungeons on both

Bring the player not the class!

oh wait a minute, they jumped that ship. Now it is "bring the character, not the player".

The WQ unlock is a minor quality of life thing. It helps the players who juggle alts to burn restpoints or PvP/LFD with them, but that is about it. If you play an alt dedicated you will have unlocked everything if you do just a little planning on your way to 110, except Suramar (but that one is quick).

I am by no means a hardcore player. Yet the new systems force my playing style even more. I gave the demon hunter class a spin and levelled my main in parallel with a DH. They both hit 110 around the same time and are now sitting at AK4. If I now switch to another character, these two will sit there accumulating AK, allowing them to easily make up for the time not spent doing all the WQs to grind AP. My other alts are not that lucky. The server AK catch-up does not appear to be equivalent to sitting idle at 110.

So comparing the two states:
1) Alt at 110 doing nothing but research AK
2) Alt at 100 waiting to get started on legion

#2 is at a significant disadvantage with the current setup. Assuming you can level up in a week's time. Spending that week a month from now will position the character well behind one that spend that week now.

If they do not want to go full-on and make AK account-wide, they should at least consider some sort of linking to the most progressed character on the account. Perhaps a penalty of 1 or 2 levels would be sufficient, and not give it during levelling. Something like: When a character hits 110, they receive a number of artifact research notes in the mail equivalent to the account's most progressed character minus 1 or 2. And can then start researching from there on their own. This way running a few characters in parallel will still be more optimal, but you will get a fail-safe for alts that gets played way later than the main. Putting alts equal to new players has never been a thing in WoW. And the quality of life benefits from being an alt (usually no money issues, hand-me-down BoEs, heirlooms, boosts, etc.) has a big part in the success of WoW. Now they are making it slightly more annoying to play alts, which removes a lot of gameplay for social players because it becomes extremely grindy.

Most social guilds and casual players rely on alts to get groups formed quicker. The fact that you do not progress your main when you plan an alt is enough penalty as it is. There is no reason to also make the alts worse than mains. It is not helping on casual population class balance that players are forced to commit to a single class. These social players will never compete in the world-first races, so there is no overall game balance to consider.
Also, most of them play alts to experience other classes. So I would wager they have no interest in skipping the class campaign steps. If you are diligent with your missions, the two mission-gates are rather swiftly taken care of while levelling for a casual player. Especially if you use the app to keep them rolling 24/7.

But knowing that the character you choose to level later than another will be at a permanent disadvantage totally sucks (well, once the artifacts are maxed out it becomes irrelevant, but that will take some time for hybrids).

[Raakel]

Unlocking WQ takes like an hour after dinging 110 - that change is just PR!

The more I play the more I come to the conclusion to let the game rest for a few weeks and wait for 7.2 or so. It's obviously just artificially toned down so that players won't rush through at the beginning. I feel like in a few weeks you'll be able to do all in maybe 40-50% less time. So why waste so much now???

[Shirofune]

While i did enjoy the feeling of opening up a dungeon on my alts, i will approve of these changes I hope they will stop themselfs at this lvl through and not cave in for people wanting AP/AK to be given freely out to the people.

- - - Updated - - -



If they reduce the AK time down to 2-4 hours undtil you are up to the current max/highest AK lvl, what is the reward for actual playing since launch? With your fix, there would be absolutely no difference between somebody who have put hours into the game since launch and somebody who hit lvl 110 today.

There has to be a difference in AP gained from new player to old player or people are just gonna say "Well what was the point in being an early adopter then?".

There's a difference, though.

Someone that played through the beginning farmed way more AP in total than the guy that just got to AK7. The second guy will never be ahead of the guy who started ahead.

Lets be honest here, unless something radical like the guy you quoted proposed happens, alts are relegated to uselessness.

[Dominus89]

The commendations were pretty nice but doesn't ak research already speed up based on how far behind you are from everyone else?

It does. My paladin dinged 110 yesterday and needed only 3 days for the first research, it'll be on par with everyone else pretty soon.
Not sure why people want it to be account wide, it's could easily be exploited if you had many alts.. just have everyone do their research, wich would give people with alot of alts a pretty big advantage, considering they can just keep pumping out the AK tokens.
Unless Blizzard would add some limit to it, that you can only use it once every 5 days.

[Flarelaine]

Third relic slot unlocked account-wide without completing the Order Hall, then we'll talk.

People would still do it for the story, AP and skin if they so desire. And if they don't? Then good, that's one less pain in the ass for alts.

It's the biggest brick wall for creating an alt right now and IMO it needs to be dealt with fast. You're time-gated from actually switching mains based on it.

"I want something but refuse to work for it"

[Otimus]

As per above, If I played 90 hours right now on my alt, the play times would be the same but i would still be wayy behind.

What If I purchase legion tomorrow? That alone guarantee's you will never be part of a good raid team. (which I understand is a very low percentage of players, but its what I do)

It's kind of a problem that will solve itself with time, isn't it? Like, if someone purchased Legion in a few months, their AK research time might be 24 hours or less until it's caught up. Plus, like... to get your three golden traits only takes around 2 months anyways if you started fresh at launch. With greatly increased research time, it's probably only going to take players like a month to do that. Or less. (If they start later than now.)

I guess the moral of the story is, is that really, this early on, leveling alts just isn't worth it, but if you just wait a while, things will get better.

Isn't it almost always like this when a new expansion comes out? If you don't get there early, you have a pretty hard time getting anything below beginner tier done, unless you have friends and or are incredibly lucky. It's just a bit more worse this time around.

Anyways, on the subject of alts: If you're unmotivated to play alts early on in an expansion, that's a good sign to me that the game is probably doing okay. Alts aren't supposed to be mains. They're sort of what you do when you're bored! Or at least that's what it is to me.

[DesMephisto]

It'd be nice if they made all the various rep tokens you can get BoA since they're useless once you're exalted and you still keep getting them(Nightfallen from withered training for example).

Nightfallen rep tokens are BoA (from mission table) once exalted it appears.

http://www.wowhead.com/item=141343/n...ignia#see-also

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Hopefully the sky is falling crowd will beat it now.

As much as I wish it was true.. LOL.. I think we both know once one falls in love with a falling sky it forever dominates their lives.

[DesMephisto]

Its great to unlock world quests it means you can level by proffessions and gear by crafted without going into the hassle of finishing every Q line even though I found them to make sense and be much fun. However the 3-4th time...

It takes like 10 quests...I was halfway into honored by doing all of high mountain...

[Deleted]

People ask for changes, Blizzard make changes, except it's not the changes they want so it's a "PR stunt".

My fucking god, how do you people function in the real world?

[Flurryfang]

There's a difference, though.

Someone that played through the beginning farmed way more AP in total than the guy that just got to AK7. The second guy will never be ahead of the guy who started ahead.

Lets be honest here, unless something radical like the guy you quoted proposed happens, alts are relegated to uselessness.

If they make it so that Alts can get the same amount of AK as a main, who has been played since launch, that character will very easily be able to get ahead of the main in no time with dedicated AP grinding. Since Ak scales exponential and since some quests/WQs in the game gives very large amounts of AP, then it is not hard to imagine a character get ahead by empowering their weapon with these items later on in the game if they get max AK.

And you say it like you havent actually played an alt this expansion.....I have an alt, which i started 2½ week into the expansion and he is 2 points of Artifact weapon traits behind my main, which was max lvl on day 2. So if you think 0,6% less power makes a character useless, then you must have a hard time playing a game, where balance is not completly equal.

[Deleted]

See? Players whine incessantly, and Blizzard *does* listen!

Actually it's quite sad that Blizzard caved in.

[Shirofune]

If they make it so that Alts can get the same amount of AK as a main, who has been played since launch, that character will very easily be able to get ahead of the main in no time with dedicated AP grinding. Since Ak scales exponential and since some quests/WQs in the game gives very large amounts of AP, then it is not hard to imagine a character get ahead by empowering their weapon with these items later on in the game if they get max AK.

And you say it like you havent actually played an alt this expansion.....I have an alt, which i started 2½ week into the expansion and he is 2 points of Artifact weapon traits behind my main, which was max lvl on day 2. So if you think 0,6% less power makes a character useless, then you must have a hard time playing a game, where balance is not completly equal.

That's not the point. Of course your alt is gonna get close to your main eventually as the current system is, but for example, if I started an alt now, the amount of time I've played in my main (18 days at lvl 110) and that amount of AP is something my alt will never ever get close to.

I'm at the point in which my next trait costs 183k AP. Even with the AK going slighty faster, the difference is huge at those traits, and is not something that an alt can catch up with in 1-2 weeks.

Legion is very alt unfriendly, whether you like or not. As it stands it is practically impossible to make an alt and get it ready for Mythic raiding within 2 weeks.

[potis]

If they reduce the AK time down to 2-4 hours undtil you are up to the current max/highest AK lvl, what is the reward for actual playing since launch? With your fix, there would be absolutely no difference between somebody who have put hours into the game since launch and somebody who hit lvl 110 today.

There has to be a difference in AP gained from new player to old player or people are just gonna say "Well what was the point in being an early adopter then?".

No, simply no.

Dungeons, rep, all those are irrelevant stuff, the game is properly done when an alt can be relevant to -raiding-.

Its a raiding game, you should be able to raid, not spend 250 hours grinding useless shit you are already had on your main.

I am not saying freebie raid gear and items, make the person play, if the guild wants to carry him they can.

But there was always the same problem.

"OP Back proc" = MoP= Alts almost useless.

"OP ring proc" = WoD = Alts almost useless.

Now its artifact power and depending on spec providing up to 40-50% DPS increase which means if you dont have them, you are useless.