May 22 Hotfixes - AK Cap Reduced to 40, WoW Arena Cup, Con Before the Storm

[lb]

IMHO they try to avoid that AK50 is reached to fast - they try to slow down players burning down trough the content. So they paused it at 40 for some month then they will raise it to 50 to give the illusion that there is something to do. I think we steering into a big content drought after TOS and they know it. This is just another foul/cheap way to make content longer "relevant" with time gating. The idea behind it is to have little to do - sufficient enough to stop players from unsubbing but less enough to stretch the content more.

[Exlex]

Meh, this is kinda annoying for alts. To get 52, you'll need I think 2.3B AP. So far WQs only give like 5M to 10M. At 40, they'll give roughly 10M to 20M. 200 or 100+ WQs (prob like 150-175) to get maxed. Ah well.

For mains, I don't think it'll be realistically possible to hit 20 points in concordance now. That kind of sucks too but getting to 11 was basically the point where going beyond was kinda crazy. I think the system is better this way but the entire expansion has been about chasing AP and most of us already are at the point where we don't really need to do anything anymore. Not sure what the 'carrot on the stick' is going to be for the rest of the expansion if we're already all done with AP for Tomb.

Why is 11 the target?

[therayeffect]

Why is 11 the target?

Well, that was kind of just the reasonable spot for me. I think I should've been more specific about that was MY goal and getting to 11 even seems like a lot now. I was looking at the math and to get to 11 in Concordance, we'll need ~31B AP. That's about 10x what point 52 is... which was fine because we were going to end up getting more than 10x the AP we're getting now but with this nerf, it's going to take 10x longer to get there when it was already kind of slow. I think that's kind of the point of the complaints. We went from 'Hey this is kind of worth it to do whenever we feel like it" to "Holy FUCK, why am I even logging into this game anymore?".

Everything just got 10x longer related to AP when it was already going to reach a point where it was worthless to do. It feels like everyone is going to end up just raid-logging again. We're going to login, do our +15s and our raid and logout again. It's WoD all over again. Most WQs will be worthless, most M+ will be worthless. This change basically nerfs the expansion's 'carrot-on-the-stick' of AP. I don't really get why they want to remove any reasonable interest in that when anyone who didn't want to do the grind didn't need to.

[Deleted]

I think this all depends on how far away next expansion is and whether the weapon traits are final or will be adjusted/expanded again. Im kinda okay with this change, dont really care, Im not pursuing AP because its inefficient atm, I will wait for a cap (40), try to get to concordance and put the rest to my offspecs. Besides that im going to casually enjoy other classes´campaigns on my alts.

Its always bad when something is not worth doing just because of time gating. People not enjoying playing alts are in a bad spot, im okay with that. I dont think this is the biggest issue they should deal with right now though.

[lucred]

With AK40 it would take 1.3 YEARS of right-clicking tokens that give a base of 1000AP to get the final rank. That is assuming you can actually HOLD the million+ tokens needed. Also, those are higher value than any WQ as even the revised history of argus tomes are only a base of 600, so you would have to get the tokens from M+ runs (over 500k of them.)

[Deleted]

Woooo none of my toons were even at 40 yet. Score for me lol.

yeah, no one is... so good score for you.

[Deleted]

Personally, I believe that they're behind on the patch 7.2.5 development. They were counting on AK 40 being the one where Tomb is released, and now that they're behind, they need to gate it until they're ready to release. Probably in the week after 7.2.5, they'll hotfix it back to 50 with the argument that they didn't want people to feel like they didn't have anything to do or some crap.

[Guyon]

Another great move of that useless person that Ion is.

[Osmeric]

Gotta fuck those alts, Ion's entire life is devoted to it.

If anything, this change is alt friendly. Mains will become pointless to grind AP on with capped AK, even if you cannot cap the Concordance on them. The cost in hours played per upgrade will become so extreme you'd be better off improving an alt. With this change that point will be reached a couple of months sooner.

[Sulika]

Think you fudged the numbers a bit somewhere. Or maybe I did. I came up with about 36 days of right clicking 1000AP tokens (granting 550m AP).

865,842,644,766,330AP to max
So you need 1574260 1000AP tokens to max
2 seconds per cast is 3,148,520 seconds
52,475 minutes
874.58 hours
36.4 days

Still pretty much impossible, just not AS impossible

Think I must have divided by 60 once instead of twice to get from seconds to hours. Well spotted!

[Damajin]

I'm going to get Concordance before I even get to AK 38 so this is ultimately meaningless.

[Cassidin]

This! AP is most crappy thing this expansion IMO. (except mythic+).

While your opinion is of course valid, personally I think it gives everyone the chance to improve and upgrade their weapon without getting drops for it. In the past, getting the weapon drop you needed could be very frustrating. Of course, we now have the drops for three relics but at least you can still upgrade the weapon and work toward it reliably.

[phoenixia]

All of you guys are doing the math wrong.

With 7.3 (and beyond) they will obviously increase the base AP gain of the worldquest (at least the new ones on argus, like they did with the ones on broken shore compared to broken isle, maybe with an even bigger gap) and the mythic+, so you'll get 20m AP for wq, 40m for M+ etc.

It will be a lot easier to grind those traits than what you think.

[Deleted]

All of you guys are doing the math wrong.

With 7.3 (and beyond) they will obviously increase the base AP gain of the worldquest (at least the new ones on argus, like they did with the ones on broken shore compared to broken isle, maybe with an even bigger gap) and the mythic+, so you'll get 20m AP for wq, 40m for M+ etc.

It will be a lot easier to grind those traits than what you think.

Hmm, so our math is wrong, because they will change the variables in the future... Interesting approach towards math

BTW: They did not increase the base AP gain for world quests on broken shore. It's just that you now have more Artifact Knowledge that you get more out of them. At AK 40, you would already get 24M AP from the broken shore world quests. This is all factored in in the calculations. In fact, all of the calculations I made are based on AK 50 even, so a WQ on the broken shore gives 331M in my calculation at 55.2M% AK.

[Yot]

Ummm no, once you hit the first rank of concordance, you're pretty much done with AP farm on that character, additional points give very little benefit
<snip>

I don't understand this logic and I see it thrown around a lot. At 52 points it's a +2k primary stat proc, 10 points later at 62 it's a +4k primary stat proc. How is double the proc considered very little benefit? Give it another 20 points at 82 and it's now an +8k proc for four times original value. Let's go to extremes and say someone maxed it at 101 artifact level for an +11.8k proc. If you had someone at 52 traits with their +2k proc versus someone with a +11.8k proc would you still think there's very little benefit between the two players?

[Snowfunk]

Yup, gotto screw those alt's over.

[phoenixia]

Hmm, so our math is wrong, because they will change the variables in the future... Interesting approach towards math

okay okay, I agree, i should have said that your predictions are wrong.

BTW: They did not increase the base AP gain for world quests on broken shore.

A majority of the broken shore WQ awards a lot more than the ones in the broken isles. So the base reward must be higher, no ?

[Unholyground]

yeah, no one is... so good score for you.

I know its great, I haven't payed in like 3 months. I got caught up for nothing too, no working my ass off.

[Dawnseven]

I'm all for the AK change as far as alts are concerned. I stopped doing AK work orders on alts at AK 30 and burning the resources, thinking I could eventually get my main to 50, buy books for 45 and then grind the last 5 levels on the alts (thereby saving myself from farming several thousand resources across more than a dozen characters, but then it got even better with this tidbit:

To that end, the item Artifact Research Compendium: Volumes I-VII is being changed to grant Artifact Knowledge level 40 instead of level 35. As before, it will be purchasable in the Order Hall by characters who have reached AK 40. This means that players will be able to immediately catch-up to the AK cap on alts once they have access to this book, which should make the process of getting to Concordance on alts less daunting too.

Sweet. So as soon as my main hits 40, I can buy books for the alts (obviously no resource issues on my main) and get them to 40 too. Works for me.

[Syenite]

Inserting my personal progress, assuming i will reach level 56 around the time i cap AK at 40 instead of 66 at 50.

Each level from then will take 30% more time than the previous, i.e. we are all currently throttled at 1 level / 5 days.

The first 5 levels after capping will take roughly 50 days, the next 5 would take 191 assuming my effortto be a constant. Assuming i will spend 100 days upgrading my mainspec i will add 7 levels to the 56 i had when AK capped --> My mainspec will cap at 63 instead of 73.

All they are going to do with this change is reducing the concordance proc by 2000. Wonder if they were afraid of it getting too strong at ~6k.....