So...AP system made obsolete?

[Tojara]

It's great for alts. You reach concordance and then you just naturally get it for doing nothing. You can literally just mission board with decent followers after you hit 52, and your alts will probably only be several traits (at most) behind your mains when 7.3 comes out. If you did this at the launch of the expansion you would probably be a dozen traits behind, or more.

For mains it literally doesn't matter either. As long as your AP bar isn't at a standstill, it's still okay to do activities that yield AP, I just wouldn't go out of your way to do them. The Top AP farmers in the world are trait 63, and have likely been doing ~8 hours worth of M+ a day since 7.2. For all that effort, trait wise they are maybe half a dozen traits ahead of people who do a single M+ a week, occasionally do emissaries, send out missions each day, and maybe hit up a couple big AP quests from time to time. Half a dozen seems like a lot, but considering that the general power increase from each individual point compared to launch, it's pretty small. That gap might have been a 6-8% power increase (or more) at launch, but now it might be a little over 1%.

The worst thing about it, at least for AP farmers is that it's only going to get worse. There is absolutely no way they can increase efficiency or put in more time to keep that gap. Eventually casual Joe who plays basically the same amount every week is going to see that gap of half a dozen shrink to probably ~2 by the time 7.3 comes out. Casual Joe probably won't have blood clots either.

For all intent and purpose that's me giving a long winded response about how the AP system is basically obsolete. It's has enough impact that you probably shouldn't ignore 52 (and honestly, several traits after 52 aren't too time consuming), but that's absolutely by design. It's basically content to keep you honest and put some effort into a character. I poop socked a lot on my Warlock once he hit 110, and it literally took ~12 hours of playtime once he hit 110 to cap get him to 52, and he's only 3 days old.

[Rotted]

Artifacts are meant to be relevant all through the expac, there's no way it's redundant half way through,

It's pretty much guaranteed we'll get a new set of traits come argus,

[Deleted]

I wish they'd apply an equally effective treatment to the legendary system.

It was cool at the start of the expansion but by now everyone is just burned out by trying to get their chars ready.

I just want to play the game. The AP changes help greatly with that. Since they were implemented I've been playing way more chars without feeling like being MILES behind everyone else. But many of my chars still only have 0-1 legendaries for certain specs and it just feels bad (not even complaining about BiS leggies).

[Eazy]

Out of curiosity, why do you say min/max in this situation? How is gaining 100 agi every couple of weeks min/maxing? What are you minimizing in order to maximize your output? Your social life perhaps?

By min/max I mean that some people are putting a lot of effort to gain the advantage in raids compared to others.
To put it more simply - they're maximizing their time to get as many AP as possible, but also minimize to do other things(because they want to focus on AP only for raids).

What are you minimizing in order to maximize your output? Your social life perhaps?

That could be the case also.

[VladimirM]

Now grants 4,000 Strength, Agility, Intellect, or Versatility at rank 1 (was 2,000).
Additional ranks now increase this value by 300 per rank (was 200).

again, unless i missed something...it seems like some people are saying shit that i have no idea what they're talking about.

you are correct, 4000 > 300 per rank. And it is far from being shit. With minimum ap earning (5-8 WQ per day) you reach 55-56 which is more than bad upgrade (compared to 52)

[Twdft]

And by grind, I don't mean "lots to do". I mean the way in which doing something today can have me putting in twice the effort for the same reward doing it tomorrow would, but then still having that nagging feeling of being behind when you finally do it. The curve never felt great. It wasn't a subtle yet noticable difference like the rested XP system - and it didn't reward doing very hard content as much as it should.

The curve felt only aweful if you grinded way ahead of artifact knowledge. I hope that more players learn one thing from Legion: to look at content, weigh reward vs investment and are able to realize "not meant to grind my ass off". The reward was always meaningful for me, I got big enough chunks of AP because I didn't grind it out when the next weapon level began to take twice the effort.

Outside of the race for mythic world first (which is not more than ~1000 players) it was never necessary to grind AP. Outside of world first race being able to concentrate for 10 minutes and get the mechanics right brings way more kills than that one more weapon level you grinded 8 hours in MoS for.

[Eggroll]

Basically, at the moment it's pretty much obsolete.

I always found the trait system to be redundat from the start because in the long run you would pick all traits anyway so what does it matter which one you pick first? It's not like the old talent system where you had to pick one and couldn't have the other. There no top ability you were glad having when finishing leveling or anything.

[Ishayu]

The curve felt only aweful if you grinded way ahead of artifact knowledge. I hope that more players learn one thing from Legion: to look at content, weigh reward vs investment and are able to realize "not meant to grind my ass off". The reward was always meaningful for me, I got big enough chunks of AP because I didn't grind it out when the next weapon level began to take twice the effort.

Outside of the race for mythic world first (which is not more than ~1000 players) it was never necessary to grind AP. Outside of world first race being able to concentrate for 10 minutes and get the mechanics right brings way more kills than that one more weapon level you grinded 8 hours in MoS for.

It felt awful if you grinded ahead because it was a big grind then.

It felt awful if you didn't grind ahead, because you were constantly behind your peers, and often times they'd complain about it.

It was a problem in far more than world first races. Even realm first races it was a problem, in fact in just plain Mythic raiding it was a problem. NH Mythic was designed around having all the points in the weapon, and not having it would get you quite a lot of abuse from your peers, even in very calm guilds.

[Jinxz]

in reality systems like AK/AP in mmorpgs should work like this:

- let all ppl farm/grind to point X
- point X is where game is balanced on overall
- point X is a base requirement everyone would/should have
- point X is a hard breaking point every player (even casuals) clearly see that this point is the breakpoint
- after point X the curve must go up very straight and give very little reward for high investment
- after point X the whole system must become longterm, stretched over time and flexible
- flexible here means that being off for 7 days shouldnt make a difference

this is the only way you dont cut out all the other things ppl like in game like pets, pvp, achvmnts, alts etc and give 90% of playerbase time to do that without feeling "loose power" or doing it wrong. on the other side you at least dont have nothing for the that 10% like to play 1 char 24/7 to the absolutelly max, regardless how small the difference is.

this is the only way you can handle such things in mmorpgs. everything else failed repeatedly in the last 20 years.

ps: one of the most important things here is, too clearly show when ppl have reached point x.

You'd make a great dev. Not the horrendous Diablo 3 ones we have now on the WoW team.