Idea: Ritual of Merging Destinies/Ritual of Alternate Destinies

[Canati]

As someone who don’t care much for raids, but enjoy the other content WoW has to offer, I often think of how I would change or what I would add to the game to add more non-raid content.

One such idea I have is to allow a character to gain another class’ class-defining non-combat ability through a time consuming “quest”. The type of ability I’m talking about is e.g. Hunters’ Feign Death, Mages’ Teleport, Priests’ Levitate, Death Knights’ Path of Frost, Druids’ Flight Form, Shamans’ Ghost Wolf, etc. These abilities would be disabled in PVP (and maybe raids) to make them no more mandatory than any of the many utility items in the game that give similar abilities.

As for how one would go about gaining these abilities, I have two ideas.

The Ritual of Merging Destinies

This would be initiated on battle.net’s account manager in order to ensure that enough warnings, disclaimers, and authentication requests are in place. You would target a max level character on your account, and upon logging into that character, you would receive a quest start item in the mail for The Ritual of Merging Destinies.

It would give you a lore-appropriate reason why a hero of the [faction] needs your help. You would have to complete a quest chain to attain the knowledge to create a Tome of [the character’s class ability], requiring that you sacrifice yourself in the process. Using the same requirements that are in place for deleting a character, the ritual would allow you to mail the battle.net account bound tome to another character before the character that did the ritual would be deleted.

The recipient would receive the tome as well as a letter from [appropriate lore character that helped you] informing you that “A hero has sacrificed themselves to help you in your adventures. It is a pity that you never had the chance to meet, but you never seemed to be in the same place at the same time”.
Whether or not the character could be undeleted at the cost of the removal of the ability on the other character I don’t know.
This version of the quest to attain the ability would be the most open, as it would allow the use of current characters, deleted ones, boosted ones, etc. Many players would have “free” abilities waiting for them by sacrificing characters they no longer use.

The Ritual of Alternate Destinies

This is the more restricted variant. A lore-appropriate NPC (maybe in Pandaria?) located somewhere would offer a number of quests (one of each class that the character is not) titled The Ritual of Alternate Destinies: [Class]. Upon starting the quest a short cutscene would explain the basics, and you would go through a ritual putting you to sleep, automatically logging you out. You would then be able to use the realm finder to find an appropriate realm, and click a new button: New alternate destiny: [Charactername].

You would then create a new character (locked into the class(es) you picked the quest for). It would be a normal leveling experience with nothing special except an additional Ritual of Alternate Destinies quest to reach max level. Upon doing so, you would go through a short quest line to “wake up” on the other character and delete the alt, OR have an option to "I cannot do it. Is there a way to free the alternate me to live his own life?".

This would complete the quest for the original character (who could also be used normally while leveling the quest alt) and the reward (for sacrificing the alt) would be a Tome of [the class’s class-defining ability].

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The whole idea behind this is to turn alt leveling into a quest for your main. A lot of people like leveling, and like making alts, but stop at some point because of any number of reasons. For me, it ended up being too much to keep them all up to date with events, gear, legendary quest, etc, so I “parked” them to focus on completing a lot of things on my main. I would gladly level a druid from 1-110 as a quest to cut a second off my mount time, as stupid as that might sound to some.

Anyways, just an idea.

[Irian]

I think the concept is cool, but I don't like the idea of:

A. Making a character solely for the purpose of sacrificing it, because while this may work in Diablo it would feel odd in WoW, an MMORPG, and;

B. The idea of giving iconic abilities from one class to another. Homogenization is already a serious issue that I'm hoping they fix in Legion, class identity is beyond bland in this game.

[barial]

This bullshit would be required for raiding just like the legendary ring, except even more punishing for alts.

This whole thing sounds like something you'd see on a Korean MMO where an enormous amount of grinding is expected

[Canati]

Yes, something that is disabled in raiding is indeed required for raiding.


As for class distinction, most of these features are already available through other means. Water walking, speed boosts, slowfall, etc have multiple options each for how you can get them on any class. The only one that doesn't is flight form, but that thing is so overpowered as a class-specific feature anyways that it doesn't bother me - and I say that having an ilv 700+ druid.

Would be different if the skills in question were e.g. death grip, hunter pet, or something like that. With currently available items in-game, I could be on my shaman, standing on water, and be joined by a warlock slowfalling off an edge, getting out of combat to get rid of a trailing mob, and running up next to me while water walking in ghost wolf form, waving, and then opening a portal to Dalaran. If all of that can already happen with random items bought from the AH or picked off low level mobs, I don't see the problem of the same thing happening from someone spending hours and hours learning and using the class they're mimicking.