If I'm unable to nolife it, is alt juggling in Legion an overall bad idea?

[TummyBoy]

For reasons, I can only really play WoW a couple of hours a day. On weekends I could plausibly spend 5+ hours getting my raids done on a couple of toons, but it seems really unlikely that I'll be able to play as much as a lot of other players.

From what I've heard of the artifact system, there isn't much of a hard cap for time investment. More time spent = more artifact power = faster development. That's fair as people who put in more time should get more rewards, but for the casuals, is trying to develop two characters going to be an exercise in futility, or does it seem possible? Killing my main because I'm spending time on my alt seems like a really bad idea.

So, basically, one to two hours a day max. A couple of extra hours on weekends. Would it be dumb of me to, especially in the beginning, try to develop an alt with parallel gear? What are your own plans for alts and your time investment per week?

[Matru]

Honestly, the way to keep an alt relevant for the entire expansion is to just keep up to date with the artifact research.
This means logging in atleast once a week to do a few world quests that rewards the 500 or so order hall resources you need for that.

If you keep this up for a few months, a single world quest might give you 30-40k artifact power, which will make it easy to get a respectable amount of traits for when you want to play the char.

[Danbala]

Fear not, I don't have the exact quote on lock, but Blizzard did say they would have catch-up mechanisims. So I'm thinking we might have an event week to level our weapons (kind of like apexis) or perhaps something like those dungeon quests where instead of getting valor, we get points on our weapons. I don't know exactly what they're going to do, but they did make mention of it. While I have a main, I fully plan on levelling my alts (one of each class on horde and alliance) to experience the storylines.

[Thage]

There are items that were datamined that dramatically up the rate you gain Artifact Power for your off-specs, and I imagine that from 7.1 onward, they'll start putting in means of increasing your alts' acquisition rate similarly. They've mentioned more than once that they're not keen on the idea of locking players out from playing their alts, but it won't be as cruise-control easy to maintain alts as in WoD.

If nothing else, I'd suggest leveling up your alts and getting their Artifacts just for the class and spec storylines. There's gobs of tasty lore to be had from them; Blizz definitely made up for lost time between TBC and Legion's lack of class quests overall.

[Krom2040]

There are items that were datamined that dramatically up the rate you gain Artifact Power for your off-specs,

What items are these?

[Thage]

What items are these?

I'll have to dig them up tomorrow when I'm not working, but they were all over the front page during beta.

[SirBeef]

For reasons, I can only really play WoW a couple of hours a day. On weekends I could plausibly spend 5+ hours getting my raids done on a couple of toons, but it seems really unlikely that I'll be able to play as much as a lot of other players.

From what I've heard of the artifact system, there isn't much of a hard cap for time investment. More time spent = more artifact power = faster development. That's fair as people who put in more time should get more rewards, but for the casuals, is trying to develop two characters going to be an exercise in futility, or does it seem possible? Killing my main because I'm spending time on my alt seems like a really bad idea.

So, basically, one to two hours a day max. A couple of extra hours on weekends. Would it be dumb of me to, especially in the beginning, try to develop an alt with parallel gear? What are your own plans for alts and your time investment per week?

For the last 6 years, I have really been able to play 9-10 hours a week. This has not precluded me nor my group from clearing Heroic(then)/Mythic(now) raids. We also only raid 6-9 hours a week over 2-3 days. Your schedule seems similar to mine with more days available to put in overall.

[Hexxidecimal]

For the last 6 years, I have really been able to play 9-10 hours a week. This has not precluded me nor my group from clearing Heroic(then)/Mythic(now) raids. We also only raid 6-9 hours a week over 2-3 days. Your schedule seems similar to mine with more days available to put in overall.

Don't think he worried about raiding though. Mostly about whether or not he should bother keeping up alts.
@TummyBoy It'll be very difficult to keep up with an alt I think with that amount of play time. At least if you are trying to keep them geared for serious raiding. But you can, as a poster above mentioned play the alt and get them leveled to 110 and then do you world quests to keep your artifact research going. This will allow you to quickly bring your toon up to speed on their most important piece of gear, their artifact.

Now, if you aren't too worried about speed in reference to the rest of your group you may be able to keep them equally geared. level them up together with time split between them evenly. Then at 110 just do enough world quest to keep your artifact knowledge up and a heroic/mythic dungeon a piece. Unless you get really unlucky drops they should be about even going into raiding though it will take you longer to get fully ready for raiding then focusing on one person.