ITT: people that still think AP is a grind even after being told multiple times that it is not.
Protip: You aren't meant to grind out concordance levels. They are just there so after a while of doing content you every so often will get a level.
ITT: people that still think AP is a grind even after being told multiple times that it is not.
Protip: You aren't meant to grind out concordance levels. They are just there so after a while of doing content you every so often will get a level.
Your whole argument is flawed. The difference in time played between you and whoever else you'd have a competitive edge against stays the same and you'll keep that edge. The difference is that now instead of having to farm till trait X before it's no longer worth the time investment you only need to farm to trait X - C while more casual players will find X - C - C2 before they feel the same. What this achieves is that it makes it easier to put AP into your offspecs before TOS comes out.
The playing field is kept even for everyone at AK40 or AK50 but reaching the highest level of AK now makes it easier for people to put points into offspecs and keep alts up to date which is great considering that TOS is coming.
You can get to Concordence easily with AK 40 though. There is no need for that jump to 50. I have 11 110's. That right... 11 of them. Almost all of them are at AK 36-37 range and closing in on having concordence on their "main" spec's. I would have all them with one spec having that 52nd point easily except I try to keep all spec's doing at least decent. My main is at his 48th point for main spec, 45th for off-spec and 44th for 3rd spec. With the jump I get in the next 3-4 levels the AP I get should be insanely high and I'll have concordence on my main and most of my alts by the time ToS opens easily. Its already been shown that anything past that point is such a small dps gain that it would have no effect on you making or not making a raid. If I can have 11 characters to Concordence by the time ToS opens or most of those 11 then people with just a few alts should have nothing to complain about.
Most people will be around 65 traits by the time ToS is halfway, I don't see many people going beyond 70 either, because it's 4x more AP than 65 traits.
So at most some people will be around 1-3 traits ahead, but that won't be long since every 5 traits the AP quadruples and eventually they'll catch up to you within a reset simply because you hit the point where you don't have enough hours in a week to stay ahead.
I don't see you being 2000-4000 stat ahead at any point unless you compare casual WQ players to mythic ToS raiders. I see you being ahead of perhaps 400-600 stats, but that effect is so small, that one good piece of loot can entirely offset that advantage you have.
Obviously. I hit concordance just now and I only did weekly chest run, normal heroic and mythic raids, and barely any WQ (didn't bother with daily hc either).
My BM and SV weapon are both at 48 aswell, so it's not a hard thing to keep going, you just have to play to get it. With AK 40, I presume I'll get 52 in SV and BM weapon, and probably 52 on all my priest specs, lock specs, and my mw monk.
Before ToS opens mid June. Like really, people complain less, and just play, you don't have to farm mythic plus to get it, you just have do be active on a daily basis for just an hour or two.
I'll just chime in and point out that with AK50 and no new traits, you'd reach Concordance in about 1-3 hours depending on what content you'd do on that alt. Now I'm certain a lot of people to whom words like "pacing" and "bigger picture" means very little think that'd be a good thing since their guild apparently forces them to level new alts, but you have to see the consequences of us having AK50 without another layer of traits to go along with it.
You need roughly 2.2 billion AP to unlock Concordance... you know what a LFR boss AP token would grant at AK50? 138 million.
16 or so LFR token drops or equivalent and you've progressed to AP endgame. ???
But take a damn second to think how enjoyable it is to just blow through all those traits you're supposed to unlock gradually while gearing up, instead Artifacts with AK50 would genuinely devolve into smashing traits for a minute then NOTHING but Concordance.
I was looking forward to AK50 too for my alts, until I realized the multiplier was simply TOO INSANE. It's like heirlooms having +1000% exp gained instead of 10. And while people who 'hate leveling' would probably think that'd be a good thing, until they realize they run to a zone, do 1 quest, then have to run to the next. Oh how fun.
It passes the realms of enhancing the fun of unlocking traits rapidly (satisfying) and into the "I did a single heroic dungeon and now I have 46 traits". That is a joke.
A clear of LFR wings and you could reach Concordance. Then truly you'd hate the AP system because the ONLY aspect of it you'd ever notice until 7.3 (hopefully would've) added additional traits so you can take a break from spending a dozen billion AP on another rank of Concordance. Because with AK50 that is all you'd ever experience. +1 Concordance over and over. Every single other trait would be filled by default, more or less.
This whole controversy is an EXCELLENT example of shortsighted players thinking they know what they want. No, in the current state of Artifact weapons, you will NOT enjoy AK50 as much as you think, just because your goal is to reach as high as possible. Good thing Blizzard realized this before we actually reached 40 or above because jesus this community thinks 'being slowed down' is nothing short of a crime against humanity. Game design is NOT just about making things faster and easier for the players. Shocking, I know.
In the end, the only real consequence of AK40 instead of 50 is that we'll have a few ranks lower Concordance than otherwise, but the feel of progression in the Artifact system isn't destroyed completely in the process.
Last edited by MasterHamster; 2017-05-24 at 11:05 AM.
Active WoW player Jan 2006 - Aug 2020
Occasional WoW Classic Andy since.
Nothing lasts forever, as they say.
But at least I can casually play Classic and remember when MMORPGs were good.
52 is more or less cap. The rest of the levels are minimal. At AK 40 it'll be easy enough to get 60-65 just playing casually before Argus. But guess what. You don't need it.
The general consensus in top 100 guilds right now is AP past 52 is just a case of do your world quests and w/e you get, you get. Given how easy getting 52 was at AK 35, getting it on alts with 40 will be easy af. With what they've done to concordance, it is already irrelevant.
Who put this stupid idea in your head that you need to get as much concordance as possible? For what, world quests? LFR? Mythic+, raiding?
It´s funny how people complain about not geting something they didn´t earn yet nor need at all and just complain for the sake of not geting something. We all get fewer ranks in Concordance (just flat % resulting in no one loosing out due to scaling) but still will have at least something to bump our AP we get from raids etc. into (what I think is the reason we have this infinite trait at all). I even like this, because I now don´t have to research this stupid thing for 40 more days and save some resources on my alts. No one loses anything rly but it´s technically a nerf so why not cry and let´s see what happens. At this point I understand why blizzard often struggles with ballancing and work with feedback, because people will bitch about anything they can find.
Sadly, quite a sizeable portion of the community feel like all progression outside of raids is a checklist to be finished asap. A system like AP that is supposed to always have some progression available, while keeping older content relevant to some extent, doesn't fly well with them.
Just look at what happened when people felt like capping 54 traits for Nighthold before 7.2 was released, people burning out for minimal boosts.
The solution that works in order to keep AP relevant without making people think they have to attain a certain goal is to make the end trait (Concordance) powerful by itself (rank 1) and allow people that want to push ways to make it slightly more powerful, but they will never CAP it, so eventually everyone will find their ceiling where they don't think it's worth to clear everything, every WQ, run 50 mythics, for just another +200 stat proc.
I'm guessing that few people will feel "obliged" to push past maybe Concordance rank 10. If that. Rank 10 to 11 is about 7 billion AP in order to increase the Concordance proc by 5%
Last edited by MasterHamster; 2017-05-24 at 11:21 AM.
Active WoW player Jan 2006 - Aug 2020
Occasional WoW Classic Andy since.
Nothing lasts forever, as they say.
But at least I can casually play Classic and remember when MMORPGs were good.
Have you actually looked at the artifact calendar? A 6k proc is 430 billion AP. The guys playing 12-18 hrs a day are at 12 billion right now. I'm going to totally ignore the "if not more" in that because the difference between 6k and 6.2k is 129b AP or in more understandable numbers 10 times what the current Rank 1 AP grinder has at the moment.
Anything mythic raider my ass, the amount of people actively grinding has taken a huge nose dive because anyone that isn't fucking stupid realises it is in no way healthy to play this game 18 hours straight weeks on end for what amounts to 2% more damage, or less.
Which is exactly the attitude they probably should have taken from the start, instead of convincing themselves of the *need* to farm AP to death to reach the cap. The sad thing is that it took Blizzard having to go to these lengths to make these people see the light.
AP was never meant to be an objective in and of itself. It was always meant to be something that we collect passively by just playing the game and that ended up rewarding those who spent more time playing with a minor advantage. Instead people took it to extremes and decided to place a higher priority on the acquisition of AP than was really justified based on the return on (time) investment.
The only difference now is that by reducing that return on investment to even lower levels, it has finally become obvious to (almost) everyone out there that if you want to advance your character, there are muchbetter ways to spend your time than on simply farming AP.
there is always a new level to go for if you want a small gain and AP locks at a point which will make that possible for quite a while. this change seems good to me tbh, my only thought is whether or not they will fuck up the same way they did before and unlock 50 traits later, effectively fucking everyone who capped their AK out asap and grinded once hitting 40.
True, but the initial implementation with 54 traits used a linear scale for the last 20 traits, which offered decent rewards for time invested to these hardcore players.
Now they have moved to a completely exponential scale and NOW they agree that grinding concordance is pointless.
You do realise that in order to get that even at AK 50 would take a very very very very long time (maybe I missed a very) of right clicking AP items even if you had an unlimited supply of them? Maxing out concordance is possible I guess.... if you played at lvl110 with your artefact for the next 2-3 expansions.........
Simply fact is - we are not MEANT to max out the artefact. The only reason it has any points beyond concordance (unless they are going to redo it again in 7.3) is just "somewhere" to put the AP items you still get once you have got concordance. Putting another point in there wont really do much - but its better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.