What do you do with your alts?

[Garretdejiko]

With Korrak's revenge being such a great way to level

Better than Island Expeditions?

[Doffen]

Azerite and essences change your game play per spec, for specific content you change your spec-azerite-essence combo for the weekly affix and in some cases for each group setup.

Thats meaningfull and its not just like getting your only 1-2 BiS legendarys (RNG) and getting the ilvl relicts and use it for everything or if you dont have them, suffering for months.

They don't really change much from one spec to another. I got all classes at max with varied ranks of essences. But they don't change the spec much like the legendaries and artifact did. But I guess it's a more subjective thing anyway, what you like and so on. Maybe I am just not imaginative enough.

What I am talking more about though is the content, different rewards for each class/spec, different stories, different legendaries, different Artifact Weapon, different customization, and it's not the same as you get with Essences. Essences are role-spesific, which make them homogenized, which isn't that great. Though, as far as the band aid essences are for the Azerite System I like it personally. And I get that they had to make something from scratch into an expansion, which is never easy.

If you ever doubt how meaningfull essences are right now, just scroll back the pages in this forum about the missing BoA essences for alt's.

This is what I wrote in the first post you quoted, Essences wouldn't be an issue if that was the system we had in the start of the expansion. Like in Legion most had maxed artifact on their chars, different specs etc at this time of the expansion. But Essences suffers from being implemented halfway into the expansion. But I totally agree about the meaningful part, Essences are meaningful, it ties with the story nicely, how good or bad that might be, and I like some of them, the acquisition as well. I also don't see the issue with essences on alts, I can do m+ and heroic raidpugs easily with everything from rank 1 to rank 3 essences, and not all of them got second minor(65) either. I do feel the lack of content though, at this time in Legion I was doing the Mage Tower, Class-mount quests, leveled up more chars for the Class Hall story, the sets, weapon-skins etc. I felt that was great. But that's my opinion.

[Ange]

I do feel the lack of content though, at this time in Legion I was doing the Mage Tower, Class-mount quests, leveled up more chars for the Class Hall story, the sets, weapon-skins etc. I felt that was great. But that's my opinion.

I am just halfway through the nazjatar meta achievement and 8.3 is allready days away, I did not feel the need to even touch my alts for other than a single weekly-10.

To be honest, some of the R4 essences felt more meaningfull and at least challenging time wise as the magetower from legion - I did all roles in the first week of the tower release.

As a regular player this was the situation for me many months before the mage tower (7.3) released to have anything to do:

long before 7.3 (26 legos / all)


3 weeks into 7.3.2 (26+5=31 legos)


3 months into 7.3.2 (57 legos)


At this point in time, many casuals worked still on the first good legendarys for the main spec. People had to basicly not play for the majority of LEGION to have anything to do with a main class at this late into the expansion.

Cant really say LEGION had as much content to do as BfA, I cant even see my main beeing done with anything till shadowlands.

[Tradu]

Raid, M+ and all the garbage grinds I need to do in order to do raid/M+.

- - - Updated - - -

People disliked AP farming in LEGION.
People hated mage tower at release in LEGION.
People hated the artefact weapon RNG drops.

The short term memory of the community in its glory.

BfA solved many big issues from LEGION and turned back hardcore anything a lot towards the casual playerbase and still the casual players are the one complaining the most about BfA. They were the ones segregated from the main game in LEGION and even locked up in garrisons in WoD.

Motivational issue? Going from "I have nothing to do in this game, I quit" to "I have something to do in this game, I quit" is just immeasurable experience that cannot be rationalized. Blizzard was smart enough to ignore this nonsense years ago and just stick to data from the active players. The latest attention to #streamwhores did nothing good for either versions of the game and will hopefully end soon and blizzard just stamps the streamers as what they are.

Data is useless without context. If you look at the data of what I did in Legion and BfA, you'd think that AP, legendaries and essences were all fantastic systems. Why else would somebody farm every legendary on every class and almost 100 spare tokens? Why else would somebody get basically every essence on like 8 characters? Clearly the Argus invasion points were the peak content they've ever added in a patch, why else would somebody do them on CD for months on 12+ characters?
Islands would look like a massive success as well, everybody is doing them! Some people even farm them all day for weeks when a patch hits!

[Augusta138]

I used to play 3-4 characters for m+ / raiding and a different view on content.

Dont play more than just 1 alt atm due to the silly essences.

[Dug]

Basically lvl cap em and abandon them. I'll do a little catch up gearing in whatever patch but I don't do anything serious with them. I can only manage my main and maybe one other alt super casually

[Blackmist]

Farm herbs. Make them into pots.

[Biske]

Dick around, do the same bosses about 13 times a week to try to get mounts from them (I have abysmal luck), stuff like that. I also use my alts to provide myself with consumables and such.

[Drusin]

Run raids for xmog, gold, mounts on all of them
Farm rares for xmog, mounts, toys on all of them
Give them all a profession you don't have, and once you have all the professions covered make the rest alchemists
Do gold emissaries on all of them
Really if you aren't interested in the class and don't care about vanity stuff then alts aren't really useful.

[MrLachyG]

With Korrak's revenge being such a great way to level, I've leveled up a bunch of my alts to 120, but now I'm sitting with a bunch of max level characters with no profession skills, gear that's absolutely terrible, level 1 heart of azeroth, no war campaign followers, no rep, etc.

I know I can get BoA gear on my main using manapearls to at least gear them up a bit, but beyond that what do people do with their alts? Do you actively farm azerite/resources/rep with them?

Yeah manapearls are a godsend for alts. That and the quest in early Naz that gives you a 375 weapon. As for what I do with them it depends on what it is. Geared my Worgen up so I could breeze through the heritage armor quest when it drops. Running old dungeons boosting the relevant rep for future heritage armor quests. That’s about it

[Jetstream]

Dunno if this is obvious, sorry if it is. But you can buy Fur from Garrison Resources which you get lots of from doing garrison mission. Of course you need to have the Trading Post building to do so.

If this was the thing you meant with buying it then nvm me!

Nope, never looked at the trading post before. I had meant the AH. I’ll look into it... looks like I’d want it on a double gatherer...

[Pony Soldier]

Right now I'm just farming for manapearls so I can buy full benthic sets for them. After I do that then its just gonna be catching them up in the storyline and doing mog runs which are really annoying right now because of the weekly raid lockouts. I seriously wish they would do away with them at least for the older raids. I go in mostly just for a couple things I want and they never fucking drop, even when I do it on multiple characters. I don't even get any other gear that I could use as transmog just bracers, trinkets, and fucking rings and gear that I can't even use.

I left some other alts for me to level normally so even if I were to get everything I wanted on my 120s I wouldn't be totally out of things to do.

[The True King]

I always use to level up alts because I enjoy the journey but when I hit max level I almost always abandon them.

[kaminaris]

They don't really change much from one spec to another. I got all classes at max with varied ranks of essences. But they don't change the spec much like the legendaries and artifact did. But I guess it's a more subjective thing anyway, what you like and so on. Maybe I am just not imaginative enough.

Oh no no no no, artifact added one button to rotation, everything else was flat boost of damage plus some cooldown reductions (which is another form of flat damage boost). It was pretty much equal to azerite essences.
However azerite gear does affect greatly most specs.

What I am talking more about though is the content, different rewards for each class/spec, different stories, different legendaries, different Artifact Weapon, different customization, and it's not the same as you get with Essences. Essences are role-spesific, which make them homogenized, which isn't that great. Though, as far as the band aid essences are for the Azerite System I like it personally. And I get that they had to make something from scratch into an expansion, which is never easy.

As for someone who did all class campaigns/mounts/mage towers.
Nope, it wasn't much.
You can lie to yourself all you want but all that crap excluding mage tower (which took me the longest amount of time). Was like 6-10 hours of QUESTS.
Mage tower was awesome, but in the end I did like 32 mage towers within 10 days. And for me it was the only real content legion had for alts.
Why I made so much alts then? Simple, to make millions of gold. Plus I am author of rotation helper addon so I need all classes at max level.

Never had any excitement on logging on alts cause after weapon quests, there was nothing to do. I wasn't logging there to have fun, but to make money, cause there was no fun till mage tower. And legiondaries? The neverending carrot on the stick can go to hell.

This is what I wrote in the first post you quoted, Essences wouldn't be an issue if that was the system we had in the start of the expansion. Like in Legion most had maxed artifact on their chars, different specs etc at this time of the expansion. But Essences suffers from being implemented halfway into the expansion. But I totally agree about the meaningful part, Essences are meaningful, it ties with the story nicely, how good or bad that might be, and I like some of them, the acquisition as well. I also don't see the issue with essences on alts, I can do m+ and heroic raidpugs easily with everything from rank 1 to rank 3 essences, and not all of them got second minor(65) either. I do feel the lack of content though, at this time in Legion I was doing the Mage Tower, Class-mount quests, leveled up more chars for the Class Hall story, the sets, weapon-skins etc. I felt that was great. But that's my opinion.

And legiondaries wouldn't have been an issue if we had waking essences at the start of legion (added at LAST patch, when they were unnecessary anymore), instead what we got? Gigantic dildo up in our butt = legendary softcap 4.

Got bad leggos? Well fuck you, create another character and try again your luck!

Are essences bad? Yes like any other rental power gear. It is bad but at least they can be pretty easy acquired except for pvp ones (WTF blizzard was thinking).
Are they worse than legiondaries, oh hell no, nothing is worse than that garbage system. And essences doesn't take 2 gear slots.

Thats about it when it comes to people memories, camera changes anyone? Unstable Arcanocrystal? Farming veiled argunite to get a chance?

-------------------

Now back at topic on hand:

I have 13 max level characters. Every class plus one double agent (ally) hunter since WoD.

1. Finally I don't have to log in to alts just because mission table gives free gold (Yeah I know I didn't have to do that in legion but that offer was too good to pass). Made millions of gold with almost no effort.
2. I use my alts to:
a) camp rares I want some drop on ex battle pets
b) use mage to do achievements around the world cause its obviously fastest way to travel = portals
c) use them to do ONE timewalking dungeon per alt when event comes up and amass tons of badges (12 dungeons = 6000 badges) - so i bought pretty much everything including reputation tokens
d) use druid to pickup herbs when Im really bored or having conversation (better than circling around pyramid/dalaran/etc)
e) mass produce invi potions from old garrison and send mount/token mission in old garrison
f) do the old daily quests ex I parked DK at molten front to farm zen vorka cache. Parked hunter in therazane throne to get Rock lover achievement.
g) doing bee events on ally alt on another server to get pets and mount (even if its not usable on horde)

and so on. There is always a way to make use having multiple alts.
And because of the amount, I can park them at multiple location doing multiple achievements/rares/battle pets at the same time.

[Doffen]

Oh no no no no, artifact added one button to rotation, everything else was flat boost of damage plus some cooldown reductions (which is another form of flat damage boost). It was pretty much equal to azerite essences.
However azerite gear does affect greatly most specs.

Wrong. And you are very wrong that it was anything like the artifact weapon. The Azerite do close to nothing else than to just add damage/stat boost. While artifact and legendaries could change the gameplay. Essences are more like Artifact. Azerite Armor is the worst system they evet made in the game. Why do you think we got Essences?

As for someone who did all class campaigns/mounts/mage towers.
Nope, it wasn't much.
You can lie to yourself all you want but all that crap excluding mage tower (which took me the longest amount of time). Was like 6-10 hours of QUESTS.
Mage tower was awesome, but in the end I did like 32 mage towers within 10 days. And for me it was the only real content legion had for alts.
Why I made so much alts then? Simple, to make millions of gold. Plus I am author of rotation helper addon so I need all classes at max level.

Like you lie to yourself that BfA is just as popular? You thinking it was crap is your opinion, many disagree with you. Class Hall and the content it provided was very good.

Never had any excitement on logging on alts cause after weapon quests, there was nothing to do. I wasn't logging there to have fun, but to make money, cause there was no fun till mage tower. And legiondaries? The neverending carrot on the stick can go to hell.

That's on you. No expansion gave the amount of content we got in Legion. What you think is fun or not is on you. I think it was great.

And legiondaries wouldn't have been an issue if we had waking essences at the start of legion (added at LAST patch, when they were unnecessary anymore), instead what we got? Gigantic dildo up in our butt = legendary softcap 4.

Got bad leggos? Well fuck you, create another character and try again your luck!

Are essences bad? Yes like any other rental power gear. It is bad but at least they can be pretty easy acquired except for pvp ones (WTF blizzard was thinking).
Are they worse than legiondaries, oh hell no, nothing is worse than that garbage system. And essences doesn't take 2 gear slots.

Thats about it when it comes to people memories, camera changes anyone? Unstable Arcanocrystal? Farming veiled argunite to get a chance.

You are right, how you got legendaries wasn't optional. But damn it was still fun to get. Essences are so much better than Azerite Armor. Again, why do you think we got essences? Because Azerite Armor is shit and people generally liked the Artifact Weapon.

[kaminaris]

Wrong. And you are very wrong that it was anything like the artifact weapon. The Azerite do close to nothing else than to just add damage/stat boost. While artifact and legendaries could change the gameplay. Essences are more like Artifact. Azerite Armor is the worst system they evet made in the game. Why do you think we got Essences?

Wrong, at most 1-2 leggo changed your rotation, making something shorter cooldown does not equal changing your rotation, it just means clicking button faster.
Many people got completely wrong idea what "gameplay changing" means, certainly not making you push buttons faster.

Nothing in this whole game comes close to how azerite gear messes up with rotation, not legendaries, not weapon artifact, not tier sets.
If you don't believe me, compare simcraft APLs from legion vs current APLs.

Gameplay changing leggos by class:

DK: Cold Heart
DH: None (aside from anger of half-giants that locked you to one talent), arguably head could change your rotation to one button if you had stream of mobs and reset cooldown repeatedly
Druid: The Emerald Dreamcatcher (just a little), Oneth's Intuition
Hunter: Magnetized Blasting Cap Launcher
Mage: Koralon's Burning Touch, Marquee Bindings of the Sun King
Monk: Hidden Master's Forbidden Touch


So long story short, effects that:
reduces cooldowns
Increases damage
adds healing effect to some spell
increases number of targets some spell affects
adds a additional charge to some spell
makes enemies more vulnerable

is NOT a gameplay changing effect.

Effects that:
Changes your core rotation priority,
makes you use spell that wasn't used before
makes you not use spell that was a part of core rotation

is a gameplay changing effect.

Like you lie to yourself that BfA is just as popular? You thinking it was crap is your opinion, many disagree with you. Class Hall and the content it provided was very good.

I don't lie to myself, i know bfa is not as popular but mostly because story truly sucks. All other pseudo arguments are people goldfish memory and the fact that "current expansion = worst expansion". It was the same for legion as well.

That's on you. No expansion gave the amount of content we got in Legion. What you think is fun or not is on you. I think it was great.

Oh please, it wasn't a content. One time 20-30 mintues quests chains is not a content. Content is something you can do repeatedly (or is not a quest chain),
meaningful content is something you WANT to do repeatedly.

BfA has more meaningful content than legion, and arguably pandaria could be better as well depending on what people did.
The only real content we got in legion was:
Mage tower, chromie scenario, whitered army scenario. Some may argue suramar, secrets. Everything else was just one time quest chain.
BfA
Mechagon (single best zone in entire game), nazjatar, island expeditions (yes I like them, and i am not in minority https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20767618605), secrets - hivemind was single best secret hands down, never had so much fun.
Some even like warfronts but I don't and dont do them - still a content, just not meaningful for me.

Mechagon and dungeon single-handedly defeated all legion content for me, and its not even last expansion patch yet. Like all the legion content combined could not even come close to how mechagon was fun.

You are right, how you got legendaries wasn't optional. But damn it was still fun to get. Essences are so much better than Azerite Armor. Again, why do you think we got essences? Because Azerite Armor is shit and people generally liked the Artifact Weapon.

No for fucks sake this is NOT why we got essences. We got essences because neck itself was lacking. Azerite gear can hold their own place - replacement for tier sets.
And legednaries was nightmare to get, people literally created another alts if they were unlucky with first 4 ones.

[Doffen]

No for fucks sake this is NOT why we got essences. We got essences because neck itself was lacking. Azerite gear can hold their own place - replacement for tier sets.
And legednaries was nightmare to get, people literally created another alts if they were unlucky with first 4 ones.

Azerite Armor was the system that was connected to the heart. It still is, but it had so many issues that blizzard wanted to upgrade it. So we got essences since the Azerite Armor doesn't really require you to work towards it anymore, they admitted that how you upgraded azerite armor was bad so they felt they had to add something. So in 8.2 they reduced the amount of regrind significantly for the Armor so players could get and forget and focus on Essences. There are quotes somewhere, I see if I can find it later.

TLDR; Azerite was and still are a Heart of Azerite system. The did not add essences just because the Heart "was lacking" in a direct sense, but because the system connected to the heart was lacking. Now Essences took the spot as main progression system. Blizzard admitted the Armor had many flaws so they added a band-aid. Which is a mini-artifact weapon in design.


"The progression system that used to be in Azerite gear will move to the Heart of Azeroth itself, which you will level up to earn new passive and active powers. "

"In some ways, we designed the Azerite armor system to respond to what we saw as a failing in Legion Artifacts in a lot of ways. Legion Artifacts had fantastic choice and customization but it was very frontloaded. It was one of those areas that players didn’t complain about, but we saw a lot and perceived as designers. For the first two months you were making tons of choices as you were speccing out your Ashbringer or your Doomhammer or whatever else, but then for the rest of the expansion, once you unlocked those gold border traits, you were just putting Artifact Power into a linear progression that was giving you small incremental upgrades for the next year and a half."

https://blizzardwatch.com/2019/04/03...oths-mistakes/

Read this. Should give you an idea. Quotes from Ion.

[Hilaw]

Geared my 5 alts to 440 gear and best essences and then stopped playing them. Maybe I need one of those classes next tier.

[Nathasil]

....

To each his own, i guess? In my book every single one of the Order Hall campaigns was VASTLY superior to the War Campaign of BFA. Suramar was worlds ahead of all the zones we got in BFA. Artifact weapons were approximately 1000 times better than any of the gearing systems in BFA. And i would gladly trade ALL of my essences just to get one single Legion Legendary back - the Holy Priest cloak, to be precise.

There were some legendaries that DRASTICALLY changed what a spec could do with a button. Blowing people up as a DK with Chains or not being able to do it is a difference. Being able to rezz yourself or not is a difference. Your spec having a snare or not having a snare is a difference.

I played Karazhan 2.0 more times than i can remember during Legion. I do not even want to make an estimate on how many times. It could have been in the hundreds. Mechagon i played exactly enough times to get r3 Vison of Perfection; even for those i only played last Boss. I did the whole dungeon maybe 3 times. And each of these 3 times was not fun. I honestly think Mechagon is on par with that shitty excuse of a dungeon on Argus.

For me, BFA was just one great disappointment. I do not even want to say that the gearing systems are the worst of those....because everything else was just as bad. I would be really hard pressed to name ONE thing i really loved about BFA.

On topic:
Currently i do with my Alts (~15 lvl120s) exactly the same what i do with my main: Nothing. Raid is on pause since early December, M+ we only run the absolute minimum right now, which is ~3 dungeons a week.
I probably should be farming gold to buy mounts before the end of expansion.....but i simply cannot bring myself to it. Logging into BFA makes me depressed. Currently almost exclusively logging in to Classic.

[kaminaris]

To each his own, i guess? In my book every single one of the Order Hall campaigns was VASTLY superior to the War Campaign of BFA.

Vastly superior to shit is still shit. I don't even count that as content.

Suramar was worlds ahead of all the zones we got in BFA. Artifact weapons were approximately 1000 times better than any of the gearing systems in BFA. And i would gladly trade ALL of my essences just to get one single Legion Legendary back - the Holy Priest cloak, to be precise.

Nah, Mechagon is worlds ahead of all WoW zones combined including all previous expansions and vanilla.

There were some legendaries that DRASTICALLY changed what a spec could do with a button. Blowing people up as a DK with Chains or not being able to do it is a difference. Being able to rezz yourself or not is a difference. Your spec having a snare or not having a snare is a difference.

If you were lucky to get it, I didn't get hunter boots till mid expansion. Anyways, effects that were on most legendaries could have been implemented as class passives.
BUT what is most important here = making base class feel mediocre and then patching it up with turbo rng items that forces you to farm all kinds of shit was the worst idea ever.

I played Karazhan 2.0 more times than i can remember during Legion. I do not even want to make an estimate on how many times. It could have been in the hundreds. Mechagon i played exactly enough times to get r3 Vison of Perfection; even for those i only played last Boss. I did the whole dungeon maybe 3 times. And each of these 3 times was not fun. I honestly think Mechagon is on par with that shitty excuse of a dungeon on Argus.

No sorry, Karazhan was boring rehash. Anyone who farmed stuff there was fed up with it, it wasn't anything new, and there was no new concepts in there.
Mechagon dungeon is miles better. Actually, I don't remember better dungeon since MoP.

For me, BFA was just one great disappointment. I do not even want to say that the gearing systems are the worst of those....because everything else was just as bad. I would be really hard pressed to name ONE thing i really loved about BFA.

For me Legion was biggest disappointment of all times. BfA is not perfect but gearing system is far better than we ever had. I finally don't need to do alt raid runs to play some M+ on alts. That alone makes it better.

Currently almost exclusively logging in to Classic.

Complaing about BfA and saying you are logging on classic where all of this stuff you mentioned was worse. Oh what did I expect

- - - Updated - - -

Azerite Armor was the system that was connected to the heart. It still is, but it had so many issues that blizzard wanted to upgrade it. So we got essences since the Azerite Armor doesn't really require you to work towards it anymore, they admitted that how you upgraded azerite armor was bad so they felt they had to add something. So in 8.2 they reduced the amount of regrind significantly for the Armor so players could get and forget and focus on Essences. There are quotes somewhere, I see if I can find it later.

TLDR; Azerite was and still are a Heart of Azerite system. The did not add essences just because the Heart "was lacking" in a direct sense, but because the system connected to the heart was lacking. Now Essences took the spot as main progression system. Blizzard admitted the Armor had many flaws so they added a band-aid. Which is a mini-artifact weapon in design.

Ok there is something you simply don't understand.

Mistake about azerite gear was it being tied to azerite neck level. That was their mistake and Ion in the same link you posted confirms it:

In patch 8.2, all traits will be unlocked as soon as you pick up a new piece of Azerite gear, letting you simply pick what you want as soon as you loot the item. The progression system that used to be in Azerite gear will move to the Heart of Azeroth itself, which you will level up to earn new passive and active powers

And this very sentence exactly confirms what I said.

They just disconnected neck from azerite gear. (It is nowhere near the fuckup with legiondaries tho, when, if you didn't have luck, you couldn't do shit about it)

Bizzard did this because their initial thought was along the lines of:
"we will make progression on azerite gear and neck is going to act just as number"

Which was wrong all along. This is why you have it unlocked from the start. And since that idea failed, they had to add something to neck BECAUSE it was lacking.
And protip: neck was always lacking. That single piece of gear aside from being better than normal necks, was really unfit to be called "artifact".
So blizzard introduced essences.