Its a bit hit and miss for me. I play wow for raiding and always has and Castle is a damn good raid. The dungeons are also pretty spot on.
Don't really like the kiting game that is m+ and I have yet to farm the maw even once.... Torghast falls somewhere in the middle... For the legendary grind, which has to be a grind of some sort, is pretty damn good tbh. Just running a linear solo dungeon with some funny talent combinations
The first few weeks I was on the, I love the reduced loot drops-train but its a bit much to be honest. The more gear you have, the longer the grind.
It was too much in bfa and now its too little... Meet in the middle for 4 items / 20 man and i'd be pretty happy.
Last edited by tomten; 2021-01-20 at 05:45 AM.
Unless you were a necrolord before the nerf, anima is painfully slow. The majority of people will be sitting on more souls than they can spend waiting on anima to come in.
And any purchase of a cosmetic/mount/pet will set it back even further.
Total anima needed just for the sanctum:
16000 for transport
44000 for the 'thing' your covenant does
16000 for the conductor (plus an extra 7500 anima if you want to charge/use all the spots)
15500 for the table (plus however much you spend on missions).
So if you want to max out your covenant, which is basicaly the core point of anima itl cost you 91500 anima.
Since pretty much the only source of anima is world quests at 70 to 110 a pop, thats approx 1000 World Quests.
Sure there are rares and chests but these are fairly low anima and a WQ will always be a better use of time.
Even the weekly quests for 300+ anima, the time taken is longer than world quests for that amount.
So thats almost 100k anima, and none of it spent on the optional things like mounts/pets/transmog. That would AT LEAST double it.
You need to play every day, dedicating an hour or two to the same boring repetitive tasks for the next several months in order to not 'fall behind' in where the game 'expects' you to be. And the game 'expects' you to have the 250 souls needed to fully upgrade things within 3-4 months so you would need to have 1000 or so anima coming in daily in order to keep up with the souls.
Sure, the argument of 'you dont need it' or 'you dont need it that fast' comes into play. But the point is, the grind is huge. Anyone not actively doing it is essentially a day behind every day they dont do it. I play this game to play it, not to earn the right to play it... thats what I pay for. Having something as casual as 'your base' locked behind such a painful and boring grind is what people dont like.
- WoD the resources were gained passively, it was a background thing and you could get more if you needed but ultimatly it was not a huge months long grind to get things.
- Legion, resources came from WQ but you could do things to increase these with your followers.
Artifact power was also a seperate drop, the grind for this was large sure, but it only was for progression/power, not the 'fun' part of the game.
- BFA had the same system as Legion. Resources you needed for the game, which you could go farm when needed and be done fairly quickly. Also had Artifact Power that's only purpose was progression/power.
- SL has 1 has removed the progression/power grind, which was always long and for the more hardcore players, but made the resources just as hard to get. The 'fun' one, the one that lets you play more game, the one that lets you buy fun things, etc now is as crappy to get as Artifact Power was.
As is, I cant waste anima on missions or conductors because i need to spend it on my Conservatory. I am locked out of some 'fun' things because I have to wait 2 months to get access to a different 'fun' thing. Thats not fun.
There are no threads i can find complaining about too much anima, but plenty about the lack of.
I've heard the iT's jUsT oPTiOnaL argument so many times already, that I came to the conclusion that playing is also optional - so I quit SL without even bothering to get AotC, which was my go-to achievement in Legion/BfA.
Oh well, at least I can play Classic until my 3 month sub runs out.
So 40 minutes of weekly Torghast, a few minutes in the Maw & poor loot rates overshadow good dungeons, raids, & PvP? I can't agree with that weighting, even if I agree The Maw is shite & the loot is bizarre. In the grand scheme of things, however, they're just minor annoyances compared to the positives.
This expansion feels like the least alt friendly so far. Covenants seemed pretty cool at first and were supposed to be the casual part of the game, but the anima grind on one character is bad enough already. The prospect of doing it on 4+ characters sounds mind numbing.
In BFA I was able to take a long break, come back for the last 10 months of the expansion, get about 15 alts to max level, had them comfortably geared out, and had plenty of time for the casual parts of this game that I enjoy (mostly collecting cosmetics). With anima acquisition as it is now, it takes about 4 months of 1,000 anima per day every day grinding to fully upgrade your covenant hall and purchase the cosmetic set. Doing that AT LEAST four times without no-lifing it isn't going to happen in a reasonable amount of time. Kinda makes me miss the cosmetic RNG that was Warfronts...
If anima gains don't increase over the course of the expansion then I see no reason to resub.
Im really dissapointed in Blizzards lack of communication, its like they know everyones pissed about loot but they are just going radio silent
I think we'd all love our spice to be a casino daily rewarding a large random amount of anima through our covenant calling or something. So weird to be able to grind all this gold and not be able to spend it on anything or convert it to anima somehow. Brokers seem interesting but are useless in this regard. Some gobo needs to smack em over their heads and teach them a thing or two.
e: The spice must flow...
Last edited by Tiwack; 2021-01-20 at 08:25 PM.
If you knew the candle was fire then the meal was cooked a long time ago.
We all have to accept rewards are not in a very good spot, but the expansion overall is really good. If you think otherwise, well that's like your opinion man, but at least this time around there doesn't seem to be broken core features (Azerite, islands, remember?), and improving loot are things they can deal with easily. That's if they want of course, and according to blues and interviews, they don't seem to be willing to change that. So who knows, maybe they like to lose money.
I like it apart from the Maw (but I only go there for the weekly renown and the Venari weeklies so it’s tolerable somehow).
I don’t quite get the new loot starving system but I enjoy my M+ anyways.
Edit: yes, anima starving can also be annoying but honestly, building upgrades is near to useless compared to the anima needed for the upgrades, I don’t have much anima but I don’t feel I need more as long as I’m able to run adventures and upgrade gear from time to time).
Last edited by chiddie; 2021-01-20 at 08:41 PM.
I'm the opposite. I'm glad I can ignore nearly everything besides raids, dungeons, and PVP. There is no titanforging, corruption, whatever other nonsense, and I'm not being forced to grind for azerite power from endless world quests and islands to unlock powers on my armor. I got my BiS legendary on the 2nd-3rd week with max item level and I no longer have to do Torghast either. I haven't even done any of the side quests or tried getting any of the mounts or any of the cosmetics. I haven't unlocked any of the anima stuff besides the portal to oribos. I haven't done a single calling in weeks and I just get my 15 souls in the maw and leave. I don't care about any of these new friendly NPC characters or the story anymore after what they did with BFA.
I just do the content I want, get rewards, and play with friends. Thanks Blizzard! Now I can just focus on my IO score, progress in mythic, and get higher rating in PVP. I hope this is the new standard.
Last edited by GreenJesus; 2021-01-20 at 08:51 PM.
9.0 is probably the best X.0 patch the game has ever seen. At least the best X.0 patch of the last decade. Is SL perfect right now? No. But the devs already acknowledged some of the shortcomings so it is to be expected that SL gets even better. We will have to see. Still, coming from WoD, Legion and BfA SL feels like a blessing.
- - - Updated - - -
I know you skipped most of BfA, but how can you say this with a straight face? Legion was abysmal for alts (well, until 7.3), BfA was even worse and it got worse and worse over the course of the expansion. Now SL is there and you have nothing to grind on any alt. No, not even anima. Because why do you need it? The cosmetic rewards are often shared upon covenants, Renown comes from all sorts of content so you level your soulbind naturally and quick.
I would say this expansion is marginally better than BFA, but worse than all previous expansions. I played BFA for about the same time before unsubbing the rest of the expac, same with WoD. Legion was better, cata and MoP were a lot better, it's a joke to compare SL with TBC/wotlk/vanilla.
The fact that progression comes almost entirely from a weekly vault sums up everything about modern blizzard caring more about carrot and string systems to keep people subscribed rather than creating a game people want to invest time in.
Last edited by intenz; 2021-01-20 at 09:27 PM.
Ash & Anima grind replaced azerite grind. Then maw grind for sockets&conduits. Whoever advertised this crap as alt friendly straight up lied. Its too much work to max multiple chars.
Covenants are another pita. Choose playing meta or nerf yourself doing what you like with covenant choices that sum up for multiple classes as one usable option. Great design. Too fucking hard to separate competitive play and singleplayer open world as separate cov specs or is the expectation to nolive multiple chars? One for fun and one for actually being viable?
I think WoD was the last xpac where you could just play the content you like without gimping yourself not grinding additional crap
I think the only worse one was WoD. Ironically it reminds me of WoD but instead of 4 orc clans we got 4 afterlife clans.
Last edited by Dystemper; 2021-01-20 at 10:49 PM.
Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam
The air sort of went out of me when I finished the kyrian and maldraxxus campaign. Right now im mostly just logging in and doing some pvp and log off again.
Theres ALOT in the game, just most of it feels not worth doing.
BTW - theres to few dungeons.
Legion and BFA were perfectly fine for alts if you weren't concerned with maxing out artifact/azerite power, neither of which was necessary if you're mostly just concerned with cosmetics and story. In Legion, the artifact/class quests were unique enough to keep things from getting monotonous. The only annoyingly repetitive part about BFA was doing the same neck and cloak acquisition quests over a dozen times, but at least that only took about an hour per character.
To complete your Covenant upgrades on a single character and get the full set of renown transmog takes about 120,000 anima. At 1,000 anima per day that's almost 4 months of daily WQ farming. Nothing that I did in Legion or BFA compares to that sort of pure, repetitive time commitment. That's a lot of hours spent farming up a currency.
You say cosmetic rewards are shared (guessing you mean within the same covenant), so does that mean if I get the plate Venthyr set and then join the same covenant with a leather wearer that they will then have the renown set unlocked for transmog as well? Or do I have to farm up the renown and anima to purchase the leather set as well? If I don't care about upgrading the same covenant buildings with alts, then it's not a big issue since I only need to farm up for the transmog pieces. The issue is farming up the 480,000 anima to complete one of each covenant. Even managing 12 separate class halls took less grinding than that...
I completely disagree with the people saying it's bad. It's great so far. I can just log in for raid progression, do arenas and BGs and 10 +15 keys for my vault upgrades.
Loot is scarce, yes, but I'm 220 ilvl so it can't be that bad. Getting 1-2 pieces of loot for a heroic CN clear, , upgrading a legendary to 235, upgrade some pvp gear and get to choose a 226 piece in the vault at the end of the week a steady stream of upgrades. This is basically what TBC was like, and it was fine.
People bitching about no loot probably just expect to be mythic-geared the same week they hit 60. It's supposed to take time
Also, I don't really care for cosmetics while the expansion is current other than the limited time pvp sets so I don't bother doing any anima farms.