Speculation - New Paragon Cache Rewards

[Torvald]

Not at all. Across the entire expansion, and now in BFA, I skipped all WQs that didn't a) give a gear upgrade or b) is an active emissary that I needed the paragon mount for. It was immediately clear that optimal play was to do emissaries and skip everything else. I didn't grind for legendaries, in fact they turned me off the game big time. Not enough to quit, so I didn't show up in Blizzard's metrics, but they most definitely negatively impacted how much I enjoyed WoW. Since I didn't grind many of my alts didn't get their spec-defining legendaries until very late, heck, some not until patch 8.0. End result, I played less.

Now I'm not every WoW player, and I know tons of people did grind for them. But unless you enjoy grinding, that sucks too.

Comparing Legion legendaries to BFA azerite... well, yeah. In many ways, legendaries were better. But that's a pretty low bar.

Optimal play for legendaries basically was just to do the emissaries and skip everything else. That's part of what made it successful - people would work on it every day, but it often barely registered for people as a grind because it just meant doing 4 world quests and then you were done for the day. Even easier when you factor in that some of those quests were nearly instantly completable, like a resource world quest if you had excess of the resource, or the kirin tor world quests where you could just fly to the goal (once flying was enabled) - and of course those kinds of quests could kill two birds with one stone if someone missed a day, giving a check mark for two emissaries (the kirin tor and the zone faction). For those who were really grinding for a legendary beyond the daily emissary, the key was doing your emissary, then spending the rest of your time doing things like raids.

Optimal play for paragon chests was different. If you had lots of alts, a huge part of it was centered around order hall management for follower reputation missions. As you narrowed the number of factions you needed a mount for still (or the warden toy), it became more beneficial to use your world-questing time to engage JUST with that faction, and ignore using that time for emissaries of other factions, on top of the continued order hall management.

A lot of the division over paragon mounts comes down to that difference in playstyle. On one side you've got players who were going to do their emissary chest each day anyway, because it was part of the routine to keep pace on getting their next legendary. Those players weren't ever driven by paragon mounts, they didn't push to complete extra WQ for paragon mounts, and they weren't managing their order halls around getting paragon mounts. If they got a paragon mount, it just registered as a neat little bonus, and they don't see why anyone would complain. The key thing about these players is that their daily WQ routine wouldn't have shifted one bit with or without the existence of paragon mounts. This was most players that I saw.

On the other side, you have a minority of players who wanted to complete their paragon collections or who (for whatever reason) got fixated on one specific paragon mount they loved the look of. They put in the extra effort to hit that next 10k over and over again. Disappointment was usually in the cards, and when they got the mount I feel like I'd see them act more along the lines of being relieved that it was over rather than excited. For a number of very unlucky ones, the grueling pace of bad luck went on month after month after month until finally Legion ended and they were still empty-handed. Paragon mounts did drive higher engagement from them, but it was negative engagement.

The impact of the two rewards in Legion were on different orders of magnitude. On one hand you've got strong rewards contributing greatly to character power. That's the bread-and-butter of WoW reward mechanisms, the kind of thing that you can be assured the masses within the playerbase will flock to. On the other hand you've got a few mounts skins that don't stand out enough to be widely recognized, a toy and a pet that could be caged and put on the AH.

If Blizzard is worried about World Quests not being rewarding enough for mass player engagement (and really they're thinking in terms of emissaries still), the solution really won't come from paragon chests, it'll only come if they find a good way to fix and integrate the Azerite system into it in a way that's satisfying to players and makes daily emissaries worthwhile to keep on top of. Paragon chests will work a primary incentive on hardcore collectors, but only in that way that kind of chips away at their good will towards WoW. Unfortunately it's just hard to see them really fixing the Azerite system. The Azerite system feels like it's a failure at too foundational a level to fix.

Sorry to ramble so much. My guess is we're actually pretty alike in our pursuits, it just always feels to me like player like us are a real minority (though it can be easy to lose sight of that in a thread like this where collector-mindset players congregate). In my own guild, I got a lot of (friendly) mockery over my efforts to get the paragon rewards as my guild-mates got to watch me fail time after time after time, month after month, just barely finishing prior to the end of Legion.

Fortunately they're just putting some toys behind the Paragon Cache's.

Disappointing that there's any collectables at all, but at least toys can be ignored easier than mounts.

I only just got my last paragon mount a few weeks ago after bringing my alt-army out of retirement and putting them back in their order halls for about a month for the first time since BfA launched. It was a horrible grind.

Funny enough, the worst paragon item for me to get last expansion was the Warden toy. I think I'm actually a bit more motivated by toys than mounts, unless the mount skin is really unique.

In a way though, I credit the paragon grind with my attitude this expansion of not grinding island expeditions. Having just finished with a truly abysmal collectible grind in Legion through paragon chests, I feel no sense of urgency to jump into another horrible system, and feel content waiting to see if they ever make reasonable fixes to island expeditions. To be fair, I'll be happy to do them if I see them actually address it in a meaningful way. Kind of like how I'm sure I'd enjoy paragon chests if I saw that they input a real bad luck protection mechanism with it. Bad luck protection would make a BFA paragon system into something fundamentally different than the Legion version. So, hoping to see them do that.

[Schizoide]

Yes, I got the vast majority of my paragon rep via order hall mission rep tokens. I got all the mounts and toys, but it took me until a couple of months before BFA launched. I didn't particularly enjoy it.

[Deleted]

I got all paragon rewards in Legion, some of them have been duplicates. I don't want this system to re-emerge ever again. It'd bad enough that we have to re-grind reputation on all alts for professions, or have to grind pet charms on top of quest completion or reputation grinds. We already have a "grind 'til your eyes bleed" system for collectiors which are the island expansion. We don't need even more of this RNG shit.