8.3 quest line just killed alts

[Phlegethon]

30 seconds is too long to fly?
You want a teleport from mob to mob too, maybe a instakill button well we're at it?

It's as taliesin said... We have these mages that can keep a portal open to fucking exodar, but can't open a portal to where we need to be because an old god is invading?
That's retarded.

[Great Destiny Man]

It's more true now than it was then to be honest. Ghostcrawler i thought did a good job but it was Activision's interference that screwed it all up. Ion just isn't a game developer. He's a lawyer posing as one.

It's easy for us to say that retrospectively but Ghostcrawler got so much shit back in Cata it was unreal. The amount of whine posts about Ghostcrawler was the same we get of Ion now, just to all to a slightly different tune.

I'm not saying Ion isn't accountable for mistakes but people tend to, and do, lash out at just about any contemporary public figure.

[czarek]

For me "alting" is about hitting endgame in a short way with skipping pretty much all chains and area uncloking dump. If i had done legendary cloak on my main, world questes, assaults etc. They should be available for my alt just when max lvl is dinged. If some want do this there should be like smth like "chromie" for past exp zones. Thats my opinion and vision of alting. Cheers.

[AidanJLowe]

I've spent about 14 hours at 120 on my alt and within the first week rank 6 cloak, 75 neck and 430 ilvl. Was surprised at how quick from 100-120 I leveled an alt and now at the bare minimum for starting serious 8.3 content.

The only thing still about alts that bugs me is the essences ranks although they aren't absolutely necessary, everything else regarding catch-up I'm pleasantly surprised with.

[Schizoide]

Yep, as of the latest changes cloak catch-up really isn't bad. You don't need a current rank cloak for most content anyway. Essences are still super annoying, that's why it's become a meme that they should be account-wide. All my alts have permanent "you have empty slots" pop-ups every time I hit C.

[msdos]

Just make sure your next alt isn't a Frost DK. Otherwise good luck getting Rank 3 World Vein, Blood of the Enemy, Conflict and Strife and Lucid Dreams because those are all your mandatory essences, without them you WILL be on bottom below tanks.

Have fun.

[Biomega]

The Cloak is not what's keeping alts down. Investing ~2h to get an illv 480+ item is about as good as it gets in terms of effort:reward ratio. That's better than the average raid night. Vessels are also a joke to keep up even if you only do the weekly assaults, and the Visions are easy for pretty much every class if all you care about is upgrading the Cloak (mask runs are a different story).

What's killing alts is essences. There's a good number of them that are locked behind hard time gates involving a mountain of chores, like 16 days of dailies in Naz for Lucid, or who knows how many dailies in Uldum for BotD, or the 3 weeks for Worldvein and CLF. Not to mention there's also still BiS PvE essences that you need to PvP for.

And you have to do that on every. single. character.

[Seiken3]

As a man who just spent 2.5 hours getting the cloak on my mage, I was a bit amazed to see that I could've skipped things... How can I tell, however? Is there something I am missing? I was looking for the "I've done this before, just take me to the next sted" as I have done it on my rogue first, but found nothing, and none of the scenarios seemed skippable... How could I, though? Do you just walk out of it agan? :P

Please do enlighten me as I am quite the altoholic but don't want to spend over 1 day in playtime just to get the cloak on my army of alts.

[Biomega]

As a man who just spent 2.5 hours getting the cloak on my mage, I was a bit amazed to see that I could've skipped things... How can I tell, however? Is there something I am missing? I was looking for the "I've done this before, just take me to the next sted" as I have done it on my rogue first, but found nothing, and none of the scenarios seemed skippable... How could I, though? Do you just walk out of it agan? :P

Please do enlighten me as I am quite the altoholic but don't want to spend over 1 day in playtime just to get the cloak on my army of alts.

AFAIK the only thing you can skip is the Engine of Nalak'sha scenario, and for that Ra-Den has a very clear and obvious dialog option of <Already done this, Skip> same as all the other scenario skips.

[Garretdejiko]

Yeah, that I knew, takes way too long to get anywhere

Save you stone in Vale, you have an Org/SW portal there, and then in Org/SW you have a portal that leads to Uldum.

I know it might be an inconvenience to not have a Vale Portal, but it can be circumvent so easily that it's essentially a non issue

AFAIK the only thing you can skip is the Engine of Nalak'sha scenario, and for that Ra-Den has a very clear and obvious dialog option of <Already done this, Skip> same as all the other scenario skips.

The HoO scenario can be skipped as well. And it might be another skip that I'm not aware of, claimed by another user

There are three skips:

Both HoO parts and the Mogu'shan Palace part.

But yeah, it's obnoxious on alts.

Although he might mean that the Mini Horrific Vision can be "skipped" by Entering the Vision and leaving right after, since the objective "Explore the Vision" (can't remember the exact phrase) is met right after entering, which can be detrimental since you'll be missing the 1.5k/3k CE awarded by the Daily quest.

[Schizoide]

Those are the only skips. In particular you can't skip the Blackrock Descent scenario. If they added that skip it would be basically fine.

But again the cloak stuff isn't a huge deal, the essences are much more annoying.

[Garretdejiko]

Those are the only skips. In particular you can't skip the Blackrock Descent scenario. If they added that skip it would be basically fine.

But again the cloak stuff isn't a huge deal, the essences are much more annoying.

Since you actually have to loot something inside, they can't just slap a skip onto it. Probably by clicking the gossip option, you'll get the scale and be able to complete the quest, though, it'd lead to a weird player/npc interaction

[Schizoide]

It's a quest item, they can give the player items through dialog, or just trigger another quest to give the item, or trigger a slightly different follow-up quest that doesn't require the item in the first place. It isn't a technical limitation, they just decided not to do it for whatever reason.

It isn't a big deal, but I do have six or seven alts sitting at the Blackrock Descent step because I just can't be arsed to do it on them.

[Zyrinx]

Yeah I don't know why they half-assed the skips.

Either do it or don't, but what they came up with makes no damn sense.

[Drusin]

It isn't a big deal, but I do have six or seven alts sitting at the Blackrock Descent step because I just can't be arsed to do it on them.

Lol I was doing the questline on an alt like "yeah this isn't so bad" then got to BWD and couldn't skip *logoff*

[Bartolo]

Indeed this for once was frustrating enough for me to stop playing. There was simply no point anymore.

[Musta]

Everything in BFA killed alts... and mains.

[frott]

For me "alting" is about hitting endgame in a short way with skipping pretty much all chains and area uncloking dump.

Some would argue "this is what killed WoW." The game is basically built to make things annoying so that "catch-up mechanics" fill in the rest of the time alongside "next week something new is available" limitations, and keep you just hooked enough to feel the warm and fuzzies when you finally have your stable of characters.

I've never seen the appeal (old MMO player here) because my philosophy is "I am my character" and other classes past my first choice never really appealed to me all that much. this is more of a role-playing mentality than a video game mentality, which WoW caters to because ad populum fallacies are what capitalism thrives on.

Essentially, any capitalist system thrives on exploiting "needs" and "wants" and you claim to want every alt possible as soon as possible so that's how the game is designed to exploit.

They could create the game so that this alt system is part of the main mechanic of progression: other games have. Your characters could be a part of a personal guild, or family. You could have one character that's "all classes" where levelling takes roughly the same amount of time but is done differently, say via scaling WQs, gathering, PVP, whatever.

They could do a ton of things. But none of them would do anything besides making multiboxers not need to multibox as much, or all of the "hey here's a levelling boost for $" or creating secondary markets / auctionhouse value.

So yes, your concept of alt is to not care about the game and get to the endpoint ASAP. The only WoW expansion where that wasn't 100% the way to go was when they had class legendaries and storylines per spec.

They need to add friction to make it "work" and it's a fine line between making it too easy / not-tedious and making it unplayable, where they're building the game to maximize subscriptions (and expansions).

I personally bowed out of the game when the progression was a cut and paste without any real meaning to the loot or need to rely on social interaction to getting there (past the pseudo eSports of progression which is basically poison to those who want fun and don't need to be about bleeding edge competition to validate the massive time sink).

But I'd still resubscribe and get every expansion at launch. This will be the first expansion in the game where I don't, as I'm just not interested in "just wait until the dungeon unlocks and use this awful dungeon finder system which limits the difficulty for autofinding."


They wouldn't dare use that same system for something like Overwatch competitive, but to slow down progression they have no problem requiring players to use archaic guild tools, archaic dungeon finding and not allow top content to be queued. Snore.

[Zyrinx]

You being lazy =/= Blizzard's fault

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They didn't have to add them at all, with them it's easily doable in under two hours - that's really not a lot of time per character for the best item you'll own for a year

Then they shouldn't have done them at all.

To be clear I don't give a rats ass about gear, I'd just like to not be in the wrong Vale phase.

[Schizoide]

To be clear I don't give a rats ass about gear, I'd just like to not be in the wrong Vale phase.

You don't need to do the blackrock descent bit and get your cloak for vale to phase. I camped (and got) all the vale mounts using my alt army and half of them don't have the cloak.