Are alternative power progression systems a positive or negative addition?

[Marxman]

They exist because the developers insist on holding the best gear for the top end players. If you don't want alternate progression systems then give players access to the main one and not gimp ass campaign gear that ends at 197.

We had exclusive gear and no alternate progression paths for 12 years before Legion. It was fine.

You don't need top-end gear if you're not a top-end player.

Alternate progression systems could be a good thing for the game... but they haven't been yet. AP sucked, Azerite sucked, Covenants suck, Garrisons sucked, and probably a few more I can't think of at the moment. I can't imagine Blizzard are going to suddenly figure out how to make them work after failing a half-dozen times already.

I'm saying the best gear going to exclusively the best players denies basically everybody else the main form of progression in the game. Yea its bad for the game. If you don't want alternate advancement fine. Remove gear from mythic raiding and put all heroic gear on a vendor that you can buy for valor which you can obtain from doing whatever activities. Also best to bring back powerful tier sets as well

Just to be clear here, you're asking for all gear progression to be obtainable from mindless, boring world quests. This would literally kill the game overnight.

[aceperson]

I am kind of curious what the prevailing attitude on this topic is here. Just for clarification I am not talking about professions like enchanting but the new currencies systems introduced from legions onwards. AP, titanforging, weekly leggos, relics, traits and everything else that isn't directly linked to a boss drop.

Has the addition of these systems improved the quality of your game play or have they become chores you accept to advance further in content?

alternative progression paths can be good for a game but also bad. i would point out warframe as an example of both. warframe started with alternate power with the focus system. it was very grindy but it didn't effect the overall player base that much. the powers allowed for some bills to become viable but weren't so powerful that everyone had felt like they had to grind it. then years later, warframe started with things like power suits which have become rather mandatory.

if any dev is reading this post, here is my advice. if a player can't feel like they can ignore a system and still do at least 90% of what they could've, the system is bad. alternative powers are fine but shouldn't be used as the basis for design.

[Count Zero]

I don't get the hate. We've always had borrowed power. Just in the past we called them tier sets. Even back then people complained about being "incomplete" until you had your four piece, people complained about not being able to upgrade to the two piece of the higher level set until they had all four pieces. These are some of basically the same complaints that people for some reason think are/were unique to Artifacts and Azerite.

[ferseba18]

I don't get the hate. We've always had borrowed power. Just in the past we called them tier sets. Even back then people complained about being "incomplete" until you had your four piece, people complained about not being able to upgrade to the two piece of the higher level set until they had all four pieces. These are some of basically the same complaints that people for some reason think are/were unique to Artifacts and Azerite.

1_ Tier sets were enhancing you but your class wasn't unplayable if you didnt own them unlike legion/BFA/SL where you needed certain conduits/azerite/artifacts.

2_ They generally required only to grind them off boss drops, you didn't need to actually play nonstop grinding each week to get new artifact/azerite levels/renown/anima to progress.

3_ Double wammy when you compare the requisites were just to equip the gear instead of grinding anima/renown/azerite/artifact power or grinding valor for upgrade in order to be able to use it.

To elaborate a bit, tier sets didn't cause gameplay changes that would result in re-adapting the playstyle once the expac was over. And some specs would be legit unplayable(as in, cannot even dream to compete against any other spec) because the borrowed power was mandatory, while it was perfectly playable without the tier sets(most Hard mode bosses were not tuned for tier sets, just certain ilvl and/or dps/healing/survival checks). You can't even argue that "current bosses didn't need borrowed powers either" because mythic nighthold, starting at star augur onwards, basically required them, and further tier bosses also needed you to grind and get at least several ranks of the new "borrowed power" whatever( Queen Azshara with essences and new azerite traits, Ditto with Ny'alotha and the dumb corruption system which accounted sometimes for half your dps in some nasty cases).

[Soimu]

Anything alt unfriendly is bad and this alternative power progression is very bad for alts.

[Zyky]

Endless grinds are unhealthy for the game, if you want player progression post max level there needs to be a weekly hard cap on it.

[Raugnaut]

Losing the power without compensation elsewhere in the class sucks. The combo of Vision of Perfection, Lucid Dream, as well as several Azerite traits made many classes/specs have a much more fun rotation - But without all those extra resources, those same specs feel clunky and bad, despite similar levels of haste between having the BfA power and not having the BfA power.

Or, of course, the mana returns - Healing pretty much feels like Blizzard did not adjust mana consumption between BfA (In which you had numerous Azerite Traits and Essences that gave you mana back for all specs) and SL, and I don't see any hope for better mana return on the horizon - If anything, mana issues will be steadily exacerbated as healers gain more haste, thus burning through their mana pools faster. While Blizzard has made minor changes to mana longevity - Some buffs to poor MWs who generally OOM halfway through the fight, ect, I literally have to gimp my healing throughput in order to make it to the end of a fight - Less number of AoE healing abilities, more single target triage, even in large raid groups.

So, yea, losing power each expansion is the shittiest feeling that there is. While I don't think I'll miss many of the conduits - Only 2-3 are actually nice/noticeable, losing eithr of the covenant abilities is going to be absolutely shitty.

[Kralljin]

I don't get the hate. We've always had borrowed power. Just in the past we called them tier sets. Even back then people complained about being "incomplete" until you had your four piece, people complained about not being able to upgrade to the two piece of the higher level set until they had all four pieces. These are some of basically the same complaints that people for some reason think are/were unique to Artifacts and Azerite.

Comparing Tier Sets to borrowed power systems is a very superficial comparison.

The "modern" borrowed power gets artificially broken by Blizzard, X.0 rolls around, Blizzard moves in and intentionally breaks the system in some fashion so players can no longer use it, whether they just straight disable it like Artifacts or don't allow you to use it in the zones of the next expansion is irrelevant, the result is the same, you lost that power. Period.

Tier sets however, usually are not broken in this fashion, you move from TX to TX+1 because TX+1 is usually superior, whether it's just because it has higher Ilvl or the set bonus in itself is better is irrelevant, your character ended up being stronger.

This is the crux, your character massively loses on power once the progression of the last two years gets removed, whereas with tier sets, you obviously "lose" them, but your character still got stronger in the process, because you replace tier set items with items that are in the grand scheme of things, superior, despite losing those tier set bonuses.

In order for that comparison to make sense, you'd have to lose Artifacts & Azerite in the same organic fashion, yet i can't imagine what sort green weapon is supposed to replace the fully powered artifacts of Legion or Azerite pieces.

[shise]

Legion's was the best of the last 3 expansions

You don´t know that.
We didn´t even get the first patch yet and, based on the last expansions, it is easy to expect at least one large patch with big changes through this expansion.

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I also think that Legion got it far better than BfA. Shadowlands at least has reduced the grind a fair amount, but I still don´t see the need for these systems.

[Itisamuh]

It's obviously good for people like me who don't have any interest in running dungeons and raids more than once. Certain things aren't to my liking like warforging and titanforging but for the most part it's good to have options. I admit it's sometimes irritating to feel like I have to log in every day for chores to avoid falling behind though.

[Zka]

It was fun at first but got really tiresome, especially that most of it is tied to solo play and timegated to oblivion.
I'd much prefer to go back to the old system of adding new talents/skills every expansion (also potentially removing less interesting ones at the same time to avoid bloat).

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Endless grinds are unhealthy for the game, if you want player progression post max level there needs to be a weekly hard cap on it.

Definite NO. Weekly caps are retarded, they are forcing you to cap out each week or miss out completely until the next catchup. This community used to know this and used to be outraged by max caps. I guess most of these people quit already.

[cparle87]

They exist because the developers insist on holding the best gear for the top end players. If you don't want alternate progression systems then give players access to the main one and not gimp ass campaign gear that ends at 197.

That's how it was in classic and BC. Once you hit the limit of the content you could do that was as far as you could progress. Only a small portion of the raiding population, itself a small portion of the overall population, ever got very far into T5, if at all. Imagine transplanting that progression system into Legion. How would the modern population feel being told all the raiding they'd have to do for 2 years was EN and ToV. That only players better than them would get to see NH, only the 10% would get to see ToS, and only the 1% would get to see Antorus?

[froschhure]

I loved any new things to play with. What I personally dislike was that heavy ap grind in legion. Which made it impossible to twink. Bfa on the other hand had several options to get your twink somewhere near your main

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Azerite was nice system, but magni was damn annoying
Essences were also pretty dope, but some of them were locked behind pvp (why? Shouldn't it be locked behind pve?)
Since I did never bother to play pvp, I did not even use those. No biggy since there were several options for essences. I disliked that they started removing things, like mage tower, longboi and r4 essences.
But loot was very nice and the game felt rewarding.

[Nadiru]

Battle Pass Power is kinda wack in an MMO with more persistent forms of progression. So for WoW specifically, I'd call the alternate progression systems a net negative. If they were to implement one with permanent upgrades (as they did for rewards in Pet Battle Dungeons with the teleport spells), I'd call that a net positive. I do acknowledge that Blizz devs are in a hard place with permanent power, and its why they had to do so much pruning. But the systems they tried to replace it with have been a mixed bag, trending towards a failure.

[Razion]

In Legion and BFA I saw them as fun little extras. Not mandatory, but supplemental. I could indulge as much or as little as I wanted and I wasn't too hurt nor really rewarded a ton for going out of my way for it.

What was nice in Legion and BFA is that it did support players playing with friends doing activities which normally would have been too low or weak a content type for them - because of these things like AP and random Legos they could participate and still feel like they will get something, and maybe get something amazing out of it.

I feel like the alternate power progression is a lot less in SL and it's pretty noticeable how much less it matters compared to Legion and BFA. Getting another trait in your Soulbind isn't really comparable to getting another trait on your Artifact weapon or another level on your Heart. It isn't supported as much in multiplayer, plus I feel like I was much more incentivized to go after Artifact weapon and Heart levels and traits and essences than I am now for the by comparison not as appealing Soulbind/Covenant elements. That's the impression I have.

[deenman]

depends on how its handled,when you make a cool progression system that is gone when expansion is over it tends to leave a bad taste,and the class ends up feeling incomplete,most of bfa had this feeling

[Raisei]

I am kind of curious what the prevailing attitude on this topic is here. Just for clarification I am not talking about professions like enchanting but the new currencies systems introduced from legions onwards. AP, titanforging, weekly leggos, relics, traits and everything else that isn't directly linked to a boss drop.

Has the addition of these systems improved the quality of your game play or have they become chores you accept to advance further in content?

I think Shadowlands is actually striking a pretty good balance. It gave us something new to play with in the two covenant abilities, but the classes still work out in their own right. Hence why most guides will tell you that you can play whichever Covenant you want unless you are really min-maxing. Yes there is a best covenant for each spec but the differences are usually small or being rebalanced now.

The Alternative to this would be that each class gets a new ability to keep every expansion. That would create quite the bloat quickly. So I don't mind this system. Sometimes some of the borrowed powers are after all actually becoming permanent if they work out well. And I will not say no if I can keep my Steward after SLs!

the answer to this is very plain and simple.

SL lost over 50% of playerbase in first 2 months because of lack of progressions systems that gave casual players reason to play game.

Oh for the love of N'zoth, stop perpetuating this Bellular-click-bait myth. WoW expansions ALWAYS start with a spike when they are fresh and new and when the hype dies down a lot of players leave. This is normal and expected, it has nothing to do with feature X you personally dislike about the game.

when people have no way of progressing their chars in mmorpgs , then those games are dying.

No way of progressing their chars? Riiiight. I think what you mean is: "I don't wanna raid or do dungeons but I want the same gear that other people work hard for without effort! Now!!!"

Ion will have his own personal record there. No previous wow game director's decisions lead to such bleeding of subs.

and VP will not stop that. By 9.1 im estimating 70-80% of playerbase will be gone from game.

it doesnt matter if mythic raiders are vocal on forums - they cannot sustain wow as game. without casuals wow is dead.

Oh my... the amount of bullshiiiit.

Not gonna adress the first point again. It's blatantly false as anyone with any knowledge of the games history knows and it is build ENTIRELY on third party data of which you can't even confirm if it is valid. Nobody knows the actual sub numbers outside of Blizzard HQ.

I get that Dramaqueens like Bellular make tons of money by telling people like you what you want to hear, but damn... after the 8th expansion of people predicting that this one surely is the death of WoW because it is the worst ever, one should think that you wisen up.

Secondly, you talk like there are only casuals that don't do any dungeon and raid and Mythic raiders.
There is a huge margin inbetween though, people that raid Heroic, do M+15s and such. Those are the targeted audience because this is the majority of players and those have a good time in game and will keep it going. What you call "casuals" are just people that don't want to play the game but for inexplicable reasons still want the rewards for playing the game.

[Zyky]

Definite NO. Weekly caps are retarded, they are forcing you to cap out each week or miss out completely until the next catchup. This community used to know this and used to be outraged by max caps. I guess most of these people quit already.

The only way post max level progression HAS EVER WORKED in this game has been with hard weekly caps. For example how valor functioned in WoD. Endless grinds are what does not work, Legion and BFA were huge failures because of their endless grinds.

[deenman]

The only way post max level progression HAS EVER WORKED in this game has been with hard weekly caps. For example how valor functioned in WoD. Endless grinds are what does not work, Legion and BFA were huge failures because of their endless grinds.

to be fair even legion and bfa didnt have real endless grinds,they did reach a point where farming for it became pointless,but yeah a system where you would have a real endless grind that didnt have huge diminishing returns would literaly be the worst posible thing blizzard could do to progression in the game

[Zka]

The only way post max level progression HAS EVER WORKED in this game has been with hard weekly caps. For example how valor functioned in WoD. Endless grinds are what does not work, Legion and BFA were huge failures because of their endless grinds.

Then maybe it's another proof that the game should not have post max level progression of any kind, except for gear.