Are alternative power progression systems a positive or negative addition?

[Lane]

Wrath was still the best system, IMO. A week's worth of running random heroics would net you enough badges to get a full set of the previous tier raid gear. I was not a fan of the Wakening Essences and the RNG chance to get legendaries in Legion, the cost of the items was too high and WQs rewarded a paltry amount. Emissaries offering previous tier raid gear would be nice instead of scaling with your current ilvl. I also liked the Argus system with Veiled Argunite, that was primarily how I geared my alts after Unsullied items since I hate raiding.

[Argorwal]

Wrath was still the best system, IMO. A week's worth of running random heroics would net you enough badges to get a full set of the previous tier raid gear. I was not a fan of the Wakening Essences and the RNG chance to get legendaries in Legion, the cost of the items was too high and WQs rewarded a paltry amount. Emissaries offering previous tier raid gear would be nice instead of scaling with your current ilvl. I also liked the Argus system with Veiled Argunite, that was primarily how I geared my alts after Unsullied items since I hate raiding.

Buying the old raids full tier set only happened with buying T9 when ICC was current.

That gear was 232 when:

ICC10 was 256
ICCH10 / ICC25 was 264
ICCH25 was 272

So, that translates to basically worse than 187 LFR gear by today’s standards.

And not every slot had badges, like weapons.

Is that what we want?

[InfiniteCharger]

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?

Alternate progression system by itself would probably be fine if the gains were permanent to the character. The problem some have with the implementation in WOW is that all these forms of grinding are associated with temporary skill/talent trees which fundamentally affect how classes play each expansion. And then they get revamped each expansion, effectively becoming a soft class redesign every time. If they simply added alternate means to grind things that would generate points toward a goal such as either choosing or adding points to some sort of thematic skill or talent in an expansion that isn't tied to leveling, that probably would be fine. But that skill or talent would be permanent and effectively the same as having a talent automatically learned via leveling but now replaced by an alternate system. And that could be associated with not just skills and talent points but other things like legendary affixes to gear or legendary crafting items and so forth, which are consumables and not permanent character progression. You could also have things like special bonuses tied specifically to mythic plus affixes to help with higher keys and complete them faster. There are a lot of things they could do to make this more of the typical grind for rewards that people really like than it is now. Grind to get keys to open wings of dungeons or special bosses is another form of alternate progression not strictly permanent character advancement but game play. The only difference here is that the impact to classes would be less jarring from expansion to expansion as talents/skills/abilities would carry over and not simply replaced with new temporary ones.

[Nalam the Venom]

I like them on the last patch of an expansion, when you have unlocked every thing and can feel the full and true power of all the systems combined

[potis]

Hasnt this been milked all these years.

Shadowlands is literally perfect, you do not have to grind a pointless currency and you can choose what you are farming, only Choreghast is annoying because you do have to farm that legendary on the new alt, and the lack of gear makes it annoyyyyingg, but manageable.

On my main i farmed Venari first month, only go to the Maw for the souls for 5mins, which after today since it hit 40, i simply wont ever go there anymore, maybe because Choreghast is there, but doesnt count.

When i get on i dont go "FUCK, DAILY FOR AP i FORGOT", i simply go "I do not want to do this calling, i will play my alt", cause playing my alt now, doesnt make my main fall back in AP and many similar things.

For the last 2 months or so, i literally played the main for 1hr every Wednesday to get weeklies out of the way, our 4hr (2+2) of raiding, and 1-3hr to do some M+ and thats it for the week, and its fun, because i do not want to play WoW all day, or the same character all day and there is no system that forces me to grind pointless crap that i simply do not want to farm on the alts also, it is not fun.

I log on, "I want to heal something", i grab my priest and heal something, i dont feel gulity about it because my main had dailies, or anything like that, and its amazing.

Lets hope they keep it like this, yes if you play only 1 character right now and you are part of the 1%, WoW does not have much to offer cause its really really boring, but thats because you choose not to do other things, i choose not to PvP, i choose not to do keys above +15, etc.

[Vivedesiderata]

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?

Maybe I just don't play enough but it literally feels like climbing flat vertical wall when trying to upgrade anything past level 1 in the sanctum. Like...they could have just made it slightly less painful and added more levels as we progressed

[Nobleshield]

The way Blizzard has done it it's bad. If they did it properly there wouldn't be a problem

[Kokolums]

If this was true why was MoP the largest recorded sub loss we know of?

They destroyed in-game communities in late BC. The vestiges of those communities hung around for a while but they were falling apart. Sub gains leveled off in wrath then started a big collapse that lasted from Cata thru WoD. If you are extroverted, you likely avoid this game. All that is left is mostly extreme introverts. The key to rebuilding sub counts is to make a lot of extroverted content again to give that group a reason to play.

The biggest change we need is guild leagues. Give people a reason to care about rival raiding guilds. That should foster community and social play. Subs would spike higher as extroverts have a reason play this game again.

[SirBeef]

That power creep kicked off 12 years ago when OS dropped.

I know power creep happened much earlier, they didn't do anything about it until later. Which really hasn't done anything, since it will get there again unless they keep de leveling players for new expansions.

[Zyky]

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

That's not really true. Every point in Legion was a significant dps gain and you could easily get a level every 2 weeks(coming from someone who was in the top 30 in the world for Artifact Power gain). BFA not so much, you're right, but it was still a dps gain every level. The game doesn't need gimmicks to force you to play, that's really the point as shown with Classic and will continue to be shown with the success of BC.

- - - Updated - - -

If this was true why was MoP the largest recorded sub loss we know of?

That's false, the largest recorded sub loss was in WoD. MoP lost the same amount of subs over the whole expansion that WoD lost in a single quarter and that's why they stopped releasing sub numbers, but the end of WoD the game was DEAD, there was hardly anybody around even on large servers like Illidan...