So now you’re level 120 in World of Warcraft and you want to start doing stuff. If you want to start doing stuff on your main character, who has presumably been playing for the whole expansion, this is likely not difficult. If you want to play catch-up on your alt, that can be a little harder, but it appears to be helped somewhat by the addition of catch-up tokens dropped during invasions in Uldum and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms on the 8.3 patch server. The tokens are bind-on-account and create a piece of level 400 gear, a quick way to get your alt up to the level of doing stuff.
Of course, players are divided on these tokens. On the one hand, bind-on-account is a nice way to catch yourself up, but the item level is also easily obtained via Nazjatar content with pearls. There are also not-yet-implemented items for rings and trinkets, which may cover slots that Nazjatar does not, but they are (as mentioned) not yet implemented. And beyond that, there are no weapon tokens and no vendors to actually buy these tokens, thus forcing you to rely entirely on luck. Still, since the patch isn’t due out until January at the earliest, there’s time for these blind spots to be addressed.
Lame. I love catch up mechanics, but this is essentially worthless. I can already easily hit ilvl 400 in these slots with Nazjatar and Mythic +0. The fact that there is no option for weapons, rings, or trinkets also means you’ll be hovering around 380 total item level with a crap weapon, and thus be totally undesirable in any group content.
Oh, also, essences. You know, those things that make up a huge portion of DPS, but are per-character and require a heavy grind to unlock? Yeah. Right. You don’t have any of those on a new character.
Overall this does nothing to address the issues with gearing up an alt in WoW. This completely misses the mark. I hope this gets changes.
Unless/until there’s a catchup for essences, it won’t make much difference. There can be a MASSIVE difference in power between characters with the same gear but different essences.
Having to re-grind the same rep to exalted (namely Nazjatar) to get your essences will grant you better gear than these catchup tokens give, so I don’t see the point.
Ah, yes, just after I subbed and have been grinding away in Nazjatar to gear up my alts. Nice.
At least you are making progress for now until 8.3 comes out. Who knows, what if the new ilevel400 tokens are fairly uncommon to get and not available on a vendor? The 385 tokens will dull the pain since they are fairly easy to build as a full set, if not upgrade.
Yeah, I guess I was mostly kidding anyway. I’ve been away from the game since a month or two after 8.0 launch and I’m having fun now gearing up and doing the 15th anniversary stuff.
IIRC, they did a similar thing with the Legion pre-event, world evasions that dropped pretty good gear for the start of Legion if you were an lowly alt that had been shelved for awhile.
I love catch up mechanics, i got way too many alts to gear up through LFR. People who are mad about em can just go play classic. We casuals who prefer to play more for relaxation can stay in the main game.
Finally the right time to hop into a WoW expansion, once they spray that WD40 onto their grinding endgame.