Today, Blizzard made a landmark decision to add in a single feature that the fans have been asking about for practically the entirety of Battle for Azeroth. Blizzard is finally making essences in World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth account-wide!
Of course, it’s worth noting that it may not be all that it seems. Blizzard mentions that the feature will be coming in a way that introduces a new currency, and given that we don’t know much about this currency, there’s a chance that we could end up back at square one.
Rank 3 essences are currently difficult to obtain for alts (alternative characters, for other characters besides your main) due to the grind required for the first two ranks. Getting to Rank 3 forces players to grind through now-obsolete content, which the vast majority of players simply decide not to do, effectively making having multiple endgame characters significantly more difficult – and less enjoyable.
To navigate this, Blizzard has made it so that characters that aren’t yet to the third rank will have access to a new currency, Echoes of Ny’alotha, that can get them there significantly faster. For this currency to be unlocked, however, players also will need to have a character on their account that is already at the third rank.
In response to this announcement, the World of Warcraft community is practically buzzing. Even game director Ion Hazzikostas is celebrating, poking fun at a popular Twitter account that raised support for account-wide essences and stating that their watch has ended.
“Building on a great deal of feedback and discussion, we’re working on an update to the game,” Blizzard announced, acknowledging the popularity of the account-wide essence as they added it. “Our goal with this update is to preserve the efforts that players put into unlocking a given Essence through its associated activity the first time while offering subsequent characters far more flexibility in pursuing that goal. We’ll have additional details in a forthcoming hotfixes update 2 that goes out around the same time as maintenance, but we wanted to let the community know ASAP that this change is in the works.”
It’s wonderful to see this feature finally being added. There are very few things that the player base of the game have asked for more than this as this expansion has continued on. More than anything, it makes it so that players creating alts will be able to get them to endgame faster instead of having to grind through obsolete content just to join up on the final content.
