The World of Warcraft: Shadowlands community has recently been discussing how alt-friendly the newest expansion has proven, with the final difficulty of the current raid having progressed to the point of being doable for players that had worked towards it.
That is to say – the expansion has gotten to the point where people have gotten their main characters to their ceiling. Now that more and more players are beginning to roll side characters and alternative toons, the question of alt friendliness has been focused on.
The primary thing that many are annoyed with is anima and the difficulty in farming it, especially given the costs of so many things in the Covenant Sanctums. With upgrades costing as much as 15,000 anima, the 35 anima given for a Mythic dungeon is a bit laughable.
Many also are focusing in on gearing, which some feel to be a bit underwhelming for the game. Players feel that there should be a bit more ease in gearing up a toon to the point of mythic dungeons or normal Castle Nathria raid difficulty.
These two issues are intertwined – one can gear through their covenant sactum, but doing so requires a high amount of anima to upgrade the gear that the covenant is giving you. Since anima is hard to obtain, gear remains a bit difficult.
That said, finishing the questline for a covenant will present you with a full set of gear as well as a token for a raid finder weapon from your covenant vendor, which rests at item level 187. If players go through all of this, as well as obtaining anima from the world quests and covenant quests, their gear will be set at a comfortable level for Mythic dungeons.
Raid Finder also presents an excellent source of gear, with the newest wing having opened to allow access to nine of the ten bosses. Clearing out raid finder once a week is a quick and easy way to gear up, though the queue time for DPS can be a bit of a headache.
Certain grinds, however, remain an absolute headache. Climbing Torghast from layer 1 to layer 8 is a nuisance, as players have to do it one at a time, requiring seven runs to reach the maximum layer and gain the ability to cap out on Soul Ash. This can make alternative legendaries annoying as well.
On that same topic, doing anything in the Maw over is more than annoying, and while it’s wonderful to see that the Torghast-centric upgrades from Ve’nari are account-wide, lacking the Maw-centric upgrades from the NPC makes the Maw even more of a slog on a subsequent run through.
All of this leads to say that Blizzard has some work on their hands to make it so that alts aren’t such a pain to get up to date, but their many ways of granting gear and general ease of leveling does make it a more alt-friendly expansion than most.
