Why I believe Blessings should be "retained"

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Genuine post. Huge proponent of the game and am absolutely loving playing it! Keep up the great work!

I believe blessings should be retained (being able to reselect previously-obtained blessings) because it allows a game in beta to have its rapidly-growing player base try different builds. In some cases it’s easy to move some talents around and be able to get a good sense; however, other times, you really need to restructure which blessings you are using – and you may have spent significant time grinding your current blessings to the point at which they stand. Blessings are less important than skills/passives and I therefore don’t see why they should have more consequence to changing them around.

Given the game is early in its life, there aren’t as many widely-available resources out there for new players to lean on when learning the game. There are some though (shout-out to those content creators – absolutely invaluable) and wow is in fun to try some of these builds, playstyles, and concepts out. Down the road, players will have more information coming in and be better-positioned to make “meaningful decisions” – but currently, it is HIGHLY-LIKELY that many, many players make more regrettable “meaningful decisions” than normal – and then because of the early stages of build info out there, these players may not realize for a while until after investing significant amounts of time. They will be sitting there feeling stuck and will have reduced enjoyment. Just to highlight the stage that build info is in… on the main third-party website for this, there is limited ability currently for quality control (anyone can submit anything and no up/down vote system) and you can search for a build using some specific unique and something like 80-90% of the results are characters that aren’t even level 100… usually something like level 50-60.

In many cases where you would need to change around blessings, it really feels preferable to just make a second character of the exact same class, solely so that you don’t lose your progress you worked so hard for. If you spent countless hours getting near-perfect blessings, there is very little chance you are going to toss those just to likely have to re-farm them from scratch again later (unless you are doing it for content).

The game is receiving massive word-of-mouth from large streamers and your player base is, and will likely continue, skyrocketing. These players will want to try things and see if they can find a result (character/spec/build) that they can get behind and truly enjoy playing. I believe retaining blessings would knock down a big barrier for getting some portion of new players to the point where they stay and adopt the game as their main game.

Finally, with the introduction of multiplayer, people WILL want to play with friends and compete. Or compete in arena when the ladder comes out. If you are competitive, you will want to have your build be set-up for that specific task. You may want to play a different role or a different style. We already made a meaningful decision in choosing our mastery. I ask you to please consider letting us have the freedom to use the mastery in different ways, so that we can fully-enjoy our characters full potential both solo and with friends, in quests, in monoliths, in dungeons, in arena, in PVP, whatever the content is. It’s likely hard to tell from your seats, but the competitive players are having to make separate, distinct characters for each format they want to be competitive in. Given it’s possible to do just that… make a whole new character (likely of the same class, and sometimes even the same mastery!) literally just to level to 100 to have the freedom to try something new without throwing out progress… why not allow people to bypass that arduous task?

Your game, your decisions. I understand and appreciate that. Just wanted to lean in with my two cents on the topic.

Sincerely,

Toro

Edit: clearly some people were confused. The last paragraph isn’t about skipping leveling. It’s saying that people shouldn’t feel that they have to level a new character solely to avoid dropping a strong set of blessings they took a long time farming (with the view that leveling a new character takes less time than fill-circle swapping blessings back and forth with high end of the range targets for them).

8 Likes
2

Yeah, there’s several other genuine posts on this topic this week…

2 Likes
3

if you can swap things out whenever you want, you’ll just end up with soulless characters.
It’s part of the game to work on your character and constantly improve it.

Maybe it would be a good compromise if you could get the blessings faster?
At the moment it can take a lot of time to get all the appropriate blessings for a character.

4

Not sure where you’re going with that. I don’t think your intention is to make people feel obligated to read every single post on the forum before making their own.

I appreciate you Llama, you do great work on here. It doesn’t go unnoticed.

Same team. I think the last sentence of my post makes it clear that I respect EHG decisions. I have 372 hours played in the last three weeks. I’m not just playing for an hour and hopping straight to the forum. <3

1 Like
5

I believe it’s perfectly fine to have to farm blessings again. It gives you something to work towards in the endgame. Just prep your new gear, then farm the blessing until you get what you need to swap into it. The design is reasonable, it doesn’t take too many tries usually, with 5 options to select out of like 13. 2-3 mono bosses on average, which takes like an hour of farrming total? And then yea, just a few more hours if you want optimized roll.

6

It would just be nice if people used the search function and posted in an appropriate thread if possible. Except for the “my feedback after xxx hours”, I can kinda get behind them all being separate threads.

If you have 5 options, youve already pushed the corruption to 200 which isn’t the quickest task (I’m just not a fan tbh).

2 Likes
7

It’s the natural progression of a character to have 200 corruption, takes just a few hours for the first mono after entering empowered. 1-2 hours on any other after you get the bonus. This is an ARPG, not a cinematic adventure game. Progress counted in single digit hours is perfectly fine.

8

It’s always the same bad take for defending obvious time wasting mechanics. “Soulless character”, “character identity” or whatever tf it is. No, it’s just a time wasting mechnic. Retraining blessings, especially after you have landed a close to max roll one, which btw is another infuriating thing, shouldn’t flat out lose you all the work you have already done.

The thing is, blessings are so integral and so important, that not being able to lock them just hinders experimentation. People don’t want to waste their time refarming something they already did, just so that can try a different option.

3 Likes
10

Not if you care about high-end of the range blessings, which are important for true high-end content. The whole point is that you can’t test other stuff without committing to having to re-do that. Or you have to make a new character. I’ve already said what I want to say. Not going to keep replying about this. I don’t want to assume what corruption level you’re doing but I think we are talking about different situations. It’s actually significantly faster to make a second character of the same mastery than what I’m talking about.

11

You mean like doing the story? Grinding for loot? Farming LP gear? Every game is a waste of time if you don’t get paid for it because the benefits you get from playing can be gotten elswhere in better and healthier ways. So what’s the point? If you give people stuff to easy they simply play other games and trashtalk the game they come from.

2 Likes
12

This reply nails it.

Think about how players are deflated about the thought of having to re-farm all the blessings when they discover a new build or acquire a new piece of gear?

The game goes cold for players without loads of play time when they finish a build. The only option is to roll a new character. Fully re-specing just requires too much.

The idea of farming the blessings and to continue farming them until you have all of them with high rolls is a pretty cool goal. Skills and passives can be re-speced with ease, why not blessings? It’s pretty exciting when you learn of a new build and all you have to do is log on, make some quick changes and your having fun with something new.

2 Likes
13

The situation is the following :

  1. Some players asked for the possibility to skip the campaign because it is annoying to them to play it all over again for each of their alts
  2. Some players asked for the possibility to skip normal difficulty timelines
  3. Now people ask for an indirect possibility to skip empowered timelines

First question I ask to myself is, why do people play the game if every single part of the content bothers them or just want to do it once ?
Second, what will people do once they finished the game once which has to take approximately few dozens hours ?

It might be a solution to increase the playing time on the game for some people but it will reduce it significantly for other people for sure.

I don’t understand the research of absolute max on everything when the game is made so you can’t reach it, especially since, if I remember correctly (not 100 % sure because I remember that info from the begining of the beta few years ago), there won’t be any form of PVP because too resources consuming and impossible to balance.

I think it’s definitely possible to have a blast on the game playing it as it is, even if I agree it needs to be a bit more alt friendly by being able to skip normal monolith for example (but you can already unlock empowered by only completing some of them), without requiring to get 4 LP items, 4 T7 items, but more generally without having to max out chars, especially since you don’t need that achieve any content in the current state of the game.

2 Likes
14

The current blessing system makes the Loot target farming blessings REALLY bad. If you have to farm for hours to get the blessing that gives you a better chance of finding a certain slot of gear, not only is that time wasted not farming for the item, but it’s also painful to replace that blessing when you do find the item you were wanting.

15

Your interpretation of my post was that I’m asking to skip empowered timelines? I’m so confused by that, I’m assuming I’m just not understanding who you are talking about. If you are talking about me, that’s not at all what I was saying. If I was like okay I want to do this build instead, then yes obviously I would farm the blessings. My whole point is that when you don’t know that you want to - and are curious to see if there’s anything to it - in some cases where the specs within a mastery are significantly different (i.e. different elements), you won’t be able to get a full read just from switching gear/skills. You have to test the other builds at very high corruption levels to know whether they are actually viable. You need to have at least the right blessings (not necessarily perfect ones) to tell the difference between a strong build and something that can really go far. But that means walking away from hard-farmed blessings just to test. Whether you did walk or not, you would still be in the timelines…

If you weren’t talking about me then my apologies XD

16

Oh I see (I was replying to you), I get your point, I indeed misinterpreted.
But can’t you already have a clue if your new build is working great or not with all the appropriate equipment and once you reskilled ? I mean if it’s really good or if you enjoy it more, it won’t be 3 offensive blessings which are going to be game changing will it ?

You mentionned that blessings were less important than skills and passives, but I disagree, one empowered blessing can be way more powerful than one skill point on even 5 or 10 passive points sometimes, and the thing is that the game is already quite alt friendly if you want to reshape all your passives or skills, which mean there are not much punishment right know except in the choice of specialization or the blessing.
Plus I think once the player arrives to empowered monoliths, and once he reached the 75 / 80 levels, he probably know what the effect of the blessing will be on his char because they are pretty straight forward to understand for most of them (offensive ones at least).

Finally, I didn’t get the competitive part in your post, since you can only co op with friends and can’t really tell or care who does the damage as long as the screen is cleared, I don’t see the point of this argument.

You mentionned that making a whole new character to level 100 to try something new is very arduous and discouraging, especially when in the same specialization, but the game allows you to respec every passive and skill in the same specialization and then go back to it if you are not satisfied.
For other specializations, I don’t see where you get the pleasure by immediately getting to level 100 because you loose the sense of progression, and it would appear to me unrewarding. Just imagine with each new meta, everyone switch to the best class instantaneously, it kind of remove a part of the interest of playing the game.

17

Still on different wavelengths. It’s okay. No one is asking to skip leveling for a different mastery or a different class. Just trust me on this… different builds can require extremely different blessings. They did a very, very good job designing the blessings and which ones come from where. You’re still writing stuff that is not at all what I’m saying. There’s no point in debating this if we are talking about completely different things. :confused:

18

Yes. Now days it’s much better, since we finish the idol/passive quests in an hour, maybe even less and the Mjasa quest can be done in 20 minutes at level 100. However an hour is way better than doing a boss for 50 fn times to get a 70% crit avoidance blessing and then get a 3lp Woven Flesh, dump the blessing, only to get a T7%hp with T6 flat Hp crit avoidance base chest with 2 open prefixes. Have fun farming the same boss another 50 fn times.

2 Likes
19

Absolutely agree with op.

As gear progresses, the choice of what blessing fits best may change. I swapped back and forth several times on my characters.

This!

Why can’t we “store” a blessing we already obtained, when we switch to another blessing?

It’s like I have to throw my current weapon on the ground and lose it when I swap to another weapon. Doesn’t make sense, right?

Nobody is asking for a skip. Just a way to save progress and not lose it.

2 Likes
20

I think it might be a good idea indeed to save the blessings you obtained for a single char, so that you can switch back and forth without any penalty for when your equipment evolves, but the blessings shouldn’t be shared between the different chars.

21

Glub, every post you are claiming people said something they didn’t. Please stop. No one said to share them between characters. Are you trolling?