So insanely stupid you can only get 2 pages a run.
To be fair, you CAN catch up to some extent. It isn't like you can catch up in one or two weeks, no. But if you do every daily every day along with every assault, etc, you can get quite a good ways into your cloak pretty quick. I mean, I don't do dailies every day and I finished this week's quest with two vessels extra that are just hanging out in my bags until next week. If I did all my dailies from here on out? By next week I'd end up with like 8 vessels waiting.Overall, Blizz has been giving enough Essence to give us more Vessels than we need to keep up to date with the rank cap. That "more than we need" allows people to catch up. Relatively, at least.
Why are all complaining about too much to grind for the upgrade this week? What did you do the last days and weeks? If you did the daily stuff you should have more than enough vessels and/or currency to buy them. I just did 4 runs today with 4 of my 5 vessels. And I have 10k to buy another one. What are you guys doing with these? Failing to finish them with masks? If so, then don't complain that you don't have enough to upgrade your cloak. Seriously, such an annoying attitude you guys have.
There is another perspective at all these catch-ups. Look at it from my point, from the point of the player who DOES play the game. Who gets everything the hard way, grinds artifact power when AK is still low, struggles to progress through the raid, spends half a year to upgrade and gear up... and then someone who left the game for this half a year comes back and gets all that in one-two weeks. Because artifact knowlegde is topped, world quests give raid quality loot... I am not joking - I get 445 pieces from emissary caches. Thats ilevel of normal raid, not even LFR, normal! What is the point to bother with normal raiding anyway then, if emissaries, which is basically free loot, ten minutes to do four trivial quests, give the same?With all these efforts to please newcomers and returners, it gets to a point that I feel Blizzard encourages active players to leave the game. Why to struggle and get stuff the hard way when I can come back in half a year and get it all in a week without much effort? Of course, we also play for pleasure of the process, but for rewards as well. And value of these rewards is extremely dimished by the catch-up mechanisms. Why should I bother with gearing up in raid now, if first ten quests in Shadowlands will give equal gear as quest rewards because Blizzard wants to please newcomers and returners? And what about us, loyal playerbase, maybe we should also feel some love for our loyalty?Besides, this is not a Counter-Strike "everyone start every match equal". This is an MMORPG. And RPG was always about preparation as much as about combat skill. You had to level up, you had to collect gear, you had to research best builds and invest time and effort into building up your character. And those who did this job MUST have upper hand, this is essence of RPG.Back in Vanilla it took about half a year to catch up. You had to level your character to 60, which was a long (but pleasant and fun) road itself, then start 5-men dungeons and do multiple runs for your dungeon set - because no one would take you to raid without it. Then you joined a guild as trial and had reduced loot for a month, and a month more till you have built comparable DKP to veterans... this was long, but every step felt milestone and accomplishment. At last, level cap, at last, first raid, wow, first epic! Things hard earned had value. And you knew that it is worth something, that it was not easy to accomplish - and won't be easy for others.And now levelling is shrunk and cut, raid gear distributed on every corner. On Monday you create account, on Tuesday hit level cap, on Wednesday join raid - and on Thursday leave, because the game is boring and lacks content, you have seen everything and would rather do something else, waiting for next expansion/patch and next round of free giveaways. This is what WoW is quickly turning into.TL/DR, catch-ups that exist in the game now are already overly excessive. To the point of practically destroying any value of efforts active and loyal players put in the game.
P.S. I do not agressively grind essences, just do invasions, invasion dailies (not all of them, I am lazy and often skip 3-men ones) and daily small visions (which takes 5 min and is the largest source of essences). I started this week with level 10 cloak, 4 bottles in bags and 19k essences, so I easily did 4 runs for level 11 and have a lot remaining. And I have failied 4 or 5 runs at start because I wanted to test myself and went to harder zones not prepared. Still it was trivial to catch up.
'Wasting' Vessels on disconnects, or bad happenings is a thing, but I see a lot of people, WASTING ALL OF THE REST (including the weeks' free one), on other things, like, when they already did the weeks' quest and go and do more runs, 'wasting' their hard earned Vessels, for the next week, and getting to the point they won't finish the next quest. Guys, take it easy, there is already a week we will need 6-runs, or 12 pages. Will you be able to finish that week's quest in the same week?Some people are even clearing with 2-3+ masks already.