They literally tell you in game what the anima conductor is for. If you actually read the quest text, it makes sense. If a piece of armor says 1 of 7, I am assuming I can upgrade it because that's what its looked like in previous iterations.
Shadowlands is fun, but Blizz has made some questionable UI decisions that have led some of my guildies into doing things they didn't intend to do.- Legendary crafting: for Leatherworking, Leather and Mail items are all split up EXCEPT for legendaries. All legendaries for leatherworking are in the same category. This has led many people I know to build the wrong legendary base item. This issue is common enough that Blizz has a help article for it asking people to let a GM know: https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/279176. That being said, they have yet to help any of my friends with it, so I have to wonder if the GMs want to know so they can laugh at you.- Sanctum upgrades: The main problem here is the lack of a confirmation button. This leads to issues where someone might be saving up for Rank 2 of the conservatory or the Ember Court, but instead purchases the travel network just going to the wrong spot. It's extremely weird IMO that Blizz doesn't require a confirmation on a 5K anima and multiple soul purchase, but does require it on a 25 anima charge from the Anima Conductor.- Mission table: This thing is a train wreck of uncertainty. I can't tell you how often I've gone in to work on putting my troops out for a mission and I've forgotten what the reward was for that mission. It also fails to show things like XP, how much you get for each mission you send out. And how many campaign missions have I done again? Glad Wowhead had the article on Venture Plan, it's far better than what Blizz opted to do with the table.
Love wowhead but can we please cut out the seemingly increasingly regular blatant scraping of the /r/wow subreddit like others suggested? For two reasons, 1.) it feels a bit lazy on wowheads part and 2.) I used to browse /r/wow a lot, but that place is toxic af and totally worthless these days for anything good other than some memes here and there, many of which make fun of the state of the sub itself now. This post is a massive stretch as others have pointed out, wow exceeds every other mmo in this space handily, and that’s speaking as a developer who works on UI/interface fairly regularly. If you need a more in depth explanation of systems beyond what your *need* to know in game (which is already in the game and all that should be in game, I definitely do not want massive multi page guides wasting space and cluttering up everything in game) that is, ironically, what wowhead is for! Even the anima extractor, which you could add an additional easy fix sentence or two to further explain it, is super easy to figure out as it is. Re:some constructive criticism on point 1, if wowhead did wanna do an article like this I would suggest having a writer go in game and find some examples/screenshots of what they felt they wanted to showcase/offer constructive suggestions on, and just forgo the reddit posts entirely. There’s two reddit post wowhead articles in a row, and the mission table post which calls the minor issue needing a minor balance change as a “dumpster fire sh*tshow” shows like I said, that they’re so hyperbolic, toxic, and out of touch with reality that I can’t take anything that subreddit says seriously. That rhetoric being in front page wowhead also reflects poorly on wowhead imo from a professionalism standpoint, those types of posts definitely don’t need attention, we should instead be promoting down to earth and actual constructive criticism.
Explore, read, figure it out. Imagine playing a game like Monkey Island, as it was originally, these days. Nobody could beat it.Although the Soul Ash weekly cap should be better explained, it's not that hard to figure out:The tooltip on the wing screen tells you that doing the highest floor, will award all the previous rewards. If you go to the other wing, it says the same (tip: that's your weekly cap)The amount of Soul Ash in the currency tab says that you have x amount of y (tip: y is the maximum you can have)I think it goes both ways: Blizzard does a poor job explaining in-game systems and players expect to be handed all the information without even trying to use these systems.
I only found out the covenant sets could be upgraded by the player when I rolled a Necrolord. Their npc to do this is standing right beside the repair vendor. The other covenants npcs are hiding... behind a pillar in a back room (kyrian), off in a corner of the transport ring (venthyr), and trying to blend into a similarly colored flag like a certain director of intelligence (night fae). Given that this seems to be blizzard's solution to gearing for the extreme casual players now that emissaries are gone, you'd think someone would have explained this in game, shown the player .. "hey, that item I just gave you.. go talk to NPC to upgrade it." like they did with the benthic armors.
And Handy Notes' people doing 'their job' of putting informative icons on maps, like Oribos and the Sanctums at least. All sanctums have same kind of systems, but their layout are different and people might miss where to find what, for WEEKS.
Lack of information about gear upgrades is terrible indeed. I have noticed "Rank 1 of 7" on my gear some weeks ago, but it took me an hour of googling to research what this means and where to get higher ranks. Not only in-game information was lacking, but all guides out there provided ZERO information, only telling about cosmetic and how it looks.However, this is far from simple cosmetics. Its a full set of armor you obtain from your covenant campaign that is ilevel 177 (equals heroic dungeons) on rank 4, ilevel 184 (equals mythic dungeons) on rank 5, ilevel 190 on rank 6 and even better on rank 7. Very good gear you can get without ever stepping into dungeons/raids (well, on Kyrian one of the campaign quests requires you to do a dungeons).While it takes about two months to complete the campaign, and so active players will probably prefer to rush to get gear faster and not wait for covenant gear to grow to these item levels, I find it very handy for my alts. With the amount of content to do I do not have much time for alts, and I like the fact that they can just sit in their covenants doing nothing apart from a few quests every week (and some WQs daily as you still need anima for 1000 anima weekly renown quest), and still get better-than-mythic-dungeon gear in two months. It is a very important system that definitely asks for a better explanation.And how it works:- through chapters 1-3 of your covenant campaign you get rank 1 (ilevel 158) gear- chapter 4 of the campaign yields rank 2 (ilevel 164) piece and then you can upgrade all previous gear to same rank/ievel- chapter 5 provides rank 3 (ilevel 171) piece and you can upgrade all your previous rewards to this rank, and so oneach week you get a 1-2 new items of next rank and then you can upgrade all your gear to this rank; it costs anima, but not very much, 1000 anima you have to earn weekly for renown should be enough to keep up with gear levelsAnd upgrading itself is done through a special NPC in your sanctum. For Kyrian it is Forgehand Phillo standing in the room with Forge of Bonds (where you manage soulbinds and conduits) behind a pillar to the left. I do not know where are similar NPCs for other covenants, but they should be similar.Very nice system for players that prefer solo questing, allowing them to get decent gear to feel comfortable in solo content (outdoor, Maw, Torghast). While I participate in group and raid content on my main, I prefer solo play on my alts, and I like this system a lot.Notice, however: you only get armor - and cloak. You have to find jewelry (neck, rings, trinkets) and weapons elsewhere.
I've posted in every comment so far, really disappointing to have to play the game with WoWHead open as so much is unclear (or buggy/broken). You never know if you are doing something wrong or it just is buggy/broke. Kudos to the designers - beautiful game, love the feel and stories, etc. But, the questionable, often unclear, buggy quests are not what I've come to expect from the past decade+ from Blizzard.As for all the systems, while most are okay to fun, it often feels like a laundry list of chores which for a supposedly "alt friendly" expac is going to feel alot like a job trying to keep up. As for the 80%, I believe it. Surprising every day you read in chat or hear people in Discord that had no clue about so many of the new systems. Soul Ash (and creating the Legendaries) and upgrading the Covenant armor seem to be two. People just seemed to ignore/miss/skip the information. I've listened to more people regarding the quest from the Runecarver and feel they have to rush to make a legendary with no idea which memory works for their play style and that it has to fit in a specific gear slot, simply because they want to finish the quest!** Good write up and yes PLENTY of room for improvement.
Had no idea the dungeon quests in Oribos were weekly during week 1. Didn't make an effort to do them before the reset.
I am one of those that did not now much at the start, as I wanted not to spoil the new stuff. But the covenant gear is one of the few things that I found almost impossible not to notice: it states clearly and in green color on the gear piece "Rank 1 of 7". Where to upgrade it, that's another matter, but I found it obvious that you can do it somewhere.
This just isn't true at all, the problem is you went from having only explosives to worry about to having something else. My group counted the times spiteful targets melee, ranged, and healer...and there are runs where its a 50/50 split and there are runs where its almost all of them going after ranged....