wow Looking Back at Essences and the Legendary Cloak in BfA

[Stan 5,240]

We're looking back at what the community thinks of the Essence system and the Legendary Cloak introduced in Battle for Azeroth.

Essences were an interesting system of borrowed power introduced back in Rise of Azshara (Patch 8.2). It took a lot of time and effort to collect Rank 3s  on a single character due to the various requirements.

Thus, the community expected the collection of Essences to be account-wide, which didn't happen, leaving many alts with almost no Essences unlocked, as people didn't want to complete the same content over and over.

Players expected Blizzard to unlock all Essences or make them account-wide with the pre-patch launch, but nothing happened on that front.

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"If Blizzard has all the data and sees that people aren't collecting Essences, maxing out their cloaks, or unlocking the Horrific Visions tree, one would think they'd come up with at least some alt-friendly solutions," says Steadman.

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The issue also extends to the Legendary Cloak and Horrific Visions talent tree system. The lengthy intro questline made players skip it completely, and the amount of effort needed to maintain the cloak was absurd, according to some Redditors.

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Source: Reddit

[Brutalis 165]

8.2 was when I stopped doing serious content purely because of the Essence grind being boring. And I'm glad I did stop because 8.3 was even worse. These were definitely bad additions, IMO, and I hope the new "borrowed power" systems we get throughout SL (because I'm sure they will add more) aren't implemented like BFA's ones were.

Edited November 17, 2020 by Brutalis

[Pandabuffel 184]

I personally thought it became too much after a while and too much to tend to. You don't want to keep an eye out for always having the best Azerite traits, essences AND corruptions the whole time. It got even worse if you had many alts too and had to keep them all updated. I personally stopped playing for more than a half year after 8.3 hit, and the addition of the corrupted gear definitely was one of the reasons why.

Edited November 17, 2020 by Pandabuffel

[Leader 2]

All cloaks, and legionaries should be shared with all other characters. Just like reputation; There is one person playing

all the characters on one account. Why start over every time you logon another character? All characters should be working

towards a collective reputation + legendary experience.

[Bobbis 208]

I had 5 chars with maxed cloak, and mad world achi, 2 were cheating classes (BM and hDH) but others were harder (gDru, Mage and pally). The actual visions were interesting given the different approaches I could take, though got boring fairly quickly, but the weekly slog to get into the visions, the essence grind pre echos, and the corruption farm after that, THAT was tedious at best and the worst part of 8.3 imo.

I did get the cloak on all classes but only because of some enforced holiday over lockdown. Having to rank the cloak up to use corruptions to be really useful in M+/hc raids killed any enthusiasm for alts past that though which is a shame as I liked playing many of them, but the thought of doing MORE bloody vale/uldum dailies and whatnot was horrible.

Some way of making this power / progress acc wide would be great, but equally, doing it helps you learn the classes better and I get why we should earn some of it individually. It's like seeing chars with huge r.io scores but do *filtered* all dps. It's like a turtle on a post, we know someone else put it there and now it's got no idea what to do next.

[Ragingwolf 310]

Maxed out the cloak and gotten the majority of the Essences to Rank 2 to Rank 3 on my Main.  But it just became too much of a hassle to drag alts through the same mundane thing over and over again.  I didn't even drag alts into last Raid tier of the expansion because I found no joy in it.  The only thing that I found challenging was working on the Keystone achievement with the Corruption system in place while attempting keys +15 or higher on specific weeks with select  affixes.