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August 2, 2024: Blizzard has issued a quick-fix patch that addresses most of the concerns below—improving rewards, looping the event in the zones it's impacted, and more. You can read the full details here. Original story follows.
The War Within's pre-patch is here for World of Warcraft—and it's kind of a banger when it comes to quality of life features. There's the Warband system, better transmog farming options, dragonriding coming to all flying mounts, and, uh, a weird glitch that brings your alts back from the dead, apparently.
The actual pre-patch event, though? Similar to the waves of grumbling over Plunderstorm and Mists of Pandaria: Remix, it's rough out there.
Here's the rundown: The Radiant Echoes event, like a lot of pre-patch events, gives players the opportunity to grind out a unique currency for powerful catch-up gear, mounts, cosmetics, and all the usual suspects. To get these, you need to cycle between three zones where an event will pop every 90 minutes.
The complaints are a two-parter. First off, the event is a little stingy with its rewards. Let's use a chest piece as a temperature check: One of these items will run you 5,000 residual memories (the event's currency).
There's a weekly quest for every zone on rotation that awards 1,500 memories per turn-in for a total of 4,500 memories a week, given there's three zones. Killing an event's main boss gets you 500, killing a mini-boss during the "Scattered Memories" phase gets you 25, and the events themselves get you 10.
Let's just ballpark that at around, say, 6,000-7,000 memories a week if you do the weeklies and stop—assuming there's a lot of players in the zone and you're not going to be there for every Scattered Memory boss kill.
That's 1.2 to 1.4 chestplates a week, which isn't really a lot—but, you might say, what about the little guys who hang out in the zones between those 90-minute timers? I'm glad you asked. Killing a normal enemy grants a whopping 1-3 memories (an average of 0.04% of a chestplate) while an elite enemy grants 5 memories (0.1% of a chestplate). So you need to kill, uh, 2,500 normal enemies to get one by mob grinding alone.
Granted, with the advent of Warband currencies, you can share echoes between your alts—so you could repeat the weekly quests across four max-level characters for far more memories if you wanted. Still, a mandatory repeat grind just to funnel memory bucks to the character you want gear on kinda sucks, on the face of it.
Mind, you do get gear drops from the event itself, but its two mounts will both run you 20,000 memories a pop (and it's still frustrating to rely on RNG if you're aiming for something specific, anyway).
The other half of complaints are aimed at the actual event cycle. This being a populated MMO, the actual "event" part usually comes and goes very quickly, leaving players waiting for an hour and a half before it spawns again. If you want to see how busy these things get, here's a nice, apt screenshot from our resident WoW enjoyer and senior guides writer Sarah James.
Now, as per the explanatory blog post, Blizzard intends to reduce this timer down to 60, then 30 minutes as the event progresses, but why not just have it start at 30? Who benefits here?
Players are, it seems, not having a good time. As one player on the game's subreddit puts it: "So wait a second, if I am not there at the EXACT time the event rotates, I’m essentially f*cked for another 90 minutes until it rotates again. Awesome."
Things are, expectedly, even worse on the official WoW forums. "This is a prime example of Blizzard not respecting the players time," writes one player after asking if the event was "some kind of joke". Another adds that "even the Shadowlands pre-patch event was better than this, and we all know how that expansion went." Oof.
I've yet to hop in and give it a whirl myself (Final Fantasy 14's savage tier just came out and I'm on that crafter grind—papa needs a new bike) but this does seem to me like an easily avoidable situation.
Looking back on all the bronze controversies around gulp frogs with MoP: Remix, I can't help but wonder if Blizzard is intentionally starting things slowly to reduce the impact of exploits—on the other hand, it's a pre-patch event, who cares? When The War Within releases in less than a month, all this gear's gonna get replaced by questing tat, anyway.
