Everything you need to know about Azerite Essences going account-wide today

If a Rank 3 Essence has been earned by another character on your account, MOTHER will offer that Rank 3 Essence for 500 Echoes of Ny’alotha. Any player who is eligible to purchase at least one Essence from MOTHER will now receive Echoes of Ny’alotha from a wide range of activities in current content. These are the values we’re planning per activity:

• Black Empire Assault – 125 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Aqir/Amathet/Mantid/Mogu Assault – 75 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Horrific Visions – 50 Echoes of Ny’alotha, plus 25 per additional objective completed (i.e. 150 Echoes for a full clear)
• Emissary Quest – 50 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Heroic Darkshore Warfront – 75 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Normal/Heroic/Mythic Ny’alotha raid bosses – 15-25 Echoes of Ny’alotha each, once per week per boss
• Ny’alotha Raid Finder wings – 25 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Random Battleground wins – 15-25 Echoes of Ny’alotha
• Rated Arena wins – 10-25 Echoes of Ny’alotha baseline, scaling up with PvP rank
• Rated Battleground wins – 35 Echoes of Ny’alotha baseline, scaling up with PvP rank
• Weekly PvP Cache – 175 to 300 Echoes of Ny’alotha, based on PvP rank
• Mythic Keystone dungeon end-of-run chest – 3 Echoes of Ny’alotha per Keystone Level (i.e. 30 Echoes of Ny’alotha for a Mythic 10)
• Weekly Mythic Keystone Cache – 20 Echoes of Ny’alotha per highest Keystone Level

We take this approach for two main reasons. First, a core part of the experience of playing an alt has always been gaining power as you see the game from a different vantage point, and setting your sights on a goal, whether that’s just reaching max level, or achieving a certain PvP rank, or raiding at a specific difficulty. Thus, every reward that’s account-wide becomes one fewer goal to strive for on alts. Second, while many players enjoy playing multiple characters, and while having alts offers a number of advantages, we’re wary of making it feel as though focusing on a single main character is objectively the wrong way to play the game. If more power rewards are multiplied across all characters on an account, not having multiple max-level alts would be inefficient.

That philosophy led us to initially decide against having Essences be an account-wide unlock, though it was the topic of significant and repeated internal discussion among the development team. The activities that reward Essences are all things that we believe are important to do at least once so that you become familiar with zones and stories, or to engage in aspects of the game that you may not have had a reason to try. If you are just returning to Battle for Azeroth or experiencing it for the first time, the goal of acquiring all of your Essences will lead you through many aspects of Warcraft’s endgame

More recently, as we continued to revisit the subject, especially in light of ongoing Shadowlands design, we came to see subsequent playthroughs of the same content for the same player differently. While we still firmly believe that each character should have a progression arc of power gains, the player behind those characters understandably may not want to repeat the exact same arc multiple times when they feel they have exhausted the variety or rewards an activity might hold. So if you’ve thoroughly worked with Nazjatar followers to earn your Rank 3 Memory of Lucid Dreams, or delved into Battlegrounds and Island Expeditions enough to earn Rank 3 Blood of the Enemy, we understand why you might not want to feel required to repeat that experience. This is the same philosophy that’s informing our plans for leveling in Shadowlands, where alts can pick and choose their path through level-up content once you’ve completed the linear narrative experience once on a character.