The endeavors in World of Warcraft started off a bit rocky. Blizzard is helping out and making sure you get even more XP.
Endeavors are one of the major social features of housing in World of Warcraft. Every month, visitors from various races and cultures come to your neighborhood for whom you can complete tasks. As a reward, you receive plenty of housing XP (for your house level), progress for the endeavor, and of course, a lot of decorations that you unlock.
However, some neighborhoods had little chance and had to endure nearly endless grinding. This has now been fixed.
What was the problem with the endeavors? Endeavors had some issues at launch that were apparently not immediately obvious during development, but became directly noticeable in the live system. Some of the key aspects are:
Neighborhoods with few active players have a hard time completing the first endeavor. The system doesn’t have data on how active a neighborhood is yet and would only scale appropriately from the second endeavor onwards.
The repeatable tasks give less and less progress with each repetition. This was meant to incentivize taking on different tasks, but led to even particularly dedicated neighborhood fans being unable to contribute after a while.
The combination of these two circumstances meant that it was already apparent for some neighborhoods after just a few days: The endeavor would not reach a successful conclusion, no matter how hard one tried. As the diminishing returns from the repeatable quests worsen the grind with each completion, the progress becomes ever smaller.
Individual players can carry entire endeavors
What has Blizzard changed now? Blizzard has acknowledged the issues and announced some major changes that are now live. These include:
- The diminishing returns on repeatable tasks are less severe. Instead of being reduced to up to 20% of the original value, the cap is now at 50%. This way, all tasks still provide good progress even when completed multiple times.
- The first endeavor generally requires fewer points to complete. You should see a greater impact from your contributions.
- The generic tasks (such as dungeons, depths, raid bosses) give more endeavor experience, so even “normal gameplay” has a noticeable effect on the endeavor.
But for everyone who is having issues with their housing level, there is also a significant improvement:
The maximum amount of housing XP you can earn from endeavors has been increased from 1,000 to 2,250. Together with the completion of the endeavor (250), you now get a maximum of 2,500 housing XP per endeavor, which is nearly a whole level for your house.
Note that the interface has not yet correctly displayed a large part of these changes; this will be addressed in a larger patch. However, you should be able to read the progress on the endeavor progress bar.
What does this mean? In short, this means that individual players can now have a much greater impact on an endeavor. It only takes a handful of active characters – or even just a single, extremely engaged character – to maximize an endeavor within days.
This should now make it possible to achieve significant progress even in a fairly inactive public neighborhood or in a neighborhood with people who hardly participate in the endeavor.
Additionally, Blizzard has announced that there will be further adjustments to the endeavors in the future, based on community feedback. If you have any further concerns about the endeavors, be sure to share your opinions in the forums or on WoW’s subreddit, or also discuss this feature here in the comments.
However, endeavors are not the only thing in World of Warcraft that urgently needed improvement. One of the “flagships” of Midnight, the Devourer Demon Hunter, needs urgent help – as it is simply a pitiful shadow of what it could be.
