Gnomecore wrote recently about the Anima drought and the absolutely staggering total cost of attempting to get everything that requires Anima. He concludes, and I agree, that for now it’s not worth it to stress about getting more Anima each week than the Renown quest requires, and that one should spend what Anima one does acquire on gear and Sanctum Feature upgrades — leaving the cosmetic & Collections rewards for much, much later.
I don’t intend to get everything. I’m ignoring the mounts, pets, and Command Table/Adventures entirely. I’ll only be upgrading the Anima Conductor to stage 2, because with my playstyle I’m not interested in an Elite enemy that requires a group to defeat, nor in special armor enhancements (I haven’t even bothered with regular gems and enchants for the last couple of expansions). I do plan to fully upgrade the Travel Network and Special Feature MiniGame eventually, though, because I want the Covenant armor recolors from those sources. I definitely want to fully upgrade my base Covenant armor set, and, depending on the Covenant, I want to get some or all of the backpieces and weapons (for my classes of choice). Even with the handful of things I’ve chosen to ignore, I’ll still need immense amounts of Anima — not to mention other resources, such as souls saved from the Maw — it takes 70 of those just to get the final MiniGame upgrade! — to get all the stuff that I’d like to get.
And then there’s Renown, which already goes out to 40. People who were keeping up had been getting 3 Renown per week, but now that the Covenant Campaign Finale has been reached, there will only be 2 Renown available per week for folks who are caught up — which means that it will take half again as long as the expansion has been out so far to reach Renown 40.
It seems that for Shadowlands, Blizzard has planned a long, long game for us — and that’s just with what we know about already. The devs don’t want to hear us complaining that we have nothing to do. And yet, with the trickle of Anima available at present, it will be a tedious, exhausting grind to get All The Things. We already know that the Soulkeeper gets increased capacity at certain Renown levels, allowing more souls to be rescued from the Maw to help with Sanctum Feature upgrades — if the final upgrade of the Soulkeeper allows it to house 20 souls, those 70 souls for the final MiniGame upgrade will only take a month to collect. Likewise, I can’t help but think that there must be plans to increase the availability of Anima in the 9.x patches. Storywise, it seems to me like it would make a lot of sense for the availability of Anima to increase at least somewhat in Patch 9.1, now that Sire Denathrius and his minions at Castle Nathria will be canonically defeated, and the flow of Anima to the Maw from Revendreth abated, if not entirely quenched. Then our activities in each successive patch could steadily ramp up the availability of Anima, until the drought is ended when we manage to restore/revive the Arbiter. Then we can spend the final patch of the expansion romping in Anima like Scrooge McDuck in his money bin, and finally getting all of those cosmetic and Collections rewards!