I remember it usually was a KSM or RTWF saying it was killing them cuz they couldn’t win at Esports if they didn’t fully Titanforge their full kit…
And that should have been a point at which fun > competative balance. Sorry if your livelyhood is getting sponsorships and making ad revenues from video’s you can do the work and grind it out to beat your competitors.
If you where a normal human being it was a big boon.
Bad take.
People have things to do other than play WoW all day because bad players refuse to do M+ or raid to get the rewards they want.
Being forced to play all day in the name of accommodation of people who don’t even like MMO’s in the first place is stupid.
You must be on a busy shard or play at just the right times of the day or week. If so, being able to reliably clear the content you want and experience it the way it was tuned to be experienced must be nice. But not everyone has that option.
This sounds like Shadowlands Season 4.
It was experimental, yes, but the fact that devs actually tried that sort of patch shows that they were looking to see how many subs they could retain with as little investment as possible.
Dragonflight Season 2 actually reminds me a lot of Shadowlands Season 4 because the new zone feels so disconnected from progression. You are supposed to either do instanced Group content or Suffused Camps in the base zones.
That has relatively little to do with the state of solo gear, in fact, the insane power of solo gear is probably making it slightly worse.
The problem with pugging, is that most groups just want to get in, get loot, get out, and often leaders want a carry, so they’ll just take the best people who apply. People know that you can currently get 424 from brainless ZC/Assault grinding, so that’s what they’re going to look for as a minimum. But you’re also going to get the super-overgeared people who want that 1 bit of transmog or 1 trinket drop that’s still somehow an upgrade from normal, so it’s not just the people who belong in normal that you’re competing against for a raid spot in a pug.
Joining an organized raid guild/community will give you a much more consistent, reliable spot for your 1 day/week raid.
I mean, you kind of already can with crafting. Get the 3 tokens of merit->enchanted wyrms crest->437 crafted item, you pick the exact item, stats, and embellishment (if you want), which is better than any gear vendor that’s ever existed. Only limit is the 1 spark/2 weeks, and you seem to be ok with only getting the item every other week or so.
Nah.
My money goes toward more tangible things like MTG cards or 40k supplies.
Lmao thats funny
You’re reaching into some dangerous territory, if you think its a good idea to mock people for their hobby interests.
Ya. The solo content is still dying 
I mean, I totally get what you are saying.
Gearing for me personally is entirely secondary to playing the game at all. It’s just not what I care about when evaluating content personally.
Since stuff is tuned for 424 and tier in solo content really all I care about for doing overworld content is 411 and tier because tier fundamentally changes the game and the devs expect everyone to have it.
Raids are very solid this patch. Gearing isn’t a huge problem for me right now. However people who don’t raid or M+ are up against mostly 437 5 man content this patch. There isn’t a lot of it. And their power level vs openworld content is in the red compared with the last two expansions. Even if their overall ilvl was lower.
The special effects on Zerith Mortis gear was great. And after about a month of unlocking it it felt good. I felt powerful for Zenith Mortis content. Even tho the gear was only a bit behind normal raid tier in overall performance. And the special effects didn’t step over raid tier progression. That was three steps forward. Zaralack and rares dropping drake crests was three giant leeps back for me. By the time I get full 424 or 431 from world events, rares, and weeklies we’ll have another raid and world patch. And we will have felt behind the whole time because of the way world content was tuned.
I and many others really miss BFA world content and our relative power level within it.
lol what, are you high mate
Time investment alone us a poor measure. Time investment & effort is the differentiator. 3 hours doing WQs shouldn’t reward the same as 3 hours in +5s or 3 hours in heroic raiding. So, yes, if you can only spend time doing WQs, you should be behind folks who have been doing harder content for the same amount of time.
In that case, they are listening to demands from people like OP for better rewards (See: every thread they posted for all of SL), and are now tuning a bit around the better rewards they’ve given it.
So the zone died because they did too much of what OP wanted.
BFA world content participation was propped up purely by AP. World quest sweeps/emissaries/paragon boxes were very efficient sources of AP. Take all that AP away (as they did in SL), and suddenly the content has a lot lower participation (as we saw in SL, the content was basically the same, but there was no AP to prop it up).
I wouldn’t say it’s tuned around a higher ilvl band, it’s mostly just tuned for 4-5 people in a group as opposed to 1-3 people. Then the dragon boss at the end of Fyrakk Assaults is tuned for 5-10.
I never wanted open world content to require parties or raids. If I asked for more open world content or for open world content to award more progression, it was under the assumption that the content would be soloable.
BfA emissaries also awarded Normal raid iLvl gear, including weapons and artifact traits, and you could see in advance what the reward was going to be. The emissaries were completely soloable.
BfA absolutely blows DF out of the water in terms of actually soloable daily open world progression. The AP rewards were good, but casual, solo and open world players are not the type to farm any kind of content for hours every day for tiny power gains or the tiny chance that a piece of gear will Titanforge.
SL callings did not offer gear at all, except the elite ones occasionally did drop gear at low item levels.
DF is still refusing to offer any kind of soloable, daily open world power progression. You just end up with stacks of Whelpling Crests that you can’t even use. Zaralek Caverns is empty because it offers less power now than even the base zones, LOL.
SL was terrible. The WQs where grueling and deliberately obtuse rarher than the multitude of short sweet and direct legion and BFA WQs and assaults.
Giving ppl a world version equivalent of 411 lfr tier doesn’t seem too much to me.
It is kinda crazy ppl can get all 424s and 431s just hammering out weeklies and drake quests if they are kinda insane from rares…
I feel like WQ emissary and weekly style gear on a different track from raid gear (a different set bonus) that hard stopped at 424 and took about 3-4 weeks would be pretty fair. Something sweet like procs to speed from killing mobs and a minor leach buff or some elemental damage proc on par with a trinket proc something thematic… like… you know… shadowflame lol. Disable the set bonus in instances. That would give solo players something fun and let raiders keep their tier pieces.
You actually dont even need the rares, you just do the horn events and get fragrant coins to buy whole boxes of drake crests from a vendor.
This was a thing in season 1. Problem with it was the same as bfa horrific visions. They were overwhelmingly used more by raiders and m+ers than the intended open world players. Whenever this happens blizz always course corrects hard in the other direction because engagement metrics mean everything.
It’s still pretty time gated I was like what the heck I can even do this. It’s sorta nice and kinda ok since only so many can be bought each week in this case. Usually a bad mechanic. It works ok here though. Im doing these anyway since I can and I like doing the world stuff even if it’s a bit tedious and zergish in Zaralack.
screams and pulls our hair not at you though … I think you get it…
Metric shmetric. Plz make a real living breathing world people can feel nostalgiac for again. Even if the rewards sorta are bad and silly or take forever… just don’t make the world feel completely trivial or the opposite direction… tedious and deliberate…
sobs softly
There’s actually a decent amount of weekly drake crests. Dungeon quest, sometimes world quests, researcher’s event, and then you can buy 2 of them for 30 smelly coin tokens a week. I’d say it’s pretty normal to get 4-5 a week if you know where they come from.
Also you can actually buy the same box multiple times per week as long as you find a way to open the one in your bags without closing the shop window.
Why do people post things like this and present them like they’re facts?
People don’t like doing chores for upgrades. They simply don’t have the time. Using words like ‘engagement metrics’ doesn’t make you right, it just means you have no idea what you’re talking about.
I still can’t believe how generous Blizz is these days to be honest. There was no way in hell you were getting tier as a solo player years ago. Now you don’t even have to step foot in a raid. This is coming from a mainly solo player as well 
It’s more that the world no longer serves as purely a catch up / starting point for lobby / group content. Blizzard did an incredible job making the world feel worth actually being in during legion and since then have spent most of their efforts trying to walk it all back to the dismay of many.
Tier from the catalyst wouldn’t even be needed if world content had its own ways to make the player feel powerful / give them cool things that only worked out in the open world but it doesn’t.