You know, that’s a really good question, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Because you’re right, there is content, and it isn’t like past expansions didn’t have wildly different things to do. And yet, something feels off. Different.
I’ve always raided up to Heroic and stopped. I don’t have interest in Mythic, and in particular after how absolutely beyond frustrated I was getting with Sepulcher with my raid group, I got AotC and bounced because I was beginning to dread my raid nights. It wasn’t fun, it was frustrating and annoying. Granted, this is the second tier I’ve been raiding with them, and while I absolutely love the group, there were nights we stalled on progress and it wasn’t fun.
M+ I find to be far less enjoyable than CMs back in the day because of the real lack of interesting rewards. I’ve never been gear driven, not for throughput. But cosmetics I will always pursue. M+ has one mount and that’s really it, and getting there only requires timing +15 which I don’t find too hard. Beyond that, there’s nothing interesting to achieve so I just don’t care.
And the world…I thought about this last night. I spent four hours in ZM on an alt, got thousands of anima, and…I was able to buy three pieces off of the vendor. And realizing I’d have to do that but multiply it exponentially to try and get everything really hit me hard because I’d be doing the same thing day in and day out, farming the same rares, for these rewards and that just…didn’t feel fun. The rares aren’t dropping these rewards, I have to get the currency for them.
So a combination of the world not feeling rewarding, a lack of really interesting cosmetics or items to pursue, and a big part of my entire friend group quitting the expansion to leave me all alone has made this experience a boring slog that just…hasn’t been fun. As a collector, it’s tedious. As a raider, it’s frustrating. As a player, it feels like a job rather than a game.
I’ve done a lot this expansion, but it doesn’t feel nearly as fulfilling as Legion with collecting artifact appearances. BfA I actually quit in 8.3 so SL is doing better than that expansion, at least, but I just don’t feel that same enjoyment or sense of accomplishment that I got from past expansions. It’s missing.