Coming back after a break in BFA is awful

Community General Discussion
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So I took a break from WoW shortly after Uldir. Realizing Shadowlands is on the way soon I thought I’d jump back in and brush up, but to my dismay this isn’t really possible in BFA. A bunch of systems were put in place on top of the Heart of Azeroth, and they all seem to be tied to a heavily time gated grind.

Azerite Essences:
These are actually pretty neat, except that I need to grind both rep and achievements to acquire competitive traits. This wouldn’t be the worst, except that many of these are heavily time gated to primarily daily quests. I’ve managed to net some decent ones, although my BiS traits are gated so far down a daily quest rabbit hole the next expansion will drop before I can even acquire them with constant grinding.

Corruption:
I feel like I can not catch up in this at all, and it sucks because corruption so heavily influences performance. Pre patch will be removing this but I was really hoping to play end game content (High Keys/Mythic Raiding) before this. Not having optimal corruptions is such a huge disadvantage that it basically excludes you from all content towards the higher end of the spectrum (and not even that high honestly).

Heart of Azeroth Level:
This was actually addressed following all the complaints early on. I’ve caught up to a respectable level fairly quick and it doesn’t bother me being just a smidge behind. What throws me off is that they fixed this, then proceeded to hard cuck alts/returning players 10x worse with the other 2 systems above.

In regards to gear, easy as ever to get back in it. Flying and things of that nature, I don’t think I should be able to walk in and grab. Its been that way for a while, those are things that require a long grind to obtain. Playing the end game though? I don’t believe in my history of playing WoW that it has been so heavily gated.

Should I be able to walk in and just get everything I need to play the level I want? Nope. However, I do believe I shouldn’t be forced to do dailies and then wait for the next day to do more - so on and so forth. If you’re going to gate the game behind meaningless quests so you can keep players online more, at least let me put in the same amount of hours in a shorter time frame.

If someone puts in 30 hours total play time to get everything they need and be in a decent spot, shouldn’t someone else be able to chug 10 gallons of coffee and play 30 hours straight to get there as well? Like, the grind is fine. Its an MMO. But the ridiculous gating behind daily quests and content that I literally can NOT farm at my own pace is horrid.

TLDR; If you took a break from this game and want to come back and play again - you can’t. At least not for end game content.

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I see this as the wave of the future. I think we will be seeing more anti catch up mechanics intended to make new and returning players feel bad about the game because it will be impossible to catch up and play. Because everybody knows that making players feel bad about the game is what made wow great.

There were no catch up mechanics in vanilla, so they’re removing them from retail.

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I’m Quitting and he should have. . .

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Except I don’t want to quit. I enjoy Many aspects of WoW. Transmog, grinding rare mounts, mythic+, mythic raiding - I have a blast in all of those things.

I just have an issue with Blizzard saying “In order to get this trait to be competitive, you need to kill 20,000 sheep.” Then following that up with “Oh yeah, but you can only kill 20 sheep a day.”

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I’m Quitting and to be honest, I just came back after taking a break from the beginning of BFA. All I did was level all my characters to 120 and stop. Just waiting for the pre patch now.

There seems to be a lot of overwhelming information in the game for me right now. I’ll just wait until Shadowlands and hopefully stay a bit longer this time.

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Do what I do OP, do nothing and just RP until SLs :smiley:

Or achievement hunt.

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Yes…yes you are!

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I actually re rolled a monk that I’ve been grinding some things on and learning. Lots of messing around in sub 10 keys and Transmog grinding which is fun. Tried to catch up on my rogue for a bit, but then realized it really isn’t possible.

Just sucks because I really want to play that higher end content, but Blizzard hit me with a solid nope.

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I feel for you dude.

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Vanilla also didn’t gate you behind daily quests which is where my issue is.

I may have had to farm 10 million things to catch up, but I could power through it in the course of a few weeks. Retail will not let you power through anything. You’re going to wait because they slapped the game full of artificial time constraints.

In fact, Vanilla was probably one of the easier expansions to catch up in. If you had a decent guild to kite you through some content you were fine in no time. On top of that, they threw catch up gear into dungeons so they did have some mechanics for catching up.