It’s just meant to be a progression. Like, push breakpoint, upgrade gear, keep pushing. A player gets snapped in half by Pika in the opener, thinks it’s a gear issue and quits.
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You do realize Wrath was the expansion with the most emphasis on rating requirements after SL right?
It was basically “the” arena gear gating expansion.
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I’m sure all the usual bobbleheads who shilled it neglected to mention that. 
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I never pushed numbers though. Rating was never what I was after.
I was always in it for the casual fun, and collections.
I have a Zulian Tiger, that’s my win condition on this account, lol.
The game itself, the gameplay loop I played it for, doesn’t exist anymore, in retail.
PvP, casual PvP anyway, is dead. Thanks to people who like to gatekeep rated gear and keep it in casual bgs, and the removal of templates.
It’s like doing Wailing Caverns in Mythic Raid Gear, how is that fun? Oh right, stomping players that can’t defend themselves, right.
So, this account is now dead weight. A game that isn’t fun isn’t worth playing.
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Then its an instant flop since they’ve already shown that they can’t make the grinds fun in SLs.
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I still say that late Wrath around Argent Tournament had the best ‘casual’ progress system, you could do dungeons to get a flat currency and turn them in for decent gear from the vendors. Wrath was also my favorite expansion so I’m probably biased.
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You play for what you play for.
However gearing and advantage is what drives the vast majority of the playerbase. Remove that and you will lose the playerbase.
I only PvP’d a few seasons over the last 15 years, most recently S1 of shadowlands. Back in TBC and Wrath casual pvp was much more prevalent from what I recall. You could grind out BGs and Arenas and slowly build up gear, but shoulders, weapons, etc were all locked behind rating. You could get the previous season’s gear for less and it was still good, iirc. I.E. Merciless gladiator’s gear to fill in the holes with Vengeful.
The rating requirements were much more severe back then, iirc. Now it’s a much more gradual system. Yet back then the casual element was larger.
Food for thought.
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Exactly how I feel.
PuG raids, were also something I was huge on back in the day. I championed tanking 10-man raids, on hardmodes or otherwise.
I hosted a Maly 10 once, and the mount dropped! Everyone assumed I would ninja, but no! I already had a cool mount! I made everyone roll, and a player won it. I was a good leader.
But no more, as the PuG scene is pretty much dead now.
Close-knit guild groups and Discord only.
Casuals as a whole have evaporated from WoW, and it’s high time I probably left too.
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So do us all a favor and quit over grinds you never did anyways
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It really is odd how it’s unacceptable to have power incentives these days. 
Heck, even cosmetics get people flustered.
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Except the gear wasn’t “decent”, it was trash, at least by raiding standards. But that’s the problem, now: “open world” players compare the gear they’re getting to the hardest content in the game, and complaining because “I want that, too”.
The big difference between now, and back in the Wrath days, is that back then people didn’t have wowhead blaring in their face every day about what people-who-are-not-them are doing.
It’s exactly like the well-documented issues with body image on social media: Everybody sees other people looking only their best on facebook, and it makes people feel bad about themselves when they drag their butt out of bed every morning and look in the mirror. Likewise, when people look on wowhead and see the cream-of-the-crop content and rewards, they think “well, why don’t I have that?” Didn’t used to be that way pre-wowhead.
If you took the same type of gearing that passed for acceptable in Wrath, and offered it to the same players these days, they’d turn their noses up. “What trash! Why don’t I get BiS items, too?” they’d say.
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This is just horrible. It seems Blizzard may not have learned from the mistakes of Shadowlands after all.
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FFXIV is a great alternative and doesn’t abandon/forget its player base if you want something else.
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No they haven’t. Casuals are very active in this game.
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Sigh…do we have explain it to you again how bad of an idea it is to try bulling people out of the game?
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Very vocal people were arguing (and getting dozens of likes for their arguments), just last patch, that what solo players really wanted was their own progression path and that they didn’t care about the ilvl. Now that they have a progression path it’s back to this.
This place is an absolute dumpster 
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This argument is dumb.
If all you do is solo/world content for gear, then you DON’T need higher ilvl.
If you want higher ilvl gear to do instanced content, then do the instanced content progression.
I already play it, lol.
Was definitely impressed, and am still catching up on Endwalker.
Heavensward was amazing.
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Endwalker was so good it gave me an existential crisis. Stuck with me for days afterwards and is easily the best FF narrative I’ve experienced.
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