It can be other rewards. Mounts. Pets. Something. But they need to make stuff faster, not grind and grind for months. And make stuff that changes, make it less repetitive, make it so if you do it once then alts can do it easier/faster. I know I would have spent more time doing outdoor content if I didn’t have to do the same questline and such over and over and over. They need more unique rewards for different classes and such.
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What does that have to do with your original point? Put your dinky back in your panties.
The point here is whether the ZM gear was worth the grind. The answer is no. By the time you got enough for the gear, it was already subpar.
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Funny thing is that there are people who want more content. It is the players who consume content who want more of it though. Content like Mage Tower and Brawler’s Guild is engaged with by a far higher percentage of Raiders or M+ players than “casuals” even though it should be the perfect “casual” content.
Casuals simply show time and again they don’t actually play for fun. There’s something in their brain that just makes them crave loot and that’s it. It’s sad.
There’s a metric ton of “somethings” for casual content in Shadowlands.
Casual. Players. Don’t. Do. Any. Of. It.
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I mean I would have done more mount/pet creation in ZM if it wasn’t for the insane amount of those currency you needed. They set the # too high. They made each pet/mount take WAY TOO LONG to grind for. If stuff was brought down to a more fun and realistic level, more people might have bothered.
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Took up too much room in my bags. Enough!!
So one thing I want to say is that I loathe collecting “currency” other than gold.
Call that irrational all you want: to me it’s a mistake Blizz & other MMO developers have made in order to give people a sop for when they’ve been playing for a good long while & haven’t seen a “worthwhile drop.” I know some people think that collecting anima or what ever is “rewarding” but I’ve always hated it.
For me, the very best time in WoW, the most fun I’ve ever had, was grinding dungeons in WotLK – first the normal, then the heroic versions. Trying to get the achievements & every now & then getting a useful upgrade drop was a riot. Nothing since has come close to that, & I’m largely convinced that nothing ever will. & yes, I know there was some amount of “currency collection” in that expac, but I personally never felt it necessary to do, because I fairly regularly got actual drops. & when I had to wait for a group, there was a lot of other fun to have as a solo open world casual, just dorking around the world map & having fun seeing things.
MoP was cool for that too, but I didn’t like the dungeons nearly as much. I’ve managed to find some fun in the expacs since MoP, but nowhere near the grand era of WotLK & its predecessors. I think this game has been slowly sliding downhill ever since MoP, even if it hasn’t yet hit bottom. But that downhill slide isn’t about casual players like me not getting raid level gear from open world quests, it’s because Blizzard is, IMO, just going through the motions.
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Add to that, the special items you needed for most of the mounts you can craft have an abysmally low drop rate, I’ve killed Euv’ouk or whatever he is called every single day he is available on my pally who has the mount crafting system open and never seen the item for one of the wasp mounts. I get having low drop rates to keep people playing longer, but there will come a point where the players will say screw it if it’s too low.
And I had the system open 1 week after it was available so only a few weeks into 9.2, just goes to show how horrible the drop rate is for some if not all those items.
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I’m not talking about ZM.
You haven’t got any achievements from Path of Ascension, Stitchyard Factory, or Ember Court.
You haven’t even done the extra quest content in Queen’s Conservatory.
There are 153 world content mounts in Shadowlands that require NO INSTANCE CONTENT to do. You have 41, and those are mostly the low-hanging fruit of “do the story and get a mount”.
World content achievements…
You don’t have any of the Exploration achievements that gives toys or titles.
Ditto on Quest achievements, except the Calia quest.
And we won’t even get into pet battles or toy collecting in general. (Not to mention transmog…)
Like I said: There’s tons of stuff to do in outdoors Shadowlands.
I do it.
People I raid with do it.
The people wanting “more world content” don’t seem to do any of it.
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they think if they continue to nerf, then folks will HAVE to raid or dungeon, or pvp…meh…don’t care. Isn’t any gear in game worth all that hassle to me, I can go run old content to stay busy…
this new expac is looking more & more like a huge waste of my money…
eh…live and learn I spose…
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I think it’s a bit misleading to tout Horrific Visions in the final patch of BfA as the norm for the entire expansion. Normal World content other than that one piece of content capped at Normal Raid ilvl, just like SL.
That said, frankly, World Content has no business matching Raid Content in terms of rewards. Its ridiculous that it ever even rewarded Normal Raid ilvl.
World Content should be a stepping stone into group content, not a replacement for it.
At least, as long as world content is designed to be the easily accessible “anyone can do it without even paying attention” thing it always is.
At this point I think I’d like to just split the different forms of content into separate progression paths entirely though. That way they don’t have to pretend to care about balancing rewards between them. World Content gear will be strongest vs mobs in the world. PvP gear will be strongest in PvP. M+ gear in dungeons. Raid gear in raids.
I don’t love the idea of gear not just being gear, but it’s clear at this point that they can’t properly balance rewards of varying content against each other (its been a massive problem for m+ vs raiding as well), so I see this as the only real way forward if players can’t accept different content being “better” or “worse” for gearing.
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Uh welp there goes any hype I had for DF. I was looking forward to playing for months and months slowly working to eventually get raid quality gear, it sounded like fun progression for people who don’t raid. Now I’ll just log on on Tuesday to do LFR and maybe spend a small amount of time filling in gear with stuff from invasions. But this has severely cut the amount of time I would spend playing DF.
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It’s still raid quality, just LFR instead of normal.
Right, but I do LFR on Tuesdays and that means less progression and gameplay for me. If I could spend months and months doing invasions to get Normal raid quality gear, that’s extra months and months of me playing instead of just logging on Tuesday to do LFR.
It’s not about the gear, it’s about having more progression to work towards and therefore more stuff to do in the game.
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Benthic gear is in the “actively made the game worse” tier.
It was a time where what they did was actually worse than just doing nothing.
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I would bet $100 that the people saying “good, it should be like this” and the people that always say at the start of the expansion “where did everyone go, the world is empty, game is dead gg” is a venn diagram that is a circle.
Wow gee I dunno, I wonder why that is. It’s a mystery… 
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Half the people who buy every expansion are going to quit the first month. It’s always been that way.
Nothing Blizzard can do will keep that half of the playerbase around. They resub, level a character, look around a bit, and leave. And that’s fine for them.
It’s fine for Blizzard, too, they’re just happy for the box sale.
Whoops, all the Growth until Cata. Someone forgot!
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That was net growth. People have been cancelling their subs in large numbers since vanilla.
Back in 2014, Blizzard announced that over 100 million people had played World of Warcraft. Yet the concurrent subs peaked at 12 million. That isn’t a contradiction; they’re totally different metrics.
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The sad part is solo players are literally asking to just be able to play the game more and have more gear progression. But the entire reason this change is being done is so that people like Ion Hazzikostas can play the game even less and just raid log.
It’s pathetic!
I would honestly bet his goal with removing flying was to make open world content take longer for solo players so they wouldn’t have to put in systems like this, so he could also just continue to raid log. It’s so stupid.
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