Especially ones that instead of being the final 10% of your character’s power end up being 50% making them mandatory for all serious content.
-First it was azerite, then essences, now rng corrupted gear. AND NONE OF THEM WERE EASY TO AQUIRE.
Azerite gear were either RNG or grinded through timegated weekly m+ caches reward
-Essences were extremely grindy, forcing people to do content they hated and many times were also timegated for almost a month or more.
-Corrupted gear with no vendor are completely RNG YET CAN GIVE YOU UP TO 20K dps boost and more for some classes. They are locked behind a huge rng aka keep grinding until you get them lol.
Our characters main source of power is no longer gear and abilities, it locked behind rental systems that are forcing ridiculous grinds while many of the timegated to desperately keep players playing.
Meanwhile in Swtor you get your set pieces and most gear early on within a week, that is 90% of your character’s power, then the last 10% comes fro, bis gear parts and amplifiers which take some time to grind but not having them isn’t a big deal, and when you get them you get a great sense of accomplishment since they last for mot of the expansion and also you can gear a ton of fun alts.
And let’s check the math based on blood mallet for those that care about numbers, my dps when I was playing via sim was somewhere above 30k but that included 1 major essence and 3 minors(1 being from the major) and now there’s a 4th minor from the new slot.
So for frost dk we check the best for 8.3 and they are
8k from world vein major
4K from world vein minor
4K from memory of lucid dreams minor
4K from breath of the dying minor
3k fro, blood of the enemy minor
Then let’s check corrupted gear
30k from infinite stars, with 25% nerf it ll be 22k
14k from echoing void
So overall through the external sources(I am not even gonna bother with azerite) the total dps is 59k, .(with 2 corrupted items, hell even one leads to 45k dps boost. At the end of the expac it ll be more)
Obviously this is sim dps under best conditions but the fact that a character’s performance is MOSTLY locked behind external systems that are both time gates and extremely grindy and also often grindy from content you don’t enjoy
If these systems design continue to shadowlands then I am not even gonna bother, Swtor ftw where I can play alts and have fun in any content without being forced into ridiculous timegated grinds, I can just have fun.