I’ve been thinking of writing on this topic and here is a thread that is very much alive and on the topic.
WOW has become pay to win in the top tier, you can enjoy upper middle medocrity for your monthly subsription and nothing else but to really breach the upper levels of the player base you need either longstanding reputiation, relationships, and don’t forget ALOT of time to build into the upper tiers. Or avalanches of gold, which can be farmed up with that last resource i mentioned “Time.”
Or you can go the pay to win route. and at the begginning of the xpack about 600 american would get you into some of the best gear in the game from arena’s and a reasonable level of skill would see you cutting edge.
Blizzard has flat out lost control of its gold as a currency. The company is taking very slow and plodding steps to regain control but the speed at which blizzard is moving suggests to me ( and perhaps me alone) that they are making money off of the loss of this control somehow as they have never simply stopped it by binding gold to accounts or some other “ironfisted” route.
another reason is that item level has for the most part become “KING” primary stats cannot be the only arbiter for a piece and the diminishing returns and stat squish on secondary stats has dictated that it is, this means pvp gear is the most accessible high level gear in the shortest time. If you’re not currently playing the meta pvp classes you have a vanishing small chance of attaining the ranking to purchase the gear so you pay for the carry.
Finally M+ gear is not good enough 210 is too low for a 15 it should be 220 which would have been inline with the last xpacks m+ 15’s where by 15’s drop nearly mythic raiding i level gear to alow classes to tune thier secondary stats effectively. this lead to a greater degree of “balance” in the game(fire mages notwithstanding)
Class development is horribly inconsistent. There has been immediate action taken to nerf classes performing in the middle of the pack, while classes percieved as overpowered receive little to no attention for months on months (see fire mages at the end of BFA…again). It is unfortunate that players playing a 15 think that the only class makeup that will suit is an MDI make up when a 15 is aboslutley achievable for any class or spec.
It is unfortunate that current raid guild strategies seem to be to make use of immunity as much as possible to ignore mechanics rather than work with them. This is by and large to the huge number of one shot mechanics found in both raiding and M+, and the massive dps checks found in raiding and m+.
Secondary to all of this Soothing has become absolutley essential to M+, as has having atleast one player of the right convenant for most dungeons with Night Fae standing out the most. Nothing has been done to tune the dungeons around convenant interaction, a herbalist cant remove the branches in MISTS but an engineer can stop the slimes in DOS, these is no interaction between engineers and the contructs in Neck wake… its all very strange and the odd requirements dictate a play to win format at the cutting edge…so to speak.
TLDR; yep i think wow is pay to win.
