That it doesn’t take that long to get to the goal if your aim is M+ and raiding? I did not play SL at all until the very end, and I can tell you it’s very quick going from task to task.
The only thing is that weird area between the Korthia unlock and heading to ZM. That wasn’t super clear, and you have to actually do so little of Korthia to actually move on.
Hard disagree. I also just returned from Wrath. Even back in Wrath I was a kid so I was a casual, every now and then I did a dungeon with my little brother. No real raiding experience or try harding experience in wow. I came back about a month and a half ago, playing healer for the first time ever, no one to play with, so full solo player with no one to carry me. I don’t play every day yet I recently easily cleared a +13 (and will keep pushing, I just haven’t been playing for a few days. Also keep in mind this is with the S4 dungeons which are harder and I also had to deal with Grievous affix as a completely new and clueless healer), have experienced minimal toxicity and today (literally a few minutes ago) I finally hit revered with the enlightened so I got my Unity memory. The game feels perfectly fine in terms of grind right now. There are many things that leveled up incredibly fast and I have to imagine it’s because they were tweaked for players getting into the game late. My renown went up faster than I could keep track of.
Don’t get me wrong, it IS a grind, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. You don’t want the grind to be taken away from an MMO, that’s dog crap boring. The longest grind (not the hardest, just the longest) was the Enlightened rep grind but even that was just doing 3 easy, brain dead, auto piloting World Quests a day (which takes like idk… 10 mins total?) and at the end I cleared some raids and that was it, I had it in like 2 and a half to 3 weeks. Also as a player that’s been away for this long and never experienced M+ the game feels like you have so many options as to how you want to gear yourself once you’re 60. I didn’t feel like raiding and I have never done PVP, M+ was perfection for me and I have been getting good gear that way. If you don’t like M+ there’s PVP (which I will get into soon) and raiding.
When I got back into the game it was a bit overwhelming to find out about all the different new things and I was a little flustered cause I had no one to play with me and teach me but luckily there was this experienced player I met in a random dungeon (not Mythic) and he gave me some sense of direction as to what to do next, he explained double legendaries, Unity and all that stuff, that’s when I started the real grind cause I had not even gotten to ZM yet. But once you understand that stuff and what Covenants are, conduits, blah blah… the game feels easy.
Just to give an idea, when I met that player who told me about ZM and the legendaries I had not unlocked the zone yet. I got to speed running the campaign (AAP helps), got to ZM, within a couple days I had already beaten the campaign and had every achievement in the zone to unlock flying. After that it was the easy World Quests daily and my choice of end game content (M+ for me, whatever you like for you). Felt chill.
Also I came back to WoW from FF14 and believe me dude, as much as I love FF14 once I’m in end game, I would rather grind 5 WoW alts from 1-60 than to play the FF14 main story once. Now that was a grind, and a frustrating one. You want to play an MMO but are locked into a single player JRPG that lasts for hundreds of hours. Coming back to WoW you learn to appreciate the different style of grind. But that’s just my opinion.
While the barrier to getting to endgame is actually really low, they could definitely do a better job of leading new players through the content; FFXIV and GW2 run laps around WoW in that department. I think the ship has sailed on getting a full on FFXIV style main story that guides you through everything, but GW2 for all it’s faults has done a really good job of breaking down the order of it’s content, making it accessible, and making sure it’s all actually there and huge portions of the story (legendary questlines) aren’t removed to create artificial FOMO. WoW could definitely push Chromie Time further into something like that.
I think where Blizzard has really messed up is new players getting to max level and getting bombarded with a bunch of different quests (all in different parts of the timeline) and systems. It gets messy, real quick.
It was the same way in BFA. It’s just a mess.
If they don’t find the game part of the game enjoyable then the chances are they won’t find the endgame content enjoyable either. If they don’t like playing wow, do them a favour and ask them to stop playing wow.
We have enough people who hate the game on GD alone, as it is.
The game was better when new players couldn’t expect to catch up to the end game in two days. You and your friend should manage expectations. If you want to play together, roll an alt and level with him/her.
100%
These posts are embarrassing. It’s an MMO, isn’t grind synonymous with this? Imagine complaining in an FPS forum about how unfair it is to have to aim. Hey, there’s more experienced players with better aim, so bring aim assist for those of us that don’t want to put the time in! XD
The grind in this game to level 60 and then to a decent iLvl is really not that bad.
Most of the returning players in my guild have been saying “Blizz are you serous? More quests?” They want to play with friends and not be hard carried. They couldn’t even queue for LFR to work on their dinars.
If your co-worker thinks this is grinding… oh man are they in for a surprise
You could have just taken them into base mythics to skip having to get ZM gear.
We have been. 
In which expac did those returning players play where there were no quests or rep grinds released with every major tier?
If you’re a new player, you shouldn’t want to skip. You should want to play the game. Otherwise what’s the point? Rush to “current”, don’t know how to play your character, then run to the forums to complain that one of the easiest mmos ever made is too hard??
Given it took us all 2 years to get to where we are, a new player taking a week or two to get to a competitive point isn’t too bad. At some point you still have to play the game and experience the content rather than have a new geared 60 given to you for no effort just so you can catch up in one day.
I don’t get these players. I mean, we need to be welcoming and all but it just feels like they’d rather be playing CoD?
New player (essentially) wants everything within a week?
Tell him to go play the game.
There’s an enormous difference between WotLK/Cata era and now. Once you level capped the only truly mandatory grind was shoulder enchants. It was just a matter of running dungeons for pre-raid BiS or catchup gear from badge vendors. There wasn’t a slog through hours and hours of max-level quests to open borrowed power systems.
Nah, I suggest he quits and no new players play, that’ll show them 
They may not remove things, sure, but don’t they also make you buy each “chapter” separately if you missed being there for it when it was live? It’s been ages since I played so please correct me if I’m wrong, but what I remember was buying an expansion and logging in to find out I could play this “season” of story and none of the others unless I paid for them. I know they don’t have a monthly sub fee but still …
I really would not want WoW to make me start buying seasons/stories I missed playing while current lol.
I think a lot of people that are new just lack knowledge, and that’s fine. it doesn’t actually take a long time to gear at all if you’re doing it at your own pace, and running your own key to learn the dungeons in +2s and gear up. You’ll progress slowly with your key, your key goes up your gear increases. you’re more comfortable in dungeons. just takes time.