If only Devs dedicated sometime on holiday events every other year, there’s a lot in this game besides the core component of each expansion.
Its not always about the gear, friend.
The braindead number grinds affect OTHER aspects of progression…anima grinds for covenant mogs, for instance.
Im not running alts paying that kind of anima cost PER piece for Ions amusement.
I stand by the belief customization is the best way to add longevity to a game. They’re usually mostly art assets, and WoW’s artists are usually stellar. If an encounter has to be designed like the Mage Tower or even the green fire for Warlocks, that’s something to do/work on. Or more secrets that have people collectively working together to try and solve it like the Lucid Nightmare or Waist of Time is also just content that can be fun to do.
Customization is just a great way to give people things to do, just don’t lock it behind ridiculous, time consuming grinds.
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some people like to grind
people play the game in many different ways.
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Blizzard has molded the community this way. They’re too afraid of change because terrible grinds are all they know now.
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Not all grinds are created equal.
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Oh 100% agree and it doesn’t stop with just gear. 
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Well, OP. If you enjoy boring grinds, that’s a you thing.
And I doubt player preferences had anything to do with it. After losing lots of employees in the purge following the legal issues, covid, and good people who leave because they got fed up with inaction on needed management restructuring, I don’t think they still had the creative personnel they would have needed to put together the dozens of endless grinds you see as the heart and soul of the game.
It’s template-driven game design. I don’t think current employees understand how to do it differently.
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I don’t mind some grind so long as there something worth it,but not too much i can’t play my alters.
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Since I am not a new player and don’t have to be forced into BfA for starting experience and SL is being put into Chromie Time to be forgotten I have created my own head canon.
Minus my Vulperas , Kul Tiran and race change to Mag’har in my mind I was badly injured during the fight with Argus and spent years in a coma.
I did not recover until just before the events of DF so in my world Battle for Systemlands never happened and in my world N’zoth was never defeated and is being saved for a proper Void expansion.
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Some classes ran complete different conduits for certain fights/mplus
Yeah agreed it was awful. Swap conduits to raid on Tuesday, can’t do any mplus till after raid on Thursday.
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I think the best solution to that was kinda what they did with renown. Once you get it you can easily unlock it on all your alts super quick.
Yeah, that’s fair! Honestly it seemed to be 0% or 100%. It was either non impactful and didn’t matter to people, or it was the worst thing in the world that actively prevented gameplay. And it didn’t help anyone. 
Well if it means anything, I’m as casual as they come and wasn’t enamored with Shadowlands’ various grind-systems.
I don’t mind something like Artifact Power when there’s very few grindy bits to the expansion, like back in Legion when AP was basically the only grind and practically everything you did contributed to that one grind, because that lends to a sense of constant, smooth progress as long as you log in even just 1-2 times per week. I don’t like when there’s multiple grinds with only some things rewarding progress to each, because that grows my list of mandatory chores.
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youre probably gonna LOVE DF dragon mounts. Tons of visual mods to farm.
some player has been riding around for a couple days now with his pimped out dragon mount on Beta.
THIS is the kind of stuff id love to see more of. More RPG themed content.
MODERATE grinds are ok with me…these grotesque monstrosities they come up with trying to force me to do content I dont like arent.
The anima costs for all those SLs covenant mogs. lmao. AINT gonna do it. Not for those crap looking things especially.
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I see the alt thing brought up a lot but I don’t think it’s a good example because of what you said right there. Just like gear catch up mechanics, they have catch up mechanics for those things too. Like someone mentioned earlier, you can start new and be renown 80 in basically a day.
Nothing is preventing you from playing alts unless you want them equal to your main, then it requires a little more time but that will be the case with or without anything extra.
And lets say you got your stable of alts all geared and caught up to your main cause there is nothing to gate you anymore other than the gear itself. Ok, now what? Wait until next patch for the ilvl to go up then do it all over again?
That would be good if they did,I just want to try out which one is more fun to play every once in awhile.
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Call it stockholm.
But I miss AP
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if they do add a grind it should be more cosmetics. the artifact weapon was cool as hell. but farming anima power to get more friendship with your covenant guys was awful
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Artifact weapons IMO are the only “system” implemented in recent expansions that felt like it worked even remotely well and had potential to become permanent. After the first few patches got the kinks smoothed out they weren’t bad at all.
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