Long time player, played since day 1 of Vanilla. Just came back from about a year break. I have found the current state of the game to just be completely overwhelming. Got to GS 205 and completed all the LFR available(casual family man) and took a step back to see what I needed to do for character progression besides the obvious improved gear drops. What was required was IMO, ridiculous. There are like 5 different mechanics, all of which is a grind. You need a damn flow chart just to keep up with them. I brought this up in my guild chat and found most other players with the same opinion. Everyone agreed that having a alt was near impossible due to the monster grind required to be competitive with one character. To be fair, I still love the game, quests are fun, raids are excellently designed, dungeons are fun. However, the time requirement to make one character “casually competitive” has went way overboard. Probably close to another break, just not in love with having so much of my time being “required” to have a casually powered, functional character. I really hope the next expansion is approached with a different mindset, otherwise I will be forced to permanently divorce the first love of my life.
That’s why I quit retail.
The Blizzard fanboiz will say, “you don’t NEED to do it. . .” Which you don’t unless you want to get into a decent raiding guild, PVP group or Mythic+ group.
The grinds aren’t too much different than rep grinds used to be, but rep grinds are much more accessible to the casual or average player. Grind x rep, get y rewards. All the current systems make you learn a bunch of new stuff to cover up what it really is–a grind.
Would be better if Blizz just brought back rep grinds, valor/justice tokens, and made professions relevant.
Things you have to grind to be competitive:
Renown - except it’s not a grind, because you get it from literally everything, so you’ll be caught up within a week or two even if you’re not specifically chasing it.
Legendary - except they’re incredibly frontloaded, so you can just knock out your 210 or 225 or whatever in a week and call it good and be at like 90% efficiency.
And that’s it. Why bother making up this insane grind that doesn’t exist?
You forgot gear. The gear grind in SL is very frustrating.
Also, I’d argue that the gear grind is pretty similar to normal. People just got spoiled rotten by BfA M+ and it was incredibly unhealthy for the game. SL was bad at launch, but hotfixes have basically reverted it to normal. I don’t like the Vault and how it affects gearing, especially on the M+ row, but that’s a topic for another day.
Reading is hard okay
Vanilla was substantially more grindy.
If you’d actually been playing since Vanilla you would be giggling at this sentiment.
^ This.
Shadowlands is the least grindy expansion since Warlords of Draenor.
This isn’t 100% true. You still need to grind conduits, legendary powers if you don’t have them (which is lame because nobody does CN anymore), the covenant campaign to unlock the soulbinds which is a slog, do torghast to get soul ash, then farm gold or mats to buy the base legendary piece.
If you are starting from scratch on an alt or just playing SL for the first time it’s a horrible slog to get caught up for 9.1 endgame activities.
The covenant campaign is content. It’s a story.
People say they want “more content” but then when it’s provided, they call it a “grind” or “slog”.
Problem I’m having isn’t the grind. I’m used to it over the many years. I’m finding it comes down to not feeling fun or being as rewarding.
The first time it’s ok. The 2nd or 3rd time through the same covenant storyline is zzzzzzz. Not to mention it doesn’t even matter what covenant you are in 9.1, it’s all the same campaign.
And the OP is doing it his first time since he claims he just came back after a year away.
This is just part of gearing like anything else. It’s not really a big separate thing. You target that trinket, you target that conduit, whatever.
Given it’s basically guaranteed in M+ and 100% from raid bosses… not really a grind. I guess you could call it that if you’re spamming normal/heroic dungeons, but even then, the chance isn’t that low and there’s no lockout so it gets knocked out pretty quick if you’re specifically spamming for it.
Agreed on this part. Old Content legendaries should be moved to a vendor or something if the game isn’t going to funnel people into that content via some other means to keep participation up.
Well you forgot rep 1, and rep 2, and Soulbinds and conduit upgrades, and that means doing a daily grind over and over and over and over and over and ove… But eventually that will be done… and you’ll keep doing it for gem slots because endless grinds are blizzards idea of content.
OH! and then farming your domination sharts, and then the domination shart upgrade farming, which means doing the same content over and over and over and over…
Maybe it’s just me, but sitting in Korthia with my map open waiting for Kroke to spawn so I can check him off my list for the day doesn’t feel like peak performance gaming.
A 20 minute snippet of terrible story, of such low quality it’s a meme, handed out peacemeal once per week barely counts as content, and even that will be over in a couple weeks… THEN we start the wait for content blizzard devs themselves say nobody is working on, which will come out some time in 2022. I guess you can grind out the same dungeons you did for the last 9 months for another year… This is clearly WoD 2.0 in every way possible at the moment with the exception that Tanaan Jungle had more to do than Korthia.
Then please go away, since you’re obviously never going to be satisfied with anything Blizzard will ever do, and you’re just here to play World of Complaincraft.
Renown - If it takes you 1-2 weeks to “get caught up,” it’s a grind. You have to repeated dailies and content until you get it up there. I don’t see how you can say it isn’t a grind.
Legendary - Need to grind gold or buy it to upgrade, plus invest time for ash to upgrade it. This on top of doing other things to boost Renown.
You also forgot:
Conduits - Basically FIVE new item slots to fill. That’s a 33% increase on the number of items slots. In addition, you need to upgrade them.
Shards of Domination - Basically more item slots.
The game has become a joke, World of SystemCraft.
So in an ideal world, how long would you like the OP to take before he’s “done” and can quit again? A day? An hour?
How little content do you want the game to have, since that seems to be the goal, here?
I’d love more CONTENT. I’d love more dungeons (I’d even take Mythic+ old dungeons at this point). A new BG. A new raid or world boss. 5v5 Arenas. 6-man rated BGs (I’d even take solo queue at this point). Professions that are fun and matter would be awesome. Crafting useful armor or weapons using hard to find BoP materials would be amazing.
What I don’t want are systems that prioritize doing dailies and the same content over and over and over and over. . .
Doing the same things over and over multiple times per day, every day is not content. It’s called a treadmill to make players think they are accomplishing something.
No, you go away. YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM!
If people would stop fighting for status quo, mediocrity, and terrible content the game would have been improved by now. Instead we have a minority of superfans rabidly salivating at any extra broken system your masters throw you, even now while it all burns around you. This is way beyond Copium at this point.
Pay to win? No problem, what a great game!
Endless Grind? That’s great! I love afk waiting for a “rare” spawn that’s up every 15 minutes!
Mobile Game Design? FOMO is the greatest thing ever!
When I think about what WoW was and the sycophants that led it to be what it is now, it’s actually disgusting.
But don’t mind me, I’m just watching it all burn down around you while the white knights pretend Actiblizz didn’t just lose 9 Billion Dollars and continues to fail it’s community in every respect. Their even still lying about the sexual harassment lawsuit.
THEY LIED TO YOU. and you shouldn’t be ok with that.
Yes actually.
Squeaky wheels get the grease.
Despite what you might think about people complaining about the games many failings, were only complaining because we want the game to become great, like it once was. It’s the easiest thing in the world to just quit, but some of us aren’t ready to give up on Systemlands yet because we know they can fix their piece of Shirt game, and will finally have to given how their losing public opinion to FF.
While I’m not saying “WoW iS dEaD” I will say WoW has cancer, and frankly pretending it doesn’t is not helping.