Casual just means you donât engage with challenging current content (at least at anything approaching a respectable pace).
You donât get cutting edge achievements (unless you pay for them). You donât do guild mythic progression or any mythic progression or heroic progression. Thereâs a good chance the only exposure to current expac raids you get is via LFR. You donât push +15 keys like crazy if you do so at all so youâre not the type of person to worry about a given weekâs affix because if you donât like it youâll just do the really easy one slated for 2-3 weeks from then. You donât do rated BGs at anything resembling a competitive level, neither do you do arenas at anywhere near a challenging level (say >1800 for argumentâs sake).
Being a casual is NOT reading quest text. It is not defined as mount farming or any of the other things you mentioned. Itâs more defined as not being the type of person the devs love and cater to as opposed to any specific playstyle or set of enjoyments. You can be a casual and not read a bit of quest text and rely on the map arrows.
Casual is kind of originally a derogatory term used by raiders who are pushing progression towards people who donât play the game at their level. Who arenât completing these âhardcoreâ PvE challenges and pushing themselves, their mastery of their character, etc to a certain level.
What you listed are some things that casuals might do. As a casual I have often enjoyed spending my time doing old content like raids and dungeons for transmogs, chances at mounts (no illusions there about drop rates in most places), collecting pets, etc. I also reside on an RP server because I enjoy RP and yes it has in the past helped with the monotony of otherwise relatively dull expansions and time periods for me.
When I was in a top 200 guild uh we dedicated about 20 hours a week to raiding. Plus additional time for some discussion, strategy, guild events and farming, etc. That wasnât casual. That also didnât include time and effort spent on theorycrafting and refinement of rotations, optimization, etc which was more work.
A casual player like me now doesnât bother min-maxing because it doesnât matter. We donât sim, we donât care about spending tens of thousands of gold on things. We donât buy pots or flasks because LFR doesnât need those. We may not bother to gem our gear with the best gems or pay for the top tier enchants right away. We donât scrutinize logs and parses to find weak points or things to improve on because it isnât needed at the level weâre playing at. Weâre just playing for fun.
Anyways back to the present. I am a casual but I donât push myself too far into any one of those things. I have periods where I go off a bit with all-the-things on a collecting binge and I have periods where I donât. But generally I balance stuff, I do a little bit, a few old pieces of content a week, some RP, etc. I spend probably an hour or two a week doing garrison stuff on my all my alts to get some gold but thatâs something I used to do within an app before Blizzard removed my ability and thatâs hardly hardcore either.
1 Like
No just have strong opinions, then OP asked for definitions of casual, so i gave mine.
âWhat do Casualâs do?â
They have an absolute blast in FF.
5 Likes
Casual is a state of mind.
1 Like
Love your name 
Casual isnt what you do in game its the pace and attitude towards it that makes someone casual. Should be pretty easy to understand
Lol this is great wow players have lost it. also to much salt ruins 
1 Like
I do 2 of those things and i have always considered myself a casual wow player. well, at least i did consider myself a casual player until i stopped playing. now im just a casual tbc player.
1 Like
Isnât casual meant to be less invested players who play less? When did the definition of casual mean players without brains?
1 Like
Wow, you really hate casual players. You literally spent a whole paragraph insulting casual players and saying that you have to be dumb to be casual
1 Like
Identifying as a âcasualâ is highly subjective. It includes people who play lots of hours but have no interest in hard content, to raid loggers who barely play outside their raid, to mythic raiders who consider themselves âcasualâ because theyâre not going for world first.
I get that, but the point of casual and hardcore at least for devs is invested vs less invested. If were going with the social definition people tend to use it to demean other players.
There are those who identify as casuals, and those who use the word as a slur. Iâve seen plenty of elitists saying that only very good players are âcasualsâ, and the overwhelming majority are actually âbaddiesâ. I donât think at this point the devs have any interest in creating content for casual players.
Youâre telling me a casual can get mythic sylvanas
As a casual player the big issue I face is engaging with content that I am clearly undergeared for⊠the game lacks genuine skill-check game play (outside of mythic raids).
I would like to see more content that was normalized and offered rewards or that was exploration/narrative driven more quest design/experience that wasnt weekly gated but was just a big bunch of âmicro storyâ⊠like yeah the overall narrative is shadowlands⊠but I would love to go check in with the frost wolves and find out whats goin on over there.
Or head back to Mankrik in the barrens and figure out what became of him, family? or still endlessly hunting quilboar⊠they could start planting seeds for future content this way and let us interact with the world in meaningful ways.
No if you kill Sylvanas on mythic you are not a casual, but you are an elite.
Post like this just shows the imbalance of an MMO.
Itâs one of the hardest things to balance. The moment they killed professions and farming the whole of wow lost a pillar.
They also killed character development too.
But casual⊠Everyone is casually playing unless your in an eSports team or working on hardcore 4+ hours a night progressions.
2 Likes
Being a potion master was something I really worked hard towards in cataclysm!
1 Like
I used to read the quest text, but it became lazier and lazier . They donât put any effort into it
2 Likes