Uh…no they didn’t.
They said pvp gear will be the gear everyone wants to pvp, raid gear will be what you want if you raid, and dungeon gear will be what you want if you mythic+.
Dom sockets are nerfed to uselessness in pvp (50% effectiveness against players) and while they can help for dungeons, it’s like a 2% increase due to no set bonus, which makes raid gear a dps loss since you probably got a higher item level piece much easier from M+.
I am the citation. I’ve played since Vanilla. Casuals may be numerous but they also disappear when things go south.
Raiding is one of the few things left to do in WOW that is unique. Having 10 or more players working together is something few other online games can match so it’s always going to be important to the devs.
Where do you think WoW would be if there was nothing but core raiding? Do you think that WoW would be around at this level still if people had to pay every month to not ever get to have anything “nice” or even see any kind of endgame or plot progression? If the other 90% of players weren’t subsidizing the development of your content with their monthly fees, you’d be hitting a gray box with a gray stick in a gray void, if the other couple million players decided to take their money to a game that respects their time and financial support and rewards them with things to do and an alternate path to feeling like they’ve progressed.
Your $14.99 a month doesn’t buy you more access to the game than anyone else’s just because what you choose to do with your time is raiding, and it certainly doesn’t make you better or more deserving of rewards just because that’s what you choose to do.
You must be new to the forums, because it’s been near 24-7 whining for the past…I don’t know, seven years or so, if not more? About “participation trophies” (see above) or “Remove LFR” or “remove Titanforging” or “remove catch-up gearing” or “the game just rains down gear on you and I don’t like it (for other people only for me)”.
You think that just because you, personally have played since Vanilla, that…that somehow makes raiders the “real” player base of the game?
That doesn’t even make sense.
What exactly about having 5494 posts on this character alone makes you think I’m new to these forums? lmfao
Go easy on me guys I’m new here.
The part where you’re pretending that you never saw raiders complaining about non-raiders having opportunities to get decent-ish gear.
Loot+ got removed on behalf of raiders and everything since then - corruption, 9.0 pitiful itemization, and shards of domination, are all a result of Blizzard desperately trying to adjust after they ripped out a jenga block the game design had rested upon.
Granted, I personally think they needed to do it at some point, but Blizzard has really got to stop half- 
ing these changes and making huge shifts mid-expansions without actually laying the groundwork for the consequences.
Yep! Your whole op! yup - I wish people could see it.
Like i said earlier, you can count the amount of people that raid at a even a sliver of competitive level on one hand here and I can assure you the ones that do post don’t care what you’ve got on.
Heres what raiders didn’t like:
Take your pick, at no point in there does anyone care about what casuals do with their welfare normal gear.
Worst take of the decade if any.
why actually am i bothering responding to another echo chamber of non raiders blaming raiders for the downfall of this game again.
what a waste of energy
Lololol good one
Don’t even try to tell me that you were okay with items titanforging up to a Mythic ilvl.
Those are the things that you don’t like. You don’t speak for all raiders, especially not the ones that whinge nonstop all over the forums about things that affect them exactly zero percent.
Just because you don’t care - great! You shouldn’t! - doesn’t mean that there’s not a ton of people who have based their entire forum posting schtick around beating the drum of “sky cake doesn’t taste good unless other people don’t get sky cake” 24/7, and the tragic thing is that the whining of that cohort was an integral part of changes that they made to the game in Shadowlands.
I wonder if these people will understand that if a game mode is released that has 90%+ participation, it sucks. And it sucks by design, because if it wasn’t mind numbingly easy it wouldn’t have 90%+ participation
Participation is never an indication of quality, the ones that “90% of the players” do are only done that much because you can do them while AFK,
BUT YEAH DOWN WITH THE 10% FOR DOING ONE OF THE ONLY GAME MODES WORTH DOING IN WOW
It is entirely possible to dislike a system like that for yourself without thinking “WAHH I DON’T WANT SENTENENZAH TO GET THIS ITEM!!!”
I disliked Titanforging because it made my character progression entirely sporadic and not linear. I didn’t like feeling like I wasn’t working towards anything important, because my biggest upgrade could come from turning over a rock
People like you continuously spun that into meaning everyone was trying to take loot away from casuals.
You’re unable to even provide a single thread of a legitimate raider who raids at a relevant level complaining about what gear non raiders get yet you (at the same time) are waving me off saying I don’t speak for all raiders.
So the 1/10 heroic person complaining about gear you get from dailies somehow is able to speak for all raiders?
You guys are kinda desperate huh?
Only 25% of the characters in the game have AOTC: Sire Denathrius. You need to bring that number down by a lot because many of those could be alts that never did the content, and further still because there’s no way to tell how many of those were gold-purchased carries. But, sure. Generously, maybe the number is 75% of the players in the game are non-raiders as opposed to 90%.
Do you have any idea how mind numbingly easy and shallow a game mode would have to be to achieve 75 to 90% + completion?
Raiding doesn’t have to have massive completion rates to be a worthwhile investment. The replayability of it is by far the highest in the game. Mythic especially commands 20 people to raid for hours and hours each week. That’s huge.
Compare that to something that may have 15 to 20% higher “completion rates,” but far less replability.
The other part about the raid being designed is that it eventually becomes legacy content. People create the attachment to the raid now and want to re-clear it later and farm it for things they didn’t get when they were current.
Y’all act like once the new raid comes out, the old raid gets deleted. Legacy farming doesn’t exist without raiding.