The level squish was aimed towards new players, while pathfinder is aimed towards masochists.
Really? I took a decently long break this year from WoW, came back recently and had flying within a couple days. I’m serious, a couple days… I think I was R35-40 or somewhere around there, so it wasn’t a climb from R1, but even if it had been, two weeks tops with the catchup.
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Well, for starters. Let’s add gear rewards from Choreghast.
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We went from “Raid or Die” in TBC to “Casuals welcome, too!” in Wrath, and then in Cata it was “Casuals welcome, but stay out of our Heroics, scrubs!” to “OMG I’m sorry, so so sorry, please come back? We’ll let you into Heroics again!” and then MoP was all “Casuals are awesome! We love you guys!” and then WoD was like “Meh, so many Casuals aren’t that awesome, who needs Casual content, anyhow?” and then Legion was like “Eh, so maybe we should throw them a few scraps…” which continued into BfA and then Shadowlands 9.0 was like “Meh, casuals can just go LFG Mythics like everybody else.” and then 9.1 was all “OK OK fine we’ll do more open world content… but we’re going to stuff it full of overtuned mobs.”
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Uh, doing Pathfinder in obsolete expansions is nothing like doing it while it was current content.
You kill junk way faster, and they implemented several things that make it much faster and easier, and also the new scaling means it’s easier to kill the junk. Also, in BfA, your HoA gains the first 30+ levels in like an hour.
I can tell you that you didn’t gain 30 HoA levels in the first few days of play during 8.0.
EDIT: Oh, and there’s no more 8-9 IRL month time-gate, either, you can go from just starting to pathfinder in a few weeks. Those of us who played during the relevant expansions had to wait months and months with no ability to progress. We had to wait for Blizz to actually implement the ability to unlock flying.
EDIT2: And nowadays, you can get a friend who already has Pathfinder to fly you around on a 2-seater. Here’s a hint: We didn’t have that luxury while it was current content.
EDIT3: Upon reading your post again, if you’re talking about Shadowlands flying (which is not called Pathfinder, mind you), yeah, they made Renown ~30 way easier to get, and then 30-40 isn’t that hard, and 44 is a stone’s throw away. But, you weren’t there during 9.0 where you were stuck on the ground for 8 months. See above about the Time-Gate.
You get Renown 4 just by doing your first Threads of Fate zone. IIRC, Renown was capped at 3 per week, which means the first week of 9.0, your maximum Renown was 3 and then the next week it was 6, etc etc etc.
All of this, while being confined to the ground. It was aimed at masochists, at least until 9.1.
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I personally hate timed content with the fury of a thousand suns, which isn’t the only reason I hate Mythics, (toxicity and the same people who whine about the lack of community are the same refusing to help newbies then purposefully driving them from the game is another.)
Shame you missed Legion when it was current. It’s my favorite expansion to date, I love it more than even Wrath & BC.
I hate the Maw and refuse to drag another alt into SL until there’s a Maw Intro skip, for the same reason. Blizzard doesn’t want me to get comfortable playing there so they slap a timer on it to drive me away. Ok. Guess I’ll log off. How many players took that time to find a more welcoming game?
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I’d take a skip to floor 5.
Do you not care about the tree? Jsut getting that ash ffor the lego only doing 2 layer 4 or 5’s a week? Have a class that can dps check the boss no issues?
Well then take this door and go layer 3 floor 5. We will tank your score ofc…
Tank my score and let me skip? Yes please. give me 0 points every run.
Druid needs ash. I got me a dreaded and painful hour or 2 here tonight. the memory changes to good too skip out on. I love feral, but it needs work to work well.
I suppose the idea was for it to be similar to an island expedition, but at least I could get azerite as reward if I somehow managed not to win an IE.
I’d take a TC save spot or a skip too
Don’t care how long a break you took, it took EVERYONE 33 weeks to get flying (unless you didn’t start the expansion on launch day). 8 months is 7 months too long for such a necessary game mechanic. With the ease of renown catchup what SL tauaght me is that there are ABSOLUTELY NO REASONS to buy or start another WoW expac until the flying patch drops which seems like a bad policy. Unless of course Daddy Blizz is OK with huge chunks of the playerbase taking 5-8 month breaks every expansion. And based upon the devs taking every opportunity to curtail our efficiency in any progression they aren’t. Hopefully enough people stopped paying during the spitegate and next expac it’s chopped entirely. 
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It’s not necessary and it trivializes content faster, which makes people get bored faster, which makes them unsub faster. They could have also just not had any requirements to unlock it, but maybe an hour long quest chain, and they would have still made you wait till this patch to unlock it.
They are… As long as they are meeting their calculated doller per sub per expansion quota, they are fine with people taking breaks and it’s actually healthy to do so. No grown adult should obsessively stim over the same video game for years on end.
LOL that term "rare: has changed to “rarely you won’t get it” everyone gets that rare mount everyone then how is it rare. Its just like Legends, used to be those 2 people on the whole server.
Profession’s died with the wow token and the lack of an economy why bother adding to them just kill them off slowly by making them so irrelevant no one bothers. No one needs to farm or make gold… The only profession the help was the boosters. AH sitting is done by the farmers and we are stuck buying tokens WTH.
The RPG in wow is dying a slow death… Seasons for mythics… really kills the narrative its an RPG… thats feels more like an esports event in an action game… uggghhh
sorry to each their own I am done till the fantasy and the RPG comes back into the game…
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The old mechanic was rep… you had to build trust with fractions… now we grind out mindless and countless currencies for the giggles of it… the story is broken over all the RPG fantasy and the story are just gone…
Its like fortnite with the seasons at this point.
Renown is just another way of saying Reputation.
Building Renown is your character building up fame, only it’s represented by a single number (because it’s how famous you are to all of the covenants and NPCs combined), while reputation is how much a particular faction likes you.
Becoming famous enough that NPCs trust you with sensitive and/or difficult missions makes sense.
What does NOT make sense, is the stupid time-gate. Especially not when the actual flying unlock is only 2 weeks into 9.1. They could have given that to us at Renown 40 back during 9.0.
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It’s the opposite. Flying lets you skip the trivial content faster, so you don’t get bored as fast. Are you really that excited by getting stunned off your mount by the same pack of trash mobs that you then have to waste your time mowing down? That’s not a challenge. It’s just effing tedious. The lack of flying is a huge factor in my decision to unsub permanently.
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Which is why it’s so weird to max my reputation with Ardenweald only to have to build renown with the Ardenweald faction. I’m exalted by reputation, but I have no renown? It makes no sense.
I was just in Revendreth today on my new-to-Shadowlands DH.
I quested for about 30 minutes, and had to quit because of IRL.
I had done many alts in Revendreth, probably 5-6+, and I always hated that zone, because of its terrain.
But, this time WITH flying, I chased a few ore nodes, and went back up and did quest objectives, saw another ore node, flew down to it, and back up to the quest NPC, and meanwhile I was looking off in the distance going
“WOW THIS ZONE IS ACTUALLY AMAZING NOW!”
And I even flew over to the Inn on the hill and it didn’t take me 5 minutes to get there, meanwhile I was enjoying the awesome spectacle beneath me.
When I logged off?
I was all “blaaaah I don’t wanna log off. I wanna do some more!”
I think Reputation is how much of a friend you are to said people, and Renown is how Heroic you are. You can be best friends with the Wild Hunt, but maybe your deeds aren’t the stuff of Heroes quite yet.
Or, maybe you got to Renown 80 and you’re still only Honored with the Wild Hunt because all of your awesome deeds were done elsewhere.
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Maybe so, but that’s inconsistent with how reputation worked in the past. After all, this is the World of Warcraft, so I always thought that reputation was inherently tied to your prowess as a hero. Most rep grinds involve mass murder on behalf of the faction that you’re championing.
Maybe Renown is a sign that they are trying to split the two concepts up?
I mean we saw hints with this back in Pandaria where you became Friends, Buddy, Good Friend, etc with the Farmers in Halfhill. And then they did it again in Legion with the Fisherfriends and we also see this with Ve’nari.
But maybe they are experimenting with a different sort of system to distinguish the two?
Ion has directly said (I believe during BfA) reputation serves a different purpose today than it did in the past.
And honestly, each expansion has been a bit different than the previous one.
Renown arguably is a replacement, since in more recent years it was largely used as a means of timegating progression.
You know…the thing about it is there is a moderate amount of solo content at end game. I like the combat and the fast pace & nuking named or elites in Korthia. Granted, at first I felt a little uncomfortable being in such close proximity to other players (both factions). TBH, I’m very pleasantly surprised at player conduct & coordination. I’m happy with all players in general from what I’ve experienced and yes I have seen a few bad apples though all games have them. I’m veering off subject, but wanted to mention this as it needs to be said.
Apart from Korthia, there is Torghast and yes I do find it fun. It provides a variance in playstyle that changes things up a bit. You still have the maw & the new assault dynamic to keep us casuals engaged. If you haven’t maxed covenant factions doing your callings & weeklies is perfect to max those for more options for mounts & mogs. Solo content could be better, sure. Though the more I play the more I’m starting to look into Mythic & raid content if good conduct persists maybe. We will see…