Originally Posted by
madmonarch
For me personally the hurry is in the achievement. Our guild is by no means the hardcore, we killed Xavius in mythic 3000th+, and sadly we have only couple of weekly resets, because of holidays, to get the achv for other guys in our roster before it will be removed. So it's not solely players-made competition here too.
You had dailies and challenges during wod, the same activities as wq and m+ in Legion. Suddenly from "meh" they became "yay". Oh, the rewards have changed, i see.
During wod you had dailies, challenges, pet battling, mount hunting, pvp, treasure finding, fishing, farming transmog, collecting achievements, leveling alts, insane in the membrane, old reputations, etc, etc. You had hundreds of things to do, but they didn't give you numbers to outgear current content, so you just omit them saying you had nothing to do.
Moreover, all that things were optional content, so you could (and can) do it at your own pace. Only required activities for competitive play were farming the basic gear (and that was capped as you know) and bis crafted gear and then just properly doing the raids or pvp. I don't know about vanilla and bc but since wotlk there was no so time-consuming initial grind as in Legion. MoP dailies were close but lasted significantly less, and once you've done the reps, you've done and move to fun part.
I've always enjoyed having spare time here and there to see the World beyond actual content. The possibility to progress every minute is forcing the min-maxing players to do this progress, the possibility to collect something is not forcing anyone to anything.