Convince me to return to Azeroth

[idunnowatdo]

If you dont have any kind of time to invest in the game because it has gotten grindy like vanilla bc times then dont come back.

[Marrilaife]

You quit because you were overwhelmed? Well if you come back, and mythic is your goal (not just casual fun), it's gonna be worse, you have to do chores all the time and go uphill in comparison to a player who never quit.

You'll be behind on:
- artifact power
- artifact knowledge
- order resources
- order hall research tree
- legendaries
- gear, while it's easy to get gear if you have friends / guild that will run you around, if you have no one, it's a tough uphill slog, the pugging community is elitist, if you don't have 900 ilvl and achievements for every possible small shit you'll have to waste hours trying to get into groups for anything that isn't trivial content rewarding pathetic gear (you can run that and pray for titanforging lololol)

Worst part of all of the above is the horrendous "catch up" idea for artifact knowledge for non-alts but returning players. If you quit 2 weeks into legion, prepare to farm order resources day and night, you can buy rank 15 then (will full OR costs) and then you can sit for a month idle until you research the other 10 ranks, without those AP grind is atrociously inefficient and your character is useless (even HC NH guilds are looking for people with artifacts 35-40+ rank, and mythic guilds want people with 50+ ranks). You can get to about 25 ranks then the curve goes up sharply and you can't just get there without max AK.

Legion is fun for casual player who wants to run around, explore, do WQ, run LFR and do some HC / Mythic (non +) dungeons, fill some AP bars, get some random legendaries, sell gathered stuff for nice amount of gold etc. For a hardcore player who wants to min max and be the best you can be, it's a nightmare. For people who quit I think it reaches the TBC levels of "being behind".

7.2 will be an improvement but also people who are ahead will jump more ahead, the gap won't get smaller, just the people who got gated earlier will be able to step a bit further, get a bit higher casual gear (20-30 ilvls more than they have, still won't be enough for anything as groups will probably start asking 920+ at that stage, or more, long standing players will have artificially inflated ilvls with 6 legendaries sitting in their bags that returning player can't dream of having), AK will go higher so you can chop those catch up points faster but that's only assuming you maxed old AK ranks.

There will be higher rank BOA tomes but those are only for alts, if you don't have a single main with high AK we don't know how it will be solved, maybe instead of 15 you'll be able to insta buy more, but it's gated behind OR costs which you can't easily get as a returning player neither has a stockpile of bloods nor can infinitely farm OR since WQ that award them are limited and you won't have Order Hall upgrades or properly equipped (or even levelled) followers to maximize your OR gains.

Legion is a good expansion for:
- casuals who don't care about min-maxing they just want to "have stuff to do" and get random rewards
- hardcore grinders
- people who want dungeons to be their end game

Legion is a bad expansion for:
- returning players
- raid loggers
- pvpers who don't like grinding their artifact, but liked to buy conquest gear and be on equal footing with opponents

[Evangeliste]

WoD had a major drop and I cannot blame people. Lore was trash, Raiding was meh apart from BRF, Ashran was terrible and all in all WoD was a mess. Leveling experience and some of the music was pretty good though. I loved Spires, Nagrand and Frostfire.

I have to say from levelling point after the expansion came and went it was nice in places like Nagrand. I haven't done Frostfire but can say it looks nice to get back to the roots of things like the orcs.
As for the raids whether I solo it, ok it's very poorly represented in the later ones since I did Highmaul but I wasn't that thrilled by Highmaul and I do get the same tedious feeling of running and stuff in later raids. An atmosphere seems to be lacking but my opinion is very, very warped on that being as seen it after.

[ceall]

If you want to get back to raiding, then go for it!
It will definitely take some time to catch up gear wise (about 3-4 weeks to reach 880+ ilvl) and even more to get your artifact maxed out. This means you will have to start at the lower end of the raiding scene, where people do not care much for artifact progression or high ilvls.

My estimation is, that you'll be ready for mythic raiding in 3 months, which is around the half of this contents lifespan.

Quick tips for getting ready fast:
0. Get into any active guild, get to know people and do stuff with them (like everything mentioned below). Generally, be social.
1. You can buy instant artifact knowledge to lvl 15, at least, you skip half the wait.
2. The auction house is your friend for high ilvl BoE gear (mostly cloaks and belts)
3. Get yourself boosted through high level mythic+ dungeons for high ilvl gear (at least buy the Keystone master achievement, which needs you to do a m+15 in time, which will give you an easy time getting into these groups)
4. Do worldbosses every week
5. World quests are just 4 mandatory per day, which is bearable
6. Your first and second legendaries come the fastest, know what spec you want play.
7. At ilvl ~870, you should start farming m+ Maw of souls, it's the most efficient way to get artifact power (at artifact knowledge 25, you can farm more than 1 million artifact power per hour)
8. Do the Nighthold lfr for the set bonus ASAP, it can increase your DPS by up to 15% depending on class/spec
9. When doing Mythic+, try to go with as many guys of your armor type for increased chances of getting gear, others don't need
10. When doing pug content, make your own groups! There's so many whiners about not getting invited into various kinds of content because they don't want to put in the effort of forming a group themselves. Don't be one of those.
11. Start at the lower end of the raiding scene, and work yourself up whenever you outperform your guild mates.

[Re1ax]

Well, you could try to be an adult, set achievable goals for yourself and reach them in a desired pace. It's not "horrendous" even for raiders since you don't have to achieve everything there is to achieve in order to be competitive even in the mythic raid environment.

thx for the advice on self control, I unsubbed 3 months ago. To your point, what exactly are the goals? If you think that for a mythic raid environment you can just do some grinding here and there and stay competitive then I'm not sure what to tell ya.

[angrys13]

No. /10char

^

I was going to say: convince yourself. You shouldn't rely on other people's opinions to make you want to play something you're interested in.

Obviously the interest is there, since you're seeking the attention from others to pursue it.

[Chloral]

If you hate the game and will most likely flood forums with your hate for how the game is not vanilla anymore, don't.

[Marrilaife]

Well, you could try to be an adult, set achievable goals for yourself and reach them in a desired pace.

There are no achievable goals in this expansion, everything is either random, or endless, or both.

Gotta love how my alt gets rank 3 starlight rose 2 days after dinging while a character I play for months can't even get rank 2 on dreamleaf. The notion of "working towards a goal" is absolutely lost in this expansion. Also gotta love when my alt gets 2 legendaries both BIS while my main can never get the one I really wish for.

Putting effort and not getting your stuff sucks.
Putting no effort and getting disproportionally rewarded sucks as well, there is no sense of achievement or accomplishment at all. It feels hollow.

There is nearly nothing that scales with effort in this expansion. Maybe Artifact levels are, but before you max your AK it mostly scales with sitting on your ass waiting for max AK rank (that OP will have to go through).

[HumbleDuck]

Why people think legion is more grindy than vanilla and TBC is beyond me.

It's a solid game, worth testing it out if you like MMOs.

[Evangeliste]

Warcraft Census. Player activity levels are already at end of WOD levels. There are people who have looked at armory information and compared wowprogress data that have come to similar conclusions.

Now, there are people who will say that data is BS, but have NOTHING to counter it with. Obviously the data isn't perfect, but it does provide a reliable snapshot over time, in my opinion. The only possible counter is the two very brief lines from the quarterly earnings report, which I find incredibly unconvincing and also revealing. I believe the first is that play was barely up (10% I believe) from a year ago. That I see as bad, not good, considering this is a brand new xpac we're talking about. The second was that NON LAUNCH QUARTER total played hours was the highest it's been in years. This isn't surprising at all and to me shows the biggest complaint about the xpac... it's INCREDIBLY grindy. So, non launch quarter total played hours are up because 1/3 of the people are playing 3X as much. That, in my opinion, does not make for a healthy game or game community.

Ok I see where you're going. The only problem I find with these kind of things is like, the release of things are not consistent so everything can go tits up because the economy around them which can change anything. Still I don't know what fixation people do have that an expansion is not as good as it was. Even with 5 million subs rolling per month... I'm British so say it's £9.99 - so that multiplied by 5 million subs per month is £49,950,000. That's nothing to laugh. In a year that's 599,400,000.
I'd be very happy with nearly £600million in my back pocket even if it fell from at it's peak being like £1.2billion.

I think this just indicates to me not necessarily the end of WoW as we know it but the target audience just isn't as much. I mean I remember recession being about in which was around TBC and WotLK which is a perfect time to lure people into the game, youngsters alienated out of work - let's do something, I know games! I know that is a serious stereotype but it influences things like subs in my opinion.

I don't think "incredibly" grindy for me really says Legion. Suramar is based on the similar principles of Vanilla (note, not exactly here) - the amount of people who hate it makes me laugh because I have friends from Vanilla playing who are like "jesus, why?". But even then, Vanilla was way more intense then Suramar. Legion as a whole isn't that grindy. Believe me I've played mobile apps with more grind than Legion as it stands.
All expansions have had you always grinding levels, grinding gear, grinding dungeons, grinding raids. The problem is potentially having 'too much' meaning without a cap on several areas - artifact, legendaries and more there's no satisfaction of end (including no evident hard cap like the class hall is finished but the reality is it's Blizzard are victims of their own generosity in providing, and wanting to keep things open-ended.

[Deleted]

Theres alot of content which is nice

[Marrilaife]

Not altfriendly???
Grindy expansion??
Stupid devs??
Mythic raiders having to make a tiny commitment?

Welcome to World of Warcraft anno 2004-2017 minus WoD. And WoD is the negative part. No content.

Sorry, but it took me way less effort to make an alt raid-ready in WOTLK or Cata than it takes now. From MOP onwards, alts started to get gated, first we had legendary questlines, now artifacts.

Also WOTLK was fairly pug friendly before ICC and the "gearscore" madness.

[Trollokdamus]

The problem with that philosophy is that, for many of us, things like world quests and grinding artifact power are a prerequisite to doing the thing we like to do. So if you cut back, you find that a higher percentage of your time is spent on the stuff you don't like because you have to get through it to get to the stuff you do. That's bad.

That's a valid concern, and I personally don't see how the situation can be changed without making all the non-raid content pointless, unfortunately.
But in my previous post I was addressing a different issue - the one of self control. It's one thing to do a medium amount of grinding to become competitive in raids, but a different one to burn yourself out by chasing every possible tiniest upgrade.
Some people feel obligated to do literally everything the game has to offer ASAP (if it offers a tiniest upgrade to their performance), which obviously leads to them being overwhelmed, frustrated, and eventually burned out.

thx for the advice on self control, I unsubbed 3 months ago. To your point, what exactly are the goals? If you think that for a mythic raid environment you can just do some grinding here and there and stay competitive then I'm not sure what to tell ya.

The goals vary from person to person really. Based on your playstyle, amount of free time, and how much grinding you can endure. As for mythics, is hardcore grinding really required to start doing them? By all means, it's cool to have maxed out artifact, high end titanforged gear and bis legendaries to top the meters or whatever, but it's not like you need ALL of these to be competitive in most guilds.

[Desparil]

Really good expansion so far and if they release 7.2 in timely manner it will have fastest content updates as far i can remember.

[MelodicAssassin]

...As for mythics, is hardcore grinding really required to start doing them? By all means, it's cool to have maxed out artifact, high end titanforged gear and bis legendaries to top the meters or whatever, but it's not like you need ALL of these to be competitive in most guilds.

Thanks to everyone for their input. On the contrary to some of the negative posts, I'm not whining or complaining about Legion. I was just curious what people thought about someone coming back to the game. Maybe the question I should have asked, which is kinda answered by Trollokdamus, was..

"What would it take a newly dinged 110 to get to mythics, specifically what tasks should be my priority? What kind of uphill battle am I up against?"

[Doffen]

Sorry, but it took me way less effort to make an alt raid-ready in WOTLK or Cata than it takes now. From MOP onwards, alts started to get gated, first we had legendary questlines, now artifacts.

Also WOTLK was fairly pug friendly before ICC and the "gearscore" madness.

Easier to get high ilvl now + 35-traits in wep is done within 3 days /played if casual. Its easier to get into raids now on alts than wotlk I'll tell you. And I pugged alot on my alts back then. Even made pugs back then. In WoD it was the easiest ever. Had 8 lvl 100 then,and I had max 3 before WoD(same as now).

That being said, my hunter main is so fun atm I hardly play my alts, tho DH is very fun so might be more on that one.

Edit: My first post was more pointed towards the freakin whining tho. If people have a hard time alting, thats fine, but dont say its hard, its not. Not pointed at you spesifically

[Addict]

If you need convincing to return, then its better that you dont until you feel like you want to.

[Deleted]

If you need convincing you shouldn't come back. But for your own shake ignore all the salty whiners' comments. They are far from the truth. If you have a guild and/or some friends to play with then the game hasn't changed at all. I am also playing since vanilla on and off.

[hulkgor]

I quit in early october when I had 2 months of game time left. The exodus of players has been MASSIVE since launch. Good try though.

There will ALWAYS be exodus on stagnant\stale periods, go figure?

See you at next expansion launch? Maybe on 7.3 for Argus?

[IceMan1763]

There will ALWAYS be exodus on stagnant\stale periods, go figure?

See you at next expansion launch? Maybe on 7.3 for Argus?

Try never. Not with the current dev team.

If they clean house and drastically change some philosophies I might consider it if/when next xpac comes out.