I know people say WoW is SO casual friendly, but not sure I agree.

[Deleted]

You can get ilevel 870 items from LFR, and 880 from a world boss that requires zero tactics and is just a Zerg fest,it doesn't get much more casual friendly than that.

Don't they actually scale up to 895 with the right amount of luck?

[Deleted]

But more realistically if you want to do what most average players want to do, level up, gear up and do some raids with your friends things get tricky. It can be a vicious cycle. Lots of grindy things to do like world quests for emissary boxes (legendary), every normal mythic every week, mythic + dungeons, heroics for added chance of legendary etc. If you don't do these things you'll end up with 2 disadvantages to people who play more:
1) lower ilvl
2) no legendary

I think you're vastly overselling the capabilities and desires of the "average player".
Average player has probably not hit 110 yet.
They never raid - apart from maybe doing a wing of LFR and neither do they have any ambitions to do so.

Half of my casual guild is still below the minimum required ilvl to queue for HC dungeons. They don't care much - most of them don't even know that the game has legendaries. They enjoy doing maybe two world quests, chatting a bit and then logging for the day.

We who do dungeons, raid (even just Normals) and read and post into forums are magical hardcore players who "know everything about the game". The casual players think we're kinda strange. (I get this often - "how can you know *all* this about the game" - when I say something incredibly obious (to me) on /g)

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Anyway, my main character is 853 right now. My best alt is at 843, which is about the item level of our tank and healer. The other two DPS are further behind. And they usually only have time to do some WQs before they have to log off. This is kinda disheartening.

Why is 853 "disheartening" ilvl? It's pretty good I think. About the same I have and I belonged to a raiding guild that is currently hitting mythics at the start of this expac (until I realized raiding wasn't for me). I'm not sure why you'd aspire to suddenly jump to the mythic ilvls - without actually joining a mythic guild? I'm happy with my 853 at the moment. Still having fun.

I understand if you want to play more than your guildmates - but in that case maybe the guild isn't for you - maybe you have ambitions that your guildies don't share?

Why exactly do we need to grind for the legendary?

[Darsithis]

But more realistically if you want to do what most average players want to do, level up, gear up and do some raids with your friends things get tricky. It can be a vicious cycle. Lots of grindy things to do like world quests for emissary boxes (legendary), every normal mythic every week, mythic + dungeons, heroics for added chance of legendary etc. If you don't do these things you'll end up with 2 disadvantages to people who play more:

You don't have to do those things. I don't. I raid a few times a week with my guild, knock out maybe one or two mythics, and every few days do the world quests if I feel like it.

[Joeydivision82]

You have nailed my problem exactly. Even though I am quite finished with my main (only have 1,2 reputations left to exalted), I still have to do a chunk of world quests (because the emissary cache can drop a legendary and because I need OH resources, crafting mats and AP), and run heroics (also for mats, as I am ench+tailor, for AP and for the 100 runs needed to get a variant of my hidden artifact skin which finally dropped some days ago) and LFR (also AP, chance for upgrades and legendary).

Now, my relevant set of WQ is not necessarily the same as for the other people in my guild. Since we are not always on at the same time, chances are high that some of us are already done and the others are just starting, and are in totally different areas because other priorities. I don't mind to come along and help to kill a group rare, but everything costs so damn much time because I cannot just hop on my flying mount and beeline to my guild mates, but have to take the long scenic flightpath routes. *pukes*

Running dungeons is a common denominator in our guild, we all like running dungeons (usually one or two per gaming session, I seem to be the only one doing more, but only heroics then). But since we almost never can form a full dungeon group (because not always on at the same time), we have to use the automatic matchmaking. And since we don't even have enough people to make a small raid, things get even more complicated.

Anyway, my main character is 853 right now. My best alt is at 843, which is about the item level of our tank and healer. The other two DPS are further behind. And they usually only have time to do some WQs before they have to log off. This is kinda disheartening.

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Just because some people are lucky, not everybody is. You cannot expect everybody to win a lottery. And forcing luck is rather futile.

Any loot drop is essentially just luck, but those higher drops happen far more than you realize.

[Poppincaps]

What you described is basically my exact situation. This semester in college has been especially stressful for me so I haven't had the time to play like I used to. When Legion first launched I tried to do as much as I could, but I still fell behind somewhat. I used to at least log on to do the emissary chests, but now I've missed a few because I didn't feel the motivation to log on.

Blizzard once again is proving that they are a game dev team of extremes. WoD had nothing to do so now they feel like they need to make sure you're never running out of things to do in the game. This might work for hardcore players or people who really love the game and have the time to play, but for more casual players it becomes exhausting quickly.

This might sound crazy, but it's actually okay if you finish raiding for the week and get all the major stuff out of the way and then decide to stop playing until next reset. People have lives and there are other games out there to play. Hell, Blizzard themselves have developed a really core portfolio of games that are all different and can consume large amounts of your time, so it's annoying that they seem hell bent on making you play WoW 24/7.

[Orangetai420]

1)create your own group on group finder
2)choose a dungeon where you can get actual gear updates
3)insert the text: "Relaxed run! No stress! wipes are ok!"
4)select the players you want in your group by class/ilvl/funny names
5)wait on hour for a tank and/or healer to show up
6)??
7)wait for another hour
8)say "screw it" and log off
9)repeat from step 1

Sucks to be DPS, its the price you pay.

[fangless]

My gf, who is not that great at video games at all, is even like 850ilvl or something. Has a legendary that she totally earned (/s), and is doing random mythic dungeons every evening.

Seems pretty casual to me o_O

[aziras]

To toss another one in here.

The thing that is missing for casuals (other than their friends' time) is for Blizzard to put all the casual-friendly pieces they have together. Imagine this:

* Group finder has automatching casual modes: Filtering out all the gear-grinders, let them rot at their screens trolling forums on how pointless this content is.
* Timewalking is available, for all dungeons, all the time (grouped by themes maybe, to not make it a complete lottery where you end up).
* Rewards scale with your iLvl a little more conservatively than WQs, but enough that a drop may be a tiny upgrade.
* Level-scaling applies to all dungeons and PvP gear-normalization is used for PvE gear to make all players equally geared regardless of character level and iLvl.
* Proving grounds as gating to make sure players at the very least understand their class and abilities (if it is accessible from low levels, maybe 40, then this is needed)
* Daily quest to queue for a specific dungeon, with a bonus if you did a specific achievement (explained a bit in the quest information) - think "glory of the hero"-type of extra challenges
* And a controversial one: Temporary faction jumping to play with friends in other factions.

You can then play with friends regardless of progress

The game has so much good content from 12+ years of availability. Yet people are grinding the same 5 zones, same handful of dungeons and one or two raids all the time. If we could play all the content at any given time even casual "loser players" would not feel they got left in the dust. And most of this technical elements are already there, they just need to be combined in a different way.

[Otimus]

WoW is pretty casual friendly as far as MMO's go. At least the ones I knew of in the past. You can pretty much view 99% of the content without a guild and just playing with strangers, and not to the best of your ability. I'd call that casual friendly.

Now, in the grand scheme of the landscape of modern gaming, I wouldn't call it, or any MMO, really, casual friendly (past the fact that MMORPG's inherently have a low skill floor and a low skill ceiling. Almost all of the difficulty is social, group composition, and knowing rotations, rather than pure gameplay prowess like in a traditionally difficult game). That's part of the reason why the genre is dying, sort of. Other genres took what worked with MMORPG's (Grinding, carrot on a stick, leveling, etc) and streamlined it, and cut out the MMORPG baggage in the process and most MMORPG's are either unwilling, or by design incapable of adapting to deal with that.

[anaxie]

I played WoW from TBC launch to 6.1 WoD losing interest rapidly in the months before hand because despite that still Warcraft and its heroes villains and Lorre is my favorite fictional universe the game is such a whisper and far cry from its TBC-Cata days. The word of the day noe is grind, your rewarded by luck and not skill.

Super RNG world bosses, drops, titanforge, legendaries, sockets, coins, caches, post garrison economy.

Pedlum has swung too far and I got out the door while I could. The journey is gone and the carrot isn't even masked for what of is anymore. Its a really sad state

[Deleted]

Well tbh I don't know about casuals, but subs are for sure lower than at launch, since my realm had massive queues every evening for 3-4 weeks, then they disappeared. Blizzard increased server capacity in 6.2.4., not 3 weeks after launch. Therefore, obviously less people are playing.

well, less queues are not difinitive proof that less people are playing. Only that people are playing less...
Could in theory still be the same amount, or more number of people subbed (yes, i know this is probably not true though. Just saying that you shouldn't jump to conclusions too quickly).