PUGs are getting ridiculous

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This is something a lot of people don't seem to get. People pugging now are largely in 2 groups.
1) Have not cleared content, have not raided much, have geared up quite a bit through celestials, ordos, vp upgrades, a few normal bosses, etc and now want to try their hand at full clearing SoO.
2) People who have cleared it and can't be bothered dealing with people doing anything subpar so they bring people who outgear it by a landslide to make it a non issue.

As the players who are willing to put in the time, deal with the content, figure things out and work a little bit do things, the next wave come in. You now have the players who legitimately think you need 570 ilvl to do Garrosh and then you have those who have done it enough times to not want to put work in again and 570 ilvl serves what they want to get done.
There are others running but those are the two camps you'll find most often on things like Open Raid.

I have done hundreds, possibly thousands, of challenge modes throughout the expansion and you're seeing the exact same thing with challenge modes now. First it was "know your class and have all consumables." Next it was "know your class, have all consumables and be 9/9 on a character already." Now it is "know your class, have all consumables, be 9/9 already and have 22+ gem sockets."

i really think you got the point!

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When you're selling CMs, running with people with well optimized gear who know CMs in and out, all the tricks, mobs to skip, ways to abuse vengeance, what pulls you can handle, where to use CDs and when to swap trinkets, engineering so you can pot the whole time, etc; CMs become pretty trivial. We can do a full 9/9 carry in under 2 hours pretty easily. We can do an entire 9/9 carry without voice communication easily. On top of the carries CMs are extremely fun for me so I run them for fun, I get the transmogs on all my classes. I'm not sure why it's such a stretch to believe this lol

Pretty much this. While i did not sell any CMs, i did them on all classes, several CMs multiple times on the same character because i did not get full 9/9 runs all the time. I am at about 130 CMs just by this. If you sell CMs regularly, you easily get 1k+ CM runs D: (like 3-4 runs per week, it's only about 9-10 weeks to get 1k CM golds, also about 600k+ in gold alone if you get 20k per run) I am pretty sad to this days that i did not take advantage of this, because i too think CMs are pretty fun and i would have solved all my gold-woes for the rest of my WoW life-time.

Also, nowadays, if you want a smooth Challenge Mode run you are usually required to have Gold CMs completed Multiple times!