Mythic raiding is too time-consuming. Full stop.

[Yunaqt]

I am doing that though, and I'm evidently not fine.

I do all my daily caches, and I've run 20 or more M+ dungeons this week (highest being 12). Still on 37 neck level, still many weeks away from unlocking the defensive traits on my gear (which is kind of important as a tank).

I haven't even unlocked the heroic gear's defensive traits yet, and that gear is being replaced on Tuesday.



But each new level you unlock costs more AP to buy, so it's still going to be about a week per level.

The M+ dungeons are pretty minor such it's such a small amount of AP per. You wont really see anything until you get the 1200+ from the cache.

idk how much it is for 37 -> 38 currently. But for mine it's around 60k per level which I can pretty much do in a week when I cbf.

So if you're overly concerned about it you can very easily push for those particular traits without a huge amount of effort and easily pick up 2 levels a week initially. But you'll hit those traits much much faster.

- Do your cache which you're already doing. (make sure you have a contract on for a faction while WQing for rep)
- Do all the large AP WQs in the world, pretty much anything on the opposite continent.
- Also favor AP WQs for Trotollian / CoA as they also give large rep gains and CoA gives more AP than the quest reads.
- Do 3 Mythic Islands (Not grind them, just for the 2.5k reward and the treasure map which can have another 2.5k Ap)
- A Mythic 10+ Dungeon (which you're already doing)

The sweep doesn't actually take very long at all, but when the levels feel more meaningful it can feel more worth. Most of those things you're already doing but it kicks it into gear a but more. Doing that some days depending on my current rep / what WQs are up can net over 10k ap a day.
With the Islands day potentially being a 15k+ day.

No islands grinding but a little bit more WQs which I personally find much less tedious.

End of the day though up to you.

[Tiwack]

Adapt or wither in decline. What is best only you can tell.

[crazyman2]

I find the consumable grind alone pretty frustrating, and this is the first time in years that I can really say that I'm burnt out - I'm still raiding only because I'd made it known a while ago that I'd have to quit by the start of March for seasonal workload reasons, and I don't want to fuck over my guild considering I'm their top damage, and I might like to return eventually, I've raided off and on with some of the same players for over 12 years, they're not always this serious about progression.

It's expensive as hell. If you're raiding 3 1/2 hours and getting in up to 15 boss attempts, that's 30 potions a night if you're tryharding and double potting every attempt
If you're buying them off the AH, it's going to cost you upwards of 12k a night on most servers, and on a small pop like mine it can get over 20. Unless you're really good at the AH, you can't afford to do that for very long. Your other option is farming herbs - other than the opportunity cost, it's extremely time consuming. 300 siren sting and 240 riverbud isn't something you can farm up in a half hour after the raid.

I take 50 potions a week for 4 nights of raiding, and I don't use pots unless we're close to a kill. I'm still losing a large portion of my Saturdays to do so, and it feels like a job I don't want to come to after 5 days in the office.

[Armourboy]

Well after the initial period of investment you could raid log in every expansion, WOD was no different. The only big thing in WOD was that consumables became effectively free, otherwise as far back as TBC you could raid log and be very successful, since you had only limited things outside of raiding that could be done to improve your raiding effectiveness, and those things were very much optional side dishes (pvp/badges) rather than core progression.

TBC in effect is grind the expansion launch content/attunements, level professions, start raiding and commence raid logging, just like every other expansion pre Legion.

You could to a certain extent, but I can remember raiders complaining back then too, it was just different things sometimes ( professions/arena in TBC, too many versions in Wrath, Valor in Cata, coins needed for roll tokens in MoP). WoD was the point where they stripped it all out and it got to the point that all players were doing their version of raid logging. The game had become very cyclical to the point not only were players raid logging, they were patch logging, and the later is the reason things like AP were added.

I also think part of the problem as well is that previous time killers tended to add in interaction, where a lot of today's is just solo play which doesn't create any illusions that it isn't anything more than time creation on Blizzard's end.

[Vantheus]

Point 1. 6-9 hours / week progressing in the raid itself (depending on how hardcore you are, it might be up to 12 hours or more).

Point 2. 1-2 hours / day grinding Azerite. Flying would cut down this time sink dramatically but let's be fair, flying is not happening this expansion.

Point 3. 30-60 mins / week clearing weekly mythic+ for cache.

Point 4. 2-3 hours / week capping conquest for cache 2 (cuz PvP trinkets are better than PvE trinkets).

Point 5. 2-3 hours / week grinding herbs and other consumables (because Blizzard ostensibly refuses to add a herb vendor). This is even worse on low pop realms where you can't just buy consumables from the AH due to price or scarcity.

Add all this shit up. You spend MORE time preparing for raids than actually raiding. And most of it is just a boring time sink. The only thing that's excusable is the mythic+ part because at the very least it's also endgame PvE content.

Remove AP grinds. No one likes them.
Make raids drop good gear. What is the point of raiding mythic if it doesn't drop BiS?
And for the love of God, add a herb vendor.
That is all.

you must not have ever been in an actual raiding guild, support crews farm everything, except AP which is easy unless you suck and flying is coming, perhaps stick with the final fantasy or some call of duty or even just World quest in WoW raiding is obviously not for you..LFR maybe?

[Azerate]

In what world is 17 hours of wow per week too much? Do you expect to do cutting edge content by playing 3 hours a week?

[Titans]

It wasn't bad at all before the AP grind/titanforging etc that was introduced in Legion.

You could raid log and clear all content without feeling behind from Burning Crusade through to Warlords of Draenor.

In fact Warlords was the last time mythic raiding felt good outside of the raid.

Fully agree mate. Doing weekly quests was fine, and dailies at the start of each tier was fine, but the soft cap on both gearing and azerite means that you never actually are 'done' your raid prep. There is always more AP to grind, and more m+ to do, and any number of hours of non-raid activity required to raid at a competitive level. I know this sounds very QQ, but the time requirements are far too intensive outside of raid. If taking 2 weeks of annual leave isn't even enough for the world first race (where many players are full time streamers then how can even a regular ‘hardcore’ guild that raids 5-6 nights or so expect to compete without sponsorship and stream income? And what is the incentive for the best 3-4 night guilds when farm loot is invalidated by catch-up gearing at end of tier anyways? By creating that infinite cap on ways to prep for raid outside of raid, it creates a system where total time played can outweigh actual time spent raiding, which is very silly if raiding is the hardest progression content. It was very similar in Legion with the legendary/AP grind, and while previous expacs had grinds too (e.g. doing legendary quest chain in MoP or WoD on alts) there was still a hard cap on amount you could complete each week.

tl;dr I love raiding because of time spent raiding, not because there is anything enjoyable about spending playing world of worldquest to power up a piece of gear by .1% towards a 2 ilvl increase so I can unlock essentially a minor defensive glyph. Hard caps on non-raiding content have historically been a good thing to prevent burnout and disproportionately rewarding those who can spend more time infinitely grinding.

[Nitros14]

In what world is 17 hours of wow per week too much? Do you expect to do cutting edge content by playing 3 hours a week?

Could easily clear all content on 9 hours or even 6 hours a week from 2008-2016. That's the game a lot of us miss.

And why we hate Legion and BFA so much.

[Marrilaife]

If you really can't find a guild that fits your bits then make one yourself, chances are you're not going to go anywhere if you fill the guild with like-minded people who just want to play suboptimal spec with suboptimal talents with suboptimal race.

Race shouldn't matter if you're not world top. I never said about sub optimal talents. And about spec, sorry, I play a tank so can't just "spec swap" like a mage, problem is for 3 expansions in a row I was constantly facing discrimination based on tank class I play because even guilds ranked 2000 feel they need the flavour of the month tank class to progress. You don't need fotm classes if you're sub world 500 rank, yet guilds keep believing it. And I'm not method quality player that can main every tank class that exists and swap depending on fotm. And neither I should have to.

So as I said out of 2 evils I'd rather "suck it up" and farm required ap thresholds than be forced to ditch my main.

We get to the same conclusion with your M+ points. Get yourself a group of likeminded players and have fun, it is MMO after all so making friends is a part of that. If you want to push stuff as suboptimal spec then find people that only want to push up to whatever your friend group is able to. I bet when you're making your M+ group you're not filling it with the worst tank with low IO score and some dps specs that you never see - after all you want to finish your keys.

I run keys with guildies, including "sub optimal" specs like dps warrior, but to stay in that guild I have to comply with requirements. Pugs are horrible, for example when we needed to fill 1 spot for a +15 a pug left because "he's not gonna join double caster group". Metaslaves as I said. Cba with groups that require blood dk for +7 on non sanguine week, any other tank is insta decline.

"Likeminded players" don't grow on trees and there are no easy search tools, for every "likeminded player" in m+ there's 10 idiots who ask for 300 r.io more than they have themselves and believe they're the well of all wisdoms. Crawling through this cesspool to pick few players that maybe can form a relaxed, nontryhard yet skilled team is a titanic effort and good luck to anyone who went through it. I know some people on the forums say they managed to build big enough friendlist to not have to pug m+ anymore, I wonder through how many horrendous groups they plowed to find the pearls. Even joining a so called "m+ community" is often more miss than hit.

And I was very efficient with my azerite awuiring. I always got my last 2 weekly caches after the reset. I always save my treasure map mission till after the weekly reset. And I also got a fuck ton of paragon caches that I waited till the artifact knowledge came back before I handed them in.

Well you don't get "a fuck ton of paragon caches" if you aren't grinding wqs. Maybe people can use some rep buffs like human racial and DMF buff but still, if you only do emissary you will maybe get 1 paragon cache per 6-7 emissaries of that faction, and since they cycle around, that's over a month to get a cache. Well, unless you grind wqs, clear invasions every day etc.

I don't deny getting 43 is possible, I just deny it's possible by "not grinding". I tried to use most tricks myself, like save 2 emissaries for next reset when ak came back, save ap items from islands if they dropped during my weekly cap, clear invasions for extra rep, save 1 paragon cache in bank and 1 pending (cap is 19.999 rep so you can nearly stockpile 2), did warfront and the "kill 25 hords" quests for extra ap even though I hate pvp, but I wouldn't say this was "normal gameplay". It was deliberate targeting of every ap source I could do except burning myself completely in islands, and I wasn't doing rated pvp because I don't like it and Blizzard doesn't like tanks in it either, so they're mostly nonviable.

This isn't a realistic look either though, the players who are successfully clearing instances before the next tier are generally not in the less hardcore guilds. You as an individual may be skilled enough to do that but you won't likely be able to place yourself among other players that fit that mould, because the vast majority of good players are in more dedicated guilds, most lower guilds are a bunch of very averagely skilled slackers carried by overly invested/dedicated skilled players, not a collective of skilled players putting in a collective efficient effort.

Generally as dedication/effort/time investment reduces so does average player skill, and along with that also comes more recruitment problems, more people quitting mid tier, more empty raid spots killing raids. In theory if you had 20 players who were of exceptional skill and who managed their time exceptionally and all turned up to raid on a budget of say 5 hours play time per week maximum, maybe you can be successful... But get with reality, we don't live in a perfect world like that, the cream rises to the top and success goes hand in hand with dedication.

Effectively that guild of 20 super skilled efficient raiders who can clear Mythic on 3 hours a week is a fairytale with no grounding in reality, it's a unicorn situation when you look into these guilds and you find a curious number of world first level players alts. And I'm not saying that low hour successful guilds don't exist, I'm saying they are few and far between and most of them are playing multiple times more outside of raids than their raid schedule might suggest.

Agreed with you, there are already big barriers to making successful mythic guild, these are faction, server, region, now you have to gather 20+ players of the same faction on the same server and they all need to have similar skill level and similar dedication level and similar amount of time they want to sink into wow... how many variables need to align to create a guild that will work? Guilds with big skill / dedication disparity often disband because more skilled / dedicated players leave believing they're wasting their time and they can achieve so much more in a more skilled / dedicated environment.

It was more possible in the world of 10 man hardmodes because it was easier to get 10 likeminded people together, usually the core would be some old friends and they didn't need many to fill extra spots.

Now with 20 man mythic you kinda need to go with the flow. In the similar manner how it's so much easier to find a mythic guild that starts raids at 7-8pm rather than morning, afternoon or late night. Odd and different guilds exist, but they're rare, and they might not have a spot for you, or they may not be on your server (and it costs to move) and in EU there's also a language barrier, there are guilds with specific non-english language as main and they're probably off limits to whoever isn't that nationality.

Sure Blizzard could "fix" it by removing the meaning from everything else in the game except raiding but then we'd be back at the point where people whine not having anything meaningful to do.

AP grinding isn't meaningful at all. That's the issue.

you must not have ever been in an actual raiding guild, support crews farm everything,

??? Since WOD I've been in over 5 different guilds and none of them had some personal slaves to give consumables to mighty raiders, that's some form of myth. However majority of these guilds were selling boosts, if anyone wants to blame the rise of bought curves and whatnot, it's on the stupid augment runes and shit, raiders have very little choice when consumables cost as much as 10-20k per raid night. And especially augment runes are not grindable. I can spend 1h in lfr on an alt counting the queue and get 5-6 augment runes or I can spend the same time boosting and supply myself with multiple stacks.

Btw there was no augment runes pre-WOD, it was just Blizzard's way to force people into doing lfr. Before there were different consumables like weapon oils but that was related to professions (I believe this specific one was from enchanting). The difference is you have multiple avenues to grind profession mats, but very limited ones for augment runes and mostly non-grindable (lfr, mission board, random dungeon satchel - they're all time limited or rng).

[FelPlague]

Well you don't get "a fuck ton of paragon caches" if you aren't grinding wqs. Maybe people can use some rep buffs like human racial and DMF buff but still, if you only do emissary you will maybe get 1 paragon cache per 6-7 emissaries of that faction, and since they cycle around, that's over a month to get a cache. Well, unless you grind wqs, clear invasions every day etc.

1. i had been saving them since 8.1 and had 2 of each
2. not grinding world quests, just doing my daily emisaries, while also having turtle contract, also got like 6 of the 7th legion because of doing the incursions.
3. was just using human racials, DMF is too much of a hassle.
4. lol what? an emisarry gives 1500 rep, 1650 for humans, to do the 4 quests you get about 300 rep, so thats about 2k rep.
pair that with the odd one giving 100 rep, thats an easy 2.1k per emisarry, meaning 4 per cache.
alos pair that with mission table giving TONS of rep.
and also dont forget the 50% bonus rep event we had.
5. with 5 reps that means atleast 3 (minus 1) of every rep each 2 weeks...
meaning that in 1 month along, you get 7 of EVERY rep. meaning ateast 1 cahce, maybe 2, with 7th legion happening all the time.
6. that is normal gameplay, doing atleast the most basic stuff, i have not been doing EVERY WORLD QUEST, or EVERY AP QUEST. i havnt even done all the dailies or rares in the warfront zones for like weeks.
the last time i went that hardcore was at launch to try and get exalted asap.

haven't really farmed
and for your viewing, how many times i have done the paragons.






after 8.1 i started going 7th legion, just way more common, the 5 currency is good cause i want it for the pet to make gold, and then eventually the final mount.
7th legion is so fucking common though, all world quests on enemy area, gives it. of course emisarry, warfronts give it, hand ins give it, island expedition weekly gives it. incursions give a ton, pvp quests give it. and many more.

[Bigbazz]

You could to a certain extent, but I can remember raiders complaining back then too, it was just different things sometimes ( professions/arena in TBC, too many versions in Wrath, Valor in Cata, coins needed for roll tokens in MoP). WoD was the point where they stripped it all out and it got to the point that all players were doing their version of raid logging. The game had become very cyclical to the point not only were players raid logging, they were patch logging, and the later is the reason things like AP were added.

I also think part of the problem as well is that previous time killers tended to add in interaction, where a lot of today's is just solo play which doesn't create any illusions that it isn't anything more than time creation on Blizzard's end.

You make good points, it looks like a lose/lose situation really however they approach it.

[ID811717]

I am doing that though, and I'm evidently not fine.

I do all my daily caches, and I've run 20 or more M+ dungeons this week (highest being 12). Still on 37 neck level, still many weeks away from unlocking the defensive traits on my gear (which is kind of important as a tank).

You are several neck levels behind, did you take a large holiday break in December or something? That would explain it. I just hit 41 and I never cared to do single WQs for AP. All my AP came from emissaries, weekly expedition cap, some M+ spam (gives low AP), some AP missions (stopped doing them when Blizz told they disabled the AP catchup, and started doing again in 8.1), and some incursions (got tired of them quickly). But I did not take any breaks; I logged in and did the emissary every day in the past 2 months.

- - - Updated - - -

you must not have ever been in an actual raiding guild, support crews farm everything, except AP which is easy unless you suck and flying is coming, perhaps stick with the final fantasy or some call of duty or even just World quest in WoW raiding is obviously not for you..LFR maybe?

You have support crews farm everything for you? Yes, sure...
Go back to your Method guild chat please, it's time to pay back the 100M debt you accumulated this tier.

- - - Updated - - -

"Likeminded players" don't grow on trees and there are no easy search tools, for every "likeminded player" in m+ there's 10 idiots who ask for 300 r.io more than they have themselves and believe they're the well of all wisdoms. Crawling through this cesspool to pick few players that maybe can form a relaxed, nontryhard yet skilled team is a titanic effort and good luck to anyone who went through it. I know some people on the forums say they managed to build big enough friendlist to not have to pug m+ anymore, I wonder through how many horrendous groups they plowed to find the pearls. Even joining a so called "m+ community" is often more miss than hit.

Could it be that the problem is in your mindset, attitude, or expectations? There are some simple rules I follow. Don't join people who require M+ score greater than their own. Don't accuse, flame or otherwise provoke other players in the middle of the run. Likewise, don't get provoked. Try your best to carry the entire run even if you need to compensate for other players not doing mechanics. After the run try to make sure you understand what exactly went wrong at each point in the dungeon (during the run people will often misplace the blame on the wrong players and on the wrong mechanics, due to their limited awareness), and figure out how you can carry that with your personal contribution in your next pugs. Just have a positive outlook on things, expect people to fail, take the most from your attempts to time keys in a clutch. I find myself in very few "horrendous" groups at all key levels.

[Marrilaife]

Don't accuse, flame or otherwise provoke other players in the middle of the run. Likewise, don't get provoked. Try your best to carry the entire run even if you need to compensate for other players not doing mechanics. After the run try to make sure you understand what exactly went wrong at each point in the dungeon (during the run people will often misplace the blame on the wrong players and on the wrong mechanics, due to their limited awareness), and figure out how you can carry that with your personal contribution in your next pugs. Just have a positive outlook on things, expect people to fail, take the most from your attempts to time keys in a clutch.

Or just run with guildies so you don't have to put up with "be 5 times better than every other member of the group, try your best to carry and expect others to fail". Instead I can have a group where everyone pulls their own weight or at least tries their best to do so.

The downside is having to fulfill the guild's criteria like farming neck levels or bringing pots / augment runes to every raid. This can be both attributed to the guild (they require it) and to Blizzard (they put it in the game). Pots were always there, other stuff not really. It's a hassle but much less of a hassle than trying to progress in pugs (both m+ and raid wise).

Not every pug is horrible, but let's say 1 in 5 is, and if you run dozens of them the bad experiences accumulate over time. If I can skip that completely, why wouldn't I.

[ydraw]

You are several neck levels behind, did you take a large holiday break in December or something?

Yeah I went home to visit family for a few weeks over Christmas/New Year period and couldn't play WoW during that time because they don't own a PC capable of running it.

[lappee]

Race shouldn't matter if you're not world top. I never said about sub optimal talents. And about spec, sorry, I play a tank so can't just "spec swap" like a mage, problem is for 3 expansions in a row I was constantly facing discrimination based on tank class I play because even guilds ranked 2000 feel they need the flavour of the month tank class to progress. You don't need fotm classes if you're sub world 500 rank, yet guilds keep believing it. And I'm not method quality player that can main every tank class that exists and swap depending on fotm. And neither I should have to.

So as I said out of 2 evils I'd rather "suck it up" and farm required ap thresholds than be forced to ditch my main.

Normally race doesn't matter, but when fights like Jaina get so much easier for having a specific race (trolls) then it does.
If you're being discriminated based on your tank class then you aren't either playing with likeminded people or you're playing a class that isn't actually valid. Guilds sub 500 rank that want better comps do so because they want better ranks (or to just clear the instance faster), they're trying to get better (hopefully) at the game but getting right classes and specs is easier way to increase raids dps.

Simply, they aren't there for the same reasons you are.

I run keys with guildies, including "sub optimal" specs like dps warrior, but to stay in that guild I have to comply with requirements. Pugs are horrible, for example when we needed to fill 1 spot for a +15 a pug left because "he's not gonna join double caster group". Metaslaves as I said. Cba with groups that require blood dk for +7 on non sanguine week, any other tank is insta decline.

"Likeminded players" don't grow on trees and there are no easy search tools, for every "likeminded player" in m+ there's 10 idiots who ask for 300 r.io more than they have themselves and believe they're the well of all wisdoms. Crawling through this cesspool to pick few players that maybe can form a relaxed, nontryhard yet skilled team is a titanic effort and good luck to anyone who went through it. I know some people on the forums say they managed to build big enough friendlist to not have to pug m+ anymore, I wonder through how many horrendous groups they plowed to find the pearls. Even joining a so called "m+ community" is often more miss than hit.

So find another guild that has requirements that you like, that is what I've been saying all along.

Pugs want to clear M+'s, you can do your own groups and pick those sub optimal specs to your group (really, people playing those whine about group comp more rarely than fotm classes since they're not getting invited that often). If you just want to join random groups then you're at the mercy of their picks. You can't blame others for not taking you when they don't want you.

Likeminded players don't grow in trees but they do exist (for most people, sure there are special cases for very special people). Find them and befriend them. Again make your own groups, its much easier to find people that way since they're coming to you and you can make the titles reflect that.
Once you do find those people its likely they have friends with the same mindset and you can grow your community. It just takes effort on your side to make it happen rather than just queuing to random groups who ask for higher IO score than what they have (really, you can see that instantly before applying to the group so shouldn't be hard to avoid them).

AP grinding isn't meaningful at all. That's the issue.

Except it is meaningful due to unlocking new traits everytime a new tier comes out. Going from level X to level Y neck where you don't unlock anything and only get neck ilvl isn't meaningful though.

[Niwes]

imo, what really stinks here is that Blizzard, around the time of MoP, released some blue posts in which they clearly stated that they

„absolutelly do not want to force any player, doing higher raiding levels like HC or Mythic, into LFR.“

this was important at that time, since a loud outcry of the community made clear, ppl hate to be forced to run mindless LFR, when committed to i.e. HC raiding. the reason was, that LFR was the most effecient way to get some ressource. cant remember at the moment what it was (maybe Valor Points or something for L quest chain, cant remember), but it was a huge thing back then.

and exactly thats the point. in 2012-2014 Blizzard still had the right mentality about that stuff. but then they started to piss on „whats good for the game“ and instead solely looked at „whats good for the MAUs and the share holders“.

because „farm boring brainless content as most efficient way to get what you need at higher raiding levels“ was called bad in these days, while EXACTLY this is now supported by Blizz in the first place. virtually force mythic raiders into brainless grinding island expeditions, just to get their AP in most efficient way there, IS EXACTLY the same thing, they clearly called „bad“ few years ago.

and this sucks. Blizzards mindset changed so horrible, imo cause of money reasons, from a philosophy that matched the game and what was something themselfes stood behind.

this is really sad and this sucks.

[La]

you must not have ever been in an actual raiding guild, support crews farm everything, except AP which is easy unless you suck and flying is coming, perhaps stick with the final fantasy or some call of duty or even just World quest in WoW raiding is obviously not for you..LFR maybe?

Lmao, what? Support crews? Maybe if you're in a top 50 guild, or you're playing in Vanilla, bud.

[Armourboy]

imo, what really stinks here is that Blizzard, around the time of MoP, released some blue posts in which they clearly stated that they

„absolutelly do not want to force any player, doing higher raiding levels like HC or Mythic, into LFR.“

this was important at that time, since a loud outcry of the community made clear, ppl hate to be forced to run mindless LFR, when committed to i.e. HC raiding. the reason was, that LFR was the most effecient way to get some ressource. cant remember at the moment what it was (maybe Valor Points or something for L quest chain, cant remember), but it was a huge thing back then.

and exactly thats the point. in 2012-2014 Blizzard still had the right mentality about that stuff. but then they started to piss on „whats good for the game“ and instead solely looked at „whats good for the MAUs and the share holders“.

because „farm boring brainless content as most efficient way to get what you need at higher raiding levels“ was called bad in these days, while EXACTLY this is now supported by Blizz in the first place. virtually force mythic raiders into brainless grinding island expeditions, just to get their AP in most efficient way there, IS EXACTLY the same thing, they clearly called „bad“ few years ago.

and this sucks. Blizzards mindset changed so horrible, imo cause of money reasons, from a philosophy that matched the game and what was something themselfes stood behind.

this is really sad and this sucks.

Thing is they hit WoD and removed all of those things and it created problems for them. Players figured out they could run the raid, farm it a couple of weeks and then everyone quit til the next patch. There was absolutely nothing to keep players logging in past a few weeks. This is why AP and titanforging were both added.

In this case Blizzard actually learned a lesson, just logging into raid doesn't make for a great game for the largest majority of people and it also wasn't good for their wallet either.

What it comes down to is balancing the lesser of two evils, one being a pointless grind and the other being nothing to do. BfA is the first extreme, WoD the later, and neither seems to be all the enjoyable.

[Echeyakee]

Bet there were 20 other guilds in the exact same position on your server, none of them wanting to be the one to 'fold' into another guild. Blizz should have made the merging process more socially attractive.

We actually did about 4 merges and poached groups of people from other struggling guilds. The problem is not social perception, but the "us vs them" mentality. In most cases guild merges result in cliques, which eventually lead to people either quitting or leaving to reform the old guild. That's what happened to us in LK, in pandaria and, most recently, in legion.

[Dysheki]

AP grinding is fucking stupid and the asshole that thought it was a good idea should be fired.

I raided semi-hardcore from WotLK to the start of Legion. There were some ups and downs. But more often than not you had to raid to get the best gear, you didn't have to worry about RNGesus and titanforging, and you basically had to do some consumable stuff outside of raid, and there was an end game with everything. Sometimes you had dailies (daily quests for tokens or daily dungeons for valor) but there was also an easy hard-stop where your returns weren't worth it. Now they put in an endless grind as a shameful way of keeping people subbed. Funny enough, I was a constant subscriber except for a period when I moved and didn't really have time anyway. Ever since Legion I've taken extended periods of time to unsub because it's just such an annoyance for anyone that only likes to raid difficult content. Congrats if you like menial content. But I don't.

Also, because of this never-ending grind, I don't feel like any time spent on alts is a good decision. As a raider, you're always looking out to make your raid better. And having fun leveling alts as a change of pace isn't possible because you need to pull that slot machine handle one more time to hope this M+ run will get the item you need. Or pull in more AP. Or run some stupidly boring expedition. Or that absolutely awful invasion shit, I don't even know what it's called. Non-raid content is just not fun for me. But in order to be semi-hardcore you have to do way too much shit to keep up (something that wasn't that bad before Legion).

I came back for BfA in a one night guild to see if it would be any better after quitting during Mythic Helya progression. It isn't. I'm done.

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Thing is they hit WoD and removed all of those things and it created problems for them. Players figured out they could run the raid, farm it a couple of weeks and then everyone quit til the next patch. There was absolutely nothing to keep players logging in past a few weeks. This is why AP and titanforging were both added.

In this case Blizzard actually learned a lesson, just logging into raid doesn't make for a great game for the largest majority of people and it also wasn't good for their wallet either.

What it comes down to is balancing the lesser of two evils, one being a pointless grind and the other being nothing to do. BfA is the first extreme, WoD the later, and neither seems to be all the enjoyable.

There were other ways to keep people happy and engaged. They were incredibly successful before WoD WITHOUT titan-forging and AP. Just saying.