Originally Posted by
Grapemask
See, this and the thing you quoted by Toybox, "There's a lot of content, it's just that none of it is required for player power," strike me as spin.
This expansion is fundamentally identical to the previous expansion. None of those things were "required" in BfA, or Legion, beyond the way that they are now - to do raids, you need gear from dungeons and/or PvP. To be best at raids, you'll want to spam mythics and heroics to fill any bad slots until raids give you better gear for those slots. Mythic rewards may have been a little better in the last expansion, but not so much so that any serious raid leader would say "it's cool if you guys just come in blues because the gear in mythics isn't the absolute best." Reputations were not "required" in (launch) BfA/Legion; you may have wanted the rewards, but there were plenty of other places to get equivalents.
Meanwhile, even raiders still have to tick these boxes at least for the next few weeks: you have to cap your soul ash in Torghast, you have to do the quests necessary to hit the Renown cap, you have to do the farming/crafting required to get the next 'base item' for your legendary, and if you're not already geared, we're still in that "do all the mythics" phase. These are mandatory for whatever "player power" is, because the game does not generate gear out of the nether. And make no mistake, just like every other expansion, Blizzard will put in grinds to replace those as soon as you've finished them - BfA didn't launch with the grinds it ended with, nor did Legion, nor did Warlords, or really any other expansion.
Compared to launch BfA, it really seems like there are more boxes to tick, and they're fundamentally less rewarding in and of themselves; Renown and soul ash are long-term grinds with few if any short-term rewards. Which isn't to say it's the worst, because I'm literally doing them right now, and I wouldn't be if I totally hated it. But to say anything has changed seems like a marketing byline. This expansion is largely identical to the last, and if anything has changed, it's mostly only in the set dressing.