The funny thing is, I don't even do difficult content. I don't raid mythic and I usually don't push very high m+ keys. I'm totally fine with the concept that mythic raiders should have better gear than me, because they're doing harder content. On the other hand, I think people who only do world quest should have lower ilvl gear than me. I literally have no idea how this is "eliteness".
If you do harder content, you get better rewards. It is like this in any other activity, and I have no idea why people are called elitist when they think it should be the same in wow.
Now with 9.0.5 everyone can get 220 gear anyway, and as you said it just takes time. As the season goes on, more and more people will be able to finish 15s, or at least 10s for heroic raid level gear. Even if they can't, they always have the ability to buy the achievement and then upgrade all their gear from m0 and +2s.
But why am I even arguing, all I get is personal attacks anyway because I'm so elitist I can't have a normal conversation
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How did you progress as a casual in vanilla, BC or WotLK? I mean, the difficulty of vanilla raids is kind of a meme nowadays, but I can assure you no casual raided BWL in 2005. There were no heroic/mythic/m+ dungeons, no LFR raids, no world quests, no order hall campaign / war campaign / covenant campaign, there were no daily / weekly quests. What was there in vanilla that was so much better than what we have today?
They introduced some of this stuff later on, like heroic dungeons in BC (which by the way were also not very casual-friendly), easier 10-man raids in WotLK, and daily quests with some incentive to work towards a goal, but I have no idea how anyone can say "turbo-casuals" had it better for the first 10 years of the game than they have it now.