Originally Posted by
Gotural
I don't think I am. I genuinly think gearing is giga fast right now, granted it requires to have a main with which you played before, that I will concede. You get conduits 200+ instantly, renown 48+ instantly (40 but by speaking to the NPC in your Sanctum + doing the 1h of required Torghast to get your max ilvl legendary you are 48 already).
Not only these grinds are really short nowadays - and I'm speaking about post 9.1.5 to be clear - but also they are far more fun than grinding your professions for additional sockets or epic gems like we had in the first few expacs imo.
Upgrades are super fast too I think, in comparison farming conquest gear through random BGs in previous expacs like you said earlier was near impossible. You had to do arenas or RBGs or you would lose your sanity quickly. I remember having a bot farming BGs days and night in WotLK / Cata for getting my gear as it was taking so much time.
As for the gameplay in general, I strongly agree with your general sentiment that less abilities = less outplays = less fun, and that's why I really didn't liked Legion and BFA. Not only classes lost all their spells and tools but even the damage buttons felt really bland. But Shadowlands did a big effort in this regard I think, Warriors alone gained back 11 or 12 spells this expac IIRC correctly. I experienced and PvPed to a high lvl in every expacs in WoW and to each their own, but while I can see that the skill ceiling was a bit higher in some previous expacs, I think Shadowlands strikes a nice middle ground without going too much in the bullshit infinite CCs from MoP, the PvE items oneshot from Cata (Vial of Shadows, Dragonwrath, Cunning of the Cruel and Gurthalaks omg) and the haste fiesta from WotLK 1.5 base sec cast time CC + 30-40% haste baseline + 10 secs baseline CC duration that made Mages horrendous to face.