It's true sadly. It is why I find classic a bit tedious as people fret over gathering so many buffs and gear for bosses that fall over easily to blues.
Still my point stands. In the past if you walked the walked you could easily bypass most grinding compared to today wow was a lot less grindy.
Going with that logic there is zero grind today, like literally zero. If you knew how to make gold you could buy yourself a boost and don't farm anything.
Nzoth will fall over you with blue gear.
Outside of that, you don't really need to farm anything as you can get decent gear without any grinds.
A full group of experienced players would do ok in normal if they were all at 425 - tanks would certainly get hit hard by a couple of bosses, but nothing too scary, and the fights would drag on a bit putting pressure on tanks and healers, but i would think it was manageable.
We often take a few ppl at that level for normal alt runs, but we usually also have a few around 450-460, and that would include 1 tank and 1 healer. Many other factors would come into play though - a 425 dps with BiS essences can still pump out some pretty respectable numbers thanks to the (imo) disgusting tuning of essences.
This here is what is referred to as a strawman argument, and tends to make the user look like a fool or an american politician (same thing really).
I could probably try to explain that there are several sets of 2% in 100% of the playerbase, or use a venn-diagram to illustrate what we call overlap, but that feels wasted on a fool.
And no. No, I did not refer to the cutting edge raiders, although i cannot completely rule out some overlap.
I get you. I just went back to farm a few reps and the gear has me overwhelmed. I'm not even trying. Doing my bee rep and going on a break again until shadowlands. Can't be bothered with these crappy gear systems that will be gone in 6 months.
They really need to ease up the essence acquisition. Just let returning players buy them with echoes on nylotha without requirements and cheaper or something.
I did most of it before Heavensward dropped, and still when I came back and started Heavensward is was an awful grind. FFXIV is a very different style of game from WoW, in that a lot of it about about the journey, and if you don't like questing and doing story it's going to suck.
I tend to play FF for a few months, then quit again for a while, because the quest design feels annoyingly old and slow - too much go there, come back, go there, come back (this may have changed - I never got to L70 due to irritation with the game). Also I don't much like the way the combat rotations have evolved, but that's a personal thing.
The catch-up does take too long, Blizzard dumps a million new systems on returning players and then leaves them in a neverending grind where they will progress more than an expansion's worth in player power. It's convoluted and unnecessarily grindy, but it keeps players with stuff to do, BFA content might be grindy but there is probably more content than any other prior expansion.
The corruption/essence system is crazy, given how Blizzard have wanted players to know what an upgrade is without simming and now you have 3 entirely separate systems that all intertwine with hilarious levels of RNG involved that need a hilarious amount of simming to get to the bottom of.. It's excessive, but at least the overpowered corruptions are fun, if not balanced.
Probably running on a Pentium 4
Its not just you.Even though they have added a ton of catch up mechanics it still is a huge grind and confusing mess.You gotta get gear that is easy enough but then there are essences,the neck to level,the cloak,and dumb corruption.Its just to much and makes me not want to play anything but my main.
That explains this entire expansion rather well.
It's just a mess. Not gonna lie, my alts are overwhelmed with the amount of stuff thrown in their faces as well when I started prepping them. Now that they're basically ready to step into mythic, they still have almost all of the quests up in Boralus, there was like 2 that really needed doing.
It's hard to pinpoint what's exactly wrong, but I agree with the sentiment that it's overwhelming and very, very off putting to go to Boralus, and here you go, do all this stuff, with no sense of achievement/reward behind any of them, idk.
The pinpoint for me is easy. The layers upon layers of borrowed power.
Prior to Legion there was only 1 thing you needed to worry about with an alt or returning character. Gear. Yes there was rep that gave gear or some sort of badge system for gear. But they all flowed into getting gear.
Now you have that same need for gear, but you also need to worry about Essences and Corruption and because both are often locked behind daily grinds you have a huge set of 'mandatory' daily activities that simply don't leave you with time/energy to do those 'worthless' quests in Boralis where previously you did a little work for gear and then had some fun doing a bunch of quests.
In order to keep people constantly engaged Blizzard added a lot of stuff that means you now have a constant reminder that you could be doing X/Y/Z for power instead of having fun and its tiring.
It ignores such insignificant forces as time, entropy, and death