Bro.
This many months after Legion launch I wasn’t even playing the game on the regular. I was playing FFXIV instead.
This many months after BFA launch I was rerolling to horde because alliance keys were dead. There’s a ton more keys than back in BFA. In BFA I could log in and not even be able to scroll the listed keys on alliance, because there were not enough groups to scroll.
It’s far better than both.
I must say that this is absolutely not because of a lack of AP.
M+ participation was sky high across ALL key levels. Both S1 and S2… until 10.1.5 when really slow class balance killed the season for many players.
Raid participation and disbands are a totally different reason. Reason being that most of us cant commit seriously to a Mythic raiding guild. Because of gear, skill, or schedule.
So most of us raid only heroic. Problem is… what do you do when you clear heroic? The content is done.
And because Mythic raiding is NOT flex, we cant even try the first few mythic bosses. Never mind attempting CE.
This has happened since WotlK. And honestly, its something that blizz should work to change. Because raiding has not changed since WotlK and its time to give it a new life (IMO). Like they did with dungeons and M+.
The logic in this thread.
“They had valor / pictures that weren’t fruit / mission tables previously” not having them now is why raid and M+ participation is down!
Well I can´t argue with that logic. Since you are playing the game, it has to be doing well.
I liked AP and borrowed power and now i have all the gear i want all the alts i want and now bored.
The gearing is too fast
Nothing meaningful to do daily
End game is very repetative
The borrowed power system allowed class and spec playstyle changes constantly without totally redoing the specs all the time. Added a lot more fun.
Now its really you have your spec and thats it forever, so boring.
Last time it was very fun was when we had corruption.
its both true and not true.
in past wow was never about infinite instance content.
in past you spammed hc dungeons for a week and then you were done there were only raids
then it was all about m0 tour and you were done
then m+ came and introduced infinetly farmable dungeons and the whole idea of not doing anything else just “sitting in lobby” aka browsing lfg and then spaming dungeons came into life. and became absolute cancer to wow.
Absolute cancer is what raid logging is.
Done with raid? Want to do more? Well, sucks for you, there’s nothing to do and you might as well play another game because there’s nothing to do once you’ve raided. Yep, that was WoW until m+.
I’m pressing X.
As it’s always has been at a given point in the patch.
As always.
Assuming BFA was a good expansion, then why did Tides of vengeance patch also saw a participation dip with many guilds disbanding ? Or isn’t that the usual second patch drop ?
Probably because they’re too hard and gimmicky, now that blizzard cutted entry taxes.
I was an Alliance player back then so no, it kinda sucked being in the minority faction, having to consistantly fight 1v5. That’s anything but fun. Maybe Horde experience was better, I don’t know, I wasn’t in that faction up until 8.3.
I don’t need Asmongold or bellular to tell me or think on my own. That’s a principle I apply in every aspect of my life as I have the chance to live in a relatively free country. And I’m a stubborn idiot so nobody easily convinces me of their opinions.
Wrath was actual peak.
Most of players only experience expansion launch so it’s quite hard to just forgive mistakes done during that time span. I mean, azerite armor sucked, for sure, but you also can’t deny that Uldir was a bad tier and infested was quite a huge let down for a seasonal affix. On top of Blizzard adding the unnecessary GCD on offensive cooldown which kinda slowed gameplay down for no valid reason.
8.1 was peak BFA, that is true. But I kinda disliked some aspects of following patches, due to borrowed powers.
That was my bad, I recon I made that quick link between anima and renown.
Yup, but at least, some grinds are evergreen, collecting gear is now a permanent transmog item. However, I can’t say I’m happy about all that AP and Azerite I’ve farmed which are now being made useless, besides running some Timewalking content with BFA armors.
Uldir : 18840 HC 1753 M
BOD : 14058 HC 4254 M (-25% HC, +242 % M)
EP : 13514 HC 1141 M (-4% HC, -75% M)
Nya: 17058 HC 2666 M(+26 HC, +233% M)
Nya being an outlier thanks to a very long patch life time and lock down.
Compared to legion
EN: 35448 HC 9442 M (Quite easy)
NH : 23341 HC 2003 M (-35% HC, -80%M)
ToS : 18680 HC 921 M (-20% HC, -65% M)
AtBt : 18138 HC 1794 M (-3% HC, +197%M)
And now SL:
CN : 21896 HC 2224 M
SoD : 12412 HC 1880 M (-44% HC, -16%M)
SotFo : 8443 HC 1239 M (-32% HC, -35% M)
And now DF :
Voti : 10836 HC 1681 M
AtSC: 8970 HC 744 M (-18% HC, -56% M)
Given the fact current tier is not over, I see no difference in dip between expansions relative to their previous tiers. I don’t see anything wrong here.
Then was BFA any better to that regards ? I mean, both 8.0 and 8.1 didn’t have had that, Corruptions were rng at first so had nothing to do with actual progression. The really true progression system were essences and in essence, had a lot of flaws, one of them being getting essences from other pieces of content.
Then what the hell is gear ?
Sorry, but killing 10 boars for AP or killing 10 boars just to farm a cosmetic currency kinda feel like the same in the end, AP won’t make killing 10 boars in the open world suddenly more fun or more enjoyable.
That assumption is wrong. Removing gear from Mythic, which I’ve seen being argued for years, wouldn’t kill guilds going for CE, who are only in there for the challenge. It would probably kill 3 or 4 bosses Mythic guilds however. And M+ barely reward any gear beyond 20, yet, many people are running keys above that treshold, because, WOAW, it’s fun !
Do you sincerly believe that was a minority ?
I mean, from TLK to WOD, it was pretty much rushing to max level, grind dungeons and rep to get ready for raiding. It was fine.
Essences slot only required the usual 3 islands per reset so it was fine. That system had another flaw not tied to AP, but AP was irrelevant in 8.2 anyways.
Well, I didn’t and it felt bad looting a mythic item that I couldn’t use. So I felt bad not going out of my way to use that item. Then in 8.1 everything was fixed, as it should have been from the get go.
Not whenever I wanted but every day, or I could be waiting for catch ups. But what’s the point of a grind if I can just wait, dodge the famr and just catch up ?
Most of mechanic inducing a wipe when 1 single players fail are saying hi.
Don’t you dare to say M+ ended raid logging 
I think the opposite.
They should have a grind where if you don’t do 12 hours of killing boars every day then your character is deleted.
You might be able to just about keep two of your characters going.
Come now. That would be too cruel!
I say, add a perma debuff: Curse of the Slacker. Reduces your overal power and stats by 25%
Gets applied every day you left a chore un-finished. The debuff obviously stacks and cannot be removed.
I don’t think AP is a bad idea but it needs to be amended so that there is a catch up mechanic that allow players to login when they feel like and not need to farm 24/7 to reach the same outcome, someone suggested for example that lets say if you are the type to farm it everyday that you gain it at a x1 rate vs someone that logs in every now and again gets it for a x3 rate and the closer you get to where the estimate should be for that time period it gets reduced etc. But I would make it so that this carries over to other expansions and that it is account wide so that it effects all your characters/specs. one of the main issues I see with the game right now is there is no crossover with gear/and progression for example lets take a legendary weapon that you get in one expac why is this then useless for the next expac generally speaking why do they not make it move forward to be relevant make a separate quest line to bring it forward that you need to complete a extra thing for you to do things like this makes it relevant to do old content while still progressing the new content it also means that the time invested in your character is not wasted from tier patch to tier patch.
Funny thing is, you obviously wanted to troll people that wants AP back. But you just trolled yourself by that. Cause that’s how people like you think about the game, when there are some things to do, like farming AP for 1% dmg buff. “Oh ho, please, no AP! If it’s in a game, I feel like I need to do chores every day! If I’m not doing it, I’m behind!!”
my participation would drop to 0 if AP ever made its return again
titanforge is an even worse idea
sincerely a casual player
24 point multiquote with added stats.
Read by: nobody.
My cats wrote that !
At the end of the day the entire falling behind on AP debate just comes down to people not being able to do middle school mathematics.
Damn, that’s some emotional damage
How come? Its not me who “cant enjoy a video game” unless Blizzard makes a mandatory daily chore list? 
(Dragon) Aspect Power LOL
You and 8 other people maybe.
Literally everyone’s saying the game has extremely low participation, even people thinking DF is good, and all the 3rd party data shows it as being extremely low. And yet you want to pretend like it’s popular?
And? How’s that relevant? BFA still had way higher participation than DF does.
Crazy part is that you can show this to all of them and they’ll still try to argue with you. Claiming that just because they enjoy Raidlogflight that means the game is good and that everyone else is also liking it. It’s wild tbh.
Thing is that we’re already seeing this. Taliesin regularly calls DF the best wow expansion ever and yet he also talks about how participation is way down and that DF is basically dead. He had a podcast with Evitel not too long ago where they both acknowledged the benefits of AP and said that they want it back. Was kinda funny to see tbh.
LOL true. First it was Diablo 4 that killed season 2 and everyone said “just wait until the hype dies down, they’ll all come back” after D4 hype died down they swapped over to Baldur’s Gate 3. Nevermind that Zaralek Cavern died on the 2nd week of the patch, long before D4 released.
I genuinely wonder when these people will stop blaming Shadowlands & BFA or other game releases for the sorry state of retail rn. None of us say this out of malice, we all just want the game to do well, but they don’t realize that.
Even if they disagree we could have a good dialogue, but they don’t want that. They just want to either gaslight themselves into thinking everything is good or they want it to be “World of Lobbycraft” so they refuse to see the other side of things.
I think it is, indirectly. Without character progression like AP motivating players, fewer people are gonna log in so you’ll have a bunch of raid/m+ loggers playing. What that means is that outside of designated/scheduled “playtime” nobody is online.
Back when AP existed, people would hop on almost everyday to progress their char and this lead to groups naturally forming. So many times i’d see people ask if anyone wanted to join for weeklies etc and we had so many people in the guild wanting to tag along that we’d form 2 groups. That doesn’t happen anymore.
The truth however is that most players don’t enjoy playing RPGs as a lobby-game. Even if they say they want to, it’s a “you think you do, but you don’t” situation.
I am open to the fact that I could be wrong, if people can present evidence to disprove me i’ll gladly accept it. But we wont be able to draw any definitive conclusions until 11.0, however all the evidence we have available so far leans towards me being right.
It had absolutely nothing to do with Patch 10.1.5 my friend. I attached a graph showcasing the number of runs done, the person making it hasn’t released an updated version yet unfortunately.
You can see the number of runs dipped below 1 million on week 6 of the patch, That’s one month before patch 10.1.5 dropped.
If you bothered reading what people said and not just making up stuff to fit your own narrative, maybe you’d understand the point.
It’s not about one or two specific things, it’s about character progression. Dragonflight has no character progression. But keep pretending like it’s just crazy talk, meanwhile the player numbers will keep dwindling.
I 100% agree. Tier sets alone are nowhere near enough to add in variety. I also agree with your other points as well.
Sure my friend, keep pretending like everything is good.
Lmao. I see more people in Zereth Mortis than I do in Zaralek Cavern.
Only times it’s been this bad has been in WoD, SL & DF.
There wasn’t a big dip at all. We went from 23940 HC guilds having killed a single boss in BoD to 20349 killing a single boss in EP. So we saw a 15% dip in raid participation. In Dragonflight it went from 21846 guilds killing a single boss in Vault to 15804
guilds killing a single boss in Aberrus. Which is a ~28% dip.
Now patch 10.1 isn’t over yet so I expect the number of guilds participating to go up, but I doubt it’ll go up by much at this point. Also just look at the raw numbers. DF on launch, which historically sees the most participation, had fewer numbers than BoD and barely more than EP. But keep pretending DF is good though.
Aberrus & also Vault are some of the easiest raids we’ve had. Only hard HC boss across both raid tiers was Raszageth. Eranog was extremely easy and yet it had barely more participation than Eternal Palace did.
I was also Alliance back then, I had loads of fun with it. Even deep into the expansion there was constant world pvp going on because of WM bonus to AP.
I’m not saying you were, but a lot of people in the vocal minority online where whipped up into a frenzy by content creators. It was especially bad around Classic wow’s launch.
Sorry but having replayed Wrath on Classic just re-affirmed that it wasn’t the game’s peak. I loved Wrath at the time, don’t get me wrong, but even for it’s time Vanilla & TBC were better than Wrath. Wrath was just cooler in terms of story, but gameplay wise it was worse.
I don’t disagree with you at all and you’re right that most players only experience the launch. However it’s not like people just experienced launch & moved on, a lot of them lingered thinking it was the same throughout the entire xpac.
Truth is, a big reason why BFA launch sucked, was because it was the first time we experienced the whiplash of going from the end of a borrowed power xpac to a “reset/fresh start” in a new expansion.
One bad patch doesn’t define an expansion. By that logic even Wrath, which was the peak for you, was a bad expansion because Wrath was awful on launch. Naxx + EoE & OS were bad raids. It wasn’t until Ulduar that Wrath started becoming good.
Honestly I disagree. Peak BFA world content was definitely 8.2, Nazjatar & Mechagond were great. In terms of overall gameplay though, BFA peaked in 8.3 with corruptions. It was so much fun to play with full essences & bis corruptions. The initial progression of Horrific Visions up to 5-masks is also some of the best solo content they’ve ever made. Only beaten by Mage Tower.
You can’t just take the pure numbers at face value. The number of players who will never quit wow make up a much larger percentage of the playerbase in DF than it did in BFA & SL. If DF on launch had the same playerbase BFA or SL did, I can guarantee you that the drop would be much larger.
Yes because of AP & Titanforging. For your average casual player, and even your hardcore raiders, it added ways to progress your character solo. Casuals are less likely to participation