The WoW YouTuber SoulSoBreezy has posted a video talking about anima and one of the problems with it. But it’s not what you think.
I think it’s worth a watch, even if you’re not the type of player he’s talking about, because maybe this way you understand the PoV of such a player and I think that’s always a good thing.
I like the idea with the sanctum to upgrade gear that scales up in trivial content and open world.
Yeah he lost me when he started talking about gear capping for non-competitive players.
I am a non-competitive player currently and casual at that (so not all that passionate, to use soul’s words) I don’t care I don’t get better gear because I don’t intend to do content that requires this gear. I do not play wow just to get stronger. The game is bigger than gear and item levels.
There are mounts, mogs, battle pets, achievements that have nothing to do with item level. Sure, things get easier with higher item level but then what? We go complain there’s nothing left to do?
There is plenty to do in game. But public testing and sites like wowhead and icyveins make it so that everything is already found out before we can even start to discover anything at all by ourselves. Which make it so raid leaders demend from their raiders they have the proper spec, proper gear, proper enchants and gems. Even before figuring out what works for ourselves the sims are already made.
The game is solved before it’s officially on the market.
A TL:DR for peps who are not interested in giving some random streamer more views?
That Anima is purely cosmetic, pretty much what we asked for. This is not problematic on its own, but perhaps it could be…more useful. There are casual players out in the world who don’t do organised raids, mythic+ or rated pvp and they get power-capped early on in the patch.
Obviously the best gear should not come from casual content, and there shouldn’t be a system that would become “mandatory” for the hardcore group. But what if there was a system, an addition to the covenant sanctum, to upgrade the ilvl of the WQ rewards, give your covenant set 4 more rank and eventually gives you a power-boost in the world, normal-heroic dungeons and LFR?
Then the casuals can keep progressing, while the hardcore players won’t be bothered by it since that system would be a “long-term goal” and with still quite minimal rewards (compared to the more hardcore players).
That’s about it.
Ah. Ty. 
You are rather exception, than a rule. Getting stronger is like core aspects of RPGs in general.
Thank you for the recap, I do wonder if these systems are introduced if we just re-enter the downward spiral of power creep that we have suffered with for past expansions.
As a non-raider or PvPer myself I can understand people’s frustrations at finding themselves with as good a set of gear they are going to get outside of the “end game” structures but to my mind that should be the push to get you into doing that content not allowing power creep from trivial content.
Showered with gear my ass. He is correct in the fact that the casual end game has failed though. Cosmetics will never cut it for the large majority.
(sorry for the naughty word)
tbh, his point is also valid for harcore players.
PvPers are 226 for few weeks already, PvEers are about to follow this trend and the 9.1 isn’t anywhere close to be released.
No moments of wonder and surprise either, because community whined so much about RNG that we now have a supermarket instead of a casino.
Casinos are fun. Supermarkets aren’t.
I don’t mind , all players in wow should be able to gear up .
The only rule that makes sense to me is the harder the activity the bigger the reward which is already like this .
I don’t mind that some1 that doesn’t engage in group content should be able to gear up via anima or whatever resource .
For people who can’t or don’t want the stress of the “big 3”, the game does cap you hard and fast with no moments of random progression to be had.
Even those who do the big 3 will hit their own relative content cap and find themselves in exactly the same situation.
Without a random upgrade mechanics, everyone gets burnt out or bored eventually.
Let me introduce you to the concept of contradiction. Which is kinda what your post is.
It took 10 posts for someone to notice this! 
I mentioned it a couple of days ago somewhere else.
I don’t normally watch videos from posts that don’t summarise them, but Soul usually talks good sense. And he does here too.
He outlines a path for world content people to continue to have something to stay for. Fair enough. We could discuss lots about whether that’s the best path, or just how much extra progression, or in what form, but his idea seems fine to me.
But the unspoken fact he omits is that it’s not only casuals who have completed their progression; it’s everybody.
Which means a drought is a-comin’.
I am not on board with the rest of your opinion though.
There were NO “moments of wonder and surprise” in Legion or BfA either.
There were MANY moments of disappointment when the roulette wheel rolled a 00. Almost every drop was an unsatisfying drop, because it didn’t whatever-forge, or didn’t corrupt, or didn’t have the right corruption.
I’ll take the supermarket every time.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned
Too much loot and people complain, tone it down a bit and a different set of people complain. It is a dichotomy that Blizzard are never going to win and in this, as in a lot of other areas, I wish they would actually stop “listening to the community” and develop the game they want to develop.
It is at the end of the day an RPG so you need to get better gear in order to defeat harder content but I personally think that the power of the gear should be determined by the content that you are participating in. That includes some way of separating PvP and PvE gear however we all know that whatever form Blizzard come up with for that people are going to complain (look at the whole PvP template fiasco where suddenly gear didn’t matter and players were up in arms over it).
Well, ya don’t need better gear if you’re not participating in big 3. Sure, anima could be used for smth else, but better gear?
Good points GraInne. They basically made it so that everyone would have normal raid gear ilvl at the end of the covenant story and for around 80% (estimating here) of the player base that effectively meant the end of gear progression.
So either they drastically overestimated the attraction of cosmetics, or they thought that players would gravitate towards higher challenges. I contend the former.
I watched it, I like his ideas, except for increasing item level of world quest gear to 207. Better if his forge gives more bonus to primary stat and stamina when in trivial content, but cap the gear item level at 200 tops. The reason is that gear itemlevel is actually used the same in all content right now.
Exactly this.
I have every tier set in at least one difficulty - whichever one I liked the look of - for Mage and Paladin up to somewhere in Legion. Despite that, I haven’t changed my mage mog since Mists or my Paladin since Legion.
I started collecting pets back in Mists. I battle them as well, and I kept collecting devotedly until late Legion. I still sorta do. But I have twelve-hundred-and-something different species now, and I needed spreadsheets to keep track back when I had just six-hundred-ish. When someone mentions a new pet, I often don’t even know whether I have it. I can’t keep track. I’ve lost interest.
I have three-hundred-ish mounts. I never was a mount collector. I use only a handful across all my alts. If there was a new one I liked, I’d bestir myself to get it, but there isn’t.
I seriously don’t care about Toys. The only half-good ones have ridiculous usage restrictions.
So what cosmetics can they tempt me with?
And it’s a fine preference. But it’s also less immersive. Part of why the beginning of vanilla (and beta) was so good is that we were noobs. We didn’t have as much info as we do now about the game. When we killed a mob, we didn’t know what it would drop for example.
Having that kind of information made wow into a different game.
Before that, we didn’t care that much about loot, because we didn’t know what to expect exactly.
Now, we know the loot tables of the raid bosses and we know they drop 4 items for 20 players. So, of course, when the average player completes a raid, he expects to get some loot. When that doesn’t happen, or when the loot he obtained isn’t what he was after, he’s disappointed.
Disappointed, because, the supermarket was out of stock.
When you don’t know, you can enjoy the ride. And when something unexpected drops, you’re happy.
In fact, I think if blizzard came up with some kind of procedurally generated items, it would make a very interesting experience. But, of course, generated items would need to be more interesting than simple stat sticks.