With all the essences, cape ranks and corruptions, it’s impossible to catch-up to any meaningful level of play coming back from a break since 8.0. It feels like running really late to a meeting, getting stuck in traffic on your way there, you try to speed but get pulled over and fined (trying to berzerk visions at 370ilv to catchup cape, only to die from a missed/premature interrupt), tripping on stairs while trying to make it to the meeting, only to have the door shut before your face as you’re about to get there, as all the grind you’d have to do would be nullified by Shadowland pre-patch/release by the time you’re able to get there even if you played for hours every day. There is really no reason to come back to the game at this point. It feels like a social experiment on how miserable you can make the returning player experience. Then, I decided that instead of even aspiring to get anything going on for end-game content, I’d rather just focus on catching up all my alts to max level again before Shadowlands, but man, is the leveling experience hell for someone with alts. It’s the same story over and over again on repeat, regardless of class or race. The same stories, the same places, the same forced campaing you have to drag yourself through over and over again. I fully understand why Freehold is so crowded and why every realms tradechats are just about boost selling. /rant
I don’t understand , you skipped pretty much entire expansion and now complain that you struggle to catch - up ?
tbh, if it was easy to jump into a Expansion u’ve never played get caught up instantly and just progress on the same bar as Players who’ve put 2 years of work into their Characters…
would there be a point playing the expansion at all? 
While I disagree with OP’s distinction between meaningful content and not meaningful content, one could criticize the developers’ similar focus that only increased throughout the years.
Hopefully they changed and Shadowlands will reflect that. 
Whats meaningful content in your eyes. I quit in 8.1 and after coming back im doing +12 keys and heroic raid.
Also dont try to do visions with 370 your just wasting keys. It takes about a day or 2 of work to get to 410 gear easily
Season is still active , there will be “shadowlands catch-up” during pre-patch.
If i remember correctly Dark Shore world quests were rewarding Antorus HC gear,we can assume similar system will exist again.
I recommend waiting for Shadowlands pre-patch. Yes it’s annoying, and it’s pretty pointless to gear right now, unless you’re wanting to raid (which I doubt a lot of guilds are doing a lot of since majority have cleared what difficulty they want).
Corruptions are getting disabled in pre-patch, and there’ll be catch-up gear.
That’s exactly what I meant, catching up to where the people are who’ve spent the whole time playing takes about as much time as they’ve spent playing, which is ludacris considering the systems you’ve been working to progress will be removed by the time anyone trying to catch-up now would even reach the halfway mark, or even a quarter of the way to be realistic. BfAs systems are just insanely grindy and just require you to come back for your weekly treadmills week after week. In Legion you could just max out your artifact from your class hall + buy gear pieces from Vindicaar by this time into the expansion and be good to go for Antorus and PvP. Now you have a cloak to grind, essences to get and even then it’s a stretch. PvP is a no-go since no amount of gameplay will beat corruptions, which it again takes months to get, and by the time you get anything even half-decent, the pre-patch will be about to drop removing them anyway.
The corruption system is one of the biggest mistakes they ever made.
While tforging is another, it comes nowhere close to the atrocity they replaced it with.
And here I am, someone who thought it could actually be fun at the start of the patch. Boy was I wrong.
I’m in a similar situation as OP, I quit a few weeks before the release of 8.1, came back a bit over a month ago. I’m a solo player, currently ilvl 452 and I wanna try corrupted powers but I have to farm a ton of echoes to do that, I wanna do visions but I have to farm coalescing visions to do that, I wanna try essences but some of them are locked behind PVP which I suck at and can’t find anybody who accepts to play with me, etc.
People who didn’t quit obviously have all of these things unlocked so why not reduce the price for visions and corruption powers for people trying to catch up? Let us have some fun with corruption while we still can.
Just like everyone else had,and still have to do !
what are you returning players some special protected polar bears or what?
As someone that joined BFA several weeks into 8.3 without playing any BFA before I have to admit the experience is pretty terrible.
After I hit 120 I wanted to start gearing up. I knew there was a questline for a legendary cloak and conveniently the launcher even had a link to a guide at that time. So I went to follow the guide, but turns out I can’t accept the quest I need to. After some googling I found out that I had to do the Nazjatar storyline first. Buuuuut i couldn’t accept that quest either. After some more googling I found out that I will need to complete the first part of the war campaign first. At this point I was pretty pissed. Not only did I not find proper information on this ingame and had to rely on wowhead comments, I also needed to complete a questline that I vastly outgeared.
Same thing happened later on. My gf (she played all of BFA) asked me to do the heroic warfront with her for the rewards. But again I was lacking the quest for that. Google revealed I had to complete the Darkshore questline first. Again content that I vastly outgeared at that point so it kinda felt like questing in a zone 10 levels below me.
While all these things don’t matter to someone that played these incrementally as they came out, they feel pretty bad, if you join late into the expansion. Why am I not able to skip the war campaign? If I cared for the story I could have done it optionally. And why is none of this properly explained in game? Is it just expected that players complete the whole story before joining any other content like mythic+ or raids? I personally play wow for the gameplay and not so much for the story, so making me sit through hours of story quests just feels awful.
TL;DR: Maybe remove some of the requirements to unlock later content for players that join later in an expansion or atleast provide proper information what has to be done to unlock some of the later content.
The whole argument that late comers shouldn’t be able to get caught up with other folks who “earned” their power by never quitting, really doesn’t hold water.
“Don’t you dare quit because you’ll fall behind!” is FOMO-driven game design with some sunk cost thrown in there to make sure you are “incentivized” to stay subscribed.
Call me old fashioned, but I expect a game that I have paid for 3 separate times (game+expansion+sub fee) to be fun right away. Not two months of non-stop play from now.
When I started in Legion (close to 7.3.5 release), I got my artifact weapons maxed out in no time. I had legendaries in no time.
Yes, when the expansion is about to end, we expect to not have to play through 3 patches just to be able to play end-game and play waste so much time catching up.
I don’t know how much it was scaling to max ilvl wise, but it seems that it was higher than heroic: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/91iav2/gearup_event_80/. My memory isn’t very good, so I could be off after the level squish for heroic.
So you’re saying that someone who is starting WoW right now, has to play for 15 years before they can play Shadowlands? Because otherwise they don’t have to do what the veterans have had to do, and that’s unfair!
This.
Even catching up with mains is a pain, and yes, I’ve had 3 different mains in 8.3. Takes roughly 1~2 months to catch up with the cloak alone, depending on how much you can get boosted. At least there are better catch up mechanics at this point… (took them only 6 months)
Comparing old expansions to ACTIVE SEASON is beyond silly.
Comparing INACTIVE SEASONS with an ACTIVE SEASON is beyond silly.
How is corruption /vision system not part of active season ?
Essences received several nerfs for obtainment requirements.
World quest / normal / hc dungeons reward higher ilvl than before .
How many catch up system has to be implemented for polar bears to stop crying ?
nah, it doesn’t.
you don’t have to step into uldir at all
you don’t have to step into dazar’alor at all
or eternal palace except for one bis trinket
it’s like that:
hit 120
queue timewalks for very easy 425 ilvl gear
fill out rest with 400 ilvl boes
start doing some world quests, they should drop decent gear with that equipment - fill out any ilvl 289 crap you still have
do all the intro crap - essence quest, cloak quest
this is the easy part. it takes rather short time to get this off the book.
now comes the time-gated part:
-grind reputations for rank 2 and 3 essences
-grind quests in Uldum and Vale to buy vision currency
-repeatdly run visions for clk upgrades
gear using M+, by far the most efficient system. +7 drops 450 ilvl loot and you don’t need any rating for such low keys
i came back in March and was caught up to standard by mid-april. kept running HVs at 4 and 5 masks for good gear, had enough titanic residue to purchase 475 ilvl tokes for all 3 slots (weekly 10, then weekly 12-13 and finally weekly 15)
It sucks for PVP because to actually be decent in there you have to do the entire PVE grind, reach 470-475 ilvl with good corruptions. Otherwise you’ll just get melted even at lowly 1200 rating matches. There is no good PVP gearing system, basic conquest bar grind only awards 445 ilvl pieces which are pretty useless (you get that from no-mask visions, weekly assaults, world bosses etc - easiest content this game has)
On the top right of your map you will always be guided towards the next main story quest that you need to do in order to advance.
I know but that is assuming I want to do all the story. But I want to avoid doing as much of the story quests as possible, since I don’t care about it.
Yes it points me to the next quest. But it is not clear what quests I have to do to unlock the content I want to do.