My only guess is that they keep doubling down on appealing to the high end to the exclusion of the majority of the playerbase. They are also trying to appease mythic raiders so that M+ doesn’t provide better gear for less effort.
It’s an arms race between designing the game for 2 of the tiniest minorities of players in the game, the highest end PvE player, which only harms the regular players by making the high end inaccessible, and thus making the gearing shorter because BiS is unachievable.
i loved leveling and playing wrath fresh classic. but after clearing naxx 25 twice and getting most gear i wanted, i lost all interest in it and havent logged on since.
i dont really see how its more rewarding ? after getting okayish gear, all you do is log on for naxx 25 and off?
Exactly why I’d make it so you buy your gear yourself.
That is, you’d get emblems from your boss kills - no loot drops at all - and earn enough to get 2 or 3 items from a full clear each week. Vault could stay if they so like, but you could target your upgrades.
Yes I know, I can only hope as fun’s not allowed. 
sarcasm isnt tolerated here, right?
Nope. I like RNG.
Sounds to me you’re just impatient and entitled tbh.
I would kill for a +3 ilvl upgrade on a weekly basis. Because right now for world content it’s usually zero - with a very, very, very small chance of getting something.
You’re looking at it the wrong way imo. In wrath Ulduar just released so all gear from phase one is free, not to mention drops in greater quantities on 25m and now also from 5-mans (change from back then). While in DF the season is relatively ‘new’. We’re no where close to the next tier and a lot of people are still gearing.
You got up to +15? That’s good so you know for sure you’ll have a very good item waiting for you on Wednesay. And Ilvl 380 is not bad?? HC average ilvl is 405 so thats barely below that if you count your m+ item you’ll get weekly. Not to mention the creation catalyst that gives you 5(!) free 385+ items on slots that you still have low gear on.
So no I kinda disagree with you there, comparing gear from a previous tier in one game to a new tier is like apples and oranges.
I want to disagree because I think WoTLK is not that good an expansion by todays standards.
But your point is definitely valid. Gearing in Wrath was really fun. I too wish Tokens to come back.
And since Dragonflight introduced Need and Greed again I dont even do LFR anymore. There is no intetersting Gearing in WoW at the moment.
They’ve done that in PvP. You can buy a Conquest piece almost every week and it goes straight to 424 in PvP. It’s also quite easy to hit the cap, so no FOMO and you can play just for fun.
No depletes, no leavers ruining it for the entire group, try again if you lose, fast queues, usually something funny happens.
But surely the sun will set on this great time and Blizz will change it back.
Agree.
I’m a returning player. Played Shadowlands for 3 months and my last play was in Mop.
I am allready considering not renewing my sub as it does not feel rewarding to play. To much time investment for ‘luck’ or a vault drop.
Atm gearing is very slow and painfull unless you are lucky, but i am the latter.
I am keeping tabs and with no exaggeration, this is what i got in basicly 1n half months of playing.
-38 normal boss kills : 3 items
-28(will be 31 tonight) Heroic kills: 1 item won of all rolls (2 offspec items that noone rolled for. tank shield so it doesnt count)
-6 vault items
-3 professions/craft items. thank god i picked that up. (two swapped with dungeon gear curently)
-3 rep items
I feel like i am wasting time doing raids, i get 0 loot most of the time and its so time consuming. I need a valor vendor or some other method.
Atm Raid is just for vault loot, and thats not a great incentive.
Atm dungeons feel more rewarding but im just not that big of a M+ fan.
But dungeons =more class mix, less ppl to compete.
Yeah, just feels like a waste a time and i feel guilty after every raid. ‘more days wasted with 0 rewards except an increasing gold repair bill and supplies lost’.
All this effort and just 400ilvl. Even tho i play from the start.
Other blokes are allready 410+ in your average HC group.
oh please. Wrath is dead, get over it. They even had to bait people into playing that scuffed version of classic with a buff lol.
Thats why its more rewarding and satisfying.
Thats the way for keep most player happy.
There are tons of sites that either use raider io/wow logs or other metrics to measure the population.
Atm Wotlk Classic servers are sitting at 220k average daily Pop. With 1mil+ subbed monthly.
Down from 350k on launch. Not dead whatsoever. Some servers are more dead than others. Seen as low as 2k to 14k to 20k. My server is full.
And Retail is sitting at about 800k daily pop. with idk how many mills subscribed.
so about 25% of the retail playerbase plays wotlk, wich isn’t bad.
But this is off-topic :D.
Whats the point of getting BIS in few days in PVE? I mean there is no charakter progression afterwards. Imo Wrath was such a boring expansion for PVE. Raids were easy, Dungeons were super easy, no world content.
Dont get me wrong I think you have a good point that gearing right now is just RNG and this sucks if you are out of luck. But I think going from one extreme to the other is also pretty bad. Can we have a middleground maybe?
Is it? patch comes out and everyone clears all the content withing 1 day and now they are out of content? How is that a good rewarding system?
I don’t give much for made up numbers. I have seen people use these datasets before, and there are way to many issues with them.
Not to mention that it can be used biasily.
Numbers support your views = 100% legit. Totally believable.
Numbers contradicts your views = 100% false because [insert the current popular excuse here]
Only valid from a certain perspective.
I did not enjoy gearing in wotlk at all. Because there was virtually nothing for a player like myself.
Yeah Dragonflight is the most commercial exp so far and woltk was still “just a game” that being said df is also fun 
But some direction change would be nice like make all previous raids playable on max level with a proper challenge and drops but blizzard owners are afraid that then no1 will buy next exp and so on what is silly but maybe someday they Will get Back to roots and make a game first and commercial sh it will follow
Just use +2 gear then ^^
What world content do you have now? Bi-weekly world quests that are dragon races (the only good ones), photography quests (yuck), PVP quests that force you into war mode or don’t exist as content otherwise, 1 WB a week that never drops anything (these literally don’t work without bonus roll tokens) and ok climbing quests when they aren’t bugged with missing stones. All of these have useless rewards as soon as you go over 370 ilvl, and give pathetic amounts of reputation ensuring that the grind lasts for months.
I won’t argue that there is more “stuff” to do on retail, but I do think that most of that stuff is useless and boring. It’s mind-boggling how Legion had the best iteration of world quests as the expansion that introduced them, as they were plentiful, short, and very relevant because of AP. Legion with the shard-hopping addon was the best world content WoW has ever had.
We can and we did, it’s called MoP. That was old school Blizzard perfecting their design ideology of a game with random rewards that also respected your time through bad luck protection, while still offering ok non-instanced content. MoP had horrible dungeons but that’s where Cata excelled, a combination of those expansions would be peak WoW imo.
All my playtime was before Ulduar dropped, I capped late into the season but still about a month ago, so this was all done before Naxx started dropping more loot and before titan rune dungeons.
You never know that, and my very first great vault had 2 completely useless items because one was the pants that I didn’t need since I got HC pants from the time walking quest, and the other was a sidegrade wrist. That’s what RNG does and why the game feels fundamentally unrewarding.
You spent time doing content, and then you’re MAYBE rewarded on Wednesday. Offloading gearing to the vault rather than the content itself is the worst thing they have done in the last 3-4 years by a mile because it stuck and it’s not going anywhere.