I think you nailed down an even bigger subject I have been talking about for a while with the I guess difficulty of content as the best way to express it. You don't want an MMORPG a game that is meant in nature to be a social construct to push away players. There are plenty of times that people are forced to choose between playing with their friends and progress. This can be ok to a degree but the level of gap as you put it that is in the current game due to a combination of knowledge, player skill, gear, and addon's weakauras is so vast that in many cases people do not want to play with friends or guildmates because the progress is cut off and they get nothing of value for the time spent.Although the covenants are neat in their own way, they could have used that time to develop content thats for everyone. Then on top of that you have covenant specific quests and areas that are tied up in each covenants anima conductor. But even after that, as @Kaige said, there are still areas that are completely devoid of any purpose. World Quests are even sparingly used in those areas, it just doesnt make a lot of sense to me from a development point of view. We could go on to say "future patches" but that is rarely the case.
Outside of that, the feel of not wanting to group with this person or that person was extremely strong this expansion. Not because I didnt like them, but because if they werent at a certain level of skill, knowledge or gear then there isnt really anything that I can do with them to where I feel like Im getting something out of it too. In the past, I would at least drag people through dungeons in order to gear them up so we could eventually do stuff that I would benefit from. But this expansion, drop rates are so low that its just not worth the time in respect to how slowly they would get gear. WoW Retail has gone a long ways towards separating casuals, average players, and mythic raid players and I doubt they'll ever lessen that gap.
This is where elite shitsniffers like Ion who gobble Method/Limit cock ruin the whole fucking game. The arms race bullshit to make the most annoying jackass faggot content with design to slow down power gamers from consuming too quickly ruins the experience of everyone who isn't a complete sweaty neckbeard faggot spending 80 hours a week online.
MMORPG's are meant to be social, it's good to have challenging/difficult content to a degree once it goes beyond to the point where you have to tell Sandso_01 - "Sorry pal I know you show up every night, have a good attitude, fun to be around, but you can only pull X,Y,Z dps or even worse sorry Sandso_01- The class/spec you choose to play sucks massive horse cock you are going to have to fuck off because you didn't FOTM it" is why this game can't sustain players.
The best way to gear up and make progression in Shadowlands is PvP, while it's nice that vendors made a return and I hope they keep them this should never be the optimal way to gear in this game. Kotick needs to fire this faggots, I bet a retarded chimp could do better at this point.
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