Those extra 25 stats? Reward for effort. If you cannot put that effort for miniscule 25 stat reward, “it’s not for you”. If you _think_ you can, but burn out fast, again, “it’s not for you”.

275 stat food/feast is still too much effort? Drop down to 250 (after all, “it’s just 25 stats” step repeated), and each food becomes one single ingredient without any tokens required. Even that too much? 200 secondary stat food drop everywhere, and can be done with ingredients you buy from vendor.

Theme of expansion is “never run out of things to do”. And yes, it means that if you try to do them all it pushes you to the point where you say “i cannot do this”. Or “I don’t have time for this”. Which is perfectly fine!

It’s like trying to eat “all you can eat” buffet. You cannot eat it all, by design. “Working as intended”.

Long-term? You’ll get all cooking maxed in a month. You’ll have 16 spot farm. Your love for fishing will become moneymaker that will cover things you don’t like to do with gold – and not lowering requirements will mean it will be bought all the way through expansion. You’ll find spots with infinite respawns for meat farming – there is at least one for turtle meat around Pools of Purity, for example, where you literally don’t move and kill them as fast as you can loot them. Cooking tokens will pile up, or maybe you’ll dedicate one free evening to farming spree (since there are things you can buy with 50 tokens).

So I started the 90 grind with all of that in mind ahead of time. I moved all my alts to Halfhill, and decided on Golden Lotus for the LW and eventual AC and ShP reps, Tillers for food, and Cloud Serpent for ME, not to mention the overall bonus it gave of helping me level fishing and archeology for those pesky achievements. In addition, I group up for dailies as much as possible. Yes I can easily solo just about anything in my path, but it goes much much much faster and far less stressful when doing things with 2, 3, 4 people. Take the first set of Golden Lotus dailies for example. 4-5 different objectives 2 that usually directly relate, Group of 3 people, each takes a quest and does it. You’re done in 5 minutes.

My big point with all of that is people tend to forget this is a MULTI-player game and big tasks are far easier when done with multiple people. If you’re choosing to do them alone, then bite off smaller chunks. In the end you’ll be far less stressed and far more happy.

I think using this approach has helped tons. I don’t feel overworked, I feel like I can skip a day and not be a totally bad raider, and I can still do all the other things like running dungeons or scenarios or pvp if I choose to.

Enjoy your gaming =)

On the plus side, I’ve been proven yet again that my guild is great. The officers understand that some people simply don’t have time to do all this, so they aren’t requiring people to bust their asses on dailies. Having to do ALL THE DAILIES to get a piece that will probably get replaced in 2 raids is silly in my opinion. Worth it for people who don’t raid regularly, but a waste of time for progression raiders.

The 2nd week I had a day off from dailies once I was valor capped, This week I continued on with august celestials and Shado pan, mainly because of enchanting patterns. The plan was to get rep to revered in everything and then just do the grind to exalted while I am not valor capped. Having said since i can’t seem to roll win a roll on a healing mace for nuts and their is also an epic ring from Exalted klaxxi I have more then once regretted not continuing with that.

I do like that doing a daily gives you a few valor points. I suppose the fact that I’m not raiding gives me more time to do random stuff, but I’ve easily capped valor every week without it being a chore. Now that dailies are getting a bit stale, I’ve dropped to just doing two factions a day, and it’s not so bad.

Yes cooking is a burden, but in a month the serious raiders who care about the extra 25 of whatever stat will be done with required rep grinds and tending the farm will be the main reason to log on outside of raids.

Since hitting 90 about 4 days after Release I’d been doing:

Klaxxi
Anglers
Golden Lotus
Order of the Cloud Serpents
Tillers

All of those took me about 1.5-2 hours every day. I finally hit Exalted with Cloud Serpents (done!) and then Revered with Klaxxi and Golden Lotus, which…opened up more Dailies.

Shado-Pan
August Celestials

After a few days of Tillers, Klaxxi, Anglers, Golden Lotus, Shado-Pan, August Celestials I finally was broken. I just don’t have the time or energy to spend 2 hours on Dailies. When the expansion was new (the first week) it was still exciting. Now Dailies are just work and I’m sick of working.

Now I’m doing Klaxxi because I want the Scorpion Mount. That’s it. When I’m done with them I’ll consider resuming a different faction.

As for food, its ridiculous. I haven’t even considered farming for 300 stat food. The mats are absurd and despite the fact that I’m inclined to seek every way possible to enhance my personal performance, I’m not even considering 300 stat food. Hell, I don’t even bother with 275 stat food and when the 250 stuff I have left over from leveling runs out, I’m not sure what I’ll do.

The lack of cauldrons is another huge problem. Cauldrons were put in as a “quality of life” improvement. Has the importance of the quality of life diminished in Blizzards’ eyes? The answer is apparently yes.

Too much grinding in this expansion. Grind for rep. Grind for Valor. Grind for food. Grind for gear. Grind for Motes of Harmony. Grind, grind, grind.

I feel like I have to “sacrifice” my raid preparation (grinding) in order to do Challenge Modes or PvP. Since when should actually playing the game be something I have to consider _not_ doing so I can “work”?

But then I clicked the link and read this and it resonated quite a bit with me. I also made the decision to stop raiding recently and it was for these very reasons and then some.

I felt like all of Blizzard’s talk of making raiding more accessible was complete hogwash. I can’t imagine that a “casual” player or someone who has a history of being more casual, who may be playing on a limited schedule, or have a limited attention span is going to want to do all of these things to be able to raid more effectively – much less someone who has a history of being a bit more serious or “hardcore.”

I felt like I was having to jump through more hoops to prove that I was serious about raiding or that I wanted it bad enough and it seemed like a slap in the face to me. My priest just hit level 90 last week and I still don’t even know what the exact “process” is for someone who just dinged to get raid ready.

It’s incredibly vague, and overwhelming, and conflicting, and completely unnecessary. It upsets me because I feel like I would still be raiding if it weren’t for this. I feel like this, all of this, drove me away and I’ll be honest, I’m quite bitter about it. It didn’t have to be handled like this and I will never understand why it was. All the blue posts, all the Tweets from Ghostcrawler himself will never help me understand why they took raiding and the preparation to raid in this direction.