One of the biggest World of Warcraft streamers delivers a lengthy response to Blizzard president Mike Ybarra after a callout made during a Twitch stream. Following a jibe from Ybarra that he was unable to clear Heroic and Mythic raids in Blizzard’s landmark MMORPG, WoW streamer Zack, best known as ‘Asmongold,’ responds with a lengthy video explaining why he has lost his love for World of Warcraft raiding.
During a stream from World of Warcraft streamer and Team Liquid co-owner Max ‘Maximum’ Smith, Smith mentions Asmongold’s recent disillusionment with the modern state of raiding in retail WoW. Blizzard president Mike Ybarra (using his online handle ‘Qwik’) posts a comment in response saying, “The problem is he can’t [do] Mythic or Heroic [content] successfully.” While it was likely a light-hearted jibe, Asmongold takes the opportunity to discuss why he struggles to enjoy the current state of the endgame.
“If you don’t play the game at all you do become out of touch,” Asmon begins, “however, I think that if you play it all the time you also become out of touch. If your job is playing the game, you will never understand the average player – because they don’t play the game as a job, and that’s okay.”
The main reason he quit raiding, Asmon says, was because of his stream. “It had nothing to do with the raid; I would have sat there and wiped, day after day, week after week, and it would have been no big deal.” But he says he could see that his stream quality was suffering as a result of the efforts. “My viewers were bored and it was annoying to play.”
He says he would have kept raiding if it weren’t for the stream, but nowadays with limited time there aren’t enough compelling reasons to raid regularly and put up with content that isn’t especially satisfying and will quickly be surpassed. “Why would I waste my time doing that? You’re building a castle on sand that erodes every six months.” Perhaps more damningly, however, Asmon adds, “I also don’t raid because I don’t find it fun.”
Asmongold’s primary concern with raiding is an overabundance of ‘downtime’ where you’re waiting around. This includes runbacks between attempts, a need to buff and rebuff, too many trash mobs, the requirement to have a Warlock to Summon, Mythic raid lockouts preventing you from raiding with more than one group per week, and the absence of cross-realm Mythic raiding on day one of a new raid.
His gripes go further, however. “I don’t like feeling like I have to download a lot of addons,” Asmon explains, “it’s annoying, I don’t want to do it.” There’s been a feeling of this constant ‘arms race’ between creators building addons to help players solve raid mechanics and Blizzard making increasingly complicated mechanics in an attempt to outfox them – which only furthers the need for more intricate addons to solve those in response.
Asmon also remarks that he thinks “20 players is too many for the current difficulty for raids,” which contributes to the already “garbage” visibility that makes it difficult to see many things. On top of this, he bemoans punishing mechanics causing a single mistake to typically result in a wipe – an issue that only serves to exacerbate the downtime from runbacks, rebuffs, and trash mob clears.
Of course, Asmongold is just one voice in the WoW community – albeit one with quite a large audience. But the numbers for completion rates in recent WoW raids don’t lie, and they show a very small percentage of players currently making the commitment to finish them. That’s surely not everything Blizzard hopes for its carefully curated endgame content to achieve.
If you are among those players still trying to clear, you’ll want to take a look through the WoW Dragonflight tier list first to get a grip on the current meta. Whether you’re raiding or not, you’ll definitely want the best WoW addons – as Asmongold notes, you’ll almost certainly need them at some point.