I am not that good

The World of Warcraft Shadowlands expansion is doing very well.  Blizzard has confirmed that subscriptions are higher now than they have been in many years, and the general reception for the expansion has been positive compared to other expansions.  The numbers bear this out too - Normal and Heroic raiding participation is way up, and vastly more guilds are killing bosses now than were doing so in the last couple expansions.  It isn't just raiding though, as participation in all endgame content has gone way up in terms of raw numbers.

There is one place where the numbers are lower though, and that is the peak of raiding challenge, Mythic difficulty.  Numbers are down compared to last expansion, and I am confident they will get much worse as time goes on.

The reason for this is the lack of a power grind in Shadowlands.  In previous xpacs people got more powerful just by playing a lot and this let them overcome challenges by virtue of slow power inflation.  Shadowlands has little in the way of power inflation compared to earlier times, and this means that guilds are struggling to make the numbers checks in Mythic raiding.  I talked about this earlier when the first guilds were killing Mythic bosses, and now the numbers have borne out my projections.  The top guilds are still able to clear raids in a couple weeks just like before, but middling guilds like mine are struggling.  We are used to slow power inflation letting us beat content eventually, but with no more power inflation on the horizon we are going to have huge problems beating the harder bosses.

Currently we have downed 4 Mythic bosses.  We will get more so long as we keep at it, but the struggle is going to be real.  It is especially difficult because these folks are used to a progression pattern where they beat all the stuff, just not that quickly.  Perfectly fine for people who raid 6 hours a week and are fairly relaxed about it.  A shift into being a guild that doesn't beat all the stuff will be tough to swallow, even if it is due to larger trends that have little to do with how we play.  Just because other guilds are having the same struggles doesn't mean we are going to be happy about this.

I like the raiding I am doing, and I intend to keep blasting away at it.  If we don't kill all the stuff I am totally okay with that.  I like practicing and playing on challenging content and eventually getting some kills, but I am not especially hung up on any particular goal.  This isn't a big problem for me personally.

Still, I don't quite know how to feel about it.  Not having the pressure to constantly grind away to get those incremental benefits is a positive, but I actually love the overall system of gradual improvements in numbers combining with gradual improvements in execution leading to victories.  I am glad to not have that feelings that I have to play all the time doing stuff that is boring... but getting brick walled with no way to progress out of it is not great.

The biggest advantage to gradual power inflation is the social flexibility it grants you.  If you get stopped by a boss you can't quite do enough damage to beat, you can either boot weaker players from your group to get past it, or you can wait until inflation gets you over the hump.  Being able to keep playing with people who are fun to play with but who aren't quite there in terms of numbers is great.  In the scenario where we stop progressing in terms of numbers we may well end up in a spot where we either have to accept that we can no longer accomplish new goals or be super mercenary about who plays with us.  

Both of those options suck.  I don't want to boot good people over 5% performance.  I also don't want to just stop having new things to do.

This isn't some theoretical thing either.  Right now I have item level 222.  I am going to hit a hard cap at 226, and likely won't quite make it there.  That is, I can expect to do 5% more damage from gear eventually.  There is nothing else that will improve my abilities.  If we are 6% off from killing a boss, that boss isn't going to die.  We have finished all the grinds the game has offered us, and I don't think it is enough.

I don't want another infinite grind where I am offered the chance to play 14 hours a day slowly getting a number bigger.  Yuck.  I just want a thing I can do every week to get myself something quite small.  Just 1% more output would be plenty, since that means by the time new content arrives I will be doing 12% more than I am right now, which should be sufficient to beat the entire raid.

People like slowly getting to their goals.  They like seeing new things, and constant, gradual progress.  We are happiest not when we get it all at once, nor when we get nothing, but rather when we get a string of victories over time.  Now it just remains for Blizzard to make that happen.