that may be so Marc but the proving grounds are basically set up for players with good AoE capabilities, there are some classes that do not have that much in the way of AoE, Blizzard needs to fix it to where the proving grounds will adjust to the specific class doing them

Blizzards biggest mistake was in gutting character progression and world immersion in favor of gear progression and content progression. Both of which are much less gratifying for the average RPG player. Hence the reason you see spikes in subscriptions with new expansions and then steady declines after.

Well the flying nerf was meant for casual players, so instead of flying around during dailies or whatever the fuck those people do, they run on the ground and end up exploring. People complained there wasn’t enough in the game, so they put stuff in the game but HAVE to limit us to the ground so we don’t fly over it. Also the silver provings is so you don’t get people who don’t know how to play the game in heroics. If you can’t do silver provings you shouldn’t be in heroics. I mean thats a given.

Also the majority of players are either raiders/pvpers, and blizzard is smart to focus on keeping them happy, cause those are the people who stay. No matter what casuals will never stay because its impossible to make long lasting progressive content for them.

I think it’s a combination of the flying, nerf’s, gating of content (proving grounds silver achieve before accessing heroic content), for example that are frustrating people. The game is over 10 years old and players that started the game back then are now less hardcore and lack the time it takes to put into it. The game isn’t near as fun or exciting anymore but boring. Guilds members are more focused on daily content than progressing.

I feel like you just explained the large loss of people when you said “it was designed for the more experienced, skilled PVE players.” I think most people don’t really want to do high level raiding for one reason or another. I went through Highmaul heroic and just didn’t care to keep going when Blackrock hit. I’d rather have simpler, more diverse things to do besides kill the big mob that repeatedly kills the raid group until we get the hang of it… snoozefest after awhile.