I've been called a freak, but what I loved most about progging CE was the repetitiveness. Tweaking something little by little to the point of perfection was always therapeutic for me. That's ironically what I miss about raiding retail.

Correct. "All thumbs are fingers, but not all fingers are thumbs"

I fully get cata isn't gonna be as hard. I raided CE through BFA, so I'm familiar with mythics difficulty. I was just asking if they've toned down the grinds that end up being the real time sinks. Before I dive head first into cata, I'm tryna see if retail might end up being about the same commitment, in which case, retail would be much more engaging

My guild used to hover around world rank 700ish. Nothing crazy. Def not looking to go for HoF with my irl commitments

Oh, ya I absolutely get that guilds will vary in time raiding depending on a lot of factors. I just got burned out bc of having busy work that seemed to take up more time than actual raiding. Busy work being tied to my raid performance was bullshit, lol. Torghast actually ended up bouncing me off WoW all together when SL came out. There's try hard guilds that spend more time raiding that don't even touch mythic (which is weird af).

I'm used to hanging around world rank 700ish. That part I'm familiar with. 9ish hours per week and probably 3 months to get CE. I guess I was more asking about all the bullshit necessary to keep up with the rep grinds and shit. Coming home daily and having 1.5 hours of world quests all in total and then some islands was the slog.