Ugh apparently you have to do Nighthold to finish the Balance of Power chain and get the artifact appearance. I'm now mad about this all over again. Not only do I have to do a pathetically easy (comparative to my group's gear level) and totally worthless gear wise Normal mode raid for like 5 weeks to get the stupid quest items, (my group doesn't raid, we just do Mythic+) but now I am gated until Nighthold, which I also have to do probably for multiple weeks. God damn blizzard, if you made this stupid appearance gated behind Mythic raids only I would understand, but Normal? And not LFR? Oh yea not to mention doing a +15 keystone isn't considered hard enough to unlock the appearance, you need to do a bunch of normal mode raid bosses! Because that is way harder than a mythic +15...
But obviously the PvP appearance isn't gated behind the organized version of the activity, nope. You can random queue and get that one no problem. Only for the PvE one are you forced to do the organized version of the activity...
I know it is only cosmetic and I shouldn't be that bitter, but my god I am bored of running normal EN for this stupid quest, as are my friends that I do Mythic+ with, but Neon Bear is, in my opinion, one of the best looking skins in the game. I just wish blizzard would realize that this is a pretty foolish way to gate things, and that something like doing a Mythic +15 should qualify you for the appearance even if you haven't slogged through normal raids for 5-10 weeks. Or at least let me do it in LFR so I can do it slowly solo 3 or so bosses a week, instead of wasting my friends time doing content that doesn't benefit us for a cosmetic reward that only I really want, or screwing over an entire group if I choose to leave a Normal run early because of burn out.
Oh well, enough ranting, time to go back to ignoring the existence of that skin like before. Stone bear forever I guess...