I raided all through Everquest, woke the sleeper. Then moved to wow in 2004 and have played it ever since.
Think about it like Pandora’s box. It opened, and there is no going back now.
I’ve seen how much fun wow could be, without having to raid, and i’ll never go back.
6 weeks, yeah!! That means we will have players playing for 6 weeks before vanishing on week 7…
But seriously though, its not that big of a deal. It just mean if you do M+, focus on the pieces from it for the non tier items when possible. Unless you just got to replace something super low ilvl. But everyone is going to be in the same boat. It will be OK…
Yes, when raiders have had a total of 9 chances at heroic loot, compared to M+ players having infinite chances at heroic loot.
The point I’m getting at is that no 2 systems can be perfectly balanced when one has a lockout on the ability to get any item at all, and the other doesn’t.
The expected values for a guild that full clears heroic, and gets 2 bosses of mythic down in a week are each player gets 2-3 heroic items, and 0-1 mythic items.
Take a player who uses that same time to chain farm +15s, They will probably end up at a higher ilvl over that 1 week period. As they have had as many chances at loot as they ran dungeons, and can expect to get about 2 heroic items every 5 dungeons. Even if we account for an extra item to offset the potential bonus ilvl from the mythic item, you would expect to have better gear than a raid after 15 dungeons, which is easily doable in a week.
Then you know perfectly well that WoW has been a 2-pillar game most of its existence.
Having 3 pillars is fine; the problem is that Blizzard has been incapable of balancing them.
With the realities of lockout vs no lockout, It’s an impossible problem they have given themselves to perfectly balance.
Did you miss where I put (on paper)? in my post
?
Which is why they need to address the lockout disparity. It’s the elephant in the room that they refuse to even talk about.
Zero reason to have lockouts on raids under mythic dif.
I fully expect them to implement some sort of M+ lockout in DF.
Oooh. You think that’s going to be in their “M+ blog” thing?
I’d get popcorn ready, if I wasn’t allergic to it. 
I wouldn’t be surprised if the M+ thing was to get rid of the bonus vault ilvl, and let end of dungeon scale up to mythic end boss at +25 or so, but make it so you only get loot from the 1st 5 unique dungeons you clear in a week in that dungeon bracket.
I figure it’s the elitist jerk in Ion finally getting to do it his way, even though everyone knows it will hemorrhage subs. Because hey why not, Microsoft is buying us out and throwing us on gamepass anyways… so screw it … go for broke. Satya Nadella is gonna can us all anyways.
Mythic + is the issue. Most players hate it.
You know that Ion hasn’t raided in a while, right?
Oh ya, good to know. 
You know, people don’t change much over time. They pretty much have hard encoded themselves by the late 20’s.
Okay. But there’s also the fact that raiding has suffered more and more ever since Ion took over WoW. The notion that Ion is somehow biased towards raiding is silly. (Or, at least, he has a bizarro way of showing it.)
No, M+ is fun. It’s not hated like Torghast.
Willing vs unwilling participation by most. Any form of content will have its detractors.
The directors vision is only one piece. There are shareholders and MAU’s to think about. I’m saying, he doesn’t have that baggage around his shoulders currently, because of the buyout. For the first time he can push his vision, which is and always was raid or die hardcore.
That’s so odd. When players complained in S3 that unlocking the Catalyst happened too late, they even said they would take a closer look at the timing for the next iteration. And now we’re still at 6 weeks? Come on.
Some folks here feel the need to pretend that everyone who doesn’t like this, wants the Catalyst to unlock the first week, but that’s not even what players asked for. ~2-3 weeks would’ve been much better, because it still takes 1 month to get all pieces.
Ion said they’re really happy with making set pieces available to all playstyles, but this statement feels a bit weird when players in M+ and PvP have to wait 2,5 months. That’s ridiculous and seems so disingenuous.
I also wonder what happened to the announcement that professions should be able to transform items into set pieces?
Catalyst should open on week 3 IMO.