One half of the forums is crying that the raid is dead on arrival.
The other half is crying that you have to enter the raid to obtain your tier set for the first 6 weeks.
And then both sides say: Why doesn’t Blizzard listen to the forums!?
Gee I wonder why.
Six weeks isn’t that bad, the system is intended as a catch up mechanic and mythic+ players will probably still have weekly chances at tier gear thru the vault. It is meant as a bad luck mechanic, not getting a piece in the first week isn’t really “bad luck”.
But in the weeks after that it’s bad luck. Even extreme bad luck to an extent and then you still don’t have the chance to craft your items after a few weeks.
The antiquated ‘Raid or Die’ philosophy will continue to bleed subs. Carrot on a stick rewards don’t work if the stick is so long you can’t see the carrot. There’s no reason that the catalyst can’t be implemented week 1 or 2 besides the fear that if everyone gets their gear in a month they’ll quit playing… when if it takes too long to gear up they’ll also quit too.
I get the impression it’s fueled by two sub groups who see the grass is greener. The casual people who want to raid but getting 20 geared, (relatively) skilled people for mythic is harder than the actual raid itself. Seeing everyone and their brother doing m+ makes it feel like m+ “stole” these potential raiders from them. The other side are people who wish they could only do m+ but as classes and content are balanced around having all the special gear from raids are at a permanent disadvantage. Both people see the “main” group of hardcore players who farm m+ the first couple weeks for the starter gear, outpacing raid only players, then get the gavels/raid trinkets/extra ilvl to outscale the m+ players.
I think the true elephant in the room is not the quantity of gear from m+, but rather how enormously powerful many pieces of raid gear are. Except for the, what, two or three meta trinkets from dungeons generally the “special” pieces of raid gear make a huge gap. Going back to BFA, trying to be an agility DPS without two mythic slappers meant you were handicapping yourself. Playing a strength user without a mythic gavel has a similar outcome. And now this issue is emaciated by apparently every boss in the new raid having special, unique gear. Presumably not quite so overpowered as the gavel, but it’s a frame of reference.
For what it’s worth, I do think the truly unlimited loot from mythic+ is rather unhealthy. I think in a perfect situation there’d be some finite amount of weekly “tokens” to spend to get loot just as strong as the raid loot, and tier is simply an available drop option. Or have the special raid gear powers only be active in the raid, but this feels like an uglier alternative.
Honestly the larger issue of mythic raiding is how it still requires 20 people in the group which kills participation more than anything else, but that’s an issue for its own thread.
Lets assume that they feel that people who raid should get the tier bonuses first since thats where it drops from. As someone who raids every week I still find 6 weeks to be to long unless they up the drop rate of these pieces considerably. Honestly it should be a 4 week wait. 3 weeks personally I think would be a happy medium so that people arent getting tier shoulders before even reaching a boss that drops them.
Hey I am all for them tweaking things for non raiders, provided these tweaks come with updating the “antiquated” raid loot system.
There’s a lot of stuff that could be assessed and updated to add to player quality of life. Bringing back group loot and random titan-forging, keeping mythic raid ID lockouts, delaying catalyst until January all feel unfun. Maybe it’s a symptom of getting older but the traditional gear treadmill and delayed gearing from raiding feels bad. Dinars, account wide flux and creation catalyst for Season 4 was a step in the right direction since everyone could get what they wanted in about 4-5 weeks and then keep playing to upgrade gear to Mythic if they wanted, which was great!
Yeah, there was totally no story behind Necrotic Wake… Or DoS… Or any of the other dungeons released in SL 
What an absolutely backward way of addressing the issues.
OK, I get it - so folks will need to wait 6 weeks unless you raid, creating a “raid or die” culture for Mythic+ or PvP for like the first half of 10.0.
I don’t love this.
1.) Making PvPers raid has never been popular. If you gotta go this route, please disable the tier set bonuses in PvP until you open the creation catalyst at very least.
2.) If SL is any indicator, all the raids are going to suck for the first 6 weeks since they don’t bother balancing around players anymore. All they care about is World First, so not only are we forced to do it, but we’re gonna be wiping on Normal for like 40 pulls on the second boss because they forgot to set one of his abilities to scale down from Mythic (like the first week of CN).
I can see Blizzard is now slowly unveiling all of the bad ideas they have on Fridays.
They also don’t have a lockout. I’m not sure why the raid lockout still exists in current WoW.
The Catalyst is a pretty cool tool and I’m not sure why they would have a 6 week delay instead of just making raid drops have a higher quantity.
because just nerfing mythic to easiest difficulty isn’t fun. Alternatively, tune mythic even harder but that makes it less accessible.
There needs to be a balance for things, a reason to do every activity, but no single activity overrules the other so much so that they become obsolete. M+ is spammable but very RNG heavy, raiding is 100% guaranteed loot with time-limited tier sets and once per week lock out, and rated PVP is…something? I don’t do pvp.
Seems like something that’s avoided if you just remove the Mythic gear and tune bosses to a set ilvl instead. Have Mythic tier be cosmetic like the elite PvP sets and tied to boss kills.
Idk though, Mythic raiding isn’t my lane.
Some of the story has always run through dungeon content but the main storylines always run through the raids, no exceptions to that throughout WoW history.
Which issue, exactly? Raid participation or accelerated gearing for non-raiders? Requiring some content to be raid-only is no different than requiring some content to be PvP-only. I choose not to participate in the latter, but I also don’t cry about it when I can’t get those rewards.
There are multiple camps here complaining about the Catalyst delay. There are those who say it puts them behind on M+ content, which I disagree with but at least the premise is plausible. Then there are those who want raid rewards without having to go into a raid to get them, and I don’t have any sympathy for that. We’re not talking about QoL rewards here, we’re talking about actual character power, and the bar has to be higher for that kind of thing.
Removing gear from the entire game is something that catches my interest. Just have people create template chars and play, like ptr kinda.
Its not a catch up mechanic its a bad luck mechanic actually
Yep. Raiders do M plus because raid drops are so poor that you fall behind quick if you don’t do some mythic plus runs. I’d love to be able to ignore that part of the game completely, but the poor drops make that impossible.
It is actually a bit of both:
If one raids it is a bad luck mechanic
If one does not raid, it can serve more as a catch up as it allows people to get tier gear from other sources, so while it does not catch up ilvl wise, it can power wise.
It’s not that, but rather because the game offers an easy path, people take it.
It’s not that raid drops are poor, but rather people want to get to the end faster. Vanilla → WOD was like that. Raid was the only source of end game gear. Even if M+ were to be added in those times, just raiding for gear would be a functional playstyle.