M+ is the best content in WoW IMO
5 up to 10 man raids would be the best but WoW doesn’t really do that.
Because the game is less of an MMO and more of an ARPG these days I find smaller group content is the best and also find that larger groups end up being less fun. I love the idea of raids but in practice it’s never really that fun. Dungeons are just like raids but you don’t have to worry about too many people.
M+ should give the best items in the game at extremely high keys.
I just wanted to point out your hypocrisy and hope that the WoW devs can figure out how to design a game that isn’t tailored around gatekeepers such as yourself, who want value to exist solely in your area.
Cheers.
It’s fine to me. I’d rather have 285 gear somehow obtainable through M+ but if I got my choice between creation catalyst opening the week Mythic opens or 285 M+ loot, I’m going to choose the option that lets the most people have fun, and thats an earlier creation catalyst.
You can easily wipe more than once and time keys even if they key is a 15
I mean, true. I was just speaking to a general sense of “you don’t need to zerg chain pull snapping packs to clear in time”.
I have not read any of the intervening posts here , just the OP .
but …
Add a time limit to any activity and it gets worse , add other people to that and its all the fun of trying to be on time for church when you have to get 7 kids ready and you ready … while he goes out and sits in the car … honking the horn to hurry you up. 
.
I already hate raiding, a dislike I brought with me from eq2… for me a raid was showing up doing everything I was told , the way I was told , only to see all loot go to someone else …and then paying my own armor repair bills out of pocket… net gain …less than nothing.
.
out 4 hours of precious time, and no loot or coin. I am not a fan.
I’m not a fan but if people enjoy it, good for them. I enjoy time-walking stuff though.
And Mythic raiding is on par with Rival in every arena season. What’s your point other than pretending that raiding is the hardest thing to do in this game?
Hate to tell you but raiding is the easiest thing this game has to offer for end game.
Please read the thread.
Raiding gives massive rewards for its lack of difficulty as well. It can easily be argued that raiding is the lowest pillar of difficulty in this game and the only people that disagree are raiders that can’t PvP or M+.
Please this isn’t 2008, no one is amazed at raiders or in awe of their accomplishments.
Clearly you’ve never spoken with my ex.
Semper Fi! 
I don’t tend to do mythic+, though I’ve dabbled a time or two. For the people that have dedicated groups and friends with which to do it, I imagine it’s a lot of fun. It certainly was when I had that. And I expect for some people it’s just not challenging or doesn’t give them anxiety because they don’t take it too personally and/or don’t mind the time spent on it–win or lose.
For me, it’s just very stressful. I take my time with things because I want to learn them and understand them. I want to take detours to pick a flower or eyeball what’s going on in the corners. I might read up on the dungeon, but more often than not, I just want to go in there and see what there is to see–and often die a LOT. And I’m a healer; so, generally if I die, everyone else is likely to die as well.
Part of what I dislike about most of the dungeons and game these days is that there is no ability to just wander around and look at things. People find the most efficient paths to clearing things, and then they don’t want to “waste time” having to clear stuff they don’t need to. I’m not saying this was any better in Vanilla or any time since then, but I do feel like most people don’t want to explore as much any more. They just want to get in, get out, and get their rewards.
Part of why I think I enjoyed Vanilla so much is because it didn’t penalize people for exploring. One of my fondest recollections from that time is when we were trying to time runs for the Baron. I’d never done a Baron run, but we needed to do so for a quest. Luckily, we found someone in general chat looking to run it, and so we grouped up, explaining that we’d never done a timed run before. The person putting it together was kind enough to explain what we needed to do, and we proceeded to promptly mess up everything, have to do it again, and still had a lot of fun with it all–breaks and everything.
Maybe back then, because there wasn’t as much to do, people were more interested in helping others learn; I honestly couldn’t say, but…what I can say is that I got a lot of help and learned a lot because there were those better players interested in just…running dungeons. That’s what they liked and what they wanted to do.
With M+ these days, those people now have a way to challenge themselves that doesn’t require (often) teaching people how to do stuff any more in order to do what they like to do. And I guess maybe that’s great for them, but less so for people like me and others like me who enjoyed being late to the party and still finding people willing to help them explore and learn new things.
As someone posted amusingly above about the RPG where the wizard was just like, “go go go pull all the things!”–M+, to me, just robs all the magic of learning and seeing something new and turning it into a competition to see how fast we can get everything done. In fact, a lot of WoW feels that way to me these days, and I often have to keep reminding myself of that Pandaria quote–“Life is meant to be savored.”
Do I want cool, phat loot? Of course I do. Back in the early days of the game, it didn’t feel so bad if you didn’t have all the cool stuff the raider kids or the PvP kids had. Sure…they’d likely trounce you in a duel, but that was okay. And sometimes, if you were skilled enough, or had a weird enough gear/talent set, you could beat them at their own game. Granted, back then we had to gear around resistances, too–if you wanted to raid.
That said, the player base wasn’t divided as much as it is today; raiders PvP’d, and groups would raid the same content for forever; so, even if you came late the party, there’d be space for you as other people stopped enjoying raiding or wanting to do the same thing ad naseum for weeks on end. That seems to have devolved into “buying a spot” these days, or belonging to a guild or group and meeting whatever criteria they set for being a “raider.”
One of the reasons my old raid team fell apart was because the raid lead hated having to do stuff outside of the raid in order to gear up to do the thing he wanted to do–which was raid. I feel like the game wasn’t really designed for him and for that, though; so, I’m not saying the game should cater to that at all since I think it takes away from the whole RPG aspect that many of us who play the game love.
But I also see people in this thread doing a lot of the same thing–saying that they only play for this one aspect of the game and that THAT is what the game should be about.
Mostly though, the game should be about having fun in a role playing game. Imagine if you were playing a TT RPG and after doing all the quests and stuff, you never got awarded upgrades? To those of you saying “Why do you need gear if you’re not doing X level of content?”–it’s more about the fun of getting something new and possibly an upgrade. It makes doing the “chores” of the game more interesting, and it makes everything you do in the game easier. Likewise, if you want to participate in the group content in the game–pug a raid, or jump into an unrated PvP match, it makes it so you’re not always hurting your team when you join, and might make it so you even win sometimes!
I know there are some purists out there who don’t think overgearing stuff and stomping old content is fun, but for a lot of us, it’s very therapeutic. And also fun. I will say that in BC when we finally managed to get down that damned Fel Reaver, it was absolutely a glorious moment. It might not have been all that hard with a group, but even getting it down with that group was a lot of fun. And when I went back and stomped its face in future expansions, it was still just as cathartic.
Maybe I’m just pining for those old days when bored people would band together to do stupid and/or silly things. We worked at killing that great whale in Wrath and then Cata–not for the rewards, (though we did wonder if it might start a quest or drop something cool), but also because it was just something fun to do in the moment when we had nothing else going on. And I miss those spontaneous moments.
I think things really started to suck when they started rewarding World First things–world first fishing, leveling, raiding, etc. You heard about them before that, but it wasn’t something the game acknowledged as being important. It was just a neat community bragging right, and that was all. I think that’s when the feel of the game really started to change overall, though.
And I’m not saying change is bad; clearly for a lot of you enjoying the game as it is now, it hasn’t been. And I do still enjoy the game, though it’s often weeks or months behind those of you who datamine, do PTR server things, or have the time, breadth, and group of friends to manage the more challenging aspects of the game. And it doesn’t necessarily feel bad, but it also doesn’t feel great, either–especially knowing that I’ll be subbed and playing this game months from now trying to get to the same place many of you are at right now.
A sad and amusing aside: I still do covenant dailies (some of them), and they drop tokens that are only useful if you do M+. If you don’t, they more or less just sit in your resources slot, reminding you that there’s this reward you’re getting for an aspect of the game you don’t do, and likely will never do–rewarded from an aspect of the game that you -do- still do but isn’t going to help you be able to do it better or faster any time soon.
I still don’t know how to feel about Pocopoc and the cipher tree thing. On one hand, it’s kind of neat. On the other, by the time I get around to finishing it, most everyone else will be done with it and have moved on. I am enjoying the weekly campaign quest there, as it means that people come out to ZM–if only to do that. It at least gives people a reason to derp around out there, though there are plenty of threads full of people complaining about how it’s time-gating content, keeping them from getting or understanding the story, and/or forcing them to do content they don’t want to do just to get rewards. It’s like everyone wants to do “group content” but they don’t actually want to do the RPG bits, or want all the RPG bits as fast as they can gobble them down. I mean, you don’t sit down at a TT RPG and expect the GM to cram a month’s worth of content into a 5 hour gaming session–do you? And sure, in a TT (tabletop for those of you wondering) game, you can hand-wave the boring time skips to get to the cool and fun stuff, but I actually kind of like it that the game is stipulating that a WAR against the Jailer is actually taking time in the game to happen.
That said, I also feel like there’s a lot of stuff missing, too–especially from an RPG aspect of the game. There are whole quests that could have been devoted to talking about and finding information about the First Ones. Or better yet, their prophecy which is supposedly about us. And what about all the characters that we’ve met up with in the game–how have their stories been progressing as we’ve healed the Shadowlands? Why aren’t there people still slavishly devoted to Denathrius in Revendreth looking to poke at their new leader? When the sky closes over Azeroth, will that mean that the Winter Queen and Elune will no longer have the ability to have direct contact with one another? Are they still able to communicate through Tyrande? Are they? What about the major lore characters and the horrible things they’ve had to endure in the Shadowlands? Are we going to get to explore more of that? And let’s just talk about the neat musical language and all the musical references in Zereth Mortis–does anyone notice how similar a lot of that is to the Naaru? Why is that? And also, how neat would it have been to “actually” learn the language–rather than just mystically suddenly being able to understand it 'cause we stuck some ciphers in a computer that automagically makes us able to understand it all now?
And I’m still looking for the giant whale and/or Fel-Reaver-esque thing in ZM. Wherever it is, …one day…I will find it, and one day, I will form a group to make it pay–or just make it dead.
So to the OP–no. I don’t do Mythic+, and I really don’t find them enjoyable. I feel as though they’ve fractured the player base in a lot of ways that, like you, I find to be troubling. At this point, though, it’s obvious that a lot of people really do seem to enjoy them, and I expect that’s not going away. It’s possible that given more time, the game will change in other ways which will either contribute to the further fracturing of the community or find ways to allow us to enjoy the game and have fun together that isn’t centered on that concept. But for now, it is what it is. And for now it’s keeping people engaged in WoW, which is making the company money.
I’m gonna be the first to say it, but holy wall of text Batman.
Also just figured I’d add this since your last paragraph was the only one I wound up actually managing to get through:
You’re blaming keys for a behavioral shift that was in the making years before M+ came out.
People who blame M+ for community shifts evidently never raided much or never did any PvP. And if you’re telling me you did and still say that, you’re just lying to yourself to try to make M+ out to be a bogeyman.
World first stuff does seem rather oddly important for no real reason.
We’ve already seen the dungeons since 9.0 release. There isn’t anything to explore
Boggles my mind that anyone cares about that in the slightest.
Yup. It’s mostly bad players who watched MDI once and think that’s what M+ is who make those chain pull comments.
The timer ruins the whole system. We also get less and less Dungeons since the introduction of M+.
The timer though is the main culprit for all issues including toxicity, anxiety, gogogo mentality, meta meta meta even in <15 keys and bland designs aka affixes.
They should reintroduce secondary raids with each patch that can be cleared in 10 man setups up to Mythic difficulty.
M+ is the worst and results in only having raids left which get boring quick if there is only 1 for 6-15 months.
The whole timer/keystone design system has to be replaced with something else. If that means Dungeon bosses get more mechanics or are harder so be it. Id rather wipe a couple of times on a boss because somebody failed that having a failed timer because of something stupid.
Toxicity in Raid Pugs is also DRASTICALLY lower than in M+ pugs. Because in raids you can improve, make adjustments, etc.
If you fail in M+ the key is dead, the score is low and the loot is minuscule. Everybody has a bad taste in their mouth and swear to themselves they will only invite the high M+ score and meta classes so it doesn’t happen again. Terrible awful system that had to be remade since BfA.
OP, maybe you’re like me.
Games with a neverending slow power creep are not my favorite. As of legion, that’s what WoW has become. (I didn’t play BFA)
AP(and things like conduits), patch “seasons”, visible timegating, %increases in gear instead of tiers, M+, 4tiers of raids, etc.
I can no longer get the gear I want(my finish) in a timely fashion, and move on to alts, such as in pre-legion. Nor can I possibly see all the story(like with class halls). So now I play a months worth, see the previous story, then quit till another 2 expansions.
I see M+ as the next stage in that design. Keep players playing the same stuff indefinitely. It’s the new age of game design, coupled with for money tokens(micro transaction).
So no, I don’t do M+ since legion. The subject depresses me. And those that partake in micro transactions and indefinite game design perpetuate the problem of no/bad content/story. AAA Video games will never be the same.
This thread got a lot more traction than I thought it would. However it is good to see so many on ship with me.
It seems the timer is the biggest issue, among others.