Does M+ Hurt Raiding: A Discussion

You need to get out more… I raid a lot and the amount of KSM people I see raiding heroic is mind blowing. Not only KSM but struggling in the raid and/or showing up with M+ talents or unenchanted or making mistakes with the easiest of mechanics.

I can’t stand M+ and have done a few 10+'s and they did not feel challenging in the slightest to me. Oh no, I have to move 5-6 feet over here, oh no someone is close to me I need to move away, oh no I have to shoot something that pops… whatever shall I do. I know that as you get higher it will obviously become more challenging and this concept that heroic raiders are struggling to time 10s is hilarious to me.

I’ve seen people doing Heroic raiding (like 2-6/11 heroic) and doing ok and they are KSM and have like 2-4pc tier that are 278’s.

What’s the point of necro posting in a year old thread just to slam on m+ like it’s not the exact same concept as raiding? You learn the dance, you succeed. Same thing for m+. 10s are also the easiest key level. Easier than 8’s and 9’s because of the affix, easier than lower keys because most people know at least half of what’s going on at that point. Step it up and maybe you’ll see why people like it so much.

Necroing is fun. Also no… I want to RAID. I don’t want to do Mythic+… I want to RAID. I don’t see the phrase Mythic+ in RAID anywhere which is why I replied because this is why I think M+ is hurting raiding on some level because that’s all everyone thinks about is MYTHIC PLUS.

It’s like as soon as the Heroic raid is over clique #1 and clique #2 “yay, let’s go get better gear than the heroic raid we were working on…”

I don’t need to step anything up because I want to RAID… you know that thing that has been happening since classic and how you only did dungeons so you could…

GET INTO THE RAID!

So nothing has changed.

Raid still drops some of the strongest trinkets.

Difference is you only had to do them until you had what you needed to raid. Now some of the gear is better than what you will probably get from raid and you have to re-get all that gear every raid tier instead of just the once.

I did LFR a few weeks ago and MAN THAT WAS EASY PEEZY LEMON SQUEEZY!!! I don’t get it?? Why does it take these guys so long to get world first?? cmon man lol. Unreal!

Which is getting addressed next expansion, thankfully.

Sort of, my understanding is you’ll not be able to just run dungeosn at the start of an expansion again you’ll just run different combinations each season. Good chance you’ll still have to farm M+ for a trinket/weapon drop each tier, it will just be a different one. Better than running De Other Side 136 times over the course of an expansion but not exactly the same as running BRD until you got HoJ and then never again.

Farming m+ isn’t a chore to me. Running the same dungeons ad nauseum is. New loot pools excites me, fresh seasons excites me, no refarms excites me. I’ll be doing m+ either way because it’s how I prefer to spend my time.

Hell, im raiding this tier and rediscovering why it’s not my thing. Too hard to find 19 like-minded and equal players VS 4.

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M+ is an alternative to people who can’t commit to raiding. Yes, sweaty folks do both. Yes some folks have said ef carrying raids when I can just do m+. If you want to raid, you can raid, and have more chances at 278 per week than anyone doing m+.

In some ways, yes.

For example, raiding is a painfully unreliable way to gear. The drops are few and far between in one lockout, whereas M+ you can run to your sweaty heart’s content. The ilvl correspondence is also off. I admit that I don’t have the skill, setup, or time to mythic raid at this point, I’m chilling in normal and heroic feels like the correct difficulty if I want challenge.

In M+ you faceroll through a few 15s and get gear that’s just as good as mythic raid (excluding the final 3 bosses). There isn’t a reason to run normal and heroic outside of community bonding with your guild and enjoying the progression. Which are valid incentives, but not good enough for a lot of players.

In M+, you faceroll through a few 15’s and you MIGHT get 1 piece that’s 3 ilvl’s shy of the first bosses in heroic. For example since reset (4 days ago) I’ve ran 9 keys and have a total of one piece of gear that’s dropped for me, not even a good one. M+ is an incredibly slow way to gear up, raiding is much faster. Sure, you can upgrade pieces to 272 (still below any mythic raid bosses, mind you) by spending valor in which you are capped on and have to farm every week. Most players who like to raid at a serious level will casually do M+, even if just one key to get a shot at a 278 piece in their vault. People who do M+ at any kind of serious level, however, will clear the whole raid, sometimes on multiple difficulties, especially if they are starting a fresh character just for a shot at tier even with the catalyst because it’s so much faster than farming flux. Also, a lot of the trinkets in raid are consistently better than m+ so look, we’re stuck raiding again.
Speaking of flux though, raiding is a faster way to do that too unless you can stomach pvp, which if you are good at it is the fastest way period and isn’t capped the way raid is.

So sure, if you want to gear up your character in the span of an entire season m+ is the way to go. Raiding is still the better route.

The key difference is most servers don’t even produce a single CE guild and some only a handful of guilds doing any sort of mythic raiding at all.

But everyone on every server can get 15s done because compared to raiding they are a joke of a difficulty, not even as hard as late heroic bosses let alone anything in mythic.

So going deep into mythic raid is the best, but is massively more difficult and less accessible compared to doing keys.

You don’t need Cutting Edge to get gear that outpaces or rivals Mythic+.

End-of-Dungeon loot is capped at 262. Doing entry-level Heroic bosses gets you better gear, getting Ahead of the Curve and those end-of-dungeon bosses gives you gear that’s almost a full tier above. Plenty of servers/guilds are more than capable of raiding to that level.

Doing any entry-level Mythic gives you significantly better gear, and Vault gear is capped at 1/week, which means anyone doing more than 2 Mythic raid bosses matches that (from Vault), and is getting better drops from the bosses themselves, as well as any Heroic bosses they deign to do.

Bringing Cutting Edge into any comparison about +15 is absolutely bonkers.

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Pretty much every heroic raiding guild shards most of the gear because they are decked in mythic+ gear.

Tier/domination gear being the exception, except for 278 tier which for 99% of the population comes from mythic+ not the raid.

If you’re only limiting yourself to talking about people entering Heroic right now, after already getting 10+ weeks of gear, maybe. “Pretty much every heroic raiding guild” can’t have been decked in Mythic+ gear at the start of the patch, because the Season and Heroic open up at the same time, and you can’t even HAVE any Vault gear from +15 until after the next Vault in the season.

Beyond that, if you’re actually killing Tier bosses, there’s a guarantee of a number of tier items dropping in the raid (and then after that the Vault). For any player getting M+ from the Vault, there’s absolutely zero guarantee that even if an item drops in a tier slot, it’s actually tier, and the numbers don’t really stack up. If you’re killing all tier bosses, the bosses themselves are your most reliable source of tier, and will get you more tier pieces spread around your raid than the random dice roll in the Vault will, especially since the raid ALSO activates its own Vault slots.

“99% of the population” (a number that obviously bears up under scrutiny and isn’t pulled out of thin air MAY have tier from non-raid sources, but that would be because they either don’t raid, don’t choose to raid, or have now been able to use the Creation Catalyst. Prior to the Catalyst being available, anyone who did exclusively Mythic+ had piss-poor odds of actually even having a 2-set, let alone a 4-set bonus.

Not really… the odd class/spec will have The First Sigil or Elegy as “maybe” their 2nd bis according to warcraftlogs but a majority of specs are now all M+ trinkets.

Also raid loot, minimal as it is, does not have a lot of variation on stats whereas M+ has all of it at your finger tips.

On top of it… let’s not even get into trying to pug into a heroic raid even if you’ve max’d out your loot from Normal. I have a few characters that maybe I could get 1 item from normal (maybe) and at 260-263 ilvl and then you’re like “I think I’ll try to get into a heroic raid…”

20 mins later

declined world.

Why? M+ provides MYTHIC level gear so why take anyone who has completed normal because they’re undergeared.

“But start your own group…” is not an excuse either. That is a band aid fix for a problem that you can’t control because M+ is easier and gives better loot than Heroic raiding hands down and is slowly destroying Heroic raiding.

I don’t hate on people who do M+ but the “excuses group” who hang out on the forums “just do this, just do that” are not fixing the problem of what is happening in-game. If you are doing a Heroic group and you see someone applying who has gear appropriate and experience above what you’re looking for… you will get declined because you can easily get better gear from M+.

Raiding progression shouldn’t be M+ → Normal → M+ til you are 270 or higher and then do Heroic and not get any benefit from the loot because you already have better. Normal raiding is fine… Mythic raiding is fine but M+ is absolutely tanking Heroic raiding because of the ilvl issue.

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I don’t think that’s actually how raiding progression works. The PuG space once a content tier is obsolete doesn’t really reflect anything actually meaningful or reasonable, and hasn’t since before Mythic+ ever was a thing.

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I have never gotten a piece of loot from raid that was useful except for that meme trinket from my first ever run. I gear entirely through m+ despite raiding once a week. Just my personal opinion I guess.

But the difficulty/reward disparity is still there. I can easily run 15s. I cannot do mythic raid. Only 3 guilds on my server/faction are actively running mythic, and we don’t have a realm first M Jailer last time I checked.

Do people still need this?