You guys are confusing difficulty with accessibility. As mentioned, killing guardians + skolex on mythic is easier than the last several bosses on heroic so once HoF is cleared up, even doing that has the potential of being more fruitful than m+ if that’s not your jam.
When gearing up new characters? Yes.
Get a better guild. Heroic doesn’t require 270+ ilvl to clear. Not even close.
I raid 7 days a week and have been in multiple guilds and yes… it does. The gap between Normal and Heroic from a pugging perspective is night and day where Normal is like “Well, we need people to raid so let’s see what happens” to Heroic where it’s “Well, we need to get carried so anyone over 270+ is taken…”. I have multiple characters that can get nothing from Normal including the end bosses and I can sit looking for groups for Heroic for 20 minutes and get non-stop declined or delisted because I’m not geared out in M+ gear that puts me above Heroic.
You’re missing the point about the guild perspective because not everything is solved by “just get a better <insert forum comment”. Heroic “doesn’t require” and “what we actually want” are two very different things and you’re glossing over what it takes to do it and what people ACTUALLY want to do it.
I raid 7 nights a week and mainly pug now because of how overwhelming guilds are with M+ and instead of getting into a guild to raid you are getting into a guild where you are pressured to do +15s. I’ve been in multiple guilds this expansion and the amount of people in these heroic guilds who have KSM for each season is easily half the raid if not more.
The expectation in Heroic is that you are doing not only Heroic raiding with the guild but you’re doing M+ 15s (normally) so the process can be sped up. The tanks, the healers, the core of these guilds almost always when I scroll over them with my mouse are filled with 2000+ IO scores and most of them have 1-3 Mythic tier pieces worn plus better than Heroic geared weapons, trinkets etc.
Like you stated “killing guardians and skolex on mythic” … have you ever done those two and not done M+ ever? I raid 7 days a week because I love raiding and have 7-8 characters I do them on and my highest for Sepulcher at this point is 263. I do my best to clear out and go 3-4 hours every night on said characters and pug some and play with friends on others but to that point when I look at logs for my characters on those nights… the raid is typically 5-8 ilvls higher than me because of M+. I keep up with them because I’m a good raider and bring all the tools to the table but it still doesn’t change that without M+ progressing higher in Heroic is next to impossibly because NO ONE… wants to bring a 263 ilvl character to progress past a certain point.
This has nothing to do with raiding progression. This is people wanting to be carried. There’s no such thing as progression is being carried.
For that matter, there’s no real progression if you’re in a guild and still pugging.
Go find an actual Heroic raiding guild and you’ll find out how raiding progression in Heroic works. Hint: They were killing Heroic bosses on day 1 without having done Mythic+. They’re doing Heroic bosses right now, and only some players are doing M+. Plenty of their players spend the 6-8 hours of the raid week online, then log off because that’s the amount of free time they have. They aren’t pugging or getting declined because they are, ya know, actually raiding as a guild. That’s how it actually works.
I’ve seen plenty of guilds, on Illidan in fact, that don’t require you to outgear the content in order to raid. I bet I could get an invite in the guild I’m in on my horde druid (on Illidan btw which is how I know) if I wanted in. Find you a guild that you can progress with, not one that’s going to carry you to AOTC and you’d be surprised what you can get into.
I’m not going to repeat my previous statement, but it still applies. If you refuse to do m+ though, it does gimp you just like if you don’t raid it will gimp you in m+. On a lot of specs where the gladiator medallion with the primary stat proc is bis, even refusing pvp can gimp you. This isn’t unheard of. Blizz expects players to engage in multiple forms of content if they want to be competitive, not just raid log or sit in dungeons or arena queues.
Bis for a lot of specs require you to raid. Even a heroic trinket from the sausage is going to put out more dps for healers in keys than a 278 ruby in a lot of cases. DPS specs and tank specs also have gear from the raid that they will want. Same applies to m+. These guilds where a lot of their raiders do m+ though, how do you know they aren’t rated that highly just because they genuinely enjoy m+? Personally the only reason I even raid anymore is for gear to push me into higher keys. Raid loot is pretty busted a lot of the time. Look at the ring that Anduin drops for blood dk’s. You think I can get that in m+?
263 is more than enough to do the first 2 bosses in mythic, and there will be guilds who will run those just to get an easy mythic raid item (did I mention the ilvl can go higher than m+?). So you haven’t really done anything to disprove my point. Get a guild that’s more in line with your philosophies, or maybe, and I do mean maybe, quit gimping yourself out of spite and get into m+. I don’t like raiding but I still do it so that I can progress further into m+, perhaps the conversation should be how raiding hurts m+?
M+ is mainly what I do. I can only speak for myself, but I am fairly certain there are a lot of people who are in a similar position. For me, M+ and the fact that you can get gear ALMOST as strong as raiding gear pulls a player like myself out of the potential raiding pool of players. If M+ gear capped at, let’s say 265ish ilvl and was significantly weaker than raiding gear, I would reluctantly raid.
The actual gameplay of raiding I enjoy, it’s just the hassle of the time commitment that I don’t like. It’s also extremely difficult to find a raiding guild that is all on the same page as far as skill and effort level. I tend to be more on the sweaty-tryhard-nerd kind of players and none of the raiding guilds I have found shares a similar playing style/philosophy…but yeah, if M+ didn’t exist the way it does now then I believe there would be more people raiding.
Or less people playing the game unfortunately!
The only reason I came back to playing was m+. I was a hardcore raider for years but got burnt out the first tier of mop and had no interest in returning until I heard about m+. I don’t mind to raid casually anymore but never again will I put raiding on the front of my priorities and the fact that we have a choice anymore is the only thing keeping my sub active. Fairly sure I’m not alone in that.
Yeah I think that’s probably true. There would be less players but a higher percentage of those players would be raiding.
I played during legion and classic a bit and it was raiding that was a big reason I quit. I felt compelled to raid to progress my character and setting aside a chunk of time to reluctantly raid isn’t what I wanted to do with my free time.
I know raiding is foundational to WoW but I see it as a dying game mode as time progresses. A lot of us are adults with IRL commitments and can’t commit several hours at a time uninterrupted. If I’m going to raid I’m not going to be one of those people that has to AFK on a regular basis. I dunno, maybe if it were half as long but then I guess it’s getting to be more like M+
One aspect I like about m+ over raiding is the lack of lag. I don’t know what’s been happening on the backend of wow but it seems like whenever there are > 20 players in an area lag shots way up for me. It doesn’t really happen in bgs or rbgs but in raid it can be bad.
It was really bad in SoD too.
Guild-groups doing Heroic are still progressing in many cases.
My guild-group for example has only killed Anduin Heroic twice now.
If you’re not in Mythic raiding, M+ is the better way to spend your time for gaining power/reward.
The can’t get tier as quickly issue was only for the first few weeks, now with Catalyst you’re relatively stupid if you’re spending 8 hours a week trying to progress Heroic instead of the 4 hours it takes to sail through eight 15s with a good group.
Not really an M+ vs raiding issue tbh. This is how pugging has been since gearscore existed. Pugs will almost always look for/choose people whose overall ilvl is higher than the gear that drops in the content.
Heroic raiding is only harder than 15’s if you are carrying people who aren’t capable of doing 15’s. Not because they don’t run keys, but because they play at a 6-10 key level. And I’ll tell you what, when you’re in a raid and 75% of the dps are doing 5k it’s really hard (and not that fun).
Bingo.
I’m not going to show up someplace 2 or 3 nights a week for 3-4 hours at a time, with scheduled breaks, and have to play after I’m tilted from failing a fight over, and over. I’m also not going to play a game where I don’t feel like I can meaningfully progress. Almost everyone I know who plays this game is 30+. You get rid of ‘start and stop when you feel like it’ content, you’ll see a pretty big chunk of the playerbase leave an already dying game.
M+ and rated PVP keeps a lot of us boomers paying a sub fee.
I’ll do normal now and then cant be bothered with heroic. It’s not that much different and I hate having to rely on on 13-20 other people.
Meanwhile I can jump in m+ for an hour and a half, get 2-3 keys done and progress my character, if we fail or the key is going bad I can leave and simply start a new key.
That statement right there is priceless WHY heroic raiding is getting ruined because of M+ but you don’t want to see it nor care because you have to be right. If I do a Normal raid and cap out on gear… what is the next logical step to do?
a. gimp myself and do M+ and outgear heroic raiding, or
b. do heroic raiding.
How am I gimping myself by doing the next logical step in raiding which is Normal into Heroic into Mythic… if I’m going to ungimp myself why don’t I just do M+, do Normal to get a sense of the raid and go straight to Mythic because I’ll be geared out from M+ quicker than doing Heroic raiding.
That is the part you’re missing… you keep trying to be “right” about your perspective while simultaneously ignoring my perspective by not doing M+.
I’ve been dinging AOTC’s since MoP so I know how they work and how raiding progression works. What you are missing because you’re focusing on “progression” instead of M+ ruining raiding is that you can easily surpass Heroic difficulties by having M+ gear.
I’m also going to be flat out with you and say you are being completely disingenuous about this. People who are killing heroic bosses on Day 1 are Mythic guilds and I’ve been watching them do this for awhile and Heroic raiding guilds are going through Normal and maybe trying out the 1st boss if it’s a faceroll boss but they are not day 1 jumping into Heroic. The only guilds I’ve ever seen do that are Mythic raiding guilds and they are typically pimped out from the raid before.
So now I’m in 2 raiding guilds because of how M+ is ruining raiding but you don’t care “ya know” how it works if you just want to pug because you have to be right.
, m+ does not hurt raiding, not reading hurts raiding.
I cleared heroic up to Sylvanas p3 the very first week, killing full-power
pre nerf painsmith heroic to which less than 2% of the entire playerbase had done so at that stage, less than sylvanas.
Overall, all you have to do to clear heroic is watch your feet and listen to audio cues and dps the right things. Nothing else to it.
Cool, keep just raiding then and stop trying to ruin m+
When you don’t fully grasp the concepts you’re talking about, then maybe you can believe M+ is a full on substitute…
But, weird take either way.
It’s not m+ alone that hurts guild, and raiding, and the game. It was actually a very interesting way to make some very polished very well developed content organically relevant. By that I mean, somewhat more interesting in a way that has less to do with rewards. Which is the best kind of game development.
But, pair that with the extreme loot rewards from m+, far far outpacing raid … it’s product cancer on crack.