Nobody kills any more bosses after 7 bosses are down, because that’s when you start extending - if not before.
This is another massive discrepancy between M+ and raiding: While climbing up through M+ you get gear; while extending to climb through the raid bosses you get nothing.
Which is why you have to - SURPRISE! - gear through Mythic+. As a raider.
M+ gearing is mandatory for raiding. The reverse is NOT true.
The whole system stinks.
Completely irrelevant statistic. Almost everyone in the game is gonna cap out at 252 this tier. You’d never argue this should be a relevant ilvl.
The only way this would not be true:
raids drop infinite loot each kill.
raid item level is +15 ilvls over anything else available and +30 ilvls over any available rings/necks.
raid bosses had loot tables that cover all possible itemizations.
Raids been slowly dying for years. We’re watching world first contenders fall apart to the roster boss. Those aren’t gear driven players. If you push the game back to raid or die, many will choose die.
This isn’t strictly true. Not only do I personally know people who are re-clearing, but I can even find random WCL entries for guilds that are working on Anduin and have re-clears uploaded recently. Ultimately, that is the choice/cost that comes from extending though.
Extending ties into the archaic lockout systems and tuning/time expectations that I mentioned earlier, but isn’t really what “gearing” is based around.
For doing M+15, that’s true. For those padding at +20-+22 without trying to push further, also fairly true. For those who are actually pushing to progress as far as possible, anyone who also raids (successfully) has a massive advantage.
Because people like you keep demanding that raiding be crap. When solutions are suggested to the problems with raiding, and Person A who doesn’t raid says “no”, then that’s part of the problem. We especially saw this pre-Shadowlands with covenants, where lots of people were cheerleading the covenant restrictions (even though they would also impact them) just because the covenant restrictions were particularly hated by people who do progression raiding/M+/PvP, or played multiple specs, or whatever. There just seems to be this schadenfreude element all over the place and it’s depressing.
I’ve been demanding nothing, so watch your tone.
Every time somebody suggests that raiding NOT be a massive chore out of kilter with everything else in the game, or that raiding actually gave rewards comparable to the time and difficulty involved, some M+ player chimes in with a bunch of nonsense and says that doing anything of the sort would be terrible.
I’m not in any way sure what you think you mean with “people like you”, but I can’t see anywhere where they’ve “demanded” anything.
FWIW, if you’re including me in the discussion, over the last few years, I’ve advocated for:
All of which are things to cut down on chore-like behaviours, RNG, and narrow down the spread of time/difficulty in what should be a good way.
Plenty of people I’ve seen on these forums share at least some of those opinions. I don’t think people have any objection to prevent “chore” like aspects, or improvements to raiding, but they’re definitely going to bristle with your attitude which basically tries to elevate raiding above all other content.
When solutions are suggested to the problems with raiding, and Person A who doesn’t raid says “no”, then they’re part of the problem.
And it’s not any particular person that’s causing this, it’s the gestalt collectively. Because you can’t go 10 seconds talking about how to make raiding better without somebody who doesn’t raid saying “no”. Usually an M+ enthusiast.
It’s also completely one-sided. When ways to improve M+ are suggested, like giving better rewards for appropriately higher keys, or balancing out the affixes to eliminate the peaks and valleys of “push weeks”, or deal with key degradation, or eliminate the hassle of annoying affixes, do you see raiders chime in and say “no, M+ should remain miserable in these regards”?
No, you do not.
But you can’t suggest improvements to raiding without people saying “no they shouldn’t fix that”.
It’s ridiculous.
Are you blind? There are always people who come into those threads to troll about how anything that would help M+ will push raiding further into the grave. It’s literally one of the main oppositions I can remember from the threads back in the day talking about how maybe +20 or something appropriate (bearing in mind +20 then is not +20 now) could perhaps allow for one item to be upgraded to end-boss ilvl, an idea that was apparently heretical.
Look, you’re not going to get much sympathy if you try and twist suggestions about making raid the one pinnacle of content, or suggestions that would have the side effect of effectively killing other game modes, into this idea that you’re just trying to make raiding better and people can’t stand that.
The keys need to be appropriately more difficult, is the thing.
People like tossing around the idea that +20’s should award higher gear, when +20 keys aren’t difficult at all. They’re certainly not remotely as difficult as 9 of the Mythic bosses in the current raid.
I’ve said for a long time that M+ getting better gear is fine, if they continue to add affixes. If +10’s have 4 affixes, then 15’s should have 5, and 20’s have 6. In addition to the numerical increases.
So last week for example could have been Fortified, Encrypted, Sanguine, Grievous, Storming on 15’s. And then for 20’s make Fortified, Encrypted, Sanguine, Grievous, Storming, Raging. In addition to the numerical increases. Now we’re getting somewhere, and it’s getting closer to the typical progression model in WoW. Anduin isn’t just Skolex with more health and damage, Anduin is Skolex with more health and damage and a mountain of additional (and much harder) mechanics.
M+ stops development at 10. More health/damage makes you take the existing mechanics seriously (for the first time, in some cases…) sure, but it’s not adding anything NEW new.
What they need to do is have our gear have 4 modes, and the power level adjusts for each mode depending on your accomplishments on that mode (open world, pvp, dungeon, raid).
Imagine a sci-fi game with a power suit and it behaves differently in water, land, air, and space. And the power level in each is dependent on what you’ve done there. The more you do in space, the better the power suit is in space. And so on.
The problem with multiple gear sets is the bag clutter. Just have peoples’ gear auto-adjust to whatever content they’re doing based on their success in that content. Fixed.
+20 keys now are not what +20 keys were in prior Seasons. Kinda like how S4 BFA was an entirely different animal with Corruption stacking.
But you’re getting into apples and oranges here. Raids pivot from loot pinatas to brick walls, and often treat those two as the same for rewards. Sepulcher has received a lot of flack for being a raid that’s being the least completed, and (perhaps) an atypical difficulty curve.
But you were the one who tried to blanket state that raiders don’t oppose M+ changes, when that’s categorically false. Trying to now come up with justifications for that opposition is just shifting goalposts.
This is a terrible idea (which will only make affix problems worse), and also vastly underestimates how scaling works. Especially early on into the expac, M+ had bosses where certain mechanics only really became relevant at thresholds past +12 ish. On top of that, as you ramp numbers, it requires different strategies and ways of dealing with certain mechanics (to effectively gain extra time), which does alter the mechanics/difficulty significantly often.
Feel free to make that suggestion in Dragonflight Beta or whatever if you feel like it’s good, but I think you’ll find that has a lot more unanticipated side-effects. It certainly has the potential to make having to do multiple modes far worse, especially since different modes approach gear acquisition differently.
For example, off the top of my head, if you had spammable 5-mans that you could do at +0, with gear magically scaled up to 278 the moment you entered a Mythic raid where you’ve killed bosses previously, you’d be making 5-man spamming much more important at the start of every tier.
I specifically mentioned “appropriately higher keys”. You even highlighted it when you quoted me.
I have never seen anyone reject the notion of better rewards for appropriately higher keys. People certainly reject giving additional rewards for keys that are pretty easy, though.
And yeah, one season’s 10 is the next season’s 15, and so on. It’s been that way since Legion. Why they keep shuffling it all over, I have no idea.
Right, and that’s what those suggestions were about. The debate wasn’t that it HAD to be at +20 (for example), but to find some appropriate level where it was comparable, even possible. It was the suggested possibility at all that garnered rabid opposition.
IDK if you just weren’t paying attention back in Season 1 / 9.0.5, but there were lots of debates and discussions, especially during the PTR where Valor was being proposed.
It’s the same reason Mythic raids have varying power curves, and no consistently between one tier and the next. The content is often slapped together to see how players handle it, and then tune after-the-fact. It’s just that M+ is an infinitely scaling mode, so it’s different. Loot upgrades are limited behind the Vault, so they don’t have to care what +15 means, and whether that changes. Everyone who’s trying to progress will always find something harder ahead of them with no clear end. From the other coin, Mythic Anduin can’t reach some point where it’s mathematically impossible, so how they approach its tuning can be handled differently.
My impression of season 1 was that any talk about M+ got overshadowed by the whole debacle with conquest gear being the best for everything.
I dunno what Blizzard’s problem is, these days. They used to have this figured out because PvP gear was generally not as good for PvE (because resilience wasn’t great for most characters), and PvE gear was generally not as good for PvP (because it didn’t have resilience).
But they sure seem to get a kick of out fixing a problem, and then throwing out all their work afterwards.
Conquest wasn’t really relevant around time 9.0.5 was happening, and also at the very least that all ties in to how M+ loot and Vault works after all. Conquest may not have been the way it was if Raid/M+ had been different at launch (and of course the ilvl/PvPilvl thing).
Most of the discussions I can recall about “prestige” rewards in M+, or the Vault caps, or Valor, had pretty much nothing to do with COnquest, and entirely about M+ as a standalone.
I thought the differing PvP ilvls for PvE was a more recent thing this expansion?
Meaning it was season 2 (or 3?). I know they’d done it in prior expansions.
Pretty sure it was either 9.1 or 9.1.5, and done as a way to help out Honor gear compete for those who were starting out in PvP? I just mentioned it since it’s something that would theoretically have changed the dynamics if it had been a thing at launch (since presumably PvP gear wouldn’t have competed nearly as well in PvE).
Like, I’m forgetting what the actual ivlls were, but I think unranked Conquest was 200, and it scaled up to 226 as Duelist? I’d presume that if differing ilvls had been in at launch, unranked Conquest might have been something like 187 (scales to 200 in PvP), with Duelist being 213 (scales to 226 in PvP). Or something like that.
This assumes both that the problem is real and the solutions are good. You’ve done nothing to demonstrate either. You lack the prerequisite ability to think critically as evidenced by you simply pointing to a perceived issue (most of your gear comes from non raiding) and drawing conclusions from there.
You suggested nothing to make raiding better, just that the loot disparity be addressed. If you had said something along the lines of:
You get no push back from anyone. You’d kill the game to save raiding. Most of us would prefer to keep playing and having fun. Mythic plus players are far stickier and more profitable for blizzard to design around. Much like those who farm transmog and other super casual stuff, which is why every patch adds 50 mounts, 30 armor items and 20 unique battle pets.
I did, actually:
And I post about it quite frequently. Maybe I should just copy-paste a magnum opus in every thread. Anyway, here are some tidbits:
There’s just so much that needs fixing. Gearing, great vault, skips, extends, boss length, spreadsheet bosses, trash, raid sizes… it’s getting close to being darn near everything, at this point.
/sigh