Considering Aotc and KSM have close to equal % completion and are relatively similar in difficulty (Aotc probably a little harder) maybe Blizz should just cap gear there.
265/272 max.
Keys > 15 and mythic raids are for cosmetics.
Blizzard realized for mythic+ having high difficulties reward power is dumb, maybe they should come to their senses about that for raiding.
Then mythic can focus on progression and kills and extending is a non-issue since there is no power to be had on reclears.
When your solution is that raiding should offer a higher ilvl than m+ (especially when it already does), then yes, an m+ player is going to chime in. I don’t want raiding to be terrible. Making it offer a more noticeably higher ilvl would make it terrible though. That would incentivize people who don’t want to raid to raid in order to be competitive with the type of content they want to do so you’d end up with a group of people who don’t want to be there. Our community is toxic enough, don’t you think? Right now as far as pve is concerned, m+ is the best way to get farmable gear with the stats you want under heroic ilvl, and once the valor cap is lifted it’s the best way to get farmable gear under mythic ilvl. Raiding still offers a higher ilvl and a potential of more high ilvl drops per week if you’re running with a static group. This is why most hardcore mythic raiders are going to be geared up faster than you or I will.
And as for the 285’s for the first 2 bosses, they lifted the lock for bosses killed this tier. You can get loot from the Jailer without having CE, it’s just luck of the draw.
You almost got there.
The issue is raiding is a “massive chore” that needs to be worked on. But you dont need to harm other aspects of the game like m+ to do it. What we really see is butt hurt raiders upset that people can do other content and get equal or better gear from it. And we have seen these same people flip out since forever with this issue.
I think the biggest issue is the difficulty to reward ratio is WAY off.
Blizz tried to offset this by limiting the 278 from mythic+ to 1 per week to “compensate” for it basing orders of magnitude to accomplish.
So fix the difficulty. Drop more items in raids. Reduce the group size to allow for less coordination (and the fights accordingly). The success of other games super high end raiding comes, in part, from not requiring 20 people to be perfect for 10m. This is fixable, but you don’t have to touch anything else to do it.
Apologies if I’ve told this story before. It’s still irritating and may be the thing that gets me to finally move on from wow.
The anti-guild pressure started instantly in legion with M+. I saw it happen in a dedicated normal and dedicated heroic guild who had tons of people. All the players in the normal guild were normal-good enough for M+ and the same was true of the heroic guild players.
But it’s not like there were enough tanks and heals in those groups to take care of everyone. Tanks and heals got overstrained having to put forth a raid-level effort into learning this stuff and also overstrained trying to spread themselves around and include all the dps. And god forbid if you were one of the debtor-specs (a spec that blizzard just gave the middle finger to) back then because you really got left out. Effectively something like 2/3 to 3/4 of the dps were left out of this new content ---- content that had HUGE rewards too.
Over time this created whatever you want to call it in guilds … drama, bad tidings, hurt feelings, sadness, however you want to put it. People who adapted more quickly to this new thing got more gear and did better which lead to them getting more invites and more opportunities (pos. feedback loop) and the reverse for people who didn’t get initial opportunities (neg. loop).
The normal guild died a quick death with some quitting and a couple going classic. The heroic guild made it through 2.1 xpacs of M+ before dying. But right away though, they had massive attrition from the patter of non-inclusion that’s a part of shoe-horning 5s content into guild. They quickly went from 40+ strong to 20 and then after that mid-low teens.
I saw M+ for the guild killer it was right away. Reminded me instantly of heroic dungeons in cataclysm, which debtor-specs always having a hard time. But that was low-key drama, the game and guilds could weather that. This new thing though, m+, I could tell right away it was going to be bad with how big the rewards were.
So I said screw it, I’ll just raid. And it worked with the heroic guild for a while. But then as the group evolved the people running the M+ got cockier and cockier, like jackass irritating. When I’d ask to be included the amount of elitist jackassery was astonishing. It was like they had all turned into 12yo epeen obsessed wackados. I mean, jesus, no wonder 3/4 of the guild left. Eventually though, curiosity got the better of me the last “season” of BFA. So I thought I’d take my heroic and mythic raid gear and see if I could pug my way to 15s and 20+ 5s content. Finally check this thing out.
I did and boy it did not go well for the heroic guild. In the course of 2 xpacs of M+ they had developed this identity for themselves as too-cool edgelords and I guess in their heads they just kept me around to fill a spot. When I started doing keys as high as they were (or higher) it kind of shattered their identity. They actually lost interest in doing runs because of it, that what they thought reality was maybe wasn’t. And the heroic guild collapsed next raid tier. A guild that raided MC and played beta.
Anyway, so what right? As the game changes so does the player population makeup right? Change is good, revitalizes the game, yada yada yada.
Well here’s what. This new population brought to us by elevated 5s content. They aren’t loyal. Warcraft isn’t the only game in town anymore and when they don’t like what they see they are poof gone. Sure they’ll come back once in a while but they are more than likely gone again after that.
What was before — all types of guilds supported by raid focus, big group content. Those groups had a giant array of interpersonal interactions from friendship to mild irritation which act like multipliers for the game. The most compelling thing in the game will always be people. That doesn’t mean the game quality doesn’t matter, high quality has to be assumed. But after that it’s the people and everything that goes along with it which cements things. Raid is big group, more people, more stuff. More glue, more nostalgia, etc. Raid is guild and guild is raid. By comparison, 5s content just doesn’t do that. Less people, less interactions, less loyalty, less nostalgia, etc etc etc.
anyway, whatever, 5s suck.
I should say — m+ was a novel idea (at least novel to me, could have been ripped from somewhere) applied to content that had been really well worked on and polished but was very under utilized. It was, a great idea. Where it has fallen flat on the face is the ridiculously elevated loot and game rewards and hyper focus from devs, business people, and the money guys. Like m+ was the 2nd coming or something.
Heroic is already similar in difficulty to KSM level keys.
No one cares about heroic. We were talking about Mythic.
Well that’s part of it, +15s which are easier than heroic giving mythic level gear every week.
Making mythic easier to be more aligned doesn’t make sense because heroic is already harder than 15s.
And mythic is a massive leap over heroic.
Make 278 gear be from 22s or so then it will be more of a choice and not a chore.
Remove gear entirely from the discussion. Just fix the amount of headache Mythic difficulty is and people will stop feeling shafted. I’ll never Stan 15s because it is the participation trophy of WoW. But it has the same relevance to key pushing Heroic Raid has to raiding so there is that.
That still doesn’t work. Heroic is already harder than 15s for worse gear. Making mythic easier without changing anything else doesn’t do anything.
My vote is cap gear at 265/272 and make mythic entirely for cosmetics.
It’s even funnier that Blizzard didn’t even update the score required to upgrade gear to 272. It’s still 2000 which is doing 10s, to upgrade gear to heroic jailer level.
Just put mythic as an option in group finder problem solved. Why do people always have to wait mid tier to play the game?
There’s more to reducing the Mythic headache then just making it easier.
such as this. This doesn’t do anything to the difficulty, but opens up the group flexibility. You could remove the hard lockouts as well. I don’t do raiding. Nothing proposed would solve that for me, but people stress way too hard about ilvl. The top key runners are mythic raiders (for the most part). You can only be competitive by doing everything.
You mean the Mythic raid? What’s that even going to accomplish? Pugs will be very lucky if they can down Skolex, let alone get past Dausegne or Xymox.
It’s still nowhere close, though. They need to keep adding affixes every 3 levels. Currently we get affixes at 4, 7, 10… and then it stops. Keep adding at 13, 16, 20, 23, etc.
If you get 278 gear once a week from +23 keys with 8 affixes… well, we’re at least getting CLOSER in making the difficulty somewhat comparable.
Eh, it can be done with tuning.
There is eventually a key level more exclusive than CE due to its infinite scaling nature. It has to happen by definition.
Dude averages at 18. He’s no authority on key difficulty. Just a butt hurt raider.
Does not feel like it, I rather PVP and run keys.
You could say that about heroic last 3, the point is
THE OPTION SHOULD NOT be closed off because of ability, it is stupid cliq mentality. I pugged exclusively CN and SoD heroic, and cleared both AOTC week 2 , because i played with people with ability and brains, but the fact the option was available to me to go raid Painsmith HC, then Guardian, Then Kel Thezud and fatescribe, I could clear them, But closing off an entire game mode because you have to write a Job description and schedule X evenings a week or have blind luck to find 20 people on your server at the specific times you are online, JUST TO PLAY A GAME MODE, is ridiculous and should have been consigned away with at the start of the expansion. I am CE tier since done end bosses, whatever that means, point is for many people, gameplay ability is more than adequate enough to clear off all mythic bosses but are hampered with archaic outdated means of organizing when there is an automated unlocked service readily available to make mythic raiding 10000% easier to access.