- what is a joke to you, is not a joke for majority of player base
- there is no reason myth track gear (which becoems quickly obsolete when season rolls around) shouldnt drop from end of dungeon 10s and be in vault for 8s. It takes 13 weeks min (assuming rng cooperates) to get full myth track on every slot). That’s a darn long time of you have alts you’d like to enjoy end game with. By giving end of run myth at 10+, you can reward pushes while allowing others to enjoy the game they are paying for too
- in many cases, crafting becomes the faster path because gilded is accessible at lower level than myth. Given gilded is pushed down further in m+ food chain and why would you not move the line down for myth track too?
Frankly, choices are m+ becoming obsolete due to all speed bumps that stop people from enjoying the game they pay for or get with the times. If S1 m+ stats don’t convince you it’s don’t a slow death, not sure what will. There is a reason why Blizz is attempting a massive overhaul. This whole leetist thinking needs to die at this point - give people equal opportunity to get the gear they want, from whatever track they choose to. Mythic raiders and higher level raiders should be rewarded with cosmetics and achievements, and not different gear and mount - that just creates resentment and fomo, which leads to decline in engagment and sub numbers. It’s a game, it’s not a chore or a competition to get bragging rights - so make it fun. People pay for a product, they will expect equal or higher value in return. In this case, capping things is reducing entertainment value, which is detrimental to the product itself
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If they didn’t want it to floor the early season, they could do a thing where you “unlock” myth track drops of a certain slot with the upgrade path. Use the same hidden achievement for upgrades today, but if myth 2 item level (hero 6) is “unlocked”, items for that slot can now drop as mythic.
You have to farm a full set and fully upgrade it to be able to farm a new set and fully upgrade it, but it’s a bit more deterministic. It won’t really open all the way up until they uncap crests, but as long as they do that by midseason, it’s fine.
I read about three words of your post and I got the jist. So you think lvl 10 mythics are difficult. Thats fine. I can agree the difficulty isn’t for everyone and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing the game as you see fit. However, you shouldn’t be rewarded end game gear if you aren’t willing to participate in end game content. By all means you don’t even need it if you aren’t even doing end game content. As for transmog hero6/6 gear gives u the same coring as myth track gear so I don’t need to hear that argument either.
I recommend you read the rest of my post then. You can have the same gear and enjoy the game at any level you want. This single mindedness about only mythic raiders and m+ pushers should have monopoly over best gear is what’s killing the game. You can still push your +20s and CE as much as you want with the gear. Simultaneously, there is nothing wrong with someone having the same gear but enjoying themselves clearing heroic raid on multiple alts everyweek and hangijg out at the 8-10 m+ range with their buddies. Everyone can have fun and get what they want. For a sub-based game, it is important to provide as many carrots as possible to keep people coming back. Creating cast systems based on gear and putting arbitrary speed bumps is doing the opposite of that. Again, s1 #s and strong feedback from majority of players pretty much tells what you need to know (and Blizz acknowledged it). Everyone is entitled to their opinion but in this case masses are speaking with their time & wallet (seems to be the most effective way to make blizz listen).
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Is it though?
Or is it that people come into games expecting to be handed everything with no effort at all?
Is it that we’ve conditioned people with inclusiveness and 4th place onwards ribbons in school track events or trophies for a season for teams in last place that they’ll get rewarded for putting in next to zero effort.
From memory, there wasn’t as much of an outcry for not having the same ilvl as raiders doing the highest content pre M+ introduction, people had the lane they stayed in or people pushed themselves to learn and do the content which gave them more player power.
In terms of player numbers and a decline in participation has everything to do with economic factors moreso than M+/M Raids being incentivised as the best way to get the highest gearing.
The state of the game right now where you’re able to get mythic recolours just by upgrading heroic track gear and the ability to be 13ilvls behind with your H track items or 3 ilvls behind with your crafted pieces which over the course of a season you can fill out in every slot you’ve been unlucky in getting a drop from your weekly m+, or kitting out an alt you’ve just leveled late into the season with near max ilvl pieces.
People need to self reflect more on their inability to want to learn to play to be able to easily do the content they want to do, rather than hammering buttons with no thought between their ears.
M+ was added 10 years ago. Been a long time since then.
Players and people in general have changed since then.
Some have more time to play video games.
Some have less.
Circumstances have changed a lot for everyone.
Taking a whole expansion, or two, break and then trying to come back is going to be hard if you have to put in months worth of free time to get anywhere near geared enough to play end game.
I like the way gearing is now compared to how it used to be.
I really don’t like where some of the classes are rn, and that has a bigger impact on my playtime than if some is “hard enough” or “costs enough time”.
I play when I can and content is hard enough really.
there’s plenty of ways to reward high end gear in different areas without making it take no effort. it does take an excessively long amount of time to reach max gear if you don’t mythic raid and that’s assuming you get good rng, me personally i haven’t seen a weapon in my vault the entire season or boots.
removing some of the rng aspect would go a long way in making gearing more friendly, for example you could give a vault token to upgrade a piece of m+/raid gear to myth track in place of a vault piece (same way sockets work now) so that no matter what you could in theory be full myth track 13 weeks in with bis items and youd have the crests to upgrade all of those pieces 15 weeks in (maybe less if you do some crafting cheese with rings) 13 weeks in is 3 months, i think being near full bis 13 months in is complete fair. half the season gearing, half the season playing with it.
this would also remove the lottery aspect of looting your bis weapon/trinket from vault if you’re someone who has something bis from raid/m+, you get it on heroic/m+ and you know you can get it on myth track by sacking a vault
This is a thing right now it’s called the crafting system, every 2 weeks you get a spark and you can make near bis items out of it with the perfect stats for your spec that are ever so slightly behind max ilvl pieces.
Even before M+ and the weekly vault was a thing, many people didn’t get an item slot upgrade the whole tier.
ICC i never replaced the Mirror of Truth back in wrath until the very last week of the xpac, it was DBW+Mirror as my combo the whole time.
So why do you feel that anyone and everyone should have the best gear. What’s the point of someone climbing the ladder or doing the hardest content if you can get the same exact gear doing practically nothing? You don’t see how that would be tremendously bad for the game?
I’m not twisting your words to fit my “new narrative”. I am taking what you said about them being incomparable, showed you the rewards offered from Seasons 1-3, and explained that yes, Season 4 of Dragonflight is comparable to Season 1 of TWW. I guess could have mentioned either Season 1 or 2 in my initial post, but that would have just reinforced my point even further since those rewards were better than what Season 4 offered. 
The rest of your post isn’t really relevant and seems purely based on your opinion.
- Obviously a +10 will be easier this late into the season?? Most people have gear cap already
- Mythic+ / gearing is not the backbone of subscriptions. WoW subs have gone up and down long before Mythic+ became a thing in Legion, and will continue to do so. There’s also Classic servers, which are still very active
People that do the type of content you are talking about is about 5-10% of player base. If you want the game to stay around and have a vibrant community, catering to minor minority doesnt seem the way to go for a business. And pushers/top players can still get rewarded with special feats of strentghs without gear. Again, if you read my posts, i already addressed all of this. There is more than 1 way to achieve the desired outcome in this case, and they dont require alienating a giant part of the player base called fun seekers. Again, it’s a subscription based game that exists purely for entertainment
Sorry but what in the mental gymnastics is this even?
Players are not alienated at all by max gear not falling into their lap just because they subbed to the game.
- Everyone is working hard to get their gear — so no idea what you all keep talking about when you say gear falling in people’s laps? you still gotta finish your heroic raids and +8-10s… This is tone deaf at best…
- Falling sub numbers and abysmal m+ participation would beg to differ. You want to keep people engaged, let them run through 10 alts and fully gear them in 4 months vs trying to max out 1 character in 4 months and never get to play other things game offers. Between RNG, caps, insane queue times and complicated currency schemes, fun gets sucked out of the game quickly. There is a reason delves are insanely popular. But then again, I can hear you saying “delves are not end game”… Blizz’s original announcement of delves would beg to differ. A lot of people subbed/resubbed for that reason alone: because of the promise of a 4th, less stressful way to gear up and enjoy the content in different ways. Nothing wrong with catering to them as well.
And one last attempt to see if this sticks (3rd time is the charm): there are other ways to handsomely reward 1%ers than giving them gear
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What’s dropping subs is poor game design choices behind classes, the atrocious state of arena post solo shuffle release which is by far their biggest mistake in terms of player participation which took a nuclear nosedive off a sheer cliff and the atrocious state of release due to the copious amounts of bugs with abilities or systems (huge desyncs).
Then you’ve also got IRL factors such as the cost of living conditions these days provide less extra money to be spent for hobbies so video games tend to get cut out of budgets over basic necessities.
yes I’m aware it’s been like this since the beginning I’ve been playing since vanilla, this doesn’t mean it should stay that way. Crafting is also not the answer, this doesnt give you bis weapons or trinkets or cantrip items.
near bis is also just incorrect, plenty of classes want weighted gear not 50/50 stats. making things more deterministic (again, 3 months LMAO which is more than half the season) is a good thing.
people want to log in and play the game without there being a lot of frustration tied to it. class balancing is a large part of that but so is the annoying gearing system right now
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most top players are playing for cosmetics or a challenge, I’ve met literally 0 that care about the gear ilvl or the feeling of obtaining bis items and it’s almost always a point of frustration rather than relief when you loot it finally. (agreeing with you btw)
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While I agree that it takes too long to gear out a character through the vault alone, giving myth track from 10s would cause a lot of problems on its own.
You could spam 10s endlessly and be fully geared out in a matter of days. It would also ruin raiding altogether as running 10s is easier than clearing the raid on heroic. You’d rapidly out gear all content in the game minus pushing keys and the harder bosses in mythic raiding.
People always take the path of least resistance. If getting everything you want is faster and easier, people will stop playing.
If people stop playing just because they “got the gear” then that means playing the game itself is not fun and they should fix that. Using gear as a crutch to keep people playing unfun content for as long as possible through a season is not a recipe for success, it is how you kill a game.
They need to make playing the game fun, the rewards are secondary.
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Agreed. And not quite sure spamming 10s is a thing for average player that is just trying to get their AOTCs. Most people struggle past 8s, above average struggles around 11-12, and pushers seem to struggle 13+ in the current tuning. If you can get your gear and finish the content on one character and come back for a 2nd character soon (and a 3rd and a 4th and so on)… that’s how you know game is fun. Right now, it feels like a chore to gear up and 100% agree with Blargen that that is exactly how you kill a game.
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