Replace “engaged” with “frustrated” and you will have the results of your experiment.
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I can’t even see the difference with or without the special effect for Season 3’s gear with settings at max for the Mage Tier. Gladiator has a special mount, CE this season has a special mount, and M+ has a crappy KSM mount but thats a different discussion.
If anything, the KSH reward should stay the same and CE should be something different or should be consistently getting a mount every season.
Let me check when Shadowlands launch, oh yes, November 2020, almost 4 years ago. The only difference between gearing from keys and the vault between Shadowlands S1 and S4 was the level at which you obtained the highest ilvl gear. In SL season 1 it was 20s (I think) and in Season 4, it was 15s. DF Season 3, highest ilvl track is +18s. Not much of a difference,
They’re adding an entirely new pillar of gear acquisition in TWW, Delves. Delves will change how we gear and also provide loot up to Heroic Level Raid gear.
Blizzard is adding more ways to get loot, not removing it.
There’s always going to be people who decide to farm keys endlessy and finish the season within the first couple weeks, and there will always be players that continue to play throughout the season at a slower pace. There’s no logical reason to slow down gear acquisition to the point that it kills one of the main pillars of end game content.
Times change, you either change with them or get left behind.
People worry about this so that they’re not locked out of content later, certain things require certain item levels after all. I mean even destiny 2 had stuff that required a certain light level but unlike WoW they did what you’re suggesting and slowed down gear progression which may be one reason their player numbers aren’t as great. For me I flat out quit Destiny 2 because they slowed down gear progression for casuals so bad I couldn’t do any of the story content in the seasons past the basic stuff, which means I fall behind and don’t get to have fun with new stuff. Being locked out of content due to item level is not fun, it’d lead to people giving up most likely and that’s not a good thing at this point.
put the final big bad guy fight at the end of the season not released on day 1
m+ can prepare you for it
imagine if hollywood put the final fight of the action movie in the first 10 mins
or…
Make the release of each boss wing part of a fantasy adventure story
release only 1 boss wing at a time over the coarse of a season and have the final fight in the last month.
Last boss rewards can be stuff for next season, mounts, clothes, titles, pets, early access portals for m+
I like the fantasy adventure approach
They did that and was called the AP system. Its gone for a reason and hopefully never comes back. They also did it with ICC back in wotlk and the issue with that is flat % increases affect other classes more than others alongside with the once you go back outside the raid the player felt considerably weaker and with mplus being a thing having inconsistent power between the 2 would be problematic.
Why is that bad design? As long as they nerf on time, what is the harm to the game?
The vast majority of guilds that will get CE this season didnt even get to experience Tindral and Fryaak pre nerfs, is like that version of those bosses just didnt exist for them.
3 years and 4 months is now the equivalent to the claimed 4-8 years. Right. And never mind the relevant S3-4 detail, it’s too pesky to fully realise that we aren’t even quite at two years of the actual current iteration.
Lol, no. Tier in the Vault (specifically in M+ slots), and the catalyst are huge changes. M+ is heavily, heavily incentivized as the best way to get tier when you can either get a tier pieces with a free ilvl boost from the Vault itself, or catalyst a piece for the same effect.
This is neither here, nor there to the discussion of how M+ is imbalanced in the way it rewards the player at present. It’s a feature that as it stands is entirely unknown in how it will function, or what kind of difficulty it will have, save loose planned ideas that we’ve been given. Ideas that are of course subject to change before the feature even sees the light of day, much less once it does.
As long as I have to do content outside the raid, I want that content to be done with as fast as possible.
The success of Classic shows that there are a lot of people who are still open to this style of gearing.
I will agree that in S2/S3 it felt weird to be basically done gearing about a month after patch launched (barring fishing for specific items in M+ vault/drops from un-killed raid bosses).
No way, this would definitely hurt the game.
This is wrong. This would only cause more players to un sub.
I know my m+ team was glad to play our alt team instead of playing our main team all season long.
The only thing Classic shows is that some people want to play that version of WoW, it says nothing about current Retail player base. They might as well be 2 completely different games.
That’s the core gameplay loop, so I can see why people play for that reason.
I think it’s impossible to go back to how things were in this department. It’s too big of a shift, and people have been used to more or less the current pace of gearing since BfA if not Legion.
The can of worms has been opened. It’s too late. Even if it’s better for the game, players will not accept it because any change will be seen as a “nerf”. If they were going to try and avoid this, Shadowlands was the absolute latest they might have been able to get away with it, since BfA was when it got really out of hand and that’d have been the very next expansion. But they didn’t. And they didn’t again with Dragonflight.
Blizzard clearly has no plans to course correct, this is just how the game is now, and I kinda hate it.
The return of valor points would be great for this if they time gated it similarly to conquest?
Unfortunately gear is replaced way to quickly for slower progression to make sense. Modern wow isn’t built for it.
If you wants slower progression I would hit up vanilla era or SoD, and even SoD is pretty quick in comparison to Era.
Gear progression doesn’t need to be slower, you and your circle should find other ways to get enjoyment out of the game instead. You can set M+ rating goals or work on alts, but expecting gear progression to be slower just because your group of friends are super casual isn’t realistic
Next time someone calls me a “casual” in a derogatory manner, I will respond by saying that “yes, I am in fact a casual mythic raider”. 
Timegates are bad especially when they’re specifically added to curtail the 0.1% of the playerbase to draw out the “”“esport”“” raid race and hall of fame progression that barely anyone cares about.
It doesn’t affect me whatsoever if people choose to no life gear/io/boss kills from the first week of a season. What does negatively affect me is garbage like the tier catalyst being delayed for 6 weeks because of raiding. Gear progression at the start of this expansion was awful especially after coming out of a season where blizzard begrudgingly let players go at their own pace instead of the one forced upon them. No thanks, not for me