Being able to simultaneously gear from M+ while progressing mythic raids means items that would traditionally be upgrades are either sidegrades by the time they drop (ie: better itemization) or no longer desired at all.
The big issue in this is that there are far more dungeons and bosses which means tons of different itemization combos whereas a raid has an average of two options to pick from, and traditionally if it wasn’t properly itemized it was still your BiS because no other options existed.
So a lot of raid gear can still get invalidated depending on how well your guild progresses and ultimately means a guild can be fully decked out in mythic quality gear despite only being halfway through the raid.
It’s less that the gear is literally invalidated and more that another avenue of acquisition of similar quality gear exists and that has sped up the gearing process.
I feel like weekly raid lockouts are one of those things WoW brought over from EQ with no better reason than “well EQ did it, and if we let people gear up too fast they’d quit”
It’s been nearly 20 years since then, and the gear spigots are fully open with M+. Well past time to redesign the lockout system.
Either have heroic raid bosses drop aspects or don’t reward m+ with aspects for anything less than a TIMED 20… maybe even higher.
Gearing up from m+ to outgear the heroic raid before you even try it at all is ridiculous.
Other option is to maybe stop gating people so hard from mythic raiding.
Mythic raiding is my preferred game mode, but i haven’t done it because i can’t on my server… there are no groups.
Transferring to more densely populated server as a porposed solution is essentially a flat out admission that some servers have access to more game modes / features than others do for the same price.
There needs to be better solutions than leaving decade long guilds / groups… like… oh i dont know… LETTING PEOPLE PLAY THE GAME.
Would mean you can’t upgrade the gear at all because normal drops drake crests. Hero requires 4 wyrm and 2 aspect upgrades.
Between hero and myth max upgraded, there’s a whopping 6 ilvl of difference, and would require aspect crest, which you do not get from heroic raid. Between max wyrm upgraded hero track and 1st stage myth track, it’s 4 ilvls of difference.
Classic being popular or having a substantial amount of players doesn’t mean it has more players than retail. Since Classic launch it pretty much helped wow recover its losses, without classic wow would be in an even dire situation.
Obviously other changes would need to be made to support it, I was just throwing out an idea not a fully fleshed out proposal.
The Mythic vault option I threw out there was admittedly lackluster, I was rolling with the assumption that Blizz would want to stick with the existing upgrade tracks. An alternative would be to create a new track that is 3 or 6 ilvls higher than max Myth gear, call it Pristine or something.
They aren’t equal. They don’t need to be. We tried raid or die. We tried easy raids. We tried titan forge. We tried letting gear be gear. We tried getting rid of tier. None of it made players happy.
This is the compromise. Making it more complicated doesn’t solve a problem that doesn’t really exist.
For people that raid in guilds, I feel that the current gearing system is the best we ever had. With a good council you have barely any need to run m+, beside for vault.
The only thing I would change is to double the amount of aspects mythic bosses drop.
And lot of people liked that pvp got split.
It didn’t make any sense in SL season 1 when most of the tank gear came from pvp… when tanks aren’t really allowed to pvp. (As vers is often bis for tanks)
Isn’t the real problem here the item level jump between raid tiers, though?
I did a check and it seems that if you Mythic raid in one tier, the most immediate upgrade the following tier is Heroic raids.
In this scenario, yes, I can see how doing high M+ keys will help gear a Mythic raider for Mythic raids. The alternative would be to spend more time farming Heroic raids, or tryhard the Mythic raid at a grossly lower item level.
However, if Blizzard simply clamped down on the absolutely ridiculous gear inflation by making Normal => Normal, Heroic => Heroic, Mythic => Mythic tier progression, I don’t think there would be a “requirement” for Mythic raiders to do M+ as preparation.
Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you.
When I was raiding ICC, I had to wait 8 weeks for that stupid healing shield to drop from Lord Marrowgar. Until then, I had to use the 10-man Naxx healing shield as there was no other reasonable avenue to get better gear except maybe 25-man Jaraxxus.
While transmog farming for the Judgement armor set, I had to wait 16 weeks, yes, 16 weeks, before the final piece of the set dropped.
I have a feeling that if M+ rewards are de-item-leveled or made not to work in raids, Blizzard would have to add some other kind of bad luck gear acquisition system or there’s going to be a large exodus of raiders from the game.
It strikes me as odd that if PvP gear doesn’t work at the same item level in PvE environments, why are players being asked to make a choice between a piece of PvP or PvE gear in the GV?
Seems like it would make more sense separate them and have a GV for PvP and a GV for PvE and you can pick one from each…
They are doing that for next expansion, it never really made sense to either choose to progress your pvp or pve progression has often it wasn’t the same stats.
