Has M+ gear rewards ruined raiding?

Not just solo. Instanced small group content has been severely lacking for a while, and the delves are going to be a welcome addition if they ship as advertised.

I have no confidence in delves personally. I think Blizzard devs have doubled down with mischaracterizing those who dont deem current gear systems as worthwhile to interact with as those who prefer solo. They clearly dont want to admit the timegate or FOMO or lackof player agency systems that ruin the multiplayer modes as the problem.

I think delves will be ruined by the same systems and some dev will roll out another “you think you do but you don’t” quote for why another game mode failed after giving into the community complaints.

It’s clear to me that they are not going to change some very core design principles that no longer work. It’s a mix of corporate demanding MAU metric design, pigeonholed methodology of system design overall (doing it “right” is much harder than phoning it in with how it’s currently done for eliciting player sunk costing for valuation purposes), etc.

Since I know theres going to be no real course change and the game will continue to head in the current direction indefinitely, it’s the primary reason I pay game time with gold to token. I had no issue doing 6 month subs in ffxiv but wow does not deserve it. It’s the only real agency here with showing disapproval.

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Lacking how, exactly?

Maybe for you and others of your ilk.
It was by far the highlight of BfA to me.

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Solo game modes aren’t necessary if they would just implement LFG queues for all the content.

There is entropy going on in this game where they want pugging to be pitted against premades and they want forming groups to be a gamey thing and they want to lure players into the raid by making the good trinkets raid exclusive on purpose and they want pugs to get less rewards for some strange reason even though everyone admits pugs are more difficult than organized content.

That’s what I don’t get about this game. Everyone admits pugging is abysmal, yet you get mostly rewarded from premades. Premades have to be at the 1% World First level to even be able to sniff the difficulty of pugs. There’s so much entropy.

People are talking about 18s feel like 12s from last season? In what world? In your perfectly crafted premade of perfect try hards? Yes, I’m sure they do in that context. It’s just mass contradictions all over the place.

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There simply hasn’t been a lot of instanced content designed specifically for (or were designed to scale for) small groups. Off the top of my head I can think of MoP scenarios, Visions, Islands and Torghast. Four things I can remember in 19 years.

If more exist than that, they didn’t leave a big impression on me.

raids usually has bis items that m+ doesnt.

Raids also gives your tier alot faster than m+

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8 M+ runs take way longer than a full raid clear. But bad raid reward numbers killed raid loot just like, when delves come, bad M+ rewards will kill M+.

There needs to be a way to target loot from specific dungeons or in each season. Running Atal Dazar a billion times and never even seeing Texans trinket drop is bad design. RNG loot is a waste of time we should either be able to craft stuff or farm it

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There was also a hard lockout on items.

You could only get 1 item at each quality per week.

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It’s done on purpose though.

People keep saying this like it’s the cause of raiding. No, they did that as a symptom of the raid being inconvenient to participate in.

It’s to abuse the social aspect to cover up the nasty lackof player agency that occurs with their timegate and fomo game design utilized to string out player sub time.

Thats why they lean on penalizing pugs even if it removes player agency and kills entire game modes for some of us.

Gearing feels meaningless and mobile game trashy in its current state so they have to lean extra hard on penalizing pugs to steer people into premades so valuation through flaunting at others covers it up instead. They can’t let players form guilds or friends at their own pace, theyre trying to force it because there is a deficit due to the bad and trashy gearing systems.

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I enjoy both, but what I don’t enjoy is having to farm M+ in order to raid :woman_shrugging:

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If you have to cram ALL of the good trinkets into the raid just to entice people to run it, it’s a dying game mode.

It’s out dated, old, ugly looking, inconvenient, cheesy, and just boring. The raid put me to sleep. I’m tired of every raid being a giant open temple with 500 foot high ceilings or an open sky box crammed full of trash that stands in one spot like a statue. Raiding is so boring and slow.

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I also don’t like how the loot tables are just set in stone from launch. They never retroactively add any new items.

This game is just insanely inflexible and predictable.

This is why I hated them. They were just so restrictive all around. Grindy and restrictive. Not how I think solo content should be.

Their way of overly leaning on the social aspect to cover up nasty things like “burned lockouts” or navigating through people to deal with timegate as progress no longer holds up. Numbers will continue to fall but systems design has already been thoroughly pigeonholed so I dont see proper change coming.

They will continue to double down and try to bait people harder into a sinking ship. If you create a product and no one touches it, youre gonna try to make it feel mandatory so you dont get fired by corporate.

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I prefer raiding but it takes sooo much time and rewards are generally meh.

A) what raid are you running that is 5 hours? This isn’t classic, dear level 10 warrior.

B) the answer to your question, however, is a resounding “no”. People can get 476 gear solo. Have they ruined raiding? again, the answer is a resounding “no”. I don’t really pvp much, but my guess is that you can high ilevel gear via pvp.

and, just like a raid, you can run several M+ dungeons and go zero loot. the mobs along the way don’t even drop coin, so you get some gold at the end of the M+ but it more or less pays for your consumes.

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It’s all insanely out dated. It reminds me of Bethesda with Starfield that is also out dated 10 years ago and them and all of their cohorts are so dated that they don’t even realize it, they are just completely living in the past, no hoots given, blinders on, chugging away.

No.

It just pointed out how raiding ruined raiding.

Need to make raiding better, not keep making M+ worse.

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