Making raiding more like M+ would cause the same problems if not make it worse. Much likely at that point you might as well just make bosses drop their whole loot table in someone inventory. M+ gearing speed isn’t healthy for the game, it was made so people would be able to raid more easily but it didn’t make more people raid mythic or even heroic because loot was never the main problem to raid at those levels. So it only made it worse because now you’re behind if you don’t do it.
I don’t think that was the intent, at the time it seemed more for the people who JUST wanted to do 5-mans all the time. As well as a response to the bemoaning of “5-mans don’t serve any purpose after the first week of an expansion” (which was true).
Based on how undertuned Emerald Nightmare was compared to M+ gear, it never seemed to even occur to Blizzard that somebody would spam the wazoo out of M+ and THEN go and do the raid.
That might have been a small part but the main intent was always to make it so people wouldn’t raid log because that’s the feedback they got from WoD. Which is also why we got AP and legendaries.
I would still say that making it the catchup gear system was the 2nd part, they wanted something so people could get into raids quicker and not have to wait multiple raid weeks to get gear.
The 5 man part is a mix of that, it’s more that they saw an opportunity.
At least that’s my understanding.
People raid logged in WoD because there wasn’t anything to do in the game. A problem that wasn’t nearly so bad in Mists/Wrath/BC, or even Cata (and Cata was pretty bad).
We told them that in WoD beta. But it was designed to be a 12-month expansion, so… 
And just to clarify: I NORMALLY DO WORLD CONTENT. There just wasn’t anything to do, in WoD. Not until Tanaan Jungle, at any rate.
I just don’t think they were ever interested in finishing that expansion, they had a lead dev transition during that time and I’m sure they felt their time would be better used doing something else as they never believed in WoD.
WoD to this day is still just astonishing to me.
It leaked on reddit before the announcement that the next expansion would be time-traveling back to a parallel universe… and nobody believed it.
The design philosophies of WoD were much more close to older expansions and I’m sure someone at the top hated that.
I’m not sure it would be so bad.
I like both raiding and M+, but if they split the gear paths, it would provide me more incentive / opportunity to play alts. For example, if I was raiding on my Pally, I would not feel compelled to do M+ on her as well, and vice versa, because gear from raids would not be useful in M+, and vice versa.
1 Like
I think numbers for both will plummet, but moreso for raids.
Think of all the players who happily play both M+ and raid and use M+ gear to supplement their raid progress.
With separate gear tracks, I think many of these players would feel like their time and effort was not being respected, not just because they would feel like they had to re-gear for each mode, but it would also take them more time to progress in M+ and raids. This would eventually lead to burnout sooner and participation dropoff.
In a previous reply I said that separate gearing paths may encourage more alt play, but if players enjoy doing both M+ and raids on multiple characters, it will just add to this feeling that there’s too much to do and, again, burnout ensues.
1 Like
Overall big numbers wise it wouldn’t affect raiding, while for sure I understand for some people it helps I don’t feel if it would happen that raiding would suffer much. So the problem is M+, how much people do we need to throw at that system to make it work? Do we really need to make it so everyone and their dogs feel incentivized to do that content?
M+ has caused much more burnouts than any raids would. It’s a pretty toxic environment by itself and way more spammy. If we get a new raid each 5 months people are happy.
1 Like
I think it should go without saying that if there was an iron curtain between the two, that raiding would no longer be tuned on the assumption that everyone had geared up through M+ FIRST.
I think as long as there is some reward / incentive for playing M+ (e.g. KSM, mounts, tmog, etc.) there will be players who play it beyond “ilvl go up”.
A fair point.
Again, I’m more than happy for Blizzard to experiment with reward systems for M+ and raids to see what eventually works for all parties.
So long as players (and devs) learn the lessons from said experiments and use it to iterate on rewards, instead of trying to find excuses if things don’t go their way… 
Naturally, but you’d still have some number of players struggle more on content than they do now, as they would no longer have M+ gear to prop them up.
Of course, but let’s be honest challenge modes weren’t the biggest attraction in the city.
There are ways to make it better but the system itself is broken. You can’t make people gear this fast if the goal is to have gear progression mean something. And they’ve mostly only made it faster through the years. Which the solution at this point is to make raids drop more loot so it can be even faster… xd You can easily compare with classic how current reward systems with M+ has just totally derailed the game. But sure make heroic raids drop aspect crest, add 50% more loot to raids with bonus rolls and the gap between M+ early game would close up a bit.
Everything has sped up, including the season length. Black Temple was the current raid for 9 months and nobody gave it a second thought.
Oh people definitely criticized long raid duration, but back then most people would still be progging earlier raids when black temple launched moreover with how you needed keys/attunements to enter. Kael’thas wasn’t an easy boss to beat in Tempest keep to enter Black temple, imagine if they required cutting edge Kil’jaeden to enter Antorus.
I didn’t play during MoP or WoD, but did challenge modes stay challenging while you geared up, or did they get easier and easier as the expansion wore on, like in Cata, Wrath and BC?
I don’t think having raids drop more loot is going to fix the problem, just make the problems take longer to appear, because even if raids dropped more loot, you’d still be facing the issue that M+ can be spammed ad infinitum…
I think most of us were still leveling during that time…
Some new items made them more easy but they never really were that much hard to begin with because the scaling didn’t really scale higher, it scaled you down. People still competed for time, but for most people they were something you do once if you cared for cosmetics and they had some of the best cosmetics (way better than right now for seasons).
Sure but raids would be more competitive versus M+ so you would need to spam less m+ to get to the same point that M+ spam lets you do. Basically raids would be a bigger weekly cap push.
I’m also open to cap M+ items from the vault to heroic and for drops to cap at normal but that is probably a worse solution for people that do not want gear to be splitted 
Raiding staying the same with the same flaws since MoP while also removing things that made it more bearable(coins) ruined raiding.
Raiding needs it’s lockout removed. Raiding needs either less players required to make a raid group (make it 5 to 20 players or whatever the mythic cap is) or it needs less mechanics where one guy out of the 20 can just wipe the whole raid. Raiding needs the tier loot transmog to be auto dropped for players who beat a specific boss, so even if you don’t get loot you get something. Raiding also needs coins or dinar to comeback and be permanent.
1 Like
I can agree with a lot of that, although I think some of it goes too far.
I think, if you get a piece of gear, it should unlock all mog appearances of that same piece from easier difficulties. Prevents the “people needing on gear that’s worse than what they have, for transmog” and encourages people to do harder content. Both good things.
I also don’t object to dinars, I just think it was silly that you could buy items from bosses you’ve never defeated.
1 Like