Raiding has ruined raiding… by being raiding.
You can only attribute it to M+ if you want to externalize blame for something that is intrinsically caused by the fact that raiding is boring as hell and nobody wants to do it if they have options to opt out of doing it.
Raiding was already ruined so M+ was created!
Raiding is a thing if yesteryear!
LFR pretty much killed raiding for most casual guilds. Now, the only people left playing a bunch of antisocial players and a handful tryhards.
You run M+ for gear now and raid for trinkets. That’s pretty much the current meta, and I’m good with that. Raiding has become a chore anymore. A single wipe results in so much downtime to run back, fully rebuff, eat, etc… its just inefficient. Its crazy to me that we can’t just respawn back at the boss like most other games have started to do. Engineering can save some time but since everyone revives at 1hp 1mana you still have large downtime.
M+ is much more efficient way to gear out, especially this season since 20s are so easy.
Soulstone a healer for wipe recovery. That’s been standard procedure since vanilla.
Raiding gear is ruining the superior game mode m+
Easily yes. I’m by no means a great raider but I enjoyed the carrot on a stick that came with seeing cool gear on players that I was striving for.
It’s not going to matter…
in two years the entire game will be solable via AI…
At this point it’s just archaic. It should be like FF14 with a WOW a twist.
Once you clear the thrash and you wipe on a boss, upon respawning you should appear in front of that boss, no questions asked. Fyrakk and Tindral are like this but they should have made it the entire instance. The speed buffs on the ancients are sort of a compromise but only because Blizzard is stubborn.
It’s hilarious too that the runback can also quickly fray tempers due to how long it can be sometimes.
No, you wouldn’t.
Whether you have 100 players looking for a +5 and 100 players looking for a +10, or, 100 players looking for +2 to +5 and 100 players looking for +6 to +10, it’s the same number in each bracket.
ETA:
Forgot to respond to this:
My understanding, or rather, theory, is the reason we got cross-faction is because Alliance started falling way way way behind Horde when it came to raiding (as shown by how much longer it was taking Alliance guilds to fill out the CE top 100 compared to Horde). It seems to me, and I could be wrong here, that the general consensus is that if you want to do endgame group content, you’re better off rolling Horde as you’ll just have more opportunities with better players.
Now, whether the latter is true or not doesn’t matter if that’s what the community perception is (and is also backed up by the few data points we have, like, again, the CE top 100) because players will make their choices accordingly, and so Blizzard allowed for cross-faction play as a way to help the Alliance players more easily engage in endgame group content.
Also, the narrative team may have just gotten tired of constantly trying to shoehorn the faction war into every expansion. 
Perhaps the reason the devs only care about players who compliment them is because the players who do not make vague and / or unreasonable demands (“we need to put the War back in Warcraft” / “Blizzard is not an indie company; we want new content every week”) and when they don’t get it, make up conspiracy theories about what and how the developers think (“the devs want to force sweaty e-sport gameplay on everyone and don’t care about open world levelers”). 
Just remember that “caring about money” is what got us:
I don’t see why shareholders would care about played-time metrics over actual subscriptions.
That would be like a gym caring more about members’ time-in-gym more than how many monthly subscriptions they have. 
i expect delves to just be the LFR equivalent for dungeons. So i doubt delves will kill m+ participation
Fantastic! Have fun in vanilla then.
M+ has it’s end as well, so 
This is a disingenuous comment and you know it. 95% of DF is brand new content. The only “recycled” content we’ve gotten is previous dungeons in the M+ rotation.
As for everyone paying a monthly sub, players who do not engage in endgame content are more likely to quit the game after a patch release than to keep playing, so, once again, why spend resources on content that most players will burn through in a week and then unsub, vs content that will keep players subbed?
If you do not like the state of the game, unsub. That’s what I have done in the past. Complaining on the forum that M+ is preventing a fountain of content from being produced while not engaging in M+ but also having nothing to do is silly. Vote with your wallet.
If indeed you are correct that Blizzard is being lazy by spending as few resources as possible to give M+ players “recycled” content, then when they see huge unsub numbers because non-M+ players are voting with their wallet, they should have no trouble devoting resources to producing this mythological fountain of Official MMORPG™ content the billion dollar company is capable of.
And the best thing about it is that it will NEVER negatively affect the M+ players, since Blizzard will be able to continue to devote a microscopic fraction of their enormous resources into making more lazy, “recycled” content to keep the M+ players happy and subbed. 
So, please, for the love of god, put your money where your mouth is and not in Blizzard’s pocket, and unsubscribe. 
I did not disagree that WoW is a theme park MMO, and players are actually using the term correctly, but, like an actual theme park, theme park MMOs have segregated “rides” that are “ridden” repeatedly and only get new rides and zones every few years (and also have old rides removed or refurbished from time to time).
What you are asking is not a theme park MMO; you’re asking for endless, infinite content at a pace no developer has thus been able to produce, including Blizzard.
Also, I was a little unsure before, but now I’m 100% sure you are Drunne posting on an alt. 
Leveling is not an “endgame” activity, so why you are putting it here is a mystery.
I don’t know about max level gear quests, but we did have Heroic dungeons to gear for the first tier of raid…in Wrath and Cata. That was about it. They were introduced part way in TBC as a way to provide catch-up / filler gear for raiders. I did not play MoP or WoD, but my understanding is that Heroics were not really part of the raid prep process, due to the massive outcry and sub loss because of their difficulty in Cata.
As for the WQs, tables, and other systems you mentioned, again, my understanding is they were added as a way to give players who did not want to raid something to do.
Brewa seems to think that they DO listen, but just to the top tenth of the 0.0001% who praise them on Twitter and in Wowhead articles.
So which is it?
Brewa seems to think that the problem is that they actually DON’T care about money.
So which is it?
Which goes back to what I said earlier:
If you’re unhappy and you know it unsubscribe 
If you’re unhappy and you know it unsubscribe
If you’re unhappy and you know it
And you really wanna show it
If you’re unhappy and you know it unsubscribe
M+ in and of itself didn’t do it, but the vault rewards for m+ sure did. Raid drops 36 items and 30 of them you don’t want because gear with better stats is gated behind doing 8 m+ for the week. max reward is 18 but you can do 20s before even stepping foot into mythic raid so by the time you get there you’re already letting gear go to transmog because you got something better, faster, easier.
And to those saying “well you don’t get tier in m+” no you absolutely do. Better tier in fact because it goes up to 489 without having to touch mythic, Especially when catalyst is available at the start of a season. You basically only go to raid for trinkets at this point…
Remove gear from raids and quickly watch 90% or more of the player base stop running them.
M+ has invalidated everything below mythic raiding, as M+ is easier, faster and rewards failure with inflated ilvl items from the vault.
Remove gear from M+ and watch 90% of the player base stop running them too. Hell, even just make them reward gear on par with difficulty (ie less ilvl than now for <20) and stop them from rewarding inflated vault slots for failing to time a key and watch 90% of the player base stop running them too.
M+'s issue isn’t that it exists, it’s that it is too rewarding compared to all other content.
If they award Heroic Raid gear?
I, for one, would likely never touch M+ again, except maybe for boredom/curiosity, as I do now.
And I know plenty of players who share this view.
It will depend on implementation, really.
Edit: Overall, everyone plays this game for gear.
Very few enjoy the game for what it is, and from that few, I’d say 90%+ are PvPers, since the PvP match is a reward in itself, since it’s ever changing.
PvE is a trick that loses its allure once learned.
Torghast would be the equivalent of a “infinite” PvE mode with no rewards other than itself that could be played for fun, if it was better implemented, due to the possible variations of powers, runs, enemies etc.
M+ comes close, but doesn’t offer enough variation to compensate for the “sameness” of each dungeon. But that’s a subject for another topic.
This is demonstrably not true and really easy to demonstrate:
According to the statistics we can get from RaiderIo, the most popular/frequent range of timed keys is from 2-13, with a drop off beginning at 14 and up (most likely since that goes all the way up to 19s). But with this data we can with 100% certainty say that the vast majority of keys, most likely both timed and untimed, exist within the roughly 2-15:ish range.
Which equates to ilvl items ranging from 441 to 463 that can drop from the dungeon. And the Vault items ranging from 454 to 476. When compared to the ilvl that drops from raids this varies from 441 all the way up to 483 from respectively LFR, Normal, and Heroic (when including the more rare drops as well, which one should because they are part of the loot table).
In a single M+ run you’ll get on average about 2 items (IIRC, but I believe that’s math that’s rounded up so it is more like 1.5+ or something like that) per group. So that is 2 items for 5 players, for roughly 30 minutes, and it is from a MASSIVE pool of items, which will almost always be lower ilvl than the gear that you are currently and actively participating in. And that’s even when including the fact of the matter when you can upgrade your gear.
The exception to this is the Vault, because the Vault serves two functions simultaneously (much to the annoyance of Brewa, even if his frustration from a purely mythic raiding perspective at least has somewhat of a basis in reality):
So… by and all, no. M+ doesn’t reward “failure” or basically any of the stuff you are proclaiming here. Yes there is a debate to be had about gearing in raids but considering this thread has been ongoing for almost ten days where the literal only correct answer to it is “No, it hasn’t ruined it - but it has changed it” … I don’t think trying to go for nuance in this thread will lead to anywhere.
You mean like how the challenge modes from Mists of Pandaria was, or the challenge dungeons from WoD? When folks were made aware that those things existed in WoD … folks ran them. A LOT.
Yes, people who play WoW for the PvE aspect cares about gearing - I have already covered why gearing is MASSIVELY important for any sense of progression in PvE content. So this isn’t the argument that you think it is … but even if you really want to make the argument, it has already been proven wrong. Time and time again.
If you fail a key you get nothing from it. Not timing a key isn’t the same thing as failing a key. This would be akin to saying “Oh your raid just killed a boss with only a few people left alive but since your group by and large failed to do the mechanics correctly and stay alive, you failed and thus’ the kill doesn’t count”. It is just as stupid of an argument as the one you are trying to make here, unless you actually think not completing a key at all somehow still counts for completing a key which, I can assure you, both happens every so often and it very much so doesn’t give you a damn thing.
So… yah’, ehm… not really much else to say than that you are quite literally just categorically wrong. Because even in the sense of the one thing you got partially right you still missed the ball:
That’s not an issue in regards to M+ specifically, but in terms of skewed gearing overall. Again that’s a discussion that requires nuance and the solution can very much so be to increase the rate of which you get gear from other sources, reducing gear from M+ in some capacity (which they already in part did with Dragonflight through crafted gear now being relevant for endgame), or it can be as simple as this isn’t a problem except for some very niche players who think because it is a problem for them that it is a problem for everyone.
Again, nuance that hasn’t existed at all in this thread. A lot of it due to people berating serious attempts at discussions, the use of personal attacks and insults, or just refusing to listen to anyone who doesn’t immediately agrees with their particular opinion.
Except it does, because if you FAIL to time a key you don’t receive a penalty - you still get an inflated ilvl boosted vault slot.