I already covered this but I guess you honestly think that unless a majority of the raid is alive at the end of a boss kill, that doesn’t count either.
Interesting take to have. Not to mention that the key was still completed at that level. Making this take of yours even more bizarre in all honesty.
That’s the thing about M+, though: It’s designed to be so faceroll easy that it’s impossible to fail to finish a key.
Except sometimes on Tyrannical, which is why Tyrannical is so much more hated: Because people might actually have to do an encounter, for a change, instead of just mow down a bunch of hapless trash mobs.
Nothing in the raid rewards super-inflated ilvl from the vault. That’s the problem.
My god. Another terrible article with terrible takes from this guy. His last article automatically came to my mind when talking about how Blizz is catering to these players.
Only reading the section about “Here’s a presentation about how much overhealing was going on in the top 50 logs of every raid!” and how he doesn’t seem to grasp why the overhealing in the last raids was so high, makes my blood boil. He doesn’t have a damn clue that the problem isn’t how ooooverpowered healers are but that damage has gotten so spiky and deadly with different damage events during a fight, that healers have to pump through to keep everyone topped. That’s how all of this overhealing is generated. It’s ridiculous that Blizzard listens to people with such weird agendas who only seem to have tunnel vision. God, now I’m mad.
Subscriptions mean little. It’s about transactions, how attractive the ongoing content is to players and maybe the retention rate. If people invest a lot of time in the game, the chance that they re-subscribe is pretty high and shows the good quality of the content that may be able to lure more players in. Problem with this “high engagement” was that Covid was around during that time and players were automatically logging in and playing more, because they had nothing else to do. 
But Blizzard could use it to decorate the shareholder report.
Nor does M+.
Because you called it “super-inflated” which it isn’t. And “inflated” gear does exist in raids, less so now with the upgrade system. But again, nothing about this has “super-inflated” gear.
Thanks for perfectly demonstrating my point Brewa.
Or maybe that’s a self-portrait where you can’t see that you are the guy behaving like that?
If you can’t even accept that M+ giving the best gear in the game, for what is incredibly trivial content, is inflated rewards, then there’s no discussion to be had. It’s like trying to have a discussion with a flat-earther.
That’s an awfully large brush you’re painting with here. You don’t speak for all MMORPG players, there are bound to be people who are looking for different things.
WoW was the more accessible MMO when it came out, but today even this more accessible MMO is not something I would be able to commit to. My schedule is just too sporadic to be able to commit to the amount of raid nights that would be required to satisfy how high I would want to push in raids. M+ gives me content I can progress with in 40 minute chunks here and there, something no other endgame mode WoW has ever offered allowed me to do. If WoW were still the old WoW, I would not still be playing the game. I’m genuinely sorry if you feel the game experience you want is gone with what WoW has become, but asking me to set aside what I am enjoying in the game because it doesn’t fit what some undetermined number of other players you claim to speak for think an MMORPG should be is not compelling in the slightest.
What content did we have in WoW prior to M+ that we don’t have now that M+ is in the game? This is the main sticking point I have with this argument. People claim that WoW was this paragon of non-repetitive content before but has become this repetitive loop of recycled content because of M+. But that’s simply revisionist history to try to sell a narrative.
The trend toward fewer dungeons in an expansion began before Legion, with Legion actually bumping that number back up. For context, BFA, Shadowlands, and Dragonflight all have the same number of dungeons or more as MoP, and 3 of those MoP dungeons were recycled vanilla dungeons. Oh and one of the dungeons in BFA, Shadowlands, and Dragonflight was a megadungeon, more akin to a 5-man raid than any dungeon we’d seen since vanilla. Not to mention all the side games and world content in Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands, each bringing more to do in the game than the total non-instanced content introduced from TBC through WoD.
You can be upset with Blizzard’s decision to reduce the amount of dungeon content from WoW over the years and I would actually support that argument. But to pin the reason for this shift to fewer dungeons on M+ is completely divorced from reality.
I definitely agree that the importance of M+ on raid gearing has become too great, so I’m with you on this.
However, the option does exist to not force yourself into M+ when you aren’t doing other things in the game. Raid progression will be slower for sure, but there’s nothing that would prevent you from achieving even CE if you find enough like-minded people to agree to that philosophy. My guild gets AOTC every tier and we have no policy requiring people to run M+ in between raids. I will grant that your raid progression would take longer, but you can still play the way we did back in the olden days of WoW if you still want.
The suggestion that nobody cares about M+ score is absolutely absurd. You may not care about it, which is fine and I’m not going to try to convince you that you should. But every key run past +20 but before title contention range is strictly for score that those players and people in their circle do care about.
Personally, I actually like that there is a small number of dungeons in an M+ season. Refining strategies and perfecting pulls is one of the things I find fun in that mode, something that wouldn’t happen if I only had incentive to run each dungeon once. Were it not for M+, I wouldn’t be playing WoW, so it certainly isn’t burning me out.
I do feel for the raiders who burn themselves out because they need to run M+ in order to reach their raid goals every season. But M+ doesn’t have to be completely nuked from orbit to allow raiders to avoid such a fate.
I have literally conceded that this is entirely a possibility. But you were so busy with your blinders that you missed that I did in fact say that this is entirely possible.
Drop the attitude and you’ll miss fewer things.
Agreed. But I ain’t the one posting the same thing over and over again, that falls entirely on your end. Just like flat earthers can do nothing but repeat the same damn things over and over again.
Isn’t it possible the players in classic are not the same as those in retail, that were retail to play exactly like classic does now that you’d simply be pushing out the players who prefer what retail is today?
Also, no one forces you to repeat the content. If you want to experience each thing once and be done, the existence of M+ doesn’t force you to do so. Normal and heroic raiding can be done without farming M+ so you can do that too with a defined end. The only thing that you wouldn’t be able to to do is push M+ score (which by your own admission, “nobody cares about”) or mythic raid, which didn’t exist back in vanilla either. Outside of lack of willpower, I’m genuinely not understanding how M+ prevents you from playing the same amount of content in the same way as you couldback in the old days of WoW.
Quite literally everything you described as what an MMORPG should be still exists, and can be engaged with in the same exact way. If you want to knock Blizzard for how much they shortened the leveling experience, that I would agree with you about and could understand the rub. But there is no reason you can’t level, quest for gear, run some dungeons for gear, raid until you kill the last boss of that raid, then take a break until next patch. The existence of every other thing you mentioned would not limit your ability to complete this core gameplay loop you mentioned.
If they did that, a lot of people would not be playing WoW anymore. WoD was the last raid or die expansion, and it featured the largest subscriber drop in history. Raid just doesn’t work for a lot of people for many reasons; if that’s all there is to do, those players won’t stay (if they pick it up in the first place).
I’m sure in the short term they don’t, but most shareholders are after long term gains. I’d bet money that play time is a strong predictor of player retention. If a person plays the game a lot, it’s more likely they’ll pick up a 12 month subscription and keep it rolling than someone who picked up a 60 day sub to check out a new patch, cleared the quests and LFR, then ducked out until next patch.
Nobody says this as you’re presenting it. Vault drops tier and catalyst allows you to create it, absolutely. But what M+ defenders say is that raiders get tier faster which is mathematically true. Every avenue M+ has to get tier is available in the same quantities to raiders, and then raiders can also get tier to straight drop.
You’re absolutely right about the item level aspect of it, but getting more pieces is more important for tier than item level. So the question comes down to gear speed versus gear quality, as always. Raiders get their power spike sooner while M+ers get better items over a longer period of time.
The problem with Torghast was its lack of real progression. It was impossible to complete the highest layers without getting gear from outside sources; the player who thought the mode was neat but had no interest in raid, M+, or PVP couldn’t even sniff the end. If there were a way to progress in Torghast by running Torghast, it could have been a great evergreen mode that many would enjoy as part of their primary gameplay loop and others might even enjoy going back to once in a while as a way to pass the time.
This is not exactly an apples to apples comparison, though.
The end state of each boss in raid is binary, dead or not dead. You only get rewards if you reach the dead state.
The end state for a key is timed, depleted, or not completed. It’s easy to rationalize rewards for timed and no rewards for not completed, just like the binary structure in raid. But depleted is a third state that is trickier to figure out a just reward for. It certainly shouldn’t be as great as timed but giving nothing seems pretty harsh.
The first key I ever ran over +20 was a tyrannical +24 AD in BFA that we all knew we were over our head on. It took us over 3 hours to complete that key, but it was easily the hardest content I completed all expansion. To try to say that I shouldn’t deserve a reward for just getting through that key, when every heroic boss in the expansion was noticeably easier for me to get through would be absurd.
I definitely agree with the item level inflation though. How good the gear from vault should be is something that should be examined, but too many people suggest that not timing a key should be grounds for no reward at all.
Yeah people forget that not everyone has a 9-5 office work job, I work 4 days on 4 days off 4 nights on 4 days off repeat.
Even in the best situation assuming that times were close to when I get home from work The best I can ever hope to pull off is 75% averaged attendance, No-one wants a raider that can only do 75% so raiding is so completely unavailable given i’ve searched for years for a team that’ll do it from AOTC to low-mid mythic tier.
Okay.
Don’t have M+ gear work in raids, and tune the raids accordingly. Fixed.
Why M+ players think everyone is gunning for them, I don’t understand. We just don’t want M+ warping the rest of the game, like it has.
Except it hasn’t? You still aren’t forced to run M+ that’s a choice you make, No-ones holding atomic annie too your forehead and telling you that you must run M+ or it’s over.
And secondly a lot of the BIS gear for both raiding and M+ still comes from raid, Raid hasn’t died, Raiding isn’t ended, Raiding simply has a competing alternative.
Show me the Cutting Edge guild where nobody’s done M+.
I’ll wait.
(Gonna be a long wait.)
Everything you have said here is true but I don’t think calling it “gear inflation” is sensible as it doesn’t serve that as a practical function at all. If all one does is to do the same content forever without any improvement or to push further then yes, it is definitely a sense of “gear inflation”. But that’s quite literally the only case where that’d be applicable to, since otherwise it serves as a stepping stone towards higher difficulty content.
So the two groups that experience this type of “inflation” I guess would be Mythic raiders as they don’t have any avenues of gear higher than that, or folks who only ever do content like LFR. But overall I don’t think describing it as “gear-inflation” really serves much purpose.
You have chosen to be in a cutting edge guild, That is the choice you’ve made. You aren’t forced to be in a cutting edge guild.
this game is many things to many people and raiding is not the majority , and raid logging is not the final destination
I don’t think everyone is gunning for M+ players. But there are several names I could drop in this thread from people calling for the removal of M+ as an endgame mode that can stand on its own.
I’m all for reining in the gearing up to and including separating the gearing between raid and M+ so raiders can avoid M+ and still compete. But it’s just not accurate to claim that nobody even in this thread haven’t called for the removal of M+.
That’s fair. I largely used the term inflation because people others were using that term, but that isn’t the right word to use.
The point I was getting at is that the difficulty of keys required to get gear on par with mythic raid is too low, and has been for quite some time now. It is a legitimate gripe that it’s common for AOTC guilds to disenchant 2/3 of the drops they get from week 2 because a significant portion of their raid team logged 20 +16 keys during week 1 and completely outgear even the later heroic bosses, all of which are noticeably more difficult than any key they ran to get that gear. Then the fact that +16 keys last season and +18 keys this season are giving gear in the vault that can be upgraded to the same item level as what drops off the ultimate mythic raid boss is mind-boggling.
I must have all those people on ignore, because I haven’t seen any of them.