Edit: Changed title for clarity. To many people not reading and are getting hung up on the original title, ‘It’s time to get rid of Mythic…’
Simply put, 4 raid tiers is too much and it’s causing issues in other parts of the game. With the introduction of BC classic, it’s pretty evident early on that all these raid tiers simply add to many layers of complexity to the game and are likely just being used to draw out content as much as possible.
Problem is though, the disparity in ilvl between tiers is causing issues in other parts of the game. PvP overall has taken the biggest hit. Whether it’s just doing BGs, world PvP, or rated, the huge differences between tiers creates massive gaps in power levels between players. Even for the better then average player, they may never get that high ilvl gear without doing content they may not enjoy (M+ & RBGs). PvP is just dead right now and this is one of the major contributing factors.
Even for PvE though, it creates unnecessary steps to reach the end goal. Is the idea really that a player ‘should’ progress through lfg, then normal, then heroic, then finally mythic? Seems like everyone I know skips lfg and normal completely. I’m not advocating we get rid of LFG, but what purpose does normal even serve now? What was wrong with BC or even wrath? If you want ‘mythic’ difficulty, introduce hardmode content again.
Going back to BC, looking at the gear you got from dungeons or even questing… some of it was very good. You could actually use it going into raid. The difference between the most geared player in raid vs the person entering is substantially smaller than what we have now. 213 to 226 right now is massive.
Finally, while I can’t see the numbers for participation, I would have imagine that all these tiers just dilute the pool of players that want to raid. It makes it harder for average players to get into good guilds and it makes it tough for guilds to recruit. I can only assume normal is an after thought for most players at this point.
I agree at the removal of at least one level. Mythic though I’m not sure. Maybe like what one suggested, make LFR on par with normal and kick normal aside. LFR becomes normal.
Personally, I have come to the (reluctant) conclusion that the whole reason that Mythic exists in the game, both M+ dungeons and M+ raids, is to simply stretch out existing content more rather than make the effort to get new content out on a timely basis.
As much as folks (justifiably) complain about new content coming too slowly, the complaints would be 100x worse if Mythic difficulty didn’t exist as a crutch to occupy peoples’ time.
You have to look at the history from LK on to understand why there are 4 levels.
In vanilla, when raids were first introduced, they put in 40 man raids. That was too hard due to trying to get so many people coordinated and you did not really need 40 people.
In BC, some raids were released as 10man and others as 25mans. This made things difficult on the guild because you would get locked as the group. You need to stay with the same people. What added more problems is that you would have to split your group up to do the 10mans for gear progression before doing the 25mans. So, you need 6 tanks and extra healers and dps to get to 30, but then doing 25man, you did not need all those tanks… This lead to what worked well for LK.
In LK, they made 10man and 25man of each raid. 1 difficulty, but the achievements were known as “hard mode”. For example, push that red button for Mimiron. This worked very well and the raiding community loved this. The new problem from this revolved around the casuals and less skilled players. Blizzard wanted a way for everyone to get to experience it.
In a later expansion, they made the raid simpler, and then added in a heroic mode for the more elitist so they can feel challenged. The not so skilled were happy, but the casuals complained about not having enough time or a group/guild to go with.
Next, they added in LFR. This was supposed to give the super casuals a way to experience the storyline since you can see the cut scenes there too. Also, the normal raids were made a bit easier and so were the heroics. The elitist complained about the difficulty.
Rather than get rid of Mythic, I think they should get rid of LFR and make Normal slightly easier and queue-able. This would not only cut down on iLvl bloat, but also help casuals/soloists gear up more easily.
LFR has a place for turbo casuals that just want to experience the game and don’t care about actually joining a proper guild to run the content. Normal is for dad guilds that raid twice a week and end up struggling on the end boss for months before finally killing it and celebrating with cold miller lites over discord. And mythic is for sweaties that need to be challenged, or else they’ll quit and go play something else.
Heroic is unnecessary. If you complete normal and need to be challenged, mythic should be the next stepping stone.
Getting rid of mythic raiding would lose far more people than the few PvP players who are unwilling to get max-tier (226) gear any other way. I would wager the majority of people wearing 226 got it from M+ rather than mythic raiding anyway.
This is a more reasonable suggestion, Normal and LFR are roughly on par in terms of need for communication/coordination (i.e. not needing much.) They could at least make Normal queuable some ways into the tier e.g. after World First is over or after the Hall of Fame is complete.
Eww Miller Lite. Some of us dads prefer a different adult beverage.
The only thing that attracts me to M+ at this point is the KSM mount. It’s a cool mount IMO. But I’ve pretty much decided that it’s not worth the pain to get it.
For sure. I started raiding in BC and did so through cata. It was actually after mythic raiding was introduce that myself and a lot of friends really got bored with it. Too many layers. The hardmodes in Ulduar were a nice approach. It added a few more pieces, but did add the gross exaggeration of ilvl we have now.
There are definitely a lot of nuances as into how we got here. That said, we have so many more tools than we did in the past to make raiding in general more flexible, so much that we have made parts of raiding pointless.
Agree. That said, the player base at the top is dwindling and its killing the game for the rest of us. This isn’t to say we can’t have equally difficult content, but rather that we look at the existing content and ask the question, do we really need this?
That’s fine, but that’s just a semantics thing. Normal feels like the most pointless of all the tiers anyways.
I do think there is something to more players needing to pushed. LFG is almost a tragedy. I get it. I understand why we have it… but it really destroys what raiding should be about. Because of that, it creates little desire to push for harder content and removes the carrot.
If they removed it, they would have to adjust ilvl slightly. Likely not by much, but it adds to the overall inflation of ilvl.