Pretty much it’s always assumed in these threads that pug mythic+ is compared with guild raiding rather than pug vs pug for both.
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Um, the entire game has taken a hit. You guys keep linking keys run, but what is the context of that data?
How many of those runs are the same accounts? How many players are not participating in M+ versus the ones that are? There isn’t much context for that number. People just see a big number, and think that means it is popular.
The only expansion I raided that much was WoD. We can all agree WoD was bad.
OP wanting WoD back is cooked.
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It’s just such a goofy argument. If people want the old school ‘raid gearing’ feeling, no one is stopping their raid team from agreeing to just loot out of raids and do zero M+. They can even elect to not take any of their vault pieces and vend the tokens. lol
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They’ll blame tuning while refusing to acknowledge this is one of the easiest tiers since Emerald Nightmare.
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M+ gear is helpful and has definitely influenced raiding. However, there is an even bigger factor that you are ignoring.
Players like the ones in “Team A” tend to spend more time improving their character and learning the game in general. Running M+ is just an extension of it.
Such players will spend time and money to get the best upgrades available to them from all sources, not just M+ (crafted gear, the best enchants/gems, and so on). Also, they will learn their class rotations, research fights, know when to use personals and health pots. All these things mean that they are less likely to die to mechanics and more likely to pump high damage. That is the real difference maker.
M+ gear will only get you so far. It is the player’s approach to the game what really matters.
Blizzard absolutely knows they screwed up with the reward track for M+, they have tried to tinker with it, to bring it more in line with the rest of the end game gearing treadmill, but any time they do, the player base goes crazy.
M+ has been a thorn in their side since it was implemented. It has eroded away participation for raids quite a bit. People love to spout that M+ is popular because it is fun, but I think it has more to do with that one can get raid level gear without the aggravation of having to raid.
Players will always always take the path of least resistance.
That is why everyone complained in SL when they tried to lower the max ilevel in SL from the end of the dungeon chest. People lost their minds, these forums were on fire for months.
Thus proving that people are mainly running it for the easy loot.
I think M+ gear acquisition shouldn’t even be a thing, the more Blizzard erodes away at the content they shined at, namely raiding, the more the game has suffered. Forcing players to raid was always part of the game if you wanted top end PVE gear.
This idea that raiding is obsolete these days is crazy, people just don’t bother with it now, because they made the raids just way too hard, and M+ offers great rewards without the hassle of a schedule, raid politics and the difficulty of modern raids.
Look at the popularity in Classic with raids, the raids there had a very high participation, way way higher than retail. Mainly because those raids are easy and offered players of all skill level a chance to raid together. It brings the player base together instead of fragmenting the players into these different raid difficulties and a million versions of M+.
People that advocate for M+ to be more featured, more prominent part of the endgame, basically want to turn WoW into an AARPG, and that is what M+ and its “seasons” remind me of. Feels like a system ripped straight out of an AARPG.
I often wonder how many players M+ pushed away from the game? I have a lot of friends that won’t play touch retail with a 10 foot pole, because of M+. People will say I’m lying, but this is the honest truth.
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That would be fine… IF Blizzard tuned the raids around that. But ever since Nighthold, Blizzard has tuned the raids around the assumption that everyone is spamming the wazoo out of M+.
Therefore, if you do not spam M+, the raid is overtuned for you.
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Yep, people who raid, raid because it’s a social activity.
WoW used to be a social game. Then Blizzard caved in to the anti-social crowd and made it all about queueing and pugging with random strangers.
They want the game to be a lobby AARPG, instead of a MMORPG. I wouldn’t read into what is said by the M+ bros on these forums. They make it seem like M+ is a lot more popular than it actually is. I’d wager that M+, especially the high keys are only run by maybe 10-20% of the population.
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If that’s true then Blizzard has some work to do. I don’t especially care if they make M+/raid gear separate (adding a stat to it like they used to do with PVP power/resilience on PVP gear for example). The last raid I actually liked raiding was CN, so it doesn’t affect me either way.
I do, however, think people like OP who apparently play the game 40 hours a week is probably a bad schedule to design the game around. That would probably negatively affect people who actually care about raiding.
I know plenty of people who used to play WoW but quit in Legion / BfA / Shadowlands / Dragonflight specifically because Blizzard over-tunes the raid unless you play WoW like a second job.
From artifact power farming to azerite power farming to essence farming to M+ farming, Blizzard relies on raiders doing chores to inflate participation numbers in all their other content, and it’s broken the back of the raiding community as a result.
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You could have looked at past seasons instead of cherry picking a week 1 417 ilvl kill, lol.
You also made it passed 2k, yet you only use 2 pieces of gear out of m+, the rest is from raid or crafted. Why is that?
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The content with the least time/responsibility requirement but highest gear yield is always the most popular.
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Easiest raid since Emerald Nightmare. Seems like a sus take.
We have data. You have feels. You aren’t winning this. Thankfully, we already know MM+ is coming so this isn’t something where we have to debate that M+ deserves more, we know it is getting more.
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I don’t know why they’re in denial about it. There’s data, or you could just notice almost every toon in the game has an IO score.
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Why do i need aspect crests from raiding when raiding gives the gear that aspect crests allow me to upgrade to?
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Yep, people often talk about how awesome Vanilla-MoP was, and I attribute that to the game requiring you to raid. Raids take more coordination and more socializing, which fostered a better end game community.
I get why they made M+, they wanted to get more use out of their dungeon content. Ironically though, the introduction of M+ kind of killed raiding, which is even more expensive to create and maintain, all to get players to spam a small subset of content. I think the devs realized they made a huge mistake, because their most expensive content has taken a back seat for many players.
Players in MMOs will always take the path of least resistance, and that is what M+ offers, top end PVE rewards without the hassle of raiding.
When I saw M+ being talked about pre-Legion, I knew that system was going to be garbage for the game, having 5 man dungeons be on par with raids as far as gearing goes was a crazy mistake.
Like I said above, I get why players love it, you get rewards without all the hassles that come from raiding.
They tried to force PVP players into this garbage system in BFA as well, and it killed PVP participation. M+ gear just dominated PVP that entire expansion. Thankfully, the new PVP devs realized that forcing players into grinding dungeons for pvp gear was a dumb idea.
I think the same should apply to raiding, make M+ gear that is for dungeons only, or make unique gear that really shines in a 5 man setting.
I absolutely think M+ should have its own gear, like pvp if it is going to be part of the end game gear treadmill. This would solve a ton of problems for people that don’t want to touch that content.
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Would also hurt people who do multiple forms of end game too. Remember in Legion when it was faster to start a new character of the same class than it was to respec or when trying to farm legendaries?
I think this would lead to those same issues/frustrations. Not saying it would be wrong, just troubles i can see on the horizon
Impossible to know that, unless you have access to the the overall population numbers. That is my point I keep trying to make. 5 million runs of M+, there isn’t any context for that number at all.
Any time I try to engage with people on this topic, they just keep deflecting, because they don’t know how many players this represents vs the players that don’t M+.
Show me data that shows the % of players doing M+ verses the players that don’t. There is no way anyone can know this unless you have access to Blizzard’s internal data.
When people link that raider.io data is is just complete conjecture on what those numbers actually mean.
I’m so tired of arguing this with the same posters. They claim that data represents its popularity, but THERE IS ZERO CONTEXT FOR IT!!!