Yup. That’s the thing. To get your wyrm shards, you have to farm 15s. 13 15s.
That’s not even actually playing the game. That’s a side thing that’s extra. When you heroic raid, you clear the raid getting gear, usable gear, 441 gear, you get tier, which is insane, you get imba trinkets, you get cantrip items, and you fill the vault to the brim with 441-upgradable gear. And you can blast through heroic in typically 3 hours. And then you’re done with your “raid chores” as it were. 3 hours in and you haven’t even gotten half way through just getting your wyrm crests, let alone actually filling your Vault or having the chance to get 441 drops from 17+ keys.
Why do you need to do it again? Players are already nearly loot capped at this point. This idea that you need to “infinitely farm” M+ is a lie because you gear up so fast. Bro, there’s a guy in the M+ discord who barely does any M+ this season, he’s just done 20s for portals, he did 3 clears of heroic raid and he’s 443 ilvl. Stop capping.
Who cares? WHO CARES? Why do you even need to cap when you can get 437 items straight up, or 441 straight up, or 444 straight up from heroic? None of those use crests. The amount of wyrm crests raiders consume is far less than M+ players, and yet raiders have a better way to efficiently get the wyrm crests they need.
As a raider you want gear from M+ to progress through the raid. As a M+ Pug player i want gear from the raid so i can progress through the M+ system and beat the “social” aspect of it.
If anything i’m more pressured to gear up than an average raider (95% of the raiding population don’t play in guilds who’d bench someone if he doesn’t do his weekly keys) as the pug scene will just leave me behind if i don’t keep up with it IO/Gear wise.
That’s literally the only reason i care about gear. I need it to get invited to groups that do what i find entertaining in the game.
It’s funny, I’ve said this before, but M16s dropping Aspect Crests actually benefits raiders more than M+ players. M+ players are starved for wyrm crests. Raiders really only need a limited supply of Aspect Crests, easily attained from M16s, and then they don’t need to get much else out of M+. All of that “infinite loot”, not really that relevant. 1/3 of loot is automatically trash because its in tier slots, and then trinkets from M+ are worse, weapons are going to be worse, so on and so forth.
Aspect Crests from low keys actually appease raiders more than M+ players. I’d happily make getting Aspect Crests more difficult and boost M+ rewards to compensate, but that’s unlikely to happen.
Upgrades might have been an admirable attempt by Blizzard to bring raid gear on par with M+. The problem is that you need to do M+ in order to do it.
Just taking my current vault as an example, I have 2 pieces of tier in it, one from the raid row and the other from the M+ row. The M+ tier piece is 441. The raid tier piece can be upgraded to 441… but I need Aspect crest from 16+ keys to do it.
The inconvenient truth. It also is an early season tax on m+ players, because we need to cap aspect and wyrm every week. And none of that matters after week 4 because well all be done with crests and just be using flightstones.
In order to completely eclipse M+ players in rewards, you only need to deplete some 16s? Woe is you. Lol.
Search “wyrm” in group finder and you will find players who are high IO plugging away at 15s because they are utterly starved for them, with no quick and easy way to get them unless they raid.
A massive tax. I just said, nah, no thanks, I’ll accept being 10 ilvls behind my friends, it’s completely fine. I have too many alts I want to play, I can’t really put up with wyrm crest farming.
Yes they are, and it still sucks doing it. At least, as a raider, I get most of mine from the raid, then I help out some of our lower/more causal teams with m+ wyrm farms to close it out.
Then it’s back to doing my 40th key for the week that drops nothing but gold because you need to be a top 0.1% player to get any lasting rewards form m+. Imagine if CE only went to the HoF. Lmao.
My guess? Team A’s players are good, Team B’s less so, and Team C’s players are bad.
I expect players that do all forms of content to be better than those who do some or one. For example, PvP players actually know that their spec can hard CC and interrupt while bad PvE players don’t know either of those things or choose to ignore them.
M+ gearing is worse than raid, especially in terms of tier acquisition which itself is the single largest contributor to a spec’s damage in terms of gear. The best you can hope for as a M+ only player is to get a different piece of tier each week from the vault (highly unlikely) and then use your KSM token on your last required piece for 4-set. At best, M+ only players have tier at the beginning of week 4 of the season.
Also, essentially every good trinket this season comes from raid. Most of the ones from M+ are pretty bad.
Raiding is also extremely easy; 95% of the mechanics boil down to “do you have your movement keys bound?” and if you got to the instance and into the boss room they are.
