At the end of the day, I’d really prefer being able to pug Mythic raids without having to worry about lockouts/ID’s. I’m tired of being in guilds that fall apart more than halfway through a Mythic raid clear, especially when versions of WoW Classic, or MoP Remix release. This is one of several reasons I think there needs to be a change.
There was also the time I was getting sub 10% pulls on Mythic Sire, but our tank (guild leader) refused to swap dps trinkets to tank trinkets even though he kept dying roughly halfway through the fight. Most of the guild also refused to farm sockets in The Maw even though I offered to walk them through, or send guides. I know Blizzard just patched dps trinkets for tanks/healers, but what’s stopping people from doing other annoying/suboptimal stuff that you can’t kick/replace them for because they’re the officer or whatever?
Next, guild schedules can be pretty restrictive, which is bad for two reasons. 1. If anyone from your main team doesn’t show up for whatever reason, you probably can’t raid, simply because of lockouts, or if you do, you will be suboptimal. 2. Even as someone without obligations (on SSDI for things like autism, physical disabilities, etc.) there are still times outside of the designated raid times when I feel more optimal/better prepared, and I’d much rather raid at those times than have to perhaps even set alarms to make sure I’m present for specific guild times.
I know there are a lot of people who will probably try and make the arguments that lockouts/ID’s are necessary for “Race to World First,” leaderboard competitions, guild cohesion or whatever, or they would hate pugging, but honestly, as someone who has been in guilds that have repeatedly fallen apart, and who has been in pugs that can easily clear more than half a mythic raid, I can say with confidence that you can probably just get rid of Mythic raid lockouts/ID’s roughly 3-4 weeks into a tier because that’s usually when RWF is over, and Blizz releases the next “flavor of the month” version of WoW, which everyone will care more about anyways.
with cross realm guilds being a thing now in TWW and hall of fame being availaible to those cross realm guilds i feel once the hall of fame fills up lockout should be removed, obviously keep it the same so if you have done a boss you cant loot it and it affects the loot drops if too many people are already locked that way people cant exploit it.
They should remove lockouts entirely from all raids, including loot lockouts; if people can spam M+ endlessly for infinite gear, the same should be true for raids. Lockouts are an antiquated system and need to go.
I don’t think loot lockouts should be removed entirely, but they do contribute a bit to “toxic” gameplay as far as power levels are concerned. Perhaps a permanent system sort of like bullion to serve as “bad luck protection,” might be worth implementing as well, especially for pvp players, now that they won’t be getting gear from vault unless they pve, and the new conquest increases don’t seem like they’d be enough to offset the vault change.
The thing that’s different about M+ using current item levels is that M+ gear is capped at 522, whereas Mythic raid gear is capped at 528, or even 535.
That seems like it would defeat the goal of my initial post, which was to try and reduce/remove artificial elements of “difficulty” (roster boss). Personally, grinding the same eight dungeons, eight times a week is annoying/unfun enough as is, and that’s with just one or two affixes.
That’s why they need to remove raid loot lockouts, so that people don’t have to do the tedious and super-unfun M+ dungeons just to get the gear for raiding.
Blizzard has been propping up M+'s participation numbers like this since Legion; it’s stupid.
Yeah, that’s fair, one solution might be to do what they did during Legion and gradually add more dungeons to the pool. Even though the later dungeons they added were difficult, at least they kept things fresh.
Or revamp the way lockouts work to be less restrictive. Even if it’s something like “lockouts reset on Tuesday and Friday” or something of that sort. Let people have more agency in how they play the game instead of treating the community like we are a bunch of children that need to be told how much candy we can have.
Even if I geared up my main, I’d play alts. The amount of effort normal seasons take to gear is a lot of why I don’t push multiple characters. I just play other games that respect my time more.
I know I would absolutely quit the game permanently if they implemented weekly lockouts per-dungeon for keystone loot. I’ve had multiple instances where gear has taken 40+ runs to drop, a season isn’t anywhere near 40 weeks long >->
No good. Most guilds raid during the week, or on weekends. A twice-weekly reset would just mean they’ve have to rearrange to raid weekdays AND weekends.
With no lockouts, a Tue/Wed guild could stick to raiding on Tue/Wed, but would have the same freedom M+ players do, to do the activities they want.
OR place M+ under the same lockout rules that raids use. But Blizzard needs to balance things out.
The lockout is why i gave up trying mythic raiding years ago. If you find a group, they start you on 2 bosses then on 3rd boss your class isn’t needed thats all for a week!!! People do crappy stuff in this game and Blizz knows it yet they allow it so…
But classic has shown us that there is demand for a slower pace of progression. Re-tune the entire end game around the idea that you gear up more slowly. Instead of assuming everyone will be 90%+ done gearing by the end of week 3, and tuning around that, tune around 90% done gearing taking 4 months.
In doing so, this allows gear to be a soft nerf to content again.
This post here is the closest to the original. There are all sorts of gatekeeper/unfun things associated with guilds that you have to go through each time you feel like raiding a tier, especially if you happen to feel like maybe there are only one, let alone two tiers each expansion that are actually worth raiding. It would be so much easier to be able to just pug Mythic raids the same as heroic/normal raids.
At the very least you should be able to continue progressing mythic raiding with a different group if need be. The singular ID for mythic raiding is far too restrictive, outdated and annoying.
I agree they need to tweak the rewards such that more power comes from vault rather than end-of-dungeon. But adding a weekly lockout would greatly affect the ability to progress M+ before players hit max gear. Unlike raid where bosses are tuned such that players are expected to come back to a boss in a subsequent raid, keys are a 1-shot and done affair. Then if you didn’t have the power to be able to time it, you can’t come back at another time that week and try it again unless you luck into the same key. And you also gain nothing from keys if you don’t complete it on that difficulty; most raid tiers are tuned such that by the time you’re able to see success in the end bosses of one difficulty, you’re able to kill the early bosses of the next difficulty.
I’m completely with you that rewards need to be restructured such that players can’t infinitely farm their way to nearly BIS item level. But forcing all players to be done with M+ for the week after 4 hours regardless how much time they want to play is also not a good approach. Especially given the way progression differs between M+ and raid.
And just to be clear, I’m fully on board with removing loot lockout from raid. I’m fully on board with doubling or tripling the loot that drops from raid. I’m all for making changes to improve the loot situation from raid. I just don’t think the answer is to neuter M+ looting in the name of making raid loot relatively less sucky.