Its not, so no need to worry.
The norm for mythic progression is extending your lockout each week. This means, as soon as you’re geared enough to set foot in a mythic raid without immediately getting destroyed, M+ becomes your only viable source of loot. This is what people are “crying” about. Granted, yes, they did drastically reduce raid drops explicitly to force people into M+, but that’s a different part of the equation.
Of course people aren’t going to be happy when they’re forced to do completely unrelated content just to keep improving for the one they actually want to do. It’s not all that far removed from the time(s) they tried to force PvPers into high-end PvE for some unfathomable reason.
Delves are engineered the same way. Both raiding and delving are set up to funnel as many people into M+ as possible, just through different means. High-end raid progression leaves you no choice, while delves hit you with a combination of scarcity and carrot on a stick designed to always leave you wanting more.
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A great example of this is the cap on Gilded Stashes in delves, capping a Delve player at 31 Gilded crests per week, even if you do 3 Gilded Stashes and the special map.
M+ dungeons, on the other hand, give out Gilded crests in - literally - unlimited quantities. And for just doing a +7, which is like Old Maid level of difficulty.
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Well, don’t forget about the Cracked Keystone that drops in a T11 coming with a quest that also rewards you 15 more gilded for completing a +2 lol.
Which of course requires M+.
Because Blizzard never gets tired of shoving people into the M+ meat grinder.
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Still not that many. Given that people are timing 20s/21s now, that means the theoretical cap for HP limited keys in full last season’s gear is 17s/18s.
But also, good? Progression nowadays is a very non-linear curve, where we finish 50% of the ilvl gain by the end of week 2, do the next 25% over the next month, then the last 25% takes 3 months, even factoring in turbo boost.
Would be better if it was closer to 25% of the progression every 4-5 weeks for the entire season, with some catchup introduced later (but not enough to fully pass someone’s main that they’ve been playing all season)
You know the gradual (still in progress) death of raiding as more and more time, effort, and intent began shifting over to M+? Well, at this point, I’m just spiteful enough about it to hope against all reason that delves wind up doing the same thing to M+.
That’s why it was so funny when the M+ers were complaining about “delves killed M+ because they’re too easy and too rewarding”. 
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The irony definitely wasn’t lost on me.
not sure why I dont like m+ but I think its the timer
is there anything more soulless and anxiety inducing than a timer
aoe rotations also boring
so dont do it? how is this “required” for raiding? Or are you just in a team that requires it, those are different things.
Find me a CE guild where nobody does M+.
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The Tome from Priory is still S-Tier. The trinket off the demon hunters in Manaforge is excellent, too. Pacemaker’s been eclipsed by the Echelon trinket from Halls of Atonement.
Why? Reshii Wraps proc is trash.
It’s good for dps, bad for tanks and heals. It’s still nothing special but you’d take 710 reshiis over a 723 from vault.
Perhaps a small reduction in power gain would be good. But for the people who are getting 50% item level gain in 2 weeks, how much of that is from M+ drops? I’d be willing to consider some form of lockout if it went from infinite to something that the average player likely wouldn’t be able to achieve due to real life commitments anyway. But if we’re going from infinite to on average 3 items per week from drops, especially since nearly a third of our item slots don’t follow traditional item level rules, that is a massive drop in power gain early in a season.
I went through every spec’s BIS lists on wowhead and counted the S-tier and A-tier trinket and where they come from. Of the S-tier trinkets, 81 instances of a spec’s S-tier trinket came from raid, compared to 41 from M+. There are only 4 specs where the number of S-tier trinkets from M+ outnumbers the number of S-tier trinkets from raid. There are 16 specs that have 0 S-tier M+ trinkets than have more S-tier M+ trinkets than raid, and 27 specs that have more S-tier trinkets from raid than M+.
To be fair, this number is flipped for A-tier trinkets; 107 come from M+ while 51 comes from raid. But since this discussion was on BIS, not just “good,” the available data doesn’t support your conclusion at all across all specs.
If we’re talking Brewmaster, you have 1 S-tier trinket from raid and 1 S-tier trinket from M+. If we expand to A-tier trinkets, there is 1 more option from M+, while another 5 A-tier trinket options from raid.
And that’s before we consider the other kinds of items like tier dropping from bosses, the Reshii Wrap procs that are over budget (yes, even for tanks), the voidcore mini-set bonuses. As I’ve said seemingly a million times now, I agree with you that M+ gear is too lucrative for its difficulty. But when the discussion is on where the most power comes from, that is tangential at best. Raid loot provides the most power gain at comparable item level for most specs every season; and in this season, it’s not even bloody close.
Not for DPS. And even for tanks and healers where it’s less valuable, it’s still an off-budget special effect that no other boots you can get have. If the stats of the boots are particularly terrible for your spec, it would be possible the proc wouldn’t make up for missing out on better stats. However, 100% of tanks and healers also have the boots as BIS; so this does not appear to be the case for anybody.
Pretty much all of it.
It’s very easy to go from 684 last season’s gear to 704 using just M+ in 1 week, only reason it took 2 at the start of the season was crest cap.
It’s important to note that in a lot of cases, these are based on early PTR numbers for the trinkets.
Wowhead has Ritual Forge and Voidcore in S/A+ tier for destro warlock, and after PTR nerfs to ritual forge, it belongs down in C-tier, and Voidcore needs the weapon to be A tier in ST only, B- tier in AOE.
So the number of raid trinkets in A/S tiers is inflated by some guide writers being too lazy to update when tuning passes happen.
I have not done a single M+ this expansion, well maybe 1 or 3 in season 1. But none since like week 4 of the expansion. You DO NOT have to do M+ to raid.
Which gets to my point. Like I said, perhaps drops shouldn’t be unlimited from M+. But going from unlimited to an average of 3.2, especially since we’re still battling randomness, is a huge decrease.
Fair enough, and if someone can present comprehensive updated stats based on changes since PTR, I’ll happily amend what I’m saying. So far nobody has shared any sort of data on this, so I was trying to bring at least some objectivity to the mix.
For feral druid at least, the trinket tier list is accurate today. A champion track Araz is on par with a myth track Signet of the Priority. There still exist the other items that drop from raid that have no equivalents in M+. It still takes a minimum of 2 full resets for someone to get their 4-piece if they don’t raid.
I’m not saying these are necessarily bad overall, getting gear at comparable item level in raid is significantly more challenging than getting it from M+. I’m not even advocating for this to change.
It just annoys me greatly when people act like raid loot is of lower quality than M+ loot because of the quantity and difficulty to get it from M+. You can count on one hand the number of cantrip items that have ever come out of M+ save trinkets (excluding corruption in BFA S4); meanwhile it’s basically an every season thing for raid. And a few times an expansion, some of those raid items are so good that LFR or Champion versions can be BIS save for higher upgrade track versions of the same thing. How many times was a strength 2-hander BIS for bears? The time it happened, you couldn’t get it in any way from M+.
I have a great idea, we should just remove m+, remove mythic and heroic raiding and only have 10 man raids again and nothing else.
If they were to really decouple M+ gear from raiding, raiding system would have to completely redesigned.
Also, even if raiding had a built-in system to get more upgrades, people would then presumably have to spend a lot more time raiding to obtain the said upgrades.
I personally would not want this since raiding is a big time commitment. I much prefer the model of M+ supplementing gear since M+ is very flexible.