Agreed. if M+ wasn’t a thing I’d have quit several patches ago lol.
Ny’alotha I loved, nathria was okay.
Aside from that only time I’ve cared about raiding since MoP was those two.
I do the raids for the aesthetic, and loot if RNG wasn’t a thing.
Did an H vault w/ guild last night, 2 terros staffs drop in a 10 man. like cool.
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Raiding is too much time and effort for todays gaming needs.
M+ saved raiding if anything, by keeping players in the game.
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Yeah, literally everyone I know who used to be all about raiding now only play for mythic+.
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I am the same! Some raids stand out a little bit Ny’alotha is a good example i also liked SoO too. I just find raids way over complex these days and more effort than they are worth.
I usually complete the last raid of the expansion for the heroic mount but thats as far as it goes, have not been in a raid guild since WoD 
I raid w/ my guild just bc they do it socially. We all push really high keys outside of raid but barely clear heroic bc we just don’t care.
Next raid we 're gonna actually try bc they’re remaking Ashkandi and I want that damned sword.
I wish Blizzard just made both loot systems good in raiding and M+ instead of trying to make them equally bad.
M+ loot system right now is very good. It is deterministic with a little RNG mixed in with chances to get tertiary stats without being game busting.
Raiding loot system is archaic. Kill boss and randomly get items in competition with other people.
Fix the raiding system without busting M+ and take away these insanely overpowered items that fall into the hands of a few people out of shear luck. It doesn’t feel good for most people.
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Back in the day, most players did not raid at all.
Non-raiders skipped those without consequence.
LFR gear is not only crap, but Group Loot means actual undergeared players don’t get enough of it to “gear up”.
Actually, back then a lot of guilds were casual, social guilds. If you only ever belonged to raiding guilds, you missed that, and now it’s pretty much gone.
Maybe not the core of your point, but if you have a warlock soulstone a healer, you lose basically zero time to runbacks. I haven’t run back from a wipe in years. I have a weakaura that turns off my release button when in a raid, even, so I can’t release by accident.
People that do mythic+ and don’t enjoy raiding does not hurt raiding. Mythic+ players aren’t going to be raiding now since they nerfed mythic+, they will now not be playing the game at all. Mythic+ doesn’t hurt raiding but with these changes it makes raiding hurt the population of players in the game.
The main cruze of this, is that Mythic raiding requires 20 competent people to be logged in and focused. Its not that raiding and mythic + are that different. If youve never completed high end mythic + then you dont realise its as much of a team effort as raiding is. But its that maintaining a 20 man roster to consistently tackle Mythic raiding every week is becoming harder and harder.
WoW’s playerbase is largely getting older. Yeah the young bucks are around but the vast majority are people that are now in their late 20’s-30’s or older. They dont have the priority time to spend raiding 5 nights a week anymore. Most just want to jump on have fun with mates then log off and go about their day.
With that in mind reducing rewards or making keys more difficult would not be the way to handle things.
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To be fair, even when raiding WAS the Pinnacle of content… people were vocal about wanting dungeons to be more prominent, which is what drove us towards M+.
That said, M+ doesn’t have to dampen your raiding experience. Your guild or community can opt to restrict your gear to entry thresholds, or go raid only on a set of toons. In our guild, we have many players who ONLY raid on certain toons for this reason. That said, it isn’t like raids have changed all that much, as you can still clear normal and heroic roughly a full 1 to 1.5 ilvl tiers below raid drops.
Not only have raid encounters grown both in mechanical and thematic design since when raiding was a pinnacle, the only reason raiding has survived as an end game isn’t even related to M+!
See, raiding as a prestigious endgame nearly died out once upon a time, in WoD, because what people are doing to heroic content now are what they did to Mythic content then. Mythic raiding at appropriate levels has never been challenging content until they switched away from flex and back to the old lockout system.
That old lockout system is the only thing offering any semblance of meaning to Mythic raiding BUT it ALSO prevents accessibility, which means less people CAN meaningful play the content.
The life life to Mythic raiding is, ironically, also the thing holding it back! Even race to world first only offers any prestige because of how undergeared the players are relative to the content.
Before M+ ever existed, high end raiding already had these underlying issues front and ready. M+ didn’t cause them, but it did highlight them by juxtaposition of what content players actually wanted to see; accessible content for all that could force players to play at their peak IF they desired to.
The Mythic Raid endgame starts a little bit below the heroic raid ilvl threshold, and every ilvl point after that is a soft nerf to the top raid end game lane.
For M+, this is where the end game lane starts. You can shift the rewards around all you want, these content thresholds will always hold as long as M+ is infinitely scaling and raiding doesn’t have a comparable offering.
Though even between both content sets, there exists a conflation of difficulty. M+ attains difficulty via the content. You start the end game lane when you’re at top end gear or hitting gear barriers, but even in groups with tight player and high player skill, there is going to be variance and adaptability in the content due to micro level play decisions.
By contrast, raiding is often formulaic and static unless an encounter has impossibly high RNG, such as Stone Generals in Nathria. In the raiding lane, the difficulty lies in the logistics of a group more than anything else.
Both lanes have a difficulty and a skill threshold, but raiding has an artificial difficulty due to being a logistics problem, where severe and several misplays can often be forgiven, whereas M+ has a content difficulty due to the content altering on less misplays or decisions.
In this current raid tier, the entire first 6/8 mythic bosses can be done on autopilot and like clockwork with a semi consistent group. When doing +20 or higher keys, the comparable M+ content, a static group of 4 can have a uniquely different key experience if that 5th player throws out an interrupt or a defensive early at times. And example of this is tyrannical bird boss on AA, where the CONTENT is what drives the difficulty of that fight.
And this is much of why M+ continues to grow and become more popular; raiding doesn’t offer a legitimate challenge via content without introducing high variance mechanics. Mythic raiding’s biggest hurdle is that, by requiring 20 players and using old lockouts, there’s less cross pollination of skilled players in groups.
If we did remove that again, we’d have the logistics out of the way, but then we would be seeing a mirror to how heroic raiding is handled; even pugs could suddenly go back to deep Mythic raiding or Cutting Edge if desired, without much extra effort.
And it’s important to note this distinction if you want raiding to shine as a lane; raiding is NOT held back by M+ but by its own arbitrary limitations.
Give us back smaller group sizes for hardmode raids and it’d likely garner a lot more attention.
Roster boss is not a fun aspect of raiding, it’s vastly easier to just get 4 other friends together and push keys than try to manage getting 19 other people together for several hours several times a week to wipe on a boss for hours.
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Make raids 5 man content like Mythic+ and there would be a higher participation rate. Having to coordinate 40 players for a raid is half the battle and a waste of time these days.
Some of us don’t want to spend three or four hours locked into one activity. I used to raid hardcore back in the day, now that I am older I’m just not interested anymore. M+allows me to run a quick dungeon or two and still feel challenged.
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Dont forget flexible schedule, and 30 min runs… and no drama
This is a literal essay haha
Also requiring 20M for highest end raiding is killing it as well as the crappy gearing outside of tier/a trinket or two. Much easier to pick up M+ and I wouldn’t blame M+. Raiding has its own issues.
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Raising is antiquated and should be removed
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The logistical nightmare of finding 20 people that are all around the same skill level has been what has killed raiding.
And the inaccessibility to do cross-server until HoF.
Oh yeah and the lockout system.
Bring back 10 man hard mode. Not “heroic”, highest difficulty. 10 man mythic.
Make gearing from raid more consequential. That would help it. I miss having fun while raiding. Now it feels like a chore and disappointment.
This seemed like a nicely developed raid outside of the BORING environment. It all looks the same and is a bunch of platforms. Unimaginative.
Also on alts I’ve had more items ninja’d via group loot by high item level players who did not need said items more than I’ve won items. FIX GROUP LOOT ITS CRAP. Why would I keep raiding on those toons too? I don’t.
M+ has its own issues too but raids dying isn’t really M+ fault.
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Agreed, it supplements PvE endgame content and is a great addition.
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