Yeah I think I would have to sewage slide myself reading takes like yours on a regular. Thankfully just passing by. Maybe the next time you throw something at the wall itll stick. Keep trying! I beleive in you!
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In a guild heroic clear that smashes it and doesnât waste loot then yes for sure.
Pug heroic raid vs pugging keys? Eh, itâs a mixed bag, and actually winning an item from a pug raid is very difficult considering each boss drops half as much gear per person as a key. And you only get wyrm crests and hero track in the vault (although some trinkets and such can be BiS even at heroic).
If you only had say 2 hours to play for the week and your choices were 1 heroic raid clear vs 4 mythic+ keys at a +8 I think youâd get a lot more mileage out of doing the 4 +8s when you consider gear drops, aspect crests, and mythic track in the vault.
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Blizzard basically killed off raiding trying to pad played time metrics. They just havenât realized yet, because they keep putting all their post launch development into raids.
Blizzard didnât kill off raiding. The raiders back in the day just grew up and have jobs, family, and overall less time. Most of WoWâs players are older than the average gamer. They canât just schedule 3 days a week to raid for 4 hours each.
M+ allows players who have real life commitments a way to stay engaged without being tied down.
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I dont enjoy the scheduley-i-ness of raiding (thus my attendance wavers around 60%), so i dont do it, although a lot or BiS come from raids.
Im not weaker for not raiding, as im not losing progress.
You have 25 weeks roughly, to do a single raid. If raiding is all someone enjoys, why not just find a strictly raiding guild. Like i said, we did it in the past, we can still do it today.
If you enjoy raiding, whats it matter if it takes 14 weeks or if it takes 6? The sooner you beat the raid the sooner your source of fun ends (neglecting alts for arguments sake). And yes i do realize the other end of the spectrum exists where takinf 24 of thr 25 weeks to down last boss isnt always fun either.
There is too much nuance to really come up with which is better here. The quality of the items from raid are generally better than the quality of items from M+, especially weapons, trinkets, and tier. Even if you get more items from M+, itâs likely any upgrades you get from raid will be more powerful upgrades than what you get from M+.
And all of that depends on where we are in the season and what your character already has. Week 2 of this season when players had very few of the good items a heroic raid clear probably made more sense. Today, when everyone has 4 piece and could have purchased all the weapons and spiffy special proc items through Bullions, 4 M+8 keys is almost definitely a better use of your time for gearing.
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Or the level 10 anything.
But personally I find this to be a negative and not a positive. The scaling in this game is a mess and feels bad all around.
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There are some nuances for sure, and I donât think the importance of aspect crests should be overlooked when you need them to go from 4/6 hero to 6/6 hero and they are the difference between 525 crafted and 512 crafted gear. Remember you will NEVER get a single aspect crest from the heroic raid, your item level cap is 512-515 as opposed to 525-528.
With Blizz accelerating the catalyst every season I donât really see tier as a great raid advantage anymore. Season 1 with an 8 week delay? Absolutely (and Iâm not saying that long of a delay was good, just that it caused a clear gear item advantage from raiding). Almost all of the tier is going to come from the catalyst and 1 from the KSM/Aotc achievement.
I agree raids tend to have more chase items like a trinket or weapon than keys. But itâs also not the case where mythic+ has bad loot in those slots. It varies season to season.
Even with 3 raids worth of trinkets and weapons my best weapon is from hard mode DoTI and one trinket from Azure Vault.
In many seasons itâs 1 trinket from keys (mirror, balefire, puzzle box, etc.) and 1 from the raid. Weapons tend to be more raid focused, sometimes.
Non-trinkets/weapon slots (aka most of the slots) tend to just be generic stats so having them come from the raid doesnât make them any better/worse than coming from a key.
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Itâs a weird old holdout to how the game used to be designed. Classes were designed with huge gapping holes that would be filled by othersâŚin a raid. 5 mans were simple enough that those gapping holes werenât such deterrents back in the day.
For example, it didnât matter if a Holy Paladin could only effectively heal 1 target at a time back in the day, because if a tank was doing well, nobody in the group should even be getting hit.
But the content has changed and the classes have changed, but the design intent that the classes have huge gapping holes did notâŚwhich is dumb.
So itâs not even a Mythic+ problem, its a Blizzard design problem.
I think each class has their own toolkit and something that makes them unique, but even unique abilities overlap in terms of impact/effect.
For the most part, currently, I think each Role (Healer, DPS, and Tanks) fill in gaps for each other even though class diversity is a thing. For instance, even though Ring of Peace and Typhoon are different abilities they both effectively do similar things in the context of M+. Soul Stones are unique in that they can be put on someone pre-death or post, but is effectively the same as a Paladinâs BR.
Thereâs a lot of class diversity, but enough overlap in the end result or use-case.
I think the biggest issue really is that people are insisting on approaching this kind of content in a pug environment at all. WoW is, objectively, a better game when played with a stable group. Pugging is a nightmare hell-hole experience that is, honestly, supposed to frustrate players into joining more organized teams.
Social bonds are what have kept this game going longer than any gameplay system could.
I donât think itâs that simple. 2 hours to play in a week is an exceptionally small amount of time to play at all, and if youâre in a situation where you can full clear heroic in that time (fairly reasonable with an organized group) then I actually think youâd get more mileage out of doing heroic than the 4 keys. Youâll be getting an additional vault slot, and the opportunity to loot âVery Rareâ gear and often your best trinkets.
Of course. And I did not intend to overlook Aspect crests; the fact that Aspect crests are basically unobtainable from raid is criminal. That certainly plays into things; when a player has most of their power-granting items and theyâre just looking for increased item levels, the Aspect crests are very useful. But if Iâm sitting at my 3-piece, the lowest item level LFR tier piece that gets me to 4-piece will be easily more impactful to my power level than an unlimited number of Aspect crests.
Sure, and it also depends spec to spec. For feral druid this season, for example, my top half dozen trinkets, top 2 weapon choices, and even both of my ring slots come from raid. And in the case of weapon and trinkets, the raid versions are BIS compared to M+ or crafting by a country mile. In season 1, basically the only thing I needed from raid was tier (which after 8 weeks I could use the Catalyst).
So yeah, I wasnât trying to say youâre wrong by any stretch. Season to season, spec to spec, there are many factors that will dictate whether raid or M+ is the best use of time just for gearing (up until youâre locked to raid, obviously). Legendary weapons, tier, and trinkets are generally better or on par from raid than M+, so early in a season there are potentially larger power spikes coming from raid. But as we move throughout the season and those items become less rare, the sheer item level and crests coming from M+ will become more useful. There are certainly exceptions to this when a given spec has power slanted toward raid or M+ in a given season, which is why I brought up the nuance in the first place.
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Which is an example of, in my opinion, good design.
Classes and Specs are able to functionally do the same thing, but how they go about doing it is the difference. That way every class functions properly while also making the classes feel unique.
Because just continuing on the stupid method of âThis class has no functional way to deal with this mechanic, therefore itâs dead weightâ isâŚarchaic and dumb.
With the exception of some very annoying ghost-related affixes in M+, I canât really think of a scenario where a class or spec is considered âdead weight.â
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Even in those niche scenarios where a specific class/spec canât deal with a singular affix like afflicted or incorporeal, they all bring other utility and would never truly be dead weight. Plus itâs a 5-man group - imo, you donât need all 5 capable of managing a singular mechanic when 2-3 will do.
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A bit hyperbolic to use the term âdead weightâ but Iâm referring to things like Season 1 or 2 where the name of the game was strong spot healing, and everyone but the recently reworked hpal was struggling and struggling hard, because only hpal had heals strong enough so that every dungeon wasnât a stress test. I vividly remember thread after thread going on and on about a healer shortage because every other healer, especially those who werenât playing paladin was like âYou know what? Screw this.â
Or if you need something more recent and slightly less crazy, VDH being the only tank with multiple consistent stops that makes just about every run trivial. Not as crazy as the spot healing era, as the other tanks can still function, but the other tanks function means the rest of the group has to function as well. Which is weird thing to complain about but here we are.
It bounces around season to season, what works and what doesnât. But, at least in my opinion, itâs all circles back to the same core issue: class diversity to Blizzard is just classes either not being able to handle mechanics at all, or do so so poorly youâre better off ignore them for something who can and then some.
I donât think this was the case.
In season 1 of DF, only 10.9% of healers were Paladins for keys +15 and up and 10.5% for +20 and up
In season 2 only 11.8% were Paladins for +15 and up and 12.8% for +20 and up.
If their spot healing was that strong and better than the other classes we would have had a Meta shift, but the meta was Druid and Shamans 2nd.
While I donât think any class is deadweight, some have advantages over the other depending on the dungeon and affix.
Like how Evokers and Priests have Mass Dispel for Bursting
Hunters, Druids, and Rogues have soothe for Raging
There was a season in SL where rogues were advantageous because of Shroud skips
All of these things make some classes more appealing and likely to be taken as a pug, but none of the other classes are deadweight because for the most part they are nice to haves and not required to get the key timed.
Whoa, how have I missed this? Evokers can MD bursting?? I knew they could remove raging, but bursting, too? (Admittedly, I rarely ever run with evokers.)
Yes, but if I remember correctly their CD is much longer.
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Itâs through Stasis. You basically press Statis, then cast your dispel on 3 targets that donât have an active dispellable debuff on them, so the CD isnât triggered, then you when bursting comes out, you press Stasis and it will recast the dispel on those 3 targets without incurring the CD and then you dispel one of the other two.
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