People do things they don’t enjoy all the time.
But that’s entirely beside the point, because mine was never that he didn’t enjoy it only that gear progression was indisputably a part of it.
I would be happy with this solution. Doing dungeons and getting no upgrades doesn’t feel good and doesn’t make me want to play the game. I feel like they balance this game around no-lifers sometimes.
How many of these kinds of dungeons were added from TBC through WoD? The style of dungeon you’re describing hasn’t been a mainstay of WoW since vanilla. Even the number of dungeons going down to 9 per expansion (if not less) dates back to MoP.
This was happening all the way back in Wrath when DPS specs started gaining real AOE options and tanks could survive the big pulls.
This has been true since LFD and cross-realm were added to the game.
Look, I don’t care if you like M+. If that’s not your cup of tea, that’s fine. But not a single thing in your list here began with or worsened as a result of M+. And in fact, outside of the time investment and feeling like an adventure, most levels of M+ don’t play out the way you’re describing here to begin with. It’s common for there to be communication amongst PUG groups needing to setup pulls and coordinate cooldowns; and absolutely no tank outside of the MDI when in a dungeon that’s an appropriate difficulty for the group is pulling more than a few packs at a time, and that’s only if the group has CDs to burn it down.
Vanilla is my favorite version of the game, and if M+ didnt create this problem, thats fine and I believe you. It’s hard to remember when this problem started. But I think the general style of dungeon design sucks. You shouldnt have to play on M+6 or whatever to start to see people actually talk to each other. I think people should have to actually speak to each other even in leveling dungeons.
I don’t like M+ so the fact that people only speak to each other in a upper levels of a game type that I hate doesn’t do anything for me.
I never do things for fun or relaxation that I don’t enjoy, doing so is a concept that I will never understand.
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I don’t wish him ill but I really am looking forward to the day he’s no longer involved in developing WoW.
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The raids are still pretty alright, so if we could just shove him purely on raid dev I’d be fine with that.
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Lol, no shame in that.
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I don’t think he’s bad at his job, necessarily, he’s good with raids and such, but he’s that very special kind of stuck in the past where he had a heyday where he was on top of the social structure strata by being in a hardcore raid guild back in the day and he thinks that the social landscape of the game should look like that forever, because it was the one where he personally thrived and was made to feel like he was important and strong.
Never mind that it’s a structure that fundamentally leaves out tons of paying players who won’t necessarily stick around indefinitely if they know that they’re always going to be relegated to being an underclass, only there to ooo and aaaah at the people with the shiny cool stuff as they pass by. He wants to keep hammering on those parasocial bonds as being the source of the game’s main difficulty, because that’s when he felt like the game was at its coolest, because it directly benefitted him.
The problem is that the game’s playerbase is too hostile and too out for themselves these days in ways that were less, back then, due to a million little reasons that are mostly out of their control like the fact that MMORPGs are an aging genre, the modern preference for quick drop-in, drop-out games over long term epic journeys, the overall souring of the discourse between people in the world, their player base getting older and having less time for gaming in general, servers being phased and CRZed and queues being cross-server leading to a loss of social opportunities, etc.
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I miss the days where I actually stopped and talked to people just because I saw them a few times in different questing zones I was in or passed them on the road a few times. That doesn’t really happen anymore.
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Some of us are just burnt oit on group activies we have done since vanilla. But we still love the game and the story and being in a guild and chatting with folks. We just dont like the strain and stress of all of the group content.
I agree, it is fascinating to observe how someone who is burnt out, and badly burnt out, can adapt their gameplay style to still enjoy a game that they stopped enjoying.
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I’ll say this - that experience does still somewhat exist on RP servers, because we don’t have phasing and CRZ. It’s a little bit of a good and a bad thing, it means that if there are obnoxious people you can’t stand you’ll keep seeing them on the flipside of that. We’re already a dramatic bunch, and that just adds to the drama 
We tend to use that cohesiveness to put together player-run events and projects instead of raid stuff, though.
This right here. Let ion do raids and mythics and suchlike. He handles that stuff well. But he needs someone to deal with the solo players and their relationship to the game because i suspect, strongly, more and more people are falling into the solo player slot.
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Not once have I disputed this. I realize there are people in here that try to claim delves are easy, full stop; I am not one of them. What one person finds easy others will find impossibly hard.
But through the lens of a single person, the level of difficulty of a T8 delve is far easier than a +6 key, despite awarding similar levels of gear. Someone who finds a T8 delve easy may or may not be able to succeed in a +6. But someone who can contribute meaningfully in a +6 will likely find a T8 delve to be a cakewalk.
I get it, it’s probably not possible to find absolute parity with two distinct systems. But right now, these aren’t even in the same zip code, much less same ballpark.
People need to stop making their arguments about the motivations of other people. You have no idea why M+ players are complaining about delves. Perhaps for some it is because they don’t feel special enough. But you can’t possibly know that to be true, and there’s no way for you to even attempt to prove it if they deny that being the reason.
I know some people upset at the delve loot are saying this, and I don’t agree with them. I do not think you shouldn’t have progression to chase; hell, I don’t even think the solution to the current problem should be changing delve gear at all.
But that doesn’t mean delves can be treated as if they operate in a vacuum, they do not. Unless delve power gain becomes limited to just delves, the game design cannot treat them as if they have no impact to the rest of the game. Yeah, for the solo player that will never attempt to M+ or raid, they could have item level 4,000 gear and it wouldn’t matter one iota.
But there are players who are getting gear from a T8 delve that are better than the first 5 key levels, then jumping to M+ and raid without a clue how those dungeons, raids, or in some cases, grouped instanced content entirely, works. This creates friction at all levels in that grouped content, from formation to planning to execution. Friction that simply doesn’t need to exist if Blizzard would just make keys with a similar difficulty as delves drop that style of gear; having to go that far up the ladder to reach gear parity with delves is crazy.
Not a single M+ key that is appropriate for the level of the group is pulled this way. Tanks pulls this way because they can solo the dungeon, the other people just make it faster. That’s been true going back to Wrath, and really picked up steam when Blizzard made tanks essentially immortal at the start of DF.
It’s a problem, yes. But the cause is not M+.
I’m with you. I do wish there were classic style dungeons still added to the game. I’m not really sure how to address the communication issue since that’s more of a player issue rather than system design.
I’m really loving the vibes of classic TW if I’m being honest. Wasn’t expecting to queue for it so much.
City of Echoes/Threads? Nah, they can have that.
I know you’re exaggerating, because it takes longer than five minutes just to do the gimmicks in some of them (cleansing the mushrooms with the crystal in Fungal Folly for example, or the gauntlet event with the timed spawns in Underkeep, etc) but… already having full 639s on the fastest moving class in the game has nothing to do with this I’m sure 
I wouldn’t mind challenging dungeons that replicate the challenging early TBC heroics, where CC, LoS and target priority are extremely useful on trash packs, and where mechanics are deadly on boss fights.
Oh wait, we now get that with DELVES.
I don’t want your stupid timer, Ion. I want to run instanced content at my own pace. I don’t want to feel guilty and treated like **** if I make a mistake and it causes the team to fail the timer. This is why I have not set foot in a Mythic+ since Legion. No ammount of coercion or incentives will get me to step in one.
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I’m not entirely sure I agree. The focus on building raids to challenge the “race” really seems like a terrible design plan and it’s been an issue for a long time.
This I completely agree with. If everyone played in a guild and could play in all the content it might not be so bad but uh, thats just not the reality we live in.
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M+ just disincentivized raiding. That did have some domino effects.
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One thing I’m not understanding is why people are saying things along the lines of “People with delve gear can hop right into +7s with no clue on how to do them,” yet those same people aren’t saying “People with heroic raid gear can leap right into +7s with no clue how to do them” or “People with 619 Conquest gear can leap right into +7s with no clue how to do them.”