You only need to look at player retention in conjunction with how hard Blizzard pushes raid to know its true.
Why would I want to think that? My favorite thing is M+. I’d be more than happy if Blizzard just dropped raids like a rock and focused on my current favorite part of the game.
Simple reality is that raids often help create communities - often to the detriment of the progress of said guild (people refusing to boot a bad player because “they’re a friend of the guild”) but to the benefit of Blizzard keeping folks subbed.
Hey folks! Just a quick update - with Season 4’s release date finally announced, I wanted to circle back to this thread and talk about how some of these experiments will be tuned/updated based on your feedback. Thanks again to everyone in this thread & elsewhere for your thoughts!
I won’t give exact numbers here as we’re still talking about them internally, but:
As written above, players clearing 10 Fated bosses per week would acquire their season’s limit of Dinar (the currency used to buy Fated raid items) by 6 weeks at the earliest. We’re going to lower the number of kills required on each quest such that it’ll land somewhere in the 4.5/5 week range instead.
We’ve also heard a lot of feedback about how if you joined late into Season 4 or had alts you wanted to play, you’d be met with a pretty large wall of Quests/Boss Kills necessary to access the system, which felt like it ran counter to the lessons learned with the Creation Catalyst. Exact details TBD, but after a certain period we’ll be heavily reducing the requirements for these 3 quests. This way the initial progression experience of early Season 4 is intact, but that the later it goes, you’ll be able to raid on a new character or with a new friend without being so far behind.
Just to mention it, we’re not currently looking at changing the rate of acquiring the materials to upgrade a Fated item to Heroic or Mythic. It’ll stay as a 100% droprate from Heroic & Mythic bosses, and then require 20 to transform.
Lastly, while this thread is specifically about the experimental Raid Rewards systems coming to S4, there’s been some questions elsewhere about Mythic Plus we can answer here. As many of you may know, Shadowlands Season 4 is changing the dungeon pool to both halves of Tazavesh, the Veiled Market, Operation: Mechagon, Return to Karazhan, and the Warlords of Draenor dungeons Grimrail Depot & Iron Docks - along with a new seasonal affix. We’ve seen it speculated, but to confirm: the Keystone Hero achievements for these dungeons (obtained by completing them on a +20 Keystone or higher) will give Hero’s Path Portals to these locations, and operate just like the ones that exist in Shadowlands at present.
Thanks for reading, thanks for your feedback, and if you have major questions that haven’t been covered in this post (or the ones before it in this thread), let us know and we’ll do our best to clarify.
P.S. While the ‘Ahead of the Curve’ & ‘Cutting Edge’ Feats of Strength are going away when Season 4 launches, the Carcinized Zerethsteed (from killing Heroic Jailer), as well as the 100% Droprates from the Mythic Sylvanas and Mythic Jailer mounts aren’t going away until Dragonflight launches (The Sylvanas and Jailer mythic mounts will stay in the game, but be significantly reduced in droprate as with previous expansions).
You’re gonna do Mythic+ raids now aren’t you? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) I’m down. Retiring raids early is a waste of development time in some ways. Just don’t retire raid tiers, up their pain with power creep.
Valor will be reset, but won’t have any caps for the season’s duration. Conquest will be reset, with a higher weekly cap than previous seasons, then go to being fully uncapped a number of weeks into the season.
I just want to have a reason to do the old (current expansion) raids and see their beauty without absolutely stomping them, and with cool rewards. I think this is a step in the right direction.
I can’t speak to the exact implementation as it’s still being decided, but we’re going to be addressing Cosmic Flux availability when Season 4 launches, or shortly thereafter.
This is not a bad approach to change things up, but it feels like we are only going to get 4-5 fated full rotations if prepatch and expansion are to launch this year. I hope these changes help out with that reduced duration. Even less than the assumption we had from initial info about season 4/fated.
A lot of people are wondering if the reward type vendor system might be carrying over to Dragonflight. Is there any indication of this new structure of being able to guarantee a piece of loot from the raid tier (or even previous raid tier in a badge type system) might be present? Having situations where making a new say BDK/Warrior and seeing your BIS trinket is the end boss of a previous tier is kinda lousy. This system nails that.
Taking away CE/AOTC after 5 months of an END tier that already had timegating for gear and player power the fights were designed around is an absolutely idiotic idea. And to add even more insult to injury it was at the cost of a somehow more convoluted idea.
Nothing you do will make up for what you’re taking away.
287 Days was the previous shortest end of expansion tier (N’yalotha) and this tier from Mythic and Double Leggo unlock will be less than 200 days. And that’s not even including the numerous bugs and issues with fights.
How is Rae’shalare (the Sylvanas bow) going to work in Season 4? Will it remain a random drop as per usual (and will it scale with Fated?), or will it be purchaseable with Dinars at Normal item level to be upgraded as normally?