What? No it isn’t. I’ve unlocked KSM and run the key levels required to obtain the highest ilvl gear in every season since M+ has existed. I have never raiding Cutting Edge. Raid is absolutely not mandatory to succeed in M+.
And no, I do not believe that it is intentional for M+ to be a superior gearing method to raid below Cutting Edge raiding. You know why I think that? Because Ion outright stated it in an interview before Dragonflight where he explicitly talked about the impact M+ has on AotC guilds.
So to make my perspective a little more clear - I’m in a AotC guild and I vastly prefer raiding to dungeoning as an in game activity. But I’ve always felt pressured to continually run M+ (which I tolerate but don’t enjoy) to avoid falling 15-20 ilvls behind the rest of my raid team and holding them back every season. I would like it if that stopped happening.
I don’t recall saying it was. In fact, I remember saying the exact opposite. Nor do I think that raid having a few unique items that scale beyond their ilvl proof that Heroic raiding is mandatory for keyrunning. Dungeons are just as capable of having BiS Trinkets. You don’t need to look at exclusively BiS gear in order to evaluate M+ as a gearing method. If valor was uncapped, then you could endlessly farm 415 ilvl loot - higher than any loot found in Heroic difficulty raids. Given that it’s also not limited to once a week like raid is, I fail to see how it isn’t a superior gearing method. I think that greater availability matters quite a bit since that’s the most attractive feature of loot to AOTC guilds. I don’t think that a Heroic raider wearing 1 trinket from a raid and 13 pieces from dungeons is an example of Heroic raiding being a better gearing method.
What level does gear matter then? If we’re talking at a level beyond where the highest ilvl rewards are given for M+ then I don’t see how that’s relevant in a discussion comparing the two as gearing methods.
M+ is already plenty rewarding in terms of availability. The main area it struggles is in absolute ceiling of gear. I don’t see any reason why we need to make it a better gearing avenue than it already is since it’s already better than raid in terms of availability and uncapping valor would make it superior to Heroic raid in terms of quality as well.
I agree that M+ should be able to match the ilvl ceiling provided by raid but in turn I think that raid should be altered to match the availability of low to mid tier loot of M+ and I find it difficult to support changes to boost M+‘s consistency in that regard when it already holds a stark advantage. That’s a tough sell to me.
The most Toxic people are on GD, screaming about the M+ community that all in all, is pretty decent.
No, that destroys the whole idea of an RPG. The gear you get from raid should work in keys, the gear you get in keys should work in raids. The person who does all aspects of PVE should get an advantage over the person who sticks to only one pillar.
You guys really should stop playing RPGs. There’s literally no need to kill the game this way and turn it into some lobby shooter.
The max Ilvl you get from M+ currently is 405 ilvl at the end of a timed run. You can ilvl upgrade some pieces to 415, sure, but with the cap on valor it means that several pieces fall behind because the most valuable pieces of gear from M+ start to cost up to 1k valor/upgrade. For weapons it’s even worse. The vault drops up to ilvl 421. Let’s say that a character uses a 2h weapon. That’s 15 slots of gear to fill.
With perfect rolls in the vault, and spending all attained valor, you could fully outfit a character with max M+ gear within 12 resets. How likely is it that you roll 12 pieces at 421, that you want + keep? The playerbase that’s clearing 8 20s reliably to have 3 choices/week of 421 slots is incredibly limited. Much more limited than those who can clear heroic raid reliably.
Just in time for the next patch release, meanwhile the Heroic Raider has done been outfitted for awhile and still has the better trinkets, rings, and weapons
Here’s a hot take.
Uncap everything from the start, put out the creation catalyst, and quit time gating stuff.
Nobody cares about the RWF anymore, if people wanna be sweats, let em be sweats.
Let’s remove all the rep grind, too. No more progression through difficulties, just continually make the game harder the more you succeed. Sounds like a ton of fun.
Pretty much this, the same crowd who felt forced to log in every single day and clear every single WQ, would start crying about having to log in every single day and having to clear so many mythic+ to not fall behind. How about this, the moment WQ go back to being daily, you can have uncapped valor.
And mythic+ is the only practical source of concentrated primal focus to keep up with sparks for crafting (at this stage) four 418 items which include weapons.
Overall I think the difficulty to reward ratio between keys and raids is the best in DF that it’s ever been.
There is also a common act of comparing someone who gears by solely pugging mythic+ to someone that pugs mythic+ and also guild raids which is a weird take. It should be pugging mythic+ to pugging only raiding.
