For a long time the question has been asked “Would people raid harder content if it didn’t award higher ilvl”. People assumed we would never get an answer because the Retail devs were pretty entrenched about Mythic always having the top ivll.
The question has been answered in SoD - yes. Overwhelming yes - people want to engage in more challenging content as a default. “LFR” and “Mythic” both award the same ilvl loot, and yet as guilds gear up more and more of them choose to opt into the higher difficulty modes. We had a pseudo world first race to clear “Mythic” and guilds are ranking clout based on their rank for having cleared Mythic. There is no longer any real justification to continue this trend of Mythic in Retail having exclusive ilvl loot.
SoD is also strong proof that the jump from Flex to fixed raid size is also a complete disaster in Retail - you have a smooth gradient of players opting into content closer to their skill level in SoD, whereas there’s a massive fall-off between AOTC and early Mythic due to the fixed 20 person raid size in Retail.
SoD has effectively given us hard evidence that Ion’s paradigm is flawed. End it.
There will always be people who push content for the sake of it regardless of rewards.
See: M+. There’s extremely little reason to go beyond 10 in S1, but there are people doing 20s.
That doesn’t mean Mythic Raid shouldn’t be more rewarding than Heroic (let alone LFR). It should be. It 100% should be.
Regardless of the fact that people will participate anyway, more difficulty, meaning more skill and effort required to be successful, should always mean better rewards.
That and people participating anyway doesn’t paint the picture of how many players drop off because they DO care about being rewarded for their effort.
I wouldn’t be against trying a templated M+ one season. Static gear, same difficult grind, 0 is braindead, +12 is doable by all classes but requires absolute coordination/group comp.
Though I admit, I kind of hate the gear grind. Champion → Hero was a pain in the butt S1. Then as I stared at vault considering Mythic I said “Naw I’m good.”
Another gear grind to push +12 (I know you don’t need 636…), no thanks. I did that crap for +7 to +10.
It’s all gear jumps. A +2 can be just as hard as a +4 with the right gear ilvl. Same goes for +7 vs +9, +10 vs +11, etc etc.
Playing SoD for like a year and a half. And then before that other random games from DF S2 to when SoD launched. I’m a big ol Classic+ Andy now. More fun to play a version of the game where the game director isn’t at war with your preferred playstyle.
Also, to your topic, I would be fine with Mythic Raiding being cosmetics and bragging points only; however, in order to do that I think they have to adjust the difficulty of Normal and Heroic upwards so the new heroic is somewhere in between the current Heroic and Mythic.
I don’t think they did a good job adjusting the relative difficulty of the content when they increased the seasonal ilvl gap from 26 from SL to DF to the current 39.
Ah yeah I was big into it during Phase 1 and 2, then fell off for me.
I’m not. I think the concept of gear curve ending at heroic raiding is ridiculous. People who raid mythic deserve - and need - more power to down the more difficult bosses.
I personally don’t see the appeal in a game where the gearing hard stops at heroic yet there’s a far more difficult mode above it, yet you can’t gain any further power to help down it.
This is not what I’m saying. Templates have already failed. Gearing and making gear choices is part of the WoW formula - this is specifically about toppling the top end gear gates and letting more players progress and make those choices.
It wouldn’t just be removing gear and keeping the difficulties. They would absolutely have to adjust the state and tuning of Mythic and like I said bumping up the difficulty of Heroic to be in between. It’s like M+ where gear stops at +10s, but a huge portion of players continue to push past that for the challenge.
They could implement something like Runescape’s Boss Enrage mechanic where once you down a Mythic boss you can increase the “Enrage” scaling for additional challenges. Like after the first kill you can attempt it with 10% additional scaling and have a leaderboard or w.e. After that 20% and so on.
Mythic raiding is dying and something needs to change.
Honestly, perhaps it needs to die to be reborn into something more worthy. Ion is holding onto it until its last breath rather than looking for a cure for its issues. Decades of entrenched thinking. Thankfully many of us can outlast Ion by simply playing other versions of the game now - we aren’t compelled to run in Mr Hazzikostas’s maze.
The player base for SoD is not the player base for Retail.
You want actual proof, import this:
into Retail, and actually publish the numbers of people who slide up the difficulty curve. Let’s see that “overwhelming” numbers moving up to Mythic. (spoiler: it’s not going to be “overwhelming” at all).
Yeah, it’s just an idea. Maybe keeping rewards and toning it down so the gap from Heroic to Mythic isn’t so big. They can still do something like the RS3 Enrage mechanic on top of it for people who just want additional challenges.
Tons of retail players flocked to SoD. We saw the ghost towns in DF.
this I’m on board wtih. Over the years & tiers, mythic has become increasingly difficult/complex. they blame it on the addon race but I think that’s a cop out.
There is no evidence to suggest this. In fact, there is quite the opposite. By the end of this tier we are expecting to see well over 1600 guilds clear Mythic Ansurek, which puts it up there as one of the higher mythic raid clears.
