Well, that’s 100% true, but I think that’s always been the case. When they started making heroic dungeons for a challenge, it was the baby seed for Mythic Plus.
All these many difficulties for the same five-mans make no sense.
Do the regular dungeon…it should drop gear appropriate to endgame prep (like the blue dungeons of yore).
No other level of dungeon is needed, and trying to scale a gear system on four different difficulty levels of the same 5-man instance is absurd.
Nobody does the normal dungeon because it doesn’t offer enough XP to make it worth the time you spend in pugs. Questing is by far the faster option for getting to the end. That isn’t a gear level issue.
Nobody does the heroic dungeons because you can’t get queues for them and RNG from boss drops in dungeons is inefficient. It keeps you stalled between 120 and Mythics, and you have crafted gear, warfronts, and WQ. IF they have heroic, it should be a bridge to Mythic +, but it isn’t. Mythic 0 is the bridge to M+. Heroic is a useless difficulty and shouldn’t be there.
IMO, the normal dungeons should reward xp and gear on par with the elite quest rewards in the leveling chains. The problem with the normal dungeons right now is that they leveled out the zones. It no longer matters which zone you go to or which dungeons you enter. They’re all scaled the same way, and there’s a huge loss there. I mean, it’s more convenient for them to be scaled, but it was a loss.
There should be no heroic level dungeon. That needs to go.
Keep the Mythic 0 difficulty, with no timer and all the mechanics present, but call it “Heroic.” Have it drop gear that gets you into M+ and Warfronts.
Bob’s your uncle.
As to raiding, I don’t think World Quests or Emissaries are a problem. I just don’t. They don’t make anything obselete. They just provide alternative routes to the same place. I’m never going to WQ my way up if I can dungeon my way up…because I despise doing WQ’s. I despise being forced to do them for hours every day for achievements, so I certainly don’t volunteer for them in pursuit of gear rewards.
The normal raid is for preview, gear catch-up, and people who play at LFR levels of skill - but want organized groups rather than pugs. Normal raiding isn’t made obsolete by WQ and warfronts. It’s a difficulty that you can skip if you want to, much like LFR. That doesn’t make it obsolete. A lot of guilds have no desire to raid in normal. We skip it sometimes and run it sometimes. It depends on our mood at the start of a new season/tier. WQ and Warfronts don’t really play into that decision-making process.