To be fair, those incentives and avenues do still exist. Raiding in and of itself offers things [mounts, pets, etc] that you don’t get from M+, and vice versa. M+ is basically intended to be a small group content scale that, at given thresholds, is similar to raids in terms of difficulty.
I would say that the main issues of that are addressed in what I proposed; a main problem posed by the current loot is that it sits slightly above given thresholds in an awkward place. I don’t necessarily think one form of content should be encouraged over the other, because both fit different demographics. I enjoy keys because of the small, comfortable group format. I don’t enjoy raids as much [particularly Mythic, which I’ve done this tier], but I’d be willing to see certain alterations at the mid range of keys [+15 loot and chest] if we then make room for alterations above that range, where there currently are none.
Mythic raiding and raiding as a whole is old. For some it’s so old, it’s new. M+ offers a Diablo-style progression focus and allows a massive crowd of older, experienced players methods to get challenging content with rewards that meet those challenges. Some people play for guild and love their raids, personally I’ve led thousands of raids. Thousands. I used to raid on a different toon every day for years, infact multiple toons daily. It just gets old and it’s stressful and in the end it’s not as fun as just having a tight group of solid players who are good at the game. Players that are new to raiding or mythic seem to want their tier to be the best, but the game is dynamic, always changing. What I predict will come to pass eventually. Raids aren’t top-end PVE. They just aren’t. M+ has shown us all that to be a fact. The weekly right now is the perfect metric for just how many are doing that content and it shouldn’t be a stepping stone to raiding, it is what it is; an alternative.
Sorry, but this just isn’t right type of thinking. If raiding ever became meaningless and there weren’t people interested in raiding the game would die over night.
Absolutely false and you know it. I can pull out the hat at least 30 bnet friends who have not raided since Wrath or MoP and I’m one of them. I’m a testament to the falsity of that claim, sorry.
Raids do still have the best gear it’s called mythic raiding.
Like clearing heroic?
Up to heroic. Unless you are relying on the once a week cache that pulls from the entire dungeon loot pool and is untradeable. Gearing through that alone would take far longer than running mythic raid.
It is still like this today. A lot of your BiS comes from the raid anyways. Raden, Drest, wrath, nzoth, cara… slightly less than half.
“The players are entitled today, thinking they deserve the best stuff with minimal effort.” -Epicericka
If you are a high end raider (mythic) you shouldn’t struggle with 1 M+15 per week. So you should be advocating for less rng.
Just wanted to add my two cents. I’m happy to reset keys, I’m happy to lower keys, I’m even happy to sell key carries and carry my guildies. Wiping in raid isn’t fun to me, but I somehow manage to deal with it. That being said, if M+ was made to where it wasn’t a competitive, and viable form of content… I’d just stop playing. Raid being the “viable, end-all be-all” content just sounds like telling the community that it’s okay to be toxic, and it’s okay that your gear progression is hard-stuck at where ever your 19 other players are at. Individualized player progression is good, being forced to raid is bad, and borrowed power systems are bad.
I mean look at M+ now. No one is wanting 465 gear. You want the gear in the chest. Gearing? Please the gear you get at the end of the run will help you improve and what you get from the chest is enough. M+ is for the challenge and can farm endless. Raiding is the harder content and should reward more.
Yea this is a good point. Gear in M+ is already pointless and no one is doing M+ for the gear, yet plenty of people are still doing M+ for the prestige. People are in an uproar about the new system for no reason other than to complain.
I read through most of them. I don’t agree that it should continue to scale all the way to 20+.
I think the way the system was is fine. At best reduce end of dungeon reward to be on par w/ heroic raid (460).
I view M+ farming as your entry point into the raid tier you want.
If you are capable of clearing +15’s easily and can do so early on, then you should be able to largely skip straight into mythic raids.
If you can only do +5’s or so then heroic is appropriate for you. So on.
It is no different to back in vanilla->cata when there was 1 raid difficulty, and you would large gear yourself via dungeoning.
The weekly bonus being on par with Mythic raid is fine. It is significantly less efficient than actually clearing the mythic raid and full of insane rng 1:100-ish chance of the item you want (that is not tradeable). A 3:100 in SL will be better but not by much, especially as the weeks go on.
As to mythic raiders requiring M+ caches to get BiS … I agree that is somewhat of a problem. However that isn’t an ilvl problem or a M+ cache being too rewarding problem. That is a poor itemization from raid problem.
The way Blizzard has it setup half of your BiS comes from raid and the other half comes from relying on M+ caches (BiS as defined as 475 gear).
Either way none of that necessitated tanking the number of end of dungeon items nor reducing them below heroic raid. You will still have to bank on M+ caches depending on how the raid is itemized and your class.
I agree with most of what you say, but I wouldn’t mind higher keys rewarding mythic tier loot. I wouldn’t want small increments up to that level, but say 15 was the heroic reward level and then every key level up to 25 didn’t increase in ilvl until you reached that hurdle.
This one i’m kind of on the fence about, I just don’t want heroic to be invalidated so quickly and actually want it to be made a bit harder.
Yeah maybe. I can tell you for the first time in a long while I was able to dabble in some mythic raiding because it was so accessible to hit the ilvl requirements.
Frankly if I spent months grinding out heroic, as a casual, a harder hitting version of the fight with new mechanics would not be appealing to me at all.
I consider base M+ as the slider that allows me to choose my raid game menu from easiest, easy, medium, hard.
I assume you mean end of dungeon loot? How would this not invalidate mythic raiding almost entirely? Wouldn’t you recreate the same thing you view as a problem with “heroic being invalidated so quickly” with something like that (regardless of whether you set the M+10,15,20,whatver)?
The way I see it is for them to reach that high hurdle, most players would have to get into heroic-mythic level raiding, or wait until they were fully geared by the weekly vault. It would take time just as it does now until people break into those higher key levels. by this time most of the raids are cleared anyway.
My main point is I think their needs to be incentives to get people out of the LFG random world and into a guild community. By making raiding more time efficient and being a bit more lucrative, it would be encouraged but not forced.
We aren’t talking about Mythic raiding. Of course Mythic raiding should have the highest ilvl. We are talking about Heroic raiding and the ilvl being better than any other end game option. Blizzard are limiting the player base and lied about PvP vendors meaning something in Shadowlands. Not only are they ruining PvP vendors they are now ruining Mythic Plus. This MMO in 2020 is going backwards now, instead of forwards, amazing.
Even within heroic you are looking at 2-4 hour clears with each boss dropping loot (as opposed to 1 chest at the end), with smaller loot tables, and all of the loot can be traded. Can you skip this via M+15 end of dungeon sure, but this isn’t the pinnacle of gearing anyways.
For true BiS - you again go back to raiding and a 20 man environment where loot can be traded and comps can be stacked (per boss if you are willing to sacrifice lockout) vs. a 1:100 guaranteed item at the end of the week that cannot be traded.
Even your best case scenario via weekly M+ caches only (dual hand vs 1-handers), 0 dups, and always BiS would take you minimally 13 weeks in SL (1 slot is legendary). Maybe 12 depending on what professions offer. That is longer than the entire raid tier and literally assumes 0 dups and perfect luck - which basically means rolling a 100 on a 100-sided die, 12 times in a row.
Yea it definitely already is, the changes they made weren’t drastic. This post mainly was a reply to all the uproar about it.
However, it doesn’t hurt to push the game a bit more in that direction. The community/social aspect of WoW has been dying for a while now and I think getting people more into a raiding/guild community is a big step in right direction.