A fair amount of comments and posts keep comparing the loot gained from M+ to Heroic raid. I would like to take this a step further to try compare the change to what actually matters, the difference between M+ and Mythic raid loot.
To the players that want to push keys this change forces us to raid Mythic to be competitive. The gear from end of dungeons is now worth its weight in raw gold. The end of week chest is good, but assuming no duplicate slots and one legendary, it takes 14 (15 if you dualwield) weeks to get an Ilvl competitve set. This is ignoring the issue of preffered stats.
I believe that you should be rewarded for completing dificult content, now, this does not mean you should get end game gear for doing a +14, the gear rewards should scale so that players pushing keys can get the gear they need to compete from the content they are doing.
Just as a brief comparison. You wouldn’t expect a ranked LoL player to grind hours of TFT for power gains in their ranked soloQ matches. That would be absurd. Players should be able to remain competitive in the content they enjoy, from completing that content.
Hopefully this all makes sense, I am a tad heated. I hope this change was made so that you can’t farm gear for the first few weeks and then is reverted for the rest of the season, but with no communication we can only speculate.
Only for azerite gear which mainly affected the bleeding edge, the stamina from those pieces was very good.
Regular loot will be more impactful now in SL as you can’t get decent Ilvl from the dungeon you lose the option to optimise your characters stats with dungeon pieces. Eventually the Ilvl from Mythic raid will be worth more than the stats on +14 pieces. This issue was not as impactful in BFA, at least in the current season.
So, yes, you had to raid mythic to be competitive in mythic plus. So, with the changes to loot in Shadowlands in regards to mythic plus, what has actually changed?
A competitive player was already forced to raid mythic in BfA, and now they’ll be forced to raid mythic in Shadowlands.
Getting a piece of gear isn’t personal improvement. Beating a key time with the same gear should be more fulfilling that beating the time with improved gear.
I don’t get the outcry about this change. If you’re actually serious about pushing keys, the loot that M+ drops is largely worthless outside certain broken items (e.g. Trinkets), and a couple ilvls lower won’t make their equivalents in SL bad.
You’re still going to be forced into raiding, or gated by your weekly chest for gear progression in SL, just like you were in BFA and Legion.
The issue is that players have to spend time and effort on content they don’t enjoy, to get the most out of content they do. With this change there will be an even larger difference in players that push keys and players that raid and push keys.
But they already have to do that so why is it all of a sudden a big deal?
So, there were already people, that were competitive in mythic plus, but not too competitive in mythic plus, that now because of these changes will be forced to raid mythic to be competitive in mythic plus and are no longer able to not be not too competitive in mythic plus?