The return of hard 5 man content

Agreed. It’s all muddled together and there’s no linear path that leads to what should be the end game content.

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i don’t think i should get heroic level anything for WQ. maybe normal level WB like we have now is fine. the only reason really for me to get better gear is to have an easier time in old content. i don’t do dungeons or raids really at all anymore. i don’t need a 425 ilevel for that. lol

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You can be an elitist without being of the elite class. I’m using the term as defined originally. I.E. ; in the socioeconomic sense. Don’t think that’s true in WOW? Observe IRL systems of government and economic stratification and consider that this would bear out in-game, as well, model of social strata that it is.

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@Dekkar, @Arshia, @Dharkside:

Thanks for the great discussion! It’s given me an idea for a post I’ll try to make later tonight. I’m off to dinner. Y’all have some excellent points! :blue_heart:

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that stuff was on par with normal dungeons.

For rep, not gear lol

But keep in mind the badge of justice vendors were a 2.4 thing, not a ‘all of BC’ thing. I got my gear from pvp, kara, zul’aman when it came out, and mooching a trash run through SSC for nether vorticies for Stunherald. Took a long time, but the ilvl disparity even then wasn’t that wide from T4 to T6.

I disagree entirely. not everyone has access or 19 other friends to do mythic raids with. But 5 really good players can knock out +12 keystones in their limited time, doing difficult, challenging content, for meaningful rewards. I don’t think raiding should be the capstone. I always found it annoying in wrath that 25 man content automatically gave better gear than the 10 man content when it was nothing more than a participation bonus. Raiding should be something that raiders like to do for the challenge and the guild team work, not the ONLY way to get gear worth wearing.

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I think this is the heart of the present situation.

Speaking as someone who’s been on both sides of that divide, I dunno how much I agree with this. It’s not fully or none.

Now that I’m done with the rep grind I play less than most casuals. But I also know not everyone can schedule out a couple blocks a week and ensure they’ll be there to do it, and we always joke that the real raid boss is attendance (that or your ISP). People who can’t commit to that need something to do, and it needs to feel rewarding.

Raids kind of do need to be story climaxes – it’s really dumb for a raid to just be random green space worms with no lead-up, and the nonexistent Alliance side of Uldir proved it – but having an accessible easy mode is a good solution. They do need to be a lot more careful about what mechanics are left in though, having someone like Uu’nat still have his whole arsenal with unkillable adds and everything was kind of dumb.

At the same time, when I was playing BC/Wrath, even casual-level play was rewarded incrementally. You could target pieces and work toward them. It felt a lot more satisfying than pelvic thrusting at a handful of outdoor mobs that can’t even punch through your az shield and getting a dozen raid-level loot boxes dropped on your head until you have literally nothing left to do but M+10 and raids.

Feeling rewarded doesn’t need to mean getting the best of everything hurled into your face for minimum effort, it means getting something better than what you have at a regular rate. If you take it as far as we have now, all you do is slam casuals against an ilvl wall that’ll last 4 months unless they luck out on TF, and watch Mythic raiders beat their heads against a boss for two weeks and watch it drop something unambiguously inferior to a vendor piece they bought before the place even opened.

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my raider friend told me with my ilevel i could do some mythic+ if i wanted. but how the crap am i supposed to do that when this expansion i haven’t even done a +2 the highest i did was healing a +5 in legion. i don’t agree with raider io though but they shouldn’t be making low level progression non existent.

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To say that raiding was “the ONLY way to get gear worth wearing” is a massive exaggeration.

IMO, the game as a whole suffers when the developers go out of their way to please everyone. It’s like saying that if you’re not a billionaire you might as well be living in Calcutta. It’s ridiculous.

Not to mention how weird/bad it feels to have to ignore one of the primary focal points of M+…

Start by reading this:

https://www.wowhead.com/mythic-keystones-and-dungeons-guide

Run M0, get a +2. Research out that dungeon (that guide breaks down into individual dungeons later on). Run it on heroic with an eye out for mechanics and enemy castbars and what they do. Watch a video to look at routes. Then start a group with your key.

Alternately, run with guildies. Pretty much anything +6 or below is readily carryable and good for learning as long as they know what to expect (most weeks 7-9 is pretty easily carryable too, but Grievous sucks lol). They might volunteer to take you on a +10 if they’re willing to deplete it.

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It’s been so long since I’ve seen someone ACTUALLY try to be helpful on the forums instead of trying to be a contrarian or be offended for someone else. Thanks for that!

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Incorrect. Those rep vendors had gear that you couldn’t buy unless you had the rep. Even Sha’tari Skyguard had gear on their rep vendor. As did Ogri’la. And you used apexis to create gear. I remember spending a lot of time up there to make gloves that I needed for our raid.

I didn’t say they were. But it was still a way to keep people running content.

In order to run Kara, you really needed to get your .5 set bonus gear from the Heroics. In order to run SSC, you really needed that rep vendor gear and Kara gear. In order to run BT, you really needed that SSC gear.

It was linear. There was a progression path. With the content we have now, a similar idea can be adapted to have a progression path so that one type of content doesn’t give you a way to skip some other type of content. That sort of thing.

I’ll see if I have time later to give an outline of what I mean so that it makes more sense.

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I agree with that. I even posted something similar.

I would like more hard 5 man mythic only dungeons to do outside of the one per expansion we have been getting for two expansions now. Please bring back hard dungeons to do that aren’t tied to mythic+.

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Theres this thing called mythic+. You know it exists right?

There’s mythic only dungeons you know those exist right?

The only reason I even do them is to get a +10 done for all my toons each week so I have a chest to open next week. If the reward from doing them was removed I wouldn’t even bother doing them at all. I honestly hate doing mythic+ and that’s mostly because it doesn’t feel rewarding to do now compared to legion. And the constant rush mentality of it doesn’t appeal to me.

I use escapist media to relax and unwind not to feel stressed out while playing a game but I guess I’m in the minority here.

I honestly would like to see a return of difficult complete dungeons that have bosses that require focus,attention and team work to down and not a marathon of how fast you can down content. I enjoy the journey not the destination.

Mechagon is the best thing in a while. On normal mode it’s a good challenge for a pug group in 400-415 gear. Trash hurts, requires a little thought (interrupt, dispel, stun) to help the tank out. Bosses hurt too and require good play from the whole group.

Hard mode is awesome! I spent 3 hours in there on the weekend. We got all the bosses down except the last, with quite a few wipes as we worked out the kinks. Ran out of time at the end and had to call it with an hour spent on King Mech. and that is a real prick of a fight, damn!

I pugged it with randoms and we had an awesome time dying repeatedly and finally overcoming a boss only to bang our heads on the next one.

10/10 can’t wait to try again. :slight_smile:

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So basically mythic +

Okay

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The other people that have complained about this same issue. They can even start their own community!

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Honestly, I think the reason why we don’t have those non timed “challenging 5-man dungeons” anymore almost completely boils down to the gearing system, which I think it’s the real problem.

What I mean is that current Mythic0 dungeons are as hard or even harder than those Cata Heroics, ofc that’s only true if you do them at the appropriate item level, the problem is that this only really happened during the first few of weeks of BFA before all the free-loot stuff went out of control…

Early BFA, M0 were tuned around players being at around 315 to 320 item level and they presented a decent challenge to overcome, then all the sudden the warfront launched and you could go farm rares to get free 340 item level (which was equivalent to M0 loot), then even more “free loot” systems started kicking in, going up to 370 item level… At this point everyone was easily over 365 item level which is almost Heroic raid gear, and about 40 item levels higher than what M0 is tuned for, so ofc it becomes a total faceroll.

Have the “free loot” capped at 340 which was LFR gear levels then M0 would have been an appropriate challenge for non-hardcore players.

**I used start of expansion numbers because it was easier as framework, increase everything by 30 item levels per new tier and everything pretty much holds true.

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