In our guild, everyone used to play together harmoniously, enjoying the game as a team. Previously, with a guaranteed baseline of +18 keys and crest farming at +16 keys, even players with less skill or who didn’t log in often wouldn’t fall too far behind in terms of gear.
However, this season started with a clear divide. Just weeks into the season, many players had already reached 619+ item levels, creating a massive gear gap between them and players who were less skilled or not as active. Those who only focused on Heroic raids couldn’t keep up with the gear progression of players grinding M+ dungeons.
As a result, our once united Heroic guild group has begun to fracture and is on the verge of collapsing entirely.
Isn’t this game supposed to emphasize social interaction?
Looks to me like your guild has two m+ sweats and a ton of people doing 10/11s, like your entire raid team plus alts. You, however, have clearly never enjoyed m+ since you only ever get KSE so is the guild really fracturing or are you just getting left behind?
The solution to the perceived problem is the same as it was day 1 TWW S1. Blizz should have left the break points for top tier crest drop and Myth vault pulls where they were circa Dragonflight S2/S3.
What the try hards were really mad about is that the casual players could acquire the same gear they had with the way Dragonflights S2/S3 break points were set…it just took a fair bit more grinding to get that overall Ilvl under that system which in turn took the casuals longer to get there. The casual players have to come to grips with the 619/620 gear wall and suck up the grinding they will have to do in 8s to get past it right now or unsub and wait to see what Blizz does. It’s a disparity in gear that the try hards want to keep because they were never happy that casual players could get that ilvl without what they perceived as “more skill” at this game. Personally I think the old break points produced a smoother gear progression curve and catered to a wider range of mindsets towards the game that makes for a healthier overall playerbase. Especially with the current affixes and fort/tyrannical kicking in together at +10. The try hards should be advocating for themselves for more reward for completing those keys at +12 and beyond instead of disparaging the casuals and spreading more of the elitist, gatekeeping mentality that so plagues the PUG scene already. In the end the arguments will always remain the same between the try hards/filthy casuals and what blizz ends up actually doing will be directly affected by how many players stop playing due to changes they made to the game that the larger portion of the playerbase may not have liked. Regardless though… I am not sure what you were hoping to accomplish with this post in its current wording. Is there a disparity that exists in TWW that wasn’t there in the last 3 seasons of Dragonflight… yes… I believe there is. Is it dividing guilds?..it shouldn’t be…and if it is, your guild probably had some issues prior that TWWs current format is just shedding light on.
I feel your pain but only from the guild I’d been with for years vs the one I’m in now.
I no longer want to be guilded (or rather, raid) with people who dont consitently work on their toons.
I am also an “AOTC-only” focused person, but I dont have an issue logging in EVERY WEEK when we’re actively progressing to ensure I continue to gear myself out …even if it means outgearing the content (which is what usually happens). My guild FINALLY downed Queen 2 weeks ago and we did it again last week and I never noticed that anyone other than maybe ONE new person didnt have a consistently upward moving average item level each week.
I am not sure if I’m overshooting here but I am OVER having a sizeable chunk of a raid team’s roster NEVER progressing their toons outside of raids.
Raid logging doesn’t actively help your raid team and I think it might be time people knock it off with that behavior.
It’s not an unreasonable ask to do at least 1-4 keys a week for vault.
Overgearing content when you only raid 2 nights a week usually means that we dont spend 2000 years on the last boss. It is what it is. I still think the number of pulls we had on queen was obnoxious compared to fyrakk.
Not tryin to be that guy or anything, but nah, not anymore.
Delves + follower dungeons eliminate the need for social interaction entirely while still offering you the chance to experience a significant amount of content.
LFG/LFR limit the scope of social interaction significantly. You can complete entire raids without saying a single word to anyone else you’re playing with.
Great Vault + Crests now give you access to gear you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get alone, and realistically, you shouldn’t be able to.
Aside from a few activities, this is essentially a singleplayer game now.
I disagree with the premise of this assessment. Blizz went out their way to make the game more single player friendly yes, which has taken a big bite out of the social interaction aspect but it really is more fun with a group of like minded nerds. So if anything id say WoW is more accommodating to both sides of that debate.
This game does function on social interaction if that’s what you want out of it, it’s the members of your guild who are choosing to let a gear gap divide them.
Also we’re what? 3 months into the expansion now? That’s 12 great vaults worth of 616 Delve Hero gear, coupled with however many potential Delver’s Bounties in the process of getting your vault slots every week. So you don’t even need M+ to be relevantly geared for AoTC progression anymore, and anyone who isn’t just full-on dead weight should be able to do Tier 8 Delves, even if they need to 5 stack and run them like a dungeon.
Not being appropriately geared for AoTC progression is basically a personal choice this season, more so than I’ve ever seen it before. So there’s no reason to be mad at Blizzard or blame the game.
How do you propose giving harder content gear to less skilled people if they didn’t clear the harder content? The structure in games like this is to push harder content while under geared, using skill, to then push to the next level and do that all over again. Getting more gear helps you reclear previous difficulties you struggled with. It still requires skill and dedication to do that harder content. If you don’t practice, care to improve, or barely log on; being left behind people who do that opposite of those things seems reasonable to me.
Not necessarily and WoW’s structure is really up to the player. You absolutely have players who will push harder content while under geared because they have the time and skill to do so, but there are also tons of players who gear up first and then move up to the next level.
To give you an example, you had people running M+10s in sub-610 gear because they had the time to learn the dungeons and the skill to pull it off while being under geared. You also had people who took their time to gear up by spamming lower tier content and upgrading their gear to be 619 before running M+10. On top of that, you even have players who took even longer to get higher than 619 by using the vault rewards and saving up Gilded crests from +8s to get 636 crafted gear.
The point is that there are multiple avenues to “level up” in content. This would apply to delves too. The point was that Delves+8 was too rewarding for the difficulty in relation to the other end-game pillars. People who couldn’t do M+6 or Normal raids were easily able to do Delves+8 in pre-season gear. The pre-season gear is the important part of this argument. It’s not that it’s too easy on it’s own. It’s that it was easy in pre-season gear for these same solo players, not the top end players.
There was no stepping stone in progression with delves. People went from D+2 to D+8 in the first week. Most people who did that wouldn’t be able to jump from M+2 to M+6 in a week. Likewise with raids from 1/8 to 8/8 normal.
Making Delves more difficult doesn’t mean solo players won’t have access to it. It means that they will have to progress over time to get it. Just like my example with M+ and the multiple avenues people take to get to the same difficulty.
Maybe we are saying the same thing here but just have different levels of when the “jumps” are accessible. I did mention that gear helps you clear content at the difficulty you were struggling at previously. But in order to get upgrades, it requires doing harder content. It’s bracketed by item level caps but even with gear there are some people who just aren’t as invested in the game as the rewards they want. And that okay, but that is the correlation to most things. People who care and invest time into things get more out of it than those who don’t. Especially in MMOs or RPGs.
The part that you aren’t considering is that the tuning was hopelessly broken those first couple weeks. There were many days when Brann was so overpowered that all you had to do was walk behind him. Other days the mobs’ hitpoints would cut in half if someone else was in the delve with you. By the time they got the tuning corrected and fixed the bugs, we outgeared the content (due to having waaaaay too many keys) and a partially leveled up Brann. None of us actually knows how difficult delves would have been in preseason gear if they had been tuned then as they are now.
I think we are more on the same page than you think we are and is the case for many arguments. The problem is that most people only see the differences in opinions and focuses on those.
Yes, gear can help you move to the next level of progression if it’s needed. However, where we disagree is that it doesn’t require you to do the harder content to get the harder gear. I gave the example of M+ because of simplicity and the general understanding of the system.
A player can run +2s to get 597 drops.
They can either run +3 and higher with 597; or
They can keep running +2s for crests and upgrade all the way to 610 before moving to +3 higher; or
The M+2 gives players access to 610 ilvl when +7s drop the same 610 ilvl (albeit a different track), but once they run the +7s with their 610 Champion gear they can replace the track and upgrade that like they did before. If they need to they can even run sub M+7 keys to get gear higher than what drops in the +7 through the vault before even stepping inside M+7.
Which is fine and I don’t see a problem with that. We even saw many solo players claim that they don’t care if it takes longer to gear as long as they have access. Well here we are where they are now moving goalposts because they no longer want to spend the time.
We also discussed over thousands of posts about how solo and casual content players often play WoW more than high content players. So using time as the limiting factor is disingenuous.
People play alts and gear through Delves post-patch. We do know how not-difficult it is now.
I only used time as a limiting factor because of the OP used it in his argument. I agree that time isn’t an argument for most people. But when the OP makes a claim that people being left behind is an issue because they are -