Gave you a like because I think portions of what you are saying here are valid. I am generally in the camp of the OP but I understand why, if raiding and that sort of high level challenging large group content is your thing, you don’t want to have to do busy work.
Personally, I just want a well balanced game that has multiple facets people can choose to play or choose not to play and truly feel progression in those areas while not having other content spheres trivialize their efforts.
But my point, generally tossed aside by the raiding crowd, is that right now, and for the better part of the existence of WoW, the raiding sphere has essentially trivialized most other aspects of the game. For the PVE aspect of the game, raiding is like Rome, all roads lead to it - and everything is somewhat subservient to it.
My efforts in the many posts above is to foster the idea that different aspects of the game should be treated separately or at least qualitatively differently. It’s not a stretch of the imagination that most people who pvp do not want to hardcore arena and most people who pve do not want to hardcore mythic raid. We need to stop treating the game as if they do and let people pursue the paths that interest them.
In essence, alternate progression is what mythic+ offers and why it’s so darn popular. It’s mostly a true alternate progression path to raiding, a path which also scales. The problem though is that raiding gear is good in mythic+ and mythic+ gear is good in raiding. Therefore raiders have often been compelled to do mythic+ and mythic+ players will always somewhat live in the shadow of raiders. Therefore, large parts of the player base are not happy.
My suggestions above, so vigorously rebuked by the usual suspects, are an attempt to address these issues.
It would take a paradigm shift and a change of how stats and gear functions in the game as the goal would be to make dungeon gear best for dungeons but mediocre in raids and open world content. The same would apply to open world gear and raid gear.
To me it makes sense. You don’t wear backpacking gear to your day job if you are a car salesman and you don’t wear a suit and a tie if you are about to go surfing. I mean you could, but those outfits wouldn’t optimally suit those purposes.
But with raiding gear, you kind of get a wetsuit, hiking gear, plus a suit and tie all rolled into one.
So these are just quick thoughts of the top of my head:
Make real world gear mainly about survival, exploring, crafting, travel, role playing, diplomacy, and fighting the types of monsters you encounter out doors.
Make dungeon gear more about stealth, exploring dungeons, detecting traps, finding treasure, solving archaelogical puzzles, platforming, and fighting the type of monsters found in dungeons.
Make raid gear about the inter-relatedness and synergistic effects of large groups, taking down massive foes, warding off massive spikes of damage, taking on epic beings in size and abilities, penetration of titan/god armor, and that sort of thing. Really focus on how to tailor gear to face complicated layered multiphase mechanics vs epic sized foes.
Make Arena gear about what is inherent to arenas (burst, control, cc, survivability, etc.)
Make BG and large scale gear more about what leads to improved performance in territorial control and things such as scouting, holding ground, controlling seige equipment, defending towers, achieving objectives, etc.
Right now gear is mainly just a numbers get bigger affair and raiders always get the biggest numbers. It’s a boring but convenient system that’s easy to create but leaves a lot of want in the player base, hence all the acrimony we have seen for 16 years.
Yes, gear would still have numbers but there’s a lot of functionalilty you could add as well. This notion should be intuitive and make perfect sense because that’s how wearable equipment functions in real life.
Not even saying the above is THE way to go but something needs to happen in the MMO gamespace and particularly WoW that is beyond the treadmill of repeatedly doing the exact same things so that numbers just get bigger with periodic resets to that curve to keep the carrot ever dangling.
