Why Mythic shouldn't be a thing

[DakonBlackblade]

So you'd prefer the current system where the raids are tuned around having a specific artifact level and it's no longer "bring the player not the class" but "Bring the AP level, not the player"

The Ap thing is a problem of the AP system, not the raid structure.

[Myta]

But you're making 10% out to be some gargantuan difference that's never existed before. Take HFC: Having your class trinket vs not was easily 10%. Most tier sets were easily 10%. And it's honestly only 10% if you're looking at an alt that hit 110 two days ago. Anyone other than a fresh alt should be past 35, making the difference some variable number under 9.5%. Also, you keep talking about 5+ and 45+, but I'm not sure where you're getting these numbers. Paragon levels start at 36, and increase to 54. You can't have both 5 and 45 paragon levels in the same scenario.

You said that gearing has never made as much of a difference as artifacts do now, but that's blatantly false.

Whether you look at gearing examples from past expansions, or keeping up with an artifact from this expansion, either had fairly significant effects on your performance.

You couldn't take a fresh alt and have them within 10% of a main in any past expansion, and you can't now either- that's not something that's changed.

You could take an a fresh alt and have them mythic ready in a short time, and you still can. That's also not something that's changed.

What's changed is the skewed perception, despite evidence to the contrary, that this DPS difference is somehow more significant than any of the past DPS differences.

You're argument is missing the time quotient, you can barring bad luck, get fed 4pc/trinket in a day if you're catching up on an alt. If you're just a regular raider but doing a new role and are a bit behind? Gear is easy. It is not the same with Paragon. It requires grinding, at non-raid timers, sometimes up to 100 times a day, grinding 5mans for AP. AK is slow progress unlocks, meaning that if you started late on the Paragon bandwagon, you will never catch up.

It's important to understand how destructive AP is to forming, reforming, recruiting guilds, let's also not gloss over high-AP player poaching and the rapid self destruction of guilds who are having to maintain 2+ 45+ alts. Every guild below top 200 is not being held back by skill, as they cleared EN Mythic and ToV just fine (after Helya fix), but find themselves stuck in front of the overtuned 5-man boss that is the Krosus wall.

[Eis]

But nonetheless, encounters are balanced around guilds that do precisely this, with upper Nighthold bosses being pure AP checks. Faced with that situation there is no room for 'git gud', when said raider leader has to explain the reason to why they're wiping to the raid is because people aren't running Maw hard enough, that becomes disheartening and is unhealthy. It is not difficult or skillful to farm AP, it is a gate pure and simple. It's not right to assume that everyone at high Paragon levels are 'the best players' but when faced with a 45+ paragon player who is uncertain in skill level, versus someone who is maybe around 5+ but you know he is good? Most guilds are not social enough or buddy enough to care, the 45+ app will be accepted every single time.

At the same time what is gear? You can get an alt in the past raid-ready in a day. Gear, consumables were the least important thing about a player, as that's easy to get. Gear is just a means to do the raid (though some people see gear as the reasons you do the raid). The paradigm has shifted now, and for the worse. Your ability to defeat bosses boils down to how much you farmed a 5man between raids, and then the Raid Leader has to be in the position to say "It's not enough, we mathematically cannot kill this boss".

It sucks that Blizzard created a system where people should feel disappointed that they didn't exploit AP when they had the chance.

Okay, lemme break this down for you.

1. It's not called an "AP check". Those bosses are called "gear checks". They have always existed, and likely will continue existing. The reason the top guilds get past them much faster is because they have been farming better content longer, and they are better than a lot of other people and thus have to crutch on gear less. It is absolutely a case of "git gud".

2. The raid leader needs to also "git gud" if they are saying that the raid is wiping because people aren't running Maw hard enough. Maybe you need more gear, but if you're really that far off you've got more issues than just AP. Unless you are really casual trying to push content you are not properly geared for, you will not run into "mathematically impossible". In fact, the only case where "mathematically impossible" has ever even been plausible was Ensidia on Yogg 0, and Stars came by and proved that their excuse was just that: an excuse.

3. If someone is applying to a guild and is at 35 traits instead of 45+, the guild likely has a reason to decline them that isn't AP. Should they accept someone that is 840 ilvl? Probably not, they'd tell that person they need some more gear unless it's a really special case. Why is AP different? Also, if your guild judges people based strictly on their AP, they have bigger issues. Is it a function of being unable to judge skill, or placing value on the wrong things?

4. I don't care or have time enough to run sims, but I'd assume 4p tier is worth way more than a few paragon traits. A good trinket is probably worth more too. A warforge or titanforge with your proper stats has gotta be worth a lot. You can't simultaneously argue that things are an AP check and gear doesn't matter. They work the same way. In fact, AP is probably way more reliable and an easier way to improve yourself than gear.

Your argument is pretty silly, and actually has nothing to do with the initial topic you started. I just don't get it.

[Myta]

1. It's not called an "AP check". Those bosses are called "gear checks". They have always existed, and likely will continue existing. The reason the top guilds get past them much faster is because they have been farming better content longer, and they are better than a lot of other people and thus have to crutch on gear less. It is absolutely a case of "git gud".

It isn't a gear check, because outside of unfathomable luck with Titanforging across your team, you need people to pull their Maw running weight to get past Krosus, that is just reality. Either several dps are carrying low AP raiders on Krosus, or you are not able to kill the boss. There is no amount of magical git gud fairy dust one can sprinkle onto the situation. The raid needs an average AP level of X, if you don't meet that check, you are not killing the boss, period. If you have the DPS, than someone is making the difference up somewhere for you. And is has nothing to do with how 'gud' the player who under farmed Maw that week was. They have to live with the knowledge that by not no-life grinding they are holding progress back.

That sort of system is broken which is why Blizzard is removing it, that's not up for debate, the creators of the game have seen this broken, flawed, failure of a system and said "Right, we clearly messed up and devolved all of Mythic raider evaluation into # of Maw Runs". The debate on whether this system sucks is over, as Blizzard agrees it sucks. The debate is around recognizing the failure, why it was terrible and never allowing that sort of system again. It's also contrary to the spirit of Mythic as again, a person of higher Paragon levels simply is more valuable to a guild than someone of lower levels, skill has been taken out of the equation here.

[KrazyKraka0]

But nonetheless, encounters are balanced around guilds that do precisely this, with upper Nighthold bosses being pure AP checks. Faced with that situation there is no room for 'git gud', when said raider leader has to explain the reason to why they're wiping to the raid is because people aren't running Maw hard enough, that becomes disheartening and is unhealthy. It is not difficult or skillful to farm AP, it is a gate pure and simple. It's not right to assume that everyone at high Paragon levels are 'the best players' but when faced with a 45+ paragon player who is uncertain in skill level, versus someone who is maybe around 5+ but you know he is good? Most guilds are not social enough or buddy enough to care, the 45+ app will be accepted every single time.

I'm Sorry but how is this even an argument right now? Guild expecting people to be at a reasonable point in the artifact level of their weapons is no different than guilds expecting people to have the appropriate gear level for the content they want to complete (Something that has been a factor in this game for a long time). In addition, you have to realize that when guilds are recruiting people they expect people who are putting in a reasonable amount of time and effort into their characters and unfortunately artifact power is an easy metric by which to measure this along side gear checks. Now I get your argument that people can always just buy gear while they are unable to purchase artifact power, but with the current catch-up mechanics in place you are able to hit around artifact level 38 just by doing the Suramar quest line. It's my understanding that the biggest trait to get your weapon to is level 36 for the 5% flat damage / healing increase and afterwards the benefits don't matter as much. Personally I got my weapon to 36 and then stopped caring about farming AP and just passively collect it each week from raids. Through this my weapon is sitting at level 44 which is more than enough to clear the content I am working on (Currently M Krosus).

Now, I guess the argument becomes would having a higher artifact level on the weapon help clear these later bosses and obviously the answer to that would be yes. However; this is no different than saying, "well if we just had some more gear we would be able to kill this boss." Both of these clearly have an impact on character performance, and in my opinion are no different than one another. Artifact power is doing exactly what it is meant to do in this game currently, and that is to reward players who are unlucky with drops with a meaningful way to still progress their character.

Now to circle back onto your original post (coming from a mythic raiders point of view), I do not believe that having raiding keystones is the correct solution to your problem. To me, the best part of mythic raiding is the added complexity that the bosses provide through the form of new mechanics. My understanding of your post (and i could be completely wrong here), is that if a keystone system were implemented it would be based on the heroic tier of raiding and just scale up health and damage from there. A system like this would most likely cause people to get burnt out on raids easier due to multiple runs of the same raid a week (assuming its like dungeon system). Even if it still has the weekly lockout, it still would cause people to get burnt out because it would not feel like your progressing on something new like the current mythic system does (due to the fact that the boss only has more hp and damage vs. new mechanics).

[JemiS]

It's important to understand how destructive AP is to forming, reforming, recruiting guilds, let's also not gloss over high-AP player poaching and the rapid self destruction of guilds who are having to maintain 2+ 45+ alts. Every guild below top 200 is not being held back by skill, as they cleared EN Mythic and ToV just fine (after Helya fix), but find themselves stuck in front of the overtuned 5-man boss that is the Krosus wall.

If this was the case, we'd have a lot more guilds sitting at 6/10. There are also aren't nearly as many guilds as you think stuck there- if you filter for guilds that cleared M EN and TOV, there are only about 59 guilds stuck on Krosus.

[Caelia]

FINALLY lol somebody gets it. They haven't balanced to top end guilds in a loooong time. Since Ulduar probably. I don't even remember Heroic LK being really that hard. I think Yogg 0 lights was the last boss that was a true race that took a long ass time to down.

While Yogg did take longer I wouldn't say that HC LK was insignificant with it's 42 days to kill after guilds managed to first get to him.

[Yunaqt]

I disagree with leveling a weapon taking a whole lot of effort to catch up - After rerolling from scratch guildless to finding a mythic guild on a resto druid it's taken about 6 weeks to gear, get AK to 25 and currently at 53 traits without nolifing it, or carrying Maws, just raiding is sufficient enough itself.
A H NH clear yields 1.25m AP, a normal clear 1m AP, then there's other raids, just doing mythic+'s and daily caches that you level it really quickly without overly worrying about it, in the meanwhile working towards getting an extra legendary or 2 and gearing.

[Aoyi]

I wouldn't be surprised if keystone raiding was introduced in the future. I don't think people are right in saying normal mode raiding is lfr 2.0 though. If you weren't overgearing it as so many people do and raiding it with its intended gear levels, than it provides a decent challenge for those players. If you are a heroic player, great! There's heroic raiding for you. And if you want to step it up, there's mythic.

Keystone raiding would be cool and maybe we'll see that next expansion. Honestly though, I think Blizzard likes the world first races as they currently are. They like the attention it draws every raid release. If it was keystone based, a lot of people would like the optional challenge, bit I don't think as many players would care to follow who did the world first +10 clears. Hype would die down.

[Socialhealer]

So you'd prefer the current system where the raids are tuned around having a specific artifact level and it's no longer "bring the player not the class" but "Bring the AP level, not the player"

that was HFC? bring the mage/hunter

rest of classes = lul

[Relapses]

With the direction the game is going, they're looking to burn out all of the Mythic raiding guilds so that once the population is small enough they can get rid of it without too many people batting an eye.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[avx81]

Well the issue is that mythic only caters to an extremely small fraction of the community and it enforces min/maxing. I will say they good thing about mythic is that it pushes classes to their hardest and really begins to show disparities. Most average guilds have heroic NH cleared and maybe a few bosses in mythic NH. A lot of guilds don't see a kill on an end tier boss until very close to the end of a tiers cycle if at all. All the while these players make up a very small portion of the community.

[Deleted]

If anything, the existence of normal AND heroic are probably what the game could afford to merge w/o too much trouble.

I second that. heroic is almost the same thing as normal currently, the main difference being the gear/amount of DPS required to clear it.

Okay, lemme break this down for you.

1. It's not called an "AP check". Those bosses are called "gear checks". They have always existed, and likely will continue existing. The reason the top guilds get past them much faster is because they have been farming better content longer, and they are better than a lot of other people and thus have to crutch on gear less. It is absolutely a case of "git gud".

Except due to how random gear drop is with legendary and titanforged that statement simply isn't true in legion. Plus former expansion didn't require players to farm dungeons for AP to be competitive.

Back in the day gear drop was tied to progression. Nowadays that's simply not the case.

[Kazuchika]

"Mythic shouldn't be a thing" states non mythic raider spouting utter nonsense.

I agree with merging normal and heroic though. Normal NH is almost LFR v2 with bosses lacking the mechanics of their heroic counterparts.

[Elix_Nosferatu]

It isn't a gear check, because outside of unfathomable luck with Titanforging across your team, you need people to pull their Maw running weight to get past Krosus, that is just reality. Either several dps are carrying low AP raiders on Krosus, or you are not able to kill the boss. There is no amount of magical git gud fairy dust one can sprinkle onto the situation. The raid needs an average AP level of X, if you don't meet that check, you are not killing the boss, period. If you have the DPS, than someone is making the difference up somewhere for you. And is has nothing to do with how 'gud' the player who under farmed Maw that week was. They have to live with the knowledge that by not no-life grinding they are holding progress back.

That sort of system is broken which is why Blizzard is removing it, that's not up for debate, the creators of the game have seen this broken, flawed, failure of a system and said "Right, we clearly messed up and devolved all of Mythic raider evaluation into # of Maw Runs". The debate on whether this system sucks is over, as Blizzard agrees it sucks. The debate is around recognizing the failure, why it was terrible and never allowing that sort of system again. It's also contrary to the spirit of Mythic as again, a person of higher Paragon levels simply is more valuable to a guild than someone of lower levels, skill has been taken out of the equation here.

As a Mythic raider in a world top 200 guild, I absolutely disagree with everything you are saying. While we have people that have literally run 1000+ M+s, I never ground Maw at all and I am 54 on my main spec and 48 on my offspec simply by doing world quests and M+ for weekly caches. I spent maybe 1.5 hours a day doing all the AP WQs as I caught up, and guess what? Now I'm pumping AP into a spec that I never use! The biggest difference between me and our Maw grinders were legendaries, and as soon as I got the OMGWTFBBQ ones, the difference effectively went away even though I was 6-8 traits behind. Hell, spec and class differences can make more of an impact than having 44 vs 54 traits (5% damage/healing/armor), especially if your class specializes in passive cleave, AoE, or ST. Also, skill is absolutely more important, because dead DPS does no DPS. Being able to do mechanics while squeezing out every bit of damage is really what defines a Mythic raider.

Also, the reason the system is being tweaked (not removed) is because they didn't want the grind to go so fast, not that they think it's broken. They never intended people to get to max traits before NH was released, let alone before ToV. This is an oversight on their part, since they created one of the most grindy games ever (DIII) and experienced the lengths to which people would grind back in Vanilla. Even after this change, nothing will be stopping people from grinding it out if they feel compelled, and they will still be able to get an edge.

The best thing about AP (and possibly the worst because alts) is that you get rewarded for the time you put in. As someone who has raided hardcore for all but 1 tier since starting in Vanilla in 2005, I've never felt like the time I put into the game was directly proportional to what I got out of it until now. With M+ and the AP system, you have a way of at least getting some small reward regardless of the luck of your RNG (rather than having to run the same instance dozens of times for a particular item, piece of resist gear, etc. and pray). A good example is the Love Rocket. I've done the event up to 10 times a day some years for as long as it's been out and not gotten it. I'd much prefer something grindable rather than everything being based on RNG (gear, TF/WF, procs, etc.).

[Deleted]

I switched mains on November 25th, I don't play that much outside of raids and I've been 54 for quite some time. The only real grind was 35 for Mythic ToV.

[Paulosio]

Mythic is aimed at hardcore raiders, its not necessary, you can still get your ilvl 925 gear from doing Heroic. There is nothing to whine about, really, as mythic just ensures minimum ilvl you will get, and having mythic as option, it just means more content to clear, why remove that?

But it's still essentially just what heroic used to be... What was the point ? Why not just leave it at raid finder, normal (with flex) and heroic.

You can make the argument that for some people norma/flex was too easy and heroic (what used to be mythic) was too hard but i'm sure there are some people who don't find the current 4 difficulties perfect for their skill and you can't just go on adding more and more difficulties for the same content. 3 difficulties was more than fine.

[Relapses]

As a Mythic raider in a world top 200 guild, I absolutely disagree with everything you are saying. While we have people that have literally run 1000+ M+s, I never ground Maw at all and I am 54 on my main spec and 48 on my offspec simply by doing world quests and M+ for weekly caches. I spent maybe 1.5 hours a day doing all the AP WQs as I caught up, and guess what? Now I'm pumping AP into a spec that I never use! The biggest difference between me and our Maw grinders were legendaries, and as soon as I got the OMGWTFBBQ ones, the difference effectively went away even though I was 6-8 traits behind. Hell, spec and class differences can make more of an impact than having 44 vs 54 traits (5% damage/healing/armor), especially if your class specializes in passive cleave, AoE, or ST. Also, skill is absolutely more important, because dead DPS does no DPS. Being able to do mechanics while squeezing out every bit of damage is really what defines a Mythic raider.

While I mostly agree with you, if you quit the game for any length of period or reroll, the amount of grinding necessary to stay relevant is quite formidable. Yes, it's possible to be 54 right now without extreme grinding, but it presumes persistent play. I think that's one of the biggest drawbacks to the current system. (It makes having a "raid ready" alt nearly impossible, too.)

[Deleted]

So you'd prefer the current system where the raids are tuned around having a specific artifact level and it's no longer "bring the player not the class" but "Bring the AP level, not the player"

get your god damn fucking facts rights atleast.... heroic aka mythic has never been "bring the player not the class" its always been bring the SETUP

[Elix_Nosferatu]

While I mostly agree with you, if you quit the game for any length of period or reroll, the amount of grinding necessary to stay relevant is quite formidable. Yes, it's possible to be 54 right now without extreme grinding, but it presumes persistent play. I think that's one of the biggest drawbacks to the current system. (It makes having a "raid ready" alt nearly impossible, too.)

I did say the worst part was alts. I actually main swapped almost 2 months into the expac, and it only took a few weeks for my new toon to get past my old one. I still maintain that the grind for legendaries is much worse than for AP. Getting two bad legendaries makes it much harder to compete.

And even though this is still the worst part, they mostly fixed the problem with the purchasable boosts to AK.