Mechanically hard =! hard by numbers
Guldan has unforgiving mechanics (well, they were unforgiving at some point), m+ just flat out kills you eventually.
Boss #1 in CoeN is not hard - there's nothing hard about your tank taking 4m per autohit from the little add. There's no skill involved, at some point you just can't survive it anymore. Same with Boss #2, eventually you'll run out of book shelves, eventually you'll deplete the shield from Boss#3 and Boss #4 will eventually just onehit people with Upheaval + Solitude. Surviving those things doesn't require skill, it requires you to have 100k additional HP.
That's the point of infinite scaling, at some point you just can't handle it anymore with current numbers. Raiding on the other hand is designed to be doable with current numbers. The fact that there are no +25 CoeN keys with tyrannical atm doesn't mean it's harder than Guldan, it only means that there are no players with 4.7m life yet.
If only there was a way to check
I don't know from a tank/dps standpoint, but from a healer pov there is hardly anything hard about mythic gul'dan when you know who needs priority healing when. Oddly enough, that's essentially what m+ is about. I find m+ to be far more taxing than raiding. I feel like m+ requires a lot more awareness from me individually as one mistake can ruin an entire key. Raiding is just mindless while people learn how to survive the same sequence of mechanics.
Last edited by ItsTiddles; 2017-05-07 at 03:40 PM.
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One mistake will ruin an entire key hey? hmm, reminds me of a certain shit encounter this tier... *cough* star bro *cough*
Let me just set this straight real quick, mechanically raiding and M+ are a joke. WoW is not a hard game from a pure gameplay point of view. What makes M+ hard is what others have said, infinite scaling so eventually you just cant possibly survive. Raiding on the other hand is hard in a different way. Raiding is hard because you need 19 other people to do it. 19 people who are motivated to push content, are able to show up at set times, spend extra time outside raid to prepare themselves for an encounter, and most importantly are able to go into the encounter and do everything right while maintaining high throughput. Theres nothing easy about that unless you're in a top 10 world guild lol.
Now lets break down what it takes to push a high level key. You need 4 other people who know the little quirks of the dungeon. what to interrupt, what mobs to skip, and the 2 abilities that each boss does lol. Thats it, takes 20 minutes with no prior organization to get a group of solid players, even in a PUG if you use WoW prog to check M+ score. Then you run mechanically easy keys until you start getting 1 shot by shit and call it quits. How is that hard at all?
Tl;dr its harder to find 19 good players than it is to find 4 good players, therefore mythic raiding is harder that mythic keystones. A pretty crazy revelation, I know.
I'm not an officer. I'm not a raid leader. I'm just a raider. Having to find 19 other people effects me in no way. I just raid with a few friends and their guild. Just like I do m+ with friends. So even if I agreed with your logic that it's hard because you need other people, it still doesn't equate to any difference in effort on my part.
Relating this back to the topic on hand: same effort I put into both - same rewards. It was Blizzard's intent to have m+ an alternative to raiding so the gear should remain along the same path. Sure, they could scale it up to a higher cap. Instead of getting mythic ilvl gear at +15 it could require a +20, but then just as many people would complain about that being "too hard".
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The "organizational" argument of the effort it takes to keep up a team of 20 people is true, but maybe the guild master and officers should get extra rewards for their efforts to keep the guild going. Most raiders just show up regularly for raids and don't participate in the officers organizational effort.
Raiding does have more mechanics, that's true. But DPS/HPS numbers are also important, and ultimately what defines "hard", in my view, is whether the boss is doable or not.
Due to infinite scaling, yes, you can push mythic+ to a level which is simply impossible to do due to one shots. But then go one level below that ceiling and then it's on the edge of being possible. However, you still need perfect execution. You need to avoid avoidable damage to make sure the unavoidable damage can be healed. And you need to do enough DPS to meet the "soft enrage" of the healer going OOM. That's very challenging, and *requires gear* to do so.
Therefore appropriate high level gear that allows progression in mythic+ should drop in mythic+. Otherwise to be able to progress in mythic+ you would be forced to gear up from mythic raids to be able to push mythic+. That's absurd, and doesn't fit with Blizaard's goal of making mythic+ an alternate progression path to raiding.
Personally from a healer point of view, I find mythic+ to be more challenging than mythic raids. The reason is that in mythic+ I'm the only healer in the group, however in a raid there are three or four other healers to "cross-cover" me in case I make a mistake and can't heal for a second or two. It's much more difficult when you're the only healer and if you mess up, the entire group wipes, it's much more personal responsibility than in raids.