What rewards does raiding need to make it more appealing?

[jdbond]

Some guy very long time ago told me that "epic" players don't raid for gear but challenege. He was such a good liar. Outside of top 1000 players, they all raid for gear. It just leads them to Mythic raid many times.

Considering that gear is replaced every tier, it is amazing how obsessed some are with item level.

[Lawlhero]

Set bonuses and having Mythic raiding drop the highest possible gear and having a bis list are the only things that will get me back into mythic raiding. I quit mythic raiding because It didn't feel as necessary as it did in the past for your character growth due to titanforging and shit.

[th3478t9gr89h2r89]

raiding has always been terrible. its a shame its considered the "end game" for wow. people dont raid because its fun, but to get gear.

but then again, ive never found pve interesting. im a minority, so many will disagree with this.

[meowfurion]

This entire thread:

*someone says something that's their opinion*

People on thread: *OMG ITS NOT LIKE THAT, this is how it is, ur stupid and an idiot this is common knowledge*

Other people: *source please?*

People on thread: *Don't be lazy! Go support my argument for me, I'm not doing your work for you even though I made the claim and statement, it's other people's jobs to support my argument for me! But YOU are the lazy ones, not me!*

No. That's not how debate and adult discussion works. If you're making a claim that is suspect and doubtful, it's not the job of the party who disagrees with it to do your job for you to support your argument.

[huth]

You said that Blizzard say that raiding participation was not high enough to justify the costs of raid development. Surely you must have a source to point to where they said that otherwise you could just as well be making it up.

IIRC, they changed their forums since. I'm not entirely sure that post is actually still available. But it was a major part of their reasoning for implementing LFR.

[Kaesebrezen]

AH great, could you link that source for me then?

Try this one: https://www.mmo-champion.com/content...ine-Blue-Posts - Should be convert to raid #63 going by the date.

Also some later blueposts for raid history:
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content...%94A-Look-Back
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content...clysm-to-Today

[Naramag]

First: Raids need provide meaningful loot for every participant. Even if it is a truckload of crafting mats, if someone wouldn't receive gear as loot.
Second: Raids need a mechanism to be kind and respectful to your fellow raiders.

The second one is impossible to provide, therefore raids would not be more appealing to me.

[Rotted]

Nothing wrong with the amount of loot dropping, but its quality needs to be tweaked and renamed

So to begin with, LFR and Mythic gear shouldn't be named the same piece of loot at all. It massively devalues the mythic items and it does lose that "wow" factor when you see someone in it.

Secondly, LFR gear needs to be changed to blue quality or have its own colour . I'm all for LFR giving out rewards as a fast option to gear, but it shouldn't be epic gear and it certainly shouldn't have a chance to titanforge higher than normal / hc.

Dungeons need to revert back to fully blue. I'd say have a special loot table for the end boss of each mythic 0 to potentially drop an epic. But epics in dungeons should be a no no

Timed mythics I'm not sure how it should be altered, clearly doing a 10+ or 15+ doesn't deserve blue. Maybe again its own colour.

To me raiding lost the appeal during cataclysm. I raided because I was envious of people standing there in decked out epics. If someone was like that in TBC you knew they put the time in, you knew they were good and you knew they deserved it 100%. These days you can hit max level and be in heroic equivalent gear within a few hours. Hell some weeks you can have an current epic from doing 4 mythic 0s. It just takes the fun out of raiding for me.

[Dapower]

So with no class sets or tier bonuses coming in Shadowlands initially what rewards do you think blizzard should add to raiding to make it more appealing for both casual and hardcore players? Or do you think raiding rewards are fine as is?

With all these boosting ads currently around my screen, apparantly its rewarding some people with a solid income

[unbound]

I think the premise of the question is a bit of a problem. Why does raiding need to be more appealing?

Fundamentally, raiding should simply be one of many activities available at end game. But even if you are focused on raiding, a more fundamental problem than having certain rewards is how this plays out over time. What is the value of the raiding reward if it will become irrelevant within a couple of months?

If you were to join BfA right now, you won't even bother to do Uldir, Battle of Dazar'alor, or Crucible of Storms unless you just want to do it for the giggles (LFR is included in the "for the giggles" category). There are too many other ways to get *much* better gear right now. I see this as the most pressing issue with raiding right now...only the current raid is relevant.

Contrast this with early expansions. My wife joined at the start of BC, so I leveled a new toon with her...and we started with Karazhan as part of raiding progression months behind others. There were no problems finding people to run with and, in fact, we ended up starting a guild to do raiding starting at Karazhan and moving well beyond. The reward wasn't just gear; it was the feeling of progression that we can move on to new interesting things (including raids).

Progression in Retail is reduced to current raid only and, once complete, to do the same raid again with a slider switch to get the same gear with slightly better stats. That is absolutely garbage reward and gets extremely boring quickly.

[kaminaris]

raiding has always been terrible. its a shame its considered the "end game" for wow. people dont raid because its fun, but to get gear.

but then again, ive never found pve interesting. im a minority, so many will disagree with this.

Oh please, that a complete bullshit. No amount of gear is going to make people raid if raids were just not fun and challenging.

- - - Updated - - -

Set bonuses and having Mythic raiding drop the highest possible gear and having a bis list are the only things that will get me back into mythic raiding. I quit mythic raiding because It didn't feel as necessary as it did in the past for your character growth due to titanforging and shit.

Or maybe, just maybe, you didn't really like raiding to begin with but you felt forced to do it since you couldn't progress your character anymore and heroic was too easy and ultimately boring?

I bet you are one of this people that can't justify the amount of time needed for raiding just to get a bit better gear, and there is nothing wrong with that.

[Tech614]

I think the premise of the question is a bit of a problem. Why does raiding need to be more appealing?

Fundamentally, raiding should simply be one of many activities available at end game. But even if you are focused on raiding, a more fundamental problem than having certain rewards is how this plays out over time. What is the value of the raiding reward if it will become irrelevant within a couple of months?

If you were to join BfA right now, you won't even bother to do Uldir, Battle of Dazar'alor, or Crucible of Storms unless you just want to do it for the giggles (LFR is included in the "for the giggles" category). There are too many other ways to get *much* better gear right now. I see this as the most pressing issue with raiding right now...only the current raid is relevant.

Contrast this with early expansions. My wife joined at the start of BC, so I leveled a new toon with her...and we started with Karazhan as part of raiding progression months behind others. There were no problems finding people to run with and, in fact, we ended up starting a guild to do raiding starting at Karazhan and moving well beyond. The reward wasn't just gear; it was the feeling of progression that we can move on to new interesting things (including raids).

Progression in Retail is reduced to current raid only and, once complete, to do the same raid again with a slider switch to get the same gear with slightly better stats. That is absolutely garbage reward and gets extremely boring quickly.

People didn't do the older raids in BC because they had to(or where a melee and needed DST lmfao), they did them because they where bad and they where the normal modes of the time. Blizzard had badge gear catchup mechanics twice over the course of BC effectively resetting gear.

You know what really gatekeeped BC raids? The fact you needed to kill KT and Vashj to even enter BT and Hyjal, until ofc sunwell released. Had absolutely nothing to do with difficulty options or all that jazz. You want BC style? Then don't allow someone to enter mythic palace until they killed Jaina on mythic. Vice versa for every other difficulty. Nothing to do with the gear or difficulty options at all.

[Reivur]

Because the M+ is overall much more flexible than raiding on top of that, you don't have to sit down for 3-4h a night, you can just play like 1-2 dungeons and call it.

Your post overall is reasonable. Even your conclusion of removing M+ to a degree is rational in how you got there, other than this glaring part right here. In particular I'm having problems seeing how that's a slight against M+ rather than raiding as a whole. When I want to play a game, I want to play that game. There is no fun in trying to rope 20 people into having a consistent schedule and everyone waiting because someone got drowned in traffic, or had to go into work because someone else called off, or any other myriad of reasons; its also not fun to over-recruit beyond 20 people and regularly sit people who don't even get to play for the week when everyone does show up.

Scheduling and shoving people in and out doesn't add fun to the situation in the slightest, and if it does you're not really a person I'd want to hang around with anyone since it sounds like you just want to manage people. Meanwhile going in and doing some quick dungeons, especially in an INFINITE SCALING SYSTEM (its not my fault the game decides to not reward onward) is far better use of time. If we pretended we didn't live in an age where all activities had to have a reward and stripped both down to "Which are you going to do" I can see damn well why Raids need thirty thousand bribes to work anymore.

And yeah. I preferred 10 mans personally and hate that their gone. Three reasons for that actually. Note these reasons aren't universal but apply to me.

1) Doing 5-7% of a boss's hp over the course of five minutes is not 'epic'. Trying to save someone's life and having four other people snipe the heal at the same time isn't 'epic'. Some people like that, but I find personal contribution and responsibility more fun.

2) Less people = less variables of chaos in terms of scheduling. It can still end up sucking.

3) Maybe I'm just not enough of a social butterfly but never in life at any point of said life have I ever had a hobby or activity where I enjoyed all 20+ people in the room. I'm more secular like that. And I know I'm not alone because I see these cliques form all the time and little bits of drama. The truth of the matter is there's a reason most hobbies or rpg groups or etc. are smaller in nature. Scheduling, but also keeping up with friends. Just to make raiding work you have to make small little concessions here and there that give you people you'd really rather not be around on a consistent basis. Even 10 stretches that limit, but 20? Forget it.

There's a barrier around raiding and all the bribes in the world won't fix how shitty it is to demand that people play only a certain amount of days a week and oh boy hope everyone's there on time or dickbags you don't like break up the guild or seven thousand different myriad of reasons instead of just playing the damn game.

[Ticj]

The gear needs to be better than mythic+

Like honestly, what's the point in spending hours upon hours in a raid, when you can just do a mythic+ in 45 minutes and get better loot?

[kaminaris]

The gear needs to be better than mythic+

Like honestly, what's the point in spending hours upon hours in a raid, when you can just do a mythic+ in 45 minutes and get better loot?

Maybe because... spending hours is a problem? Like 9 hours a week or more, for half a year... on a fixed schedule... Maybe that is the problem?

[ydraw]

The gear needs to be better than mythic+

Like honestly, what's the point in spending hours upon hours in a raid, when you can just do a mythic+ in 45 minutes and get better loot?

The gear is already better than M+.

Your post says it all. It's not the gear that's the issue with raiding. It's spending the hours and hours that is the issue.

The thing that would improve mythic raiding participation the most is the removal of Mythic raid lockouts, because then you could tackle Mythic raids boss by boss like you can with Heroic.

[Starfals]

Raiding could have mounts, pets, cool lore, cinematics, sets that u can't get elsewhere and probably a bit better gear. If the best gear is 450, raids could drop it, and mythic pluses max could be like 435/40. Not a huge difference but enough to make people want even better.

Thats how i feel about it. Also less RNG. I had to farm Aggramar forever and i never got the helm piece. It just never dropped. Only dropped from normal, but normal is not the best item soo.. less RNG, better gear, sets, transmogs/pets/mounts and maybe they can make a few other reasons.

[Kralljin]

When I want to play a game, I want to play that game.

The issue with that logic that is logic can also very much apply to people who just want to play a single player game rather than MMO.
Dealing with other people is a core aspect of the MMO genre.

The organization requirement kicks in once you reach a given difficulty, that virtually applies to any multiplayer game.

At the end of day, if i didn't want to put up with other people, i wouldn't play an MMO.
If i join club to play soccer / football or whatever, i also have to show up for training and can't just show up whenever i feel like it.

If some people don't like that, that's their choice and i respect that, but they can't turn around and demand similiar rewards.

1) Doing 5-7% of a boss's hp over the course of five minutes is not 'epic'. Trying to save someone's life and having four other people snipe the heal at the same time isn't 'epic'. Some people like that, but I find personal contribution and responsibility more fun.

Working with other people to overcome a difficult challenge is fun to me.
Which is a rather Meta statement to be honest.

The massive issue here comes from how M+ is fundamentally designed and how it achieves its difficulty.

Raids have a rather decent design overall, the encounters are (overall) good designed and provide a reasonable challenge for a given difficulty.
Mythic obviously adds a lot on top of that but the challenge is usually a fit for a given difficulty.

And most importantly, once you did Mythic, you're done, you've completed the most difficulty version of a fight.
With M+, it's always so open ended due to it's infintively scaling mechanic and time trial portion, you could always go like "but yeah it's a bit more".

Furthermore, the Affix design / Percentage based dmg / hp increase is such a hamfisted way to achieve difficulty.
In raids, a given encounter is fine tuned for a difficulty, with specific mechanics being there or not or certain mechanics doing a specific amount of damage.
Blizzard doesn't mindlessly apply mechanic X / Y / Z to a given Boss, slaps X% onto a boss and calls it "Mythic".
Yet M+ does precisely that.
It's so damn annoying to deal with these affixes every week, because it's obvious that not every Instance was designed around virtually any Affix.
Especially affixes that essentially force to do stuff in a less efficient manner completely contradict the time trial aspect of M+ in a game like WoW.
Most of the time, Dps just want to floor it, yet depending on the affix, i can't do that despite that the clock is ticking.

And this comes with obvious downsides, once you reach a given level, things start to fall apart and start to question whether that's truly intended.
That's where another massive issue of M+ kicks in: Class Balance.

For M+, it is crucial that anyone has decent defensives, because once you high keys, almost anything one shots you, certain classes / specs have serious issues with beating a given instance during a given affix week.

A Holy / Disc priest will seriously struggle on a High Tol Dagor key + Tyrannical because the very first boss will most likely kill the priest whenever you are targeted by its burrow ability.

This is not "difficult", that's just broken.
That's why classes such as rogue are so damn popular in M+, because they have such great defensives and can virtually survive any ability that went from "problematic" to straight up lethal due to the level of the M+ key or Tyrannical / Fortified Affix.

In raids, Blizzard has likely wisened up since Legion and avoided these mechanics, even a class that doesn't have supreme defense of a rogue can still compete in (mythic) raids and is just fine.


Also, i don't have to play the very same type of content for the entire expansion.
I am so sick of beating up pirates in Freehold, yet once 8.3 is out i'm going to do it all over again, simply because M+ rewards go up with each season and replace my entire set of gear earned during the previous season within days.

I like 5man Dungeons, but due to M+, i do all those Dungeons that i did during release of the expansion over the course of the entire expansion with the same goddamn character.
Imagine if Blizzard just kept releasing Uldir every few months and simply buffs everything by a certain %, tweaks a few mechanics and calls it a "new season".
That's the "business model" of M+, new content doesn't replace old content, you have to do the same content over the entire expansion.

Furthermore, it keeps rewarding me the same gear.
M+ gearing is like playing groundhog day.
New M+ season? Better get all those good items, just in an updated fashion!

No new art, no new effect, nothing, just virtually the same stuff just with buffed numbers.

Raids at least have some items with a unique effect, trinkets and previously even a new set bonus, yet in M+, it's the same rewards every damn season.
Lastly, the ability to spam M+ kills off any longterm incentive to play the game.
If you play M+ on a active basis, you have all rewards within 2-3 weeks, then you just come back for the weekly roulette of the Weekly chest.

Whereas Raids (at least previously) provided a longterm incentive to play due to the Lockout system, if you wanted to get all the goodies, you had to come back next week, with M+, you're done within weeks and then have to play the Titanforged roulette for upgrades.

I could go on, but that's the basic gist of all the points why i dislike M+.
All M+ has going for it is that's easier to organize, that's it.

TL;DR M+ is worse than raiding in terms of design.

There's a barrier around raiding and all the bribes in the world won't fix how shitty it is to demand that people play only a certain amount of days a week and oh boy hope everyone's there on time or dickbags you don't like break up the guild or seven thousand different myriad of reasons instead of just playing the damn game.

Out of any system, i think raids nail the "MMORPG" fantasy the most, so i think it's totally fine that the best rewards lay there where the games truly works at its best.
M+ feels like a system straight out of an ARPG / Hack'n slay like Diablo / PoE.

[Ticj]

The gear is already better than M+.

Your post says it all. It's not the gear that's the issue with raiding. It's spending the hours and hours that is the issue.

The thing that would improve mythic raiding participation the most is the removal of Mythic raid lockouts, because then you could tackle Mythic raids boss by boss like you can with Heroic.

Only mythic gear is better than mythic+. It is so easy to get heroic level gear from mythic+, which is the difficulty most people raid in anyways.

- - - Updated - - -

Maybe because... spending hours is a problem? Like 9 hours a week or more, for half a year... on a fixed schedule... Maybe that is the problem?

Oh and grinding the same few dungeons for 2 years is somehow better huh?

[arkanon]

It means previously raiding was less accessible.

I agree with you that percentage is a better measure of engagement compared to raw numbers. However, i disagree that it proves raiding was ONLY less accessible. There could be a variety of reasons - one of which could be it was simply less desirable, due to rewards or gameplay. Accessibility is certainly a factor for SOME, and its always interesting looking at the "how many people are raiding" statistic when you REMOVE LFR.

- - - Updated - - -

The gear is already better than M+.

Your post says it all. It's not the gear that's the issue with raiding. It's spending the hours and hours that is the issue.

The thing that would improve mythic raiding participation the most is the removal of Mythic raid lockouts, because then you could tackle Mythic raids boss by boss like you can with Heroic.

I hate to tell you this, but the overwhelming majority of players are below Normal raid skill requirements. I know as people who raid mythic that seems silly, and i know mythic raiders LOVE beating their chest and exclaiming how easy heroic is, but for the majority of players, it is above them, and they are not willing or not motivated to improve as a player when there exists so many ways to gear your character up, even at a much slower pace.

I personally believe the rewards from low-mid keys is far, far too high, considering how easily they can be cleared by a pretty incompetent group, with no real class knowledge, or dungeon experience.

- - - Updated - - -

Raiding could have mounts, pets, cool lore, cinematics, sets that u can't get elsewhere and probably a bit better gear. If the best gear is 450, raids could drop it, and mythic pluses max could be like 435/40. Not a huge difference but enough to make people want even better.

Thats how i feel about it. Also less RNG. I had to farm Aggramar forever and i never got the helm piece. It just never dropped. Only dropped from normal, but normal is not the best item soo.. less RNG, better gear, sets, transmogs/pets/mounts and maybe they can make a few other reasons.

I would like to see the mounts, pets, and cosmetics moved away from raiding, and have gear sets that improve your ability in THAT content type.

- best pvp gear drops from pvp
- best open world gear drops from open world content - improved flying speed, improved running speed, improved health regen out of combat in the world, better WQ rewards etc
- Best raid gear drops from raiding - if the item bonuses from Benthic gear was actually attached to raid gear, it would have been a good system

I also agree that RNG is not an enjoyable system - i dont hate the idea of a bonus roll, but instead of it proccing WF/TF, or a socket etc, it should reward Gold, or a currency such as badges if they are ever returned.