Significant change to M+ gear drop rates in Shadowlands

[Victoryrush]

Is it possible that these so-called great raiders stop asking for game changes that are only in line with THEIR game perspectives?
If anything Mythic raiding is already more rewarding than any dungeon key possible bar the weekly chest.

Doing a 25+? Fine, here is your 465 ilev loot. Meanwhile, pug-able raid bosses that are 10x easier already drop 470 ilev. How about that? Does it feel good to be rewarded more for less?
And it's not enough, professions crafted gear require some lame currencies that drop in raids but not in M+.

Just what else do you want?! Mind your own game, don't whine around for minor reasons and stop interfering into other peoples game play. Grow up.

I did my fair share of raiding about 10-15 years ago and I shouldn't be forced to do it in order to be somewhat competitive and to have fun.

Fine with the change as long as the number of items increases with the difficulty. 1 item sub 10+ is fine. 2 items sub 20+ is fine.

There should be an incentive to run 20+ keys and a higher drop item level in the weekly chest attached to it. Blizzard might want to think about cosmetic M+ rewards and mounts that don't look like a piece of crap, like the current one. Fine with Pandaria re-skins.

[Orwell7]

Please understand that there are A LOT of games with 5 player content which is fun, rewarding and challenging.

There are ZERO other games that offers 20 players fun, rewarding and challenging content. World of Warcraft is our last bastion.

However, I still FULLY support that M+ should be done 100% without raiding!
Let's not jump to each others throats. The absolute highest M+ levels of M+ should NOT require raiding. The highest raid difficulty should NOT require M+.
And PvP should not require M+ nor raiding either.

Why Blizzard forces THEIR idea on players of what SHOULD be fun is beyond be, but here we go.

[Xauro]

Well i like this change. I rather have it like this. BIS gear will be BIS. No RNG when you get it. Each drop will count to something. Each drop will be the best it can be at that ilvl.
I dont know how many times i gotten drops in BFA that was useless b/c not right corrupt/"titanforge". Atleast now i know if something drop it will be "bis". Also when i say " bis" i mean for that you doing. Raid will have better drops yes. So calling it BIS are probly wrong word but i think ppl get what i mean. In BFA 90% av the drops i gotten have been gear i sold to vendor or gear i wasnt happy with. And yeah they did improve this with a currency so you can buy the right corrupt but that was kinda late in the expansion. I was already burnt out by that point. But maybe im alone being that.

also...

Dont forget how craft legondarys will work. To me it sounds that you will get it from all sources and maybe m+ will be one of the best sources beside raiding? If thats the case im sure gunna run m+

"Memories and Legendary Powers
To craft Legendary armor, you’ll first need to retrieve specific memories that contain Legendary powers. These memories can be found all over Shadowlands – from questing, running dungeons with friends, fighting against the enemy faction, or defeating powerful foes in Castle Nathria and the Maw, there will be plenty of work for the bravest of champions to do in order to collect them all."

[tikcol]

They could just put a lockout on m+ dungeons like there is for regular mythic dungeons. That way you couldn't keep farming the same m+ all day and it would be very wow like.

Ofc you could still do all m+ dungeons in one day but that's just how wow worked for 15+ years. Nerfing loot to a single piece at the end feels cheap and artificial.

[Doffen]

You are correct in grasping its meaning!

I dont like the way they just keep adding systems on existing systems, more currencies to farm with more and more timegating.

Maybe you like this, but I dont. I rather have something more engaging than what BFA has offered and less focus on more systems to keep track of, but we'll see.

Well that I do agree of. I also want it more streamlined like the Artifact Weapon and believe there is an in between of what we have had in the two last expansion and the ones before. BfA was all over the place.

I believe there is a sweet spot :>

[Vakir]

My fear is that a poor roll out of this change could change M+ irreversibly, even if they eventually realize it's an issue and revert it later on down the road. Blizzard has a track record of having conceptually grandiose ideas (see: Azerite) which -- once sprung onto the playerbase -- end up playing out entirely different than they may have intended, leading to them having to piecemeal solutions to problems they created. I'll concede that I'm perhaps being a bit histrionic in my fears but there is definitely precedent for this kind of thing.

Oh, you have some valid feedback - I am just as scared with things like Covenants or Soulbinds. I think it's a bit easier to fix this long-term since it's a problem they can see a lot sooner due to more clear cut metrics (people either run lots of M+ or they don't) and if people aren't engaged with the content, it's a whole lot easier for them to change it rather than needlessly drag their feet.

The biggest issue I see is things like trinkets or exclusive weapons a la Cut of Death. But it might be smarter for them to just...not put too many eggs in the basket of unique items like that which are tuned too highly. If nothing else, at least it's not something like the god damn Arcanocrystal.

[Toybox]

Just a quick hypothetical situation.

Imagine a roster of 25 raiding mythic for 3 hours. They kill 6 bosses & do some progress on their next boss. From the 6 bosses, an average of 4 pieces of loot dropped from each, for a total of 24 items.

Now for 3 hours, those same 25 people split up into 5 groups of 5 & do m+. They're already pretty well geared, so doing 15s in half an hour isn't really a stretch. Let's just say each group of 5 manages 5 dungeons in the same amount of time spent raiding. In Shadowlands, that'd be 25 items, pretty much identical to the raid. On retail, it's a whopping 75 items, which is pretty insane. That's without taking into consideration higher keys award more loot which will skew the figures even more.

I know dungeon loot will likely be lower item level than mythic raid loot, but with interesting drops like conduits, trinkets, & perhaps mini-set bonuses like the Mechagon rings, it'll still feel rewarding for the time spent for most people. Right now, it is so generous with what it gives you that, for those only driven by loot, normal & heroic raiding are pretty meaningless.

I'm cautiously optimistic. I do feel there should be more items dropping from higher level keys, but overall, I really don't mind this change much.

[Malix Farwin]

Barely anyone is raiding mythic. Saying everything but mythic raid gear is irrelevant is ignorant.



It doesn't matter what you meant. It matters what you said. You said titanforging, got called out for that, then said you didn't SAY titanforging. We cannot read minds here, my dude. Articulate yourself.

Its the ssame thing you are playing semantics when that wasnt even the main point of the post. You detailed the ENTIRE argument when literally NOTHING about my argument changed. Titanforged existed for 90% of the xpac with the last bit being corruption(which is titanforging 2.0). When i said it was going away it was absolutely correct. It also should of been implied that corruption was going away as well. You know how essences are call borrowed power, literally same difference.

[Tojara]

A few things.

One piece of loot in an absolute vacuum is actually fine, and I say this as somebody whose main form of content is M+ (I stopped raiding after I killed Mythic Azshara). Putting on my balance hat, it makes absolutely zero sense that one of the most lucrative, and efficient ways of gearing is coming from a source of content that is repeatable. If people are being honest, the gearing structure should be leaning towards lockout activities, followed by sources that are more or less unlimited (M+ is still limited by how many you can do in a week, granted, for most it's still virtually infinite).

This expansion virtually erased the need to do any raiding content beyond the first few weeks. Yes, raids are still important from time to time for a quick fix or for that tier defining trinket, but the majority of people's gearing path can solely exist in M+. Mythic raiding is still valuable of course, but as it stands, M+ is just an activity you have/should want to do at the beginning of a tier as a raider, or is the optimal way of getting gear if you're a returning player and have friends. Essentially, M+ destroys heroic and normal raiding difficulties, quickly making them obsolete.

M+ 'destroying' raiding isn't unique to BFA, it's just a symptom of how BFA systems double-down on this behavior too. It would've easily existed in Legion if there weren't systems in place to make raids still important. Raids in Legions were mostly important because Tier sets still existed, Titanforging existed, and more importantly, a hidden tracker per boss kill allowed you to accelerate towards a random legendary as well. Tier sets returning will make raids a bit more important, but without Titanforging or random legendaries, the incentive to raid won't be returning to Legion or prior levels anytime soon.

As per my opening statement, one piece of loot in vacuum is fine. However, when you start to consider that the regular formula is to lose a piece of loot upon depletion, you quickly realize that one piece of loot is probably a bad idea. Why? Not that I ever do random groups, but my friends who do it tell me horror stories of people having zero accountability and bailing either randomly, or when something even slightly goes wrong. If the old system of losing a piece of loot becomes standard with Shadowlands, random pick up group M+ will effectively be even more difficult to complete because people simply aren't going to waste their time if they have the slightest inkling that the key won't be in time. So if one piece of loot is the direction they go with, they should probably get rid of loot being removed upon depletion.

All of that said, I think it's bad from a design standpoint to reward people equally for depletion compared to actually doing the key in time. One could certainly argue that the group doing it in time is being far more efficient and saving time, but it's still a bad case to be made if I'm being honest. Why should a group that finishes a 15 in time by several minutes be rewarded with a single piece of loot, when the group who struggled through the same key and depleted by several minutes also get a single piece of loot? Also a single piece of loot has inherent problems and further pushes groups to consider stacking the same armor type even more than they do already, something I think a lot of people are overlooking when thinking about one piece of loot per run. There are certainly creative ways to fix this, but that's an entirely different discussion.

In my opinion two pieces of loot with no scaling factor like we currently have is probably the play, with losing a piece of loot on depletion. This still gives incentive to finish the key in time, without making pug life even more miserable by a potential zero pieces of loot dropping on a deplete. If they want to do a single piece of loot I'm fine with it, but there should be a scaling factor in how strong that one piece of loot gets if they go with that option. In a world with fewer pieces of loot from M+, there's absolutely no reason that they should be treating a 10, 15 or 20 key with the exact same reward structure.

TLDR; Two pieces of loot, with negative one for depletion. No quantity gains per higher key level, but quality gains is something they should heavily look into. Quality based on key level doesn't need to scale forever, but should be higher than it currently is. Harder content should be more rewarding essentially, which I think is a good mantra to live by.

[MrDaemon]

wtf are you even doing here if you think the devs are such scumbags who only want to fuck us over? Like seriously, why are you here? Are you even still playing? If yes, why? You clearly seem to have a huge hate boner for the game and the devs. So what are you doing here?

If last 2 expacs didnt prove devs are scum and want to just increase your playtime with RNG drops and stupid systems then I am not sure if you even play the game.
M+ was one of the best features implemented in years and they are managing to fuck it up slowly. Titanforging made sense with it, corruptions are terrible system. Without titanforging M+ is literaly get weekly and dont bother again.

- - - Updated - - -

That's not what I'm talking about though. Right now there is still a chance, small chance perhaps yes, that you might get rewarded for running an M+ and people are still coasting off the back of TF/Corruption, so the group finder still has lots of groups.

What happens to the population of M+ groups when you get literally nothing for running them? Not a small chance, literally nothing.

There is no reason to run M+ for corruption because you dont want it on 465 ilvl. You want it on 475 items. Titanforging should be returned for M+.

[burek]

TLDR; Two pieces of loot, with negative one for depletion. No quantity gains per higher key level, but quality gains is something they should heavily look into. Quality based on key level doesn't need to scale forever, but should be higher than it currently is.

Yes, something like that. M+ needs some sort of compensation for the removal of titanforging and this loot reduction. One item weekly from the chest just doesn't cut it to compete with mythic raiding. Especially since raiders will get that chest as well anyway.

[Ange]

There is no reason to run M+ for corruption because you dont want it on 465 ilvl. You want it on 475 items. Titanforging should be returned for M+.

You can still luck out with corruption and socket on 465 ilvl drops. BIS stats alone with a socket with the current CRIT-%/HASTE-% meta corruption choice will replace a random 475 ilvl drop pretty fast.

At the very least you get still echoes from a M+ the end of dungeon loot with optional socket+corruption (similar to high TF proc) is still something nice to see.

If you only care about ilvl and not about optimizing your gear to end-of-expansion-broken-stat-scaling you have of course no reason to run them. But without min-maxing you have never any reason to do anything in this game for gearing.

[MrDaemon]

You can still luck out with corruption and socket on 465 ilvl drops. BIS stats alone with a socket with the current CRIT-%/HASTE-% meta corruption choice will replace a random 475 ilvl drop pretty fast.

At the very least you get still echoes from a M+ the end of dungeon loot with optional socket+corruption (similar to high TF proc) is still something nice to see.

If you only care about ilvl and not about optimizing your gear to end-of-expansion-broken-stat-scaling you have of course no reason to run them. But without min-maxing you have never any reason to do anything in this game for gearing.

Only good corruption for 465 sockets is TD, IS is shit because it scales with ilvl. If you are not playing alt or late to expansion there is a chance most of your items are already 475 and if you go stacking stat corruptions there is like super tiny chance you get a piece which has 1. right stats, 2. socket, 3. best corruption.

That tiny amount of echoes you get is shit. For first 10 level it scales fine since its super easy but getting 200 for 15+ is a joke. It should be at least 400+ at 15+, 1000+ at 20+, 2000+ at 25+.

[Wuusah]

Only good corruption for 465 sockets is TD, IS is shit because it scales with ilvl. If you are not playing alt or late to expansion there is a chance most of your items are already 475 and if you go stacking stat corruptions there is like super tiny chance you get a piece which has 1. right stats, 2. socket, 3. best corruption.

That tiny amount of echoes you get is shit. For first 10 level it scales fine since its super easy but getting 200 for 15+ is a joke. It should be at least 400+ at 15+, 1000+ at 20+, 2000+ at 25+.

If you are using %secondary corruptions, then a 465 with the right secondary stats is better than a 475 with the wrong ones. No matter if it has sockets or not (you can put sockets on it if necessary anyway). With 475 being restricted to mythic raids and a weekly chest item, it's not a given that you get your secondary stat on a 475.

And on top of that, most people are not mythic raiders.

[Alcsaar]

And playing with watered down items is a good thing? If loot is to be exciting and fulfilling again then loot needs to be scarce.



I did read your whole comment. I don't know what you're talking about.

I think you guys are making this into a way bigger problem than it is. The weekly chest will give you an item of your choice (1 out of 3, iirc). So the chance to get absolute garbage out of your weekly chest will be close to none. On top of that there is crafting, legendary crafting, raiding, pvp. You're looking at this nerf in a vacuum and completely neglect that you're going to get great items from other sources with a lot of agency over what items you get.

Stop being drama queens.

Yes, being able to get a lower power version of an item that is still REALLY GOOD is good.

- - - Updated - - -

The plan was to make gear matter more by removing the RNG parallel systems (titanforge, corruption) and reducing the pace of obtaining gear. Good changes. Expect similar changes for raid gear.

Gear doesn't matter more or less, its just going to take more time to get. Since they're having to give up their endless AP grinds and bullshit playtime sinks like that, now they are doing this and painting it as a "positive change" when the only intent is to make people run the same dungeons *over, and over, and over* to the point of absolute boredom

There is no reason to take away gear just because they're removing the layered upgrading systems, lets not kid ourselves here.

[OFiveNine]

This change is fine presuming you get other stuff from doing the m+

[Low Hanging Fruit]

This change is fine presuming you get other stuff from doing the m+

I guess the little number in the 3rd party addon might go up and down.

[Eapoe]

I don’t mind 1 piece of loot per run. What I do mind is that it will incentivize armor stacking which can lead to people being excluded in runs simply because they don’t wear an armor type.

[OFiveNine]

I guess the little number in the 3rd party addon might go up and down.

That and hopefully something like valor points or w/e

[Bigbazz]

I feel like this is maybe a good change. M+ was the replacement for challenge modes, but challenge modes are something only the very passionate players (and boosters who tended to fall into that group anyway) did regularly, it was good challenging niche content. Then in Legion M+ replaced raiding as the primary form of gearing and AP progression, allowing you to powerfarm high quality gear like Diablo 3 greater rifts..

They scaled that back a little in BFA but it was still a bit excessive perhaps? I'm not 100% certain how I feel about it, the M+ popularity wasn't bad for the game but I also don't think that for the majority of players M+ has played out so well (for a variety of hot topic reasons)/. I know a lot of raiders who enjoyed and even kinda relied on the pre-legion method of raiding for gear and having a finite amount of progress they can do each week towards character power.