Raiders, how much of BfA's content would you do if it weren't "required" for raiding?

[Toybox]

And this view is obviously prevalent among the wider world of warcraft base as a whole. Maybe gaming in general. People like to chase a carrot. You can either provide them that carrot or not and watch them opt out of your game. Once you accept that people need a carrot it's incredible unreasonable to expect the developers rob everybody else of that carrot so that some people don't feel put out.

You're not wrong, I guess. Still, the better content is still the content people want to play for more reasons than just carrot chasing, and BfA added very little in that sense. Tuning issues aside, Torghast is pretty damn fun though, & I can see myself spending a hell of a lot of time in there regardless of the lack of power reward.

[Glorious Leader]

You're not wrong, I guess. Still, the better content is still the content people want to play for more reasons than just carrot chasing, and BfA added very little in that sense. Tuning issues aside, Torghast is pretty damn fun though, & I can see myself spending a hell of a lot of time in there regardless of the lack of power reward.

This patch I picked up playing arms warrior instead of playing the usual healing class. Its a blast and I've been doing content that I don't even really get much of a reward for. Like low mkeys where the gear isnt an upgrade but I would still get echoes of nyalotha. Maybe I'm the hopeless addict? Either way the intrinsic reward from the content is important (the awesome feeling of punching people in the face) but its important to have something worthwhile to work towards that makes you feel like you are getting stronger.

[Toybox]

This patch I picked up playing arms warrior instead of playing the usual healing class. Its a blast and I've been doing content that I don't even really get much of a reward for. Like low mkeys where the gear isnt an upgrade but I would still get echoes of nyalotha. Maybe I'm the hopeless addict? Either way the intrinsic reward from the content is important (the awesome feeling of punching people in the face) but its important to have something worthwhile to work towards that makes you feel like you are getting stronger.

I started playing DPS this tier for the first time since WotLK & I'm enjoying it as well in instanced content where upgrades are no longer available (apart from maybe a socketed Coral dropping from Ashvane) - Arms Warrior also. Playing M+ just for the sake of it is something I've done since it's implementation, as it's great content even without the rewards.

[Accendor]

Let me first address the "NoThInG iS rEqUiReD" point that someone will doubtlessly bring up - Yes, we know, but going into higher level PvE content, there's an expectation that your character (or characters depending on the guild) are up to date & ready to go. While this has also been the case in previous expansions ('cept maybe WoD at some points), I think it's fair to say that BfA is by far one of the heaviest in terms of time commitment outside of raiding, much to the dismay of many.

So, let's look at everything that you had to do throughout BfA to keep your characters as relevant as possible as to not hold your friends & guildies back. Out of the following, which would/wouldn't you do? (If you'd do things once or twice to experience the content but not want to repeat it indefinitely, that's fair, too). I know Warfronts aren't required anymore, and whether Islands & PvP are required for you fully depends on the spec you play & the essences you're best of with, but it's best to include them.

Islands
Warfronts
Emissaries/WQs
Mythic+ Weekly
Mythic+ Farm
Visions
Professions
Rep/Currency Farm
Battlegrounds
Arena

I can only speak for myself, but outside of keeping on top of my professions, M+ (which I really enjoy thanks to having some good guys n gals to play with), the exalted faction count, & occasional PvP, I'd gladly sit out everything else after a try or two.

Visions are decent enough content, but farming world quests to get currency to farm 5 masks to get a socket for a drop I just got in a raid is not really my idea of a good time. All things considered, socketing an item is probably a good 3+ hours of repetitive gameplay, & if I could skip it, I gladly would.

Emissaries/WQs wouldn't even be considered upon hitting exalted. Thankfully there's not too much of a grind now compared to previous patches, but still, 3-4 quests for the emissary alongside Vale/Uldum (if not the rare/cache quests) is quite a bit all the same.

Islands & Warfronts have gladly faded in relevance, but they're exactly the kind of content, like world quests, I'd simply not consider after experiencing them once or twice. While I don't think islands are terrible by any means, there's definitely other stuff I'd rather do instead outside of the game, & honestly, I think that's fine.


So, what would you be doing outside of raids if everything was truly optional in the sense that it had absolutely zero impact on your performance as a raider? Would you be a raid-logger, or would you dabble in other content outside of raiding? Or maybe you just love how BfA rewarded the sheer amount of effort you could put into your character & don't see it as a negative at all - That's fine, too! Opinions are just that.

I will do no content that does not provide a growth in character power. If no if the listed content would provide that, I would only raidlog or unsub.

[Jastall]

Sounds like a lot of people want WoD but everyone apparently hated WoD.

Do remember these here forums are home to a very small % of the playerbase that tends to be more hardcore, IE gravitates towards more challenging goals. Half these forums are Mythic raiders looks like but in actuality like 2-3% of said playerbase kills more than the first 3 bosses.

And most people who hate WQs would change their tune pretty quickly if the alternative was Apexis dailies and AFKing in the garrison afterwards. How about these Challenge Modes that close to nobody did when current compared to M+ which is a very popular feature? Mark my words, if Blizzard ever puts out another expansion where player power is exclusively found in raids, the raid-or-die tears will drown out the people complaining that something other than (insert current raid) gives useful rewards.

[exochaft]

Do remember these here forums are home to a very small % of the playerbase that tends to be more hardcore, IE gravitates towards more challenging goals. Half these forums are Mythic raiders looks like but in actuality like 2-3% of said playerbase kills more than the first 3 bosses.

And most people who hate WQs would change their tune pretty quickly if the alternative was Apexis dailies and AFKing in the garrison afterwards. How about these Challenge Modes that close to nobody did when current compared to M+ which is a very popular feature? Mark my words, if Blizzard ever puts out another expansion where player power is exclusively found in raids, the raid-or-die tears will drown out the people complaining that something other than (insert current raid) gives useful rewards.

There just needs to be more avenues of player progression, and not all of them have to be defined by increasing player power.

CM's were fine as their own content, and while there is little difference between CM's and M+ in terms of the content they are and how they work, the cause of M+ popularity going up is almost universally that M+ offered player power and CM's didn't. Furthermore, the gear rewards from M+ in BfA were tuned so that you could get better gear than heroic raiding every raid tier, while being able to spam M+ nonstop. The amount of time/effort/planning required to clear a raid on mythic is astronomically higher than heroic, and the gear jump from other sources is very minimal to the point where most of the player base don't think it's worth it. Add on that you can do one +15 right now and get a mythic raid ilvl piece guaranteed with so little time investment, you can't blame players for moving away from all levels of raiding.

As it stands, many of the 'requirements' to raid are there because raiding isn't the ultimate place to get your BiS gear, nor is it necessarily the most time-efficient for the vast majority of players. When Blizz started adding others gearing paths, what they initially failed horribly at was disrupting a gear hierarchy. Add on top systems like WF/TFing and corruptions in BfA, you get a recipe for disaster where most people (regardless of skill/content level) are angry at the gearing system.

One huge flaw I see in retrospect was Blizz designing content so that a player could eventually reach mythic raid level gear through other means, it would just take longer than mythic raiding (this could apply to any level of raiding, honestly, not just mythic). Okay... why? What purpose does that serve? This comes down to social behaviors of players and what keeps players engaged. Players will almost always take the path of least resistance, and even Blizz devs know this. If you give them a gearing pathway that has the same end result as someone who has to put in a lot of time/work/effort, but make it achievable without all the time/work/effort, almost all the players are going to take the easy way out. What M+ has done is given many players an easy way out of not raiding in order to get the same player power that a mythic raider would.

Am I saying you shouldn't get mythic quality raid gear from M+? Not necessarily, but the bar right now is waaaaaay too low, especially when you can farm keys and get better-than-heroic raid gear from end-of-run chests. When you view raiding/M+ gearing from this angle, a lot of SL decisions start making a LOT of sense. People were initially up in arms about non-scaling end-of-run loot from M+, as well as a reduction in loot gains from end-of-run chests... but there's a good reason for it: this sort of change combats not only how mandatory M+ is for raiders in terms of farming end-of-run chests, but also M+ completely dominating the gearing scene in terms of how easy it is to grind very powerful gear. The current weekly vault/chest slated for SL also addresses these issues, as you can feasibly gear up via M+ to high gear levels... but M+ will no longer being the fastest/easiest way to do that.

I think people have been semi-institutionalized by the way WoW has been developed recently, and they expect everything to be easy and achievable by everyone. However, that isn't a realistic goal, and trying to balance around that causes more harm than good. Furthermore, Blizz has reduced the amount of avenues of progression not related to gear over time, giving players less ways to personally succeed in the game. The direction of development on SL is a small step towards a game where it'll likely be much harder for the average player to achieve the same gear levels with the same amount of effort as BfA, which is why there has been a lot of pushback on some changes. However, for the health of the game, these sorts of changes probably need to be made, and there will be adjustment pains.

I'll stop here, as I could keep on going... but this is already long enough. However, I will say (to loop back to the OP) is that having alternate paths of progressions is fine, but you need clear delineation of paths with concurrent goals, as well as systems whose goals are different. The problem with BfA is that most of the progression paths all lead in the same direction and overlapped, which is a problem.

[Tiev]

I would raid. Do mythic+ and professions.

I like world quests so long as I don't *need* to do them to be raid ready.

Everything else just waters down my experience and yet I have to do them :/


Edit:

In relation to gearing up by doing things you don't enjoy -> We should have types of gear. PvP, dungeon, raids. You can wear any type, anywhere, but if you're not doing the content of that type, it counts as 5-10 ilvls lower. Maybe that would let us gear up however we want but not feel like we need to gear up somewhere specific to use that gear somewhere else.

[Jastall]

I think people have been semi-institutionalized by the way WoW has been developed recently, and they expect everything to be easy and achievable by everyone. However, that isn't a realistic goal, and trying to balance around that causes more harm than good. Furthermore, Blizz has reduced the amount of avenues of progression not related to gear over time, giving players less ways to personally succeed in the game. The direction of development on SL is a small step towards a game where it'll likely be much harder for the average player to achieve the same gear levels with the same amount of effort as BfA, which is why there has been a lot of pushback on some changes. However, for the health of the game, these sorts of changes probably need to be made, and there will be adjustment pains.

I'll stop here, as I could keep on going... but this is already long enough. However, I will say (to loop back to the OP) is that having alternate paths of progressions is fine, but you need clear delineation of paths with concurrent goals, as well as systems whose goals are different. The problem with BfA is that most of the progression paths all lead in the same direction and overlapped, which is a problem.

I don't think M+ alone hit raid participation that hard, not by itself. It is more of a combination of it plus the additional systems Blizzard put to the fore in Legion/BfA, and anyway the participation isn't THAT much lower than in Mists/WoD where raiding was the only way to gain player power beyond Heroic dungeons. I'd say the tradeoff was worth it, considering the playerbase at large, even if I agree that Blizzard dialing these things down in Shadowlands was a good move as well; they gotta find a balanced spot where out of raid activities are worthwhile without being too rewarding for their difficulty or too tedious to accomplish.

That said, I do think the mentality that is the most ingrained is that raiding should the be all and end all of player power. Some people absolutely would be satisfied with a raid or die approach and Blizzard categorically rejected that after WoD, as do I frankly even as someone who mostly raid. The game shouldn't revolve around this one activity and other progression paths like M+ have more than a valid place, as do side activities like Torghast. It's fine for people who don't raid Mythic to get good gear eventually, the top tier players always, always end up getting the best stuff the fastest no matter what anyway.

[cparle87]

Content that only exists because of the carrot isn't good content to begin with, as if it were then people would play it regardless. The best example of the opposite I can probably give of this is high level M+ - No-one pushing high keys is going to get an upgrade from doing 2x's, but the reward is the playing of the content itself & not a shiny bauble at the end, which is why people in my guild often do dozens of keys past the weekly 15. There's no reward, but it's fun, & that's all it needs to be.

Don't you remember WoD? The whole "raid or die" thing. Or the "there's nothing to do outside your garrison." I'd point out the plethora of stuff to do. Rares to kill for mounts/pets/toys/resources. Apexis dailies (Tanaan alone had like 6) you could turn around and buy things to disenchant/vend/auction for gold. Archaeology (I actually finished it before flying was put it. Pet battles (1 trainer per zone then like 15 in Tanaan). And without fail someone would tell me "That's not content." To which I developed the analogy of going to the fridge, opening it, seeing it full of stuff you're not in the mood for, then calling up the hotel director and lying and saying it's empty.

[Zandalariprelate]

M+ because they're really fun, Visions and 5 man dungeons for the 1k bag of gold.

[arkanon]

I only did the things i enjoyed in BfA - didnt farm anything, didnt do content that i didnt enjoy, no matter how strong the reward. For this reason we mostly focused on casual heroic clears, rather than Mythic, because we no longer felt the benefit was worth it.

I unsubbed a while ago, and will remain so until the prepatch for exactly this reason - im not paying to go round and round in circles doing content i dont enjoy, just to make me more powerful in the content i do enjoy. There are far too many exceptional games for me to be playing, to spend my time spamming shit i dont like.