Originally Posted by
Tronski
Raiders don't want fun. They want bragging rights and the awe of their peers (and lessers) in their respective echo chambers. Often they want the power it translates to in PvP in order to get the edge they claim they don't need. Fun is not on the agenda, unless you count PvP roflstomping. Remove the high power gear and the gear-walls called progression difficulty (as in i.e. having mythic raids doable in heroic gear) and the players of WoW would do it once and the scene would be dead save for 5 people on each server waiting for crossrealm mythic to be enabled so they can have some more fun.
I recently did a thread regarding gear scaling in mythic raids akin to Timewalking or Challenge modes, and it turned out that not a single person in that discussion would raid unless said raiding eventually would give them the necessary power to progress in that raid difficulty. People actually want gear to be the most influential barrier / artificial difficulty, because then they know that they eventually will overpower the mechanics they can't handle. And for some reason that is better than just making fights less complex again.
but it's a hen/egg dilemma. Mythic raids are usually more complex than Heroic raids, and if mythic raids were to be dumbed down in order to be doable with a lower ilvl, why even have mythic, right? But if the rewards aren't so powerful people need them like golden brown, why would they spend weeks wiping on one boss? That's certainly not fun in itself.
Then on top of that you have ActiBlizzions metrics to push time required to finish content unbearable long to make sure people keep logging into the game.
It's both really sad and amusing. Mostly sad.
From a gameplay perspective, the game would probably benefit from a mythic raid model where the difficulty is just a little higher than heroic, more complex, but where stronger gear isn't the only solution to progress, or at all - and where the rewards doesn't make you a god in the open world or a first-pick in any group. Something like gear scaling or ilvl cap.