Other than the current season, a +15 was significantly harder than a heroic raid (in S1-S3 <1% achieved keystone master). We only recently hit a point with corruption and gear scaling that a +15 became "easy". This is further exacerbated by people watching MDI/WF players doing +13-17 on the BETA and inferring it being quickly achievable by the average player. The whole system trickles down and I don think people understand that. Even if we assume all mythic raiders can easily do a +15, any time they spend doing so gives them sub-heroic raid gear. Then a heroic raider does a 10 or 11 and gets sub-normal raid gear. How are people going to find doing content that offers no rewards for their ability fun?
And this doesn't even cover the M+ only players who will be nowhere near being able to clear the content they would otherwise on a competitive ladder. Even on live the survivability/damage/healing between full 465 vs 475 is huge. Making this worse only puts "the wall" that much lower for those who cant full-clear mythic - which puts an artificial boundary on progress and feels bad. When WF/TF/corruption were a thing, this would have been fine due to the repeatability of M+ and fishing for RNG upgrades but putting high level M+ this much below other players on competitive content is unacceptable.
"Weeks" is not long enough, it should take MONTHS, and what you are counting into that time is the time period after you are so geared up that upgrades are only available from a small number of weekly things that can be completed in an hour.
By the time you get the reps up, you've already received equivalent or better gear elsewhere in almost any case. Same for crafting. Are there exceptions, like CoA at the beginning of the expansions? Sure, but the existence of some small exceptions that primarily only exist before any patches doesn't negate my argument.
"stop puting you idiotic liberal words into my mouth"
-ynnady
The number of players does not define the difficulty, but the number of players with the skill in that content do.
Also you can do as much +15 as you want, when raid loot is limited. Blizz doesnt want players to be able to farm heroic gear.
There is no fact that i think +15 are easy early on, i did not say that.
The fact is that blizzard cant add loot saves for dungeons with this system, they should have make the loot system different from the beggining, like letting you decide which dungeon and which key level want to use, at least until +15 and then implementing a save system like raids have but with mythic dungeons.
But because the system sucks, now they have the idea of nerfing the reward from the dungeon because now they want HC+ to being only raid/weekly chest drop so you have a limited number of attemps per week to loot.
I mostly agree with what you are saying, but mythic dung loot was too high for being able to farm it IMO and it seems in blizzard's, at least for now
M 20 isn't relevant because gear upgrades stop at 15.
And yes I think a great deal of HC raiders can manage a +15. Its not going to be the smoothest experience ever and they will fail occasionally but hey, HC guilds also wipe on HC bosses.
What is wrong now? ask all the HC guilds that can't find players because why bother when you can outgear HC by playing M dungeons. And the last bosses give 5 ilvl more is probably not worth the effort of finding and raiding with a guild. (and all this is made much worse by Titanforging which fortunately is going away)
It ignores such insignificant forces as time, entropy, and death
Here's where you are missing:
1. Regardless of the item level, top tier players may still wear gear from Mythic +. Look at the Tusks from RU, or trinkets from other areas. Even at the heroic level these could still be better than mythic level gear that only drops in the raid.
2. You M+ only players need to get off your high horse. being able to spam dungeons over and over to farm heroic level gear should have NEVER been in place. Raids have a weekly lockout. As a raider who has played since BC, there have been many weeks in my wow career that i did not receive any form of upgrade. This will make the upgrades you receive much more valuable. Getting 1 max level piece of gear a week guaranteed without even having to time the dungeon...that's pretty good.
3. I wouldn't go so far as to compare the difficulty of dungeons to raids. But there is a level of planning an effort that goes into raid progression that doesn't exist in dungeons. This should be rewarded. This ALSO exists in Heroic...as top progression guilds will not have high item level on launch to clear these and pugs will not be able to full cler for at least the 1st couple weeks. Dungeons will fall over, at least at the lower levels, and are spammable ways to increase your character power.
This change is great. Probably one of the best changes that they have made to the game in a while.
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Noone "grinds" 20s. You PUSH 20+. This will stay the same in SL as it stands now in BFA
I'll give you an example of my experience.
I burned out and quit back during the beginning of BFA as I wasn't enjoying the game. I got the itch and came back several months ago for a couple months. In that time I did nothing but dailies and the occasional M+. My character is over 470 and I pretty much need to immediately leap frog over all the other content and jump directly into mythic to continue progressing it.
If I were a newer or less experienced player I would never have done anything challenging to teach me about the game, the pacing is basically non-existent. I just went from world quest difficulty to needing to do mythic raiding in order to progress my character further. That's absolutely not healthy for the game.
You should want to progress through appropriate content, as opposed to leap frogging over it. But they've stretched the game so thin with difficulties and constantly pushing people into the most current content that its created this issue.
I agree that it definitely needs to be slowed down, but I'm wondering what long term paths means to you? For instance one of the main points in the OP in this thread is that M+ gear caps out at a lower ilvl than heroic raiding. Where do you see power related rewards capping out prior to participating in end game group activities? Or what other long term progression would you like to see for that part of the game that might not be power related?
How many of those players raiding a given difficulty wanted / aspired to be raiding another difficulty? How many players bought the game with the intention to raid, or do dungeons, or pick any content you want but never got that far? How many people who completed a highly completed achievement actually had fun doing so and / or were playing the game for that specific thing? How many players felt forced to do X or Y content for rewards but otherwise would not have done it?The numbers we were able to pull back in the day were extremely reliable because in the data we could parse out active, inactive, etc.. We were also able to compare the number of people that killed any bosses to the number that killed all and do similar analyses that provided insight on this. There is no way to massage those numbers to make raiding look like it was ever a popular activity.
I could keep coming up with questions like these all day, we don't have the information. All we can do is make assumptions.
..and so he left, with terrible power in shaking hands.
I'd contest your perceived difficulty of a +15 to heroic raid, but that aside I don't think Keystone Master isn't the best metric as that achievement is typically a goal... and that goal isn't player power. You could maximize your player power gain on a character via M+ and not get Keystone Master, because you do something like aim for only doing FH +15's every week in pugs and call it a week... and always avoid places like SotS/TD that are much harder with most affixes (this was my general strategy with alts as it was the best cost/benefit ratio). Usually my alts where I only did M+ and maintained high ilvls relevant to the current patch had +15's in 3-5 dungeons, because the weekly chest gearing method doesn't discourage such behavior.
As has probably been mentioned ad nauseum, M+ is a spammable loot system that has been rewarding better-than-heroic loot in the latest BfA patch. That in itself is a huge problem from the overall gearing model, even when it was just heroic loot, and even more when you look at the weekly rewards. Should content that is spammable, requires much less players, less organization, less time, and generally less effort be rewarding better or the best loot compared to something that has a weekly lockout (where you may not even personally get loot), requires more players, more organization, more time, and generally more effort? My answer is absolutely not, as I feel players should be rewarded according to all those factors.
However, the responses I've seen that are against the beta changes all boil down to wanting M+, despite being inferior to mythic (or even heroic) raiding in term of the multiple factor I mentioned above (and that's not even all of them), to be just as rewarding as said content. Most, but not all, of the responses tend to be emotional arguments instead of logical/rational arguments, similar to what happens if you see a nerf to a class where the class in question screams the sky is falling while every other class knows the nerf was a long time coming. I've seen the sob stories of "I don't have time to invest in raiding, but this change is forcing me to raid!", and the irony is that nothing has changed in this regard. The translation is "I'm used to getting rewarded just as much or better than raiding with much less time and effort, but now if I want the best gear I won't get it as fast if I don't raid!" Key points are you won't get gear as fast, as there's some important things here. In terms of spamming M+, yes, gearing will be slower at the start... but spammable content should have inferior rewards compared to hard lockouts. But... getting 'BiS' gear will actually be faster if you only M+ over the season with Shadowlands because of how the Vault works.
So does the current beta systems kill M+? Nope, not at all, especially if M+ is your only content. All these changes do is smooth out your gear progression in M+ while simultaneously preventing M+ from interfering with raiding. Your initial gearing will be slower than BfA at the start, but reaching your end gear point will be faster. If your game is M+, you will reach the same gear levels as a mythic raider if you want, that doesn't change. If your sticking point is that the last two mythic bosses are giving ilvl rewards higher than available in M+, you're never going to convince me the effort and cost required to progress and kill the toughest mythic bosses in a raid is found anywhere in M+ content with how it's designed (which is also why I hope the Vault doesn't give loot from the higher ilvl bosses unless you've killed them that week). In SL, M+ will be better rewarded than heroic raiders on a weekly basis still (even though there still may be issues with this), as no amount of heroic raiding will get you a higher reward than doing one +14 key in the Vault. There's so much good going for M+ in Shadowlands that's an improvement that gets ignored in this current discussion, which is why I feel most arguments are emotional and with either no basis or illogical chains of thought.
“Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.”
“It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville
then the "solution" would be to limit amount of gear you can get per week, not making it WORSE...
and yes, you can run M+ "unlimited time", you can also NOT FINISH IT, when someone leaves you are fucked, in raid you just invite someone else or continue other day...
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a goddamn monkey can manage +15, its easy, same as HC raiding, and no, M+20 is not irelevant, if the +15 is too easy to reward HC gear (which its not) then surely they could just up the ceiling to +20...
well yeah, if your stance is "better gear is not worth the effort of raiding" then there is different problem than M+...
and surely, if 5ilvl is not worth it, then 3ilvl which will be now above M+15 is not worth it even more, so why bother... then again, normal last few bosses is just 3 below M+15, so why bother with M+ at all...and so on...
Its like nobody in this thread has actually raided, ever... What makes you think you get loot every week just because you raid?
I have gone months and sometimes even full tiers without ever seeing a piece of item drop... You're GUARANTEED to get one item per week... The entitlement from the M+ crowd is unreal....
It's just impossible to balance on every possible level of content. You're kinda overrecating because if a mage is doing 75% of the DPS then it's not the balancing fault. I understand your concern, but I think that it shouldn't matter that much in lfr/normal/hc. I'd even say that 10-15% differences in DPS is not that high for the unbalanced low level content.
I wouldn't say that HC raid is giving you more loot. The drop chances will be reduced in SL and we all know that you can spam M+ dungeon. And the whole dungeons drop list is higher than the raid one.
Actually... i find this a good change? Raiding should be rewarding! you spend allot more time in raids then Mythic+
Also no titanforging? no corruption shit? i can have a best in slot list again!?
Hell i thought atleast the socket will suck but you can buy a item enhancer for that 2!
So now i can finally play multiple chars and not be gimped on any of them!
Finally! there should be a moment when you get that last item and think to yourself. it's DONE best item on every slot. every raid boss dead! highest possible dps Simmed for that last time!
Now to take a more casual playing style and enjoy an alt or rolfstomping some easy dunguons with non mythic raiding friends.
http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/4...4841599821.jpg the boy that will forever be named the HHD wiper. R.I.P
I seriously do not think people understand how important Mythic plus was to guilds and ESPECIALLY Alliance guilds. These changes are going have extremely negative effects on the game.
Mythic plus was A MAJOR powerhouse feature of WoW that is now dead. Noone is wasting time in Mythic plus to get sub heroic gear when you can pug other content much easier with less effort. It is literally now just Normal Plus.
If you understand how WoW works this is going to be a serious nightmare.
Raiding was always and always be the pinnacle of World of Warcraft - no matter how many people actually do it, it is the final goal, something every PvE strives for.
People that thinks best form of endgame PvE is 30 minutes runs should find a game better suited for their instant gratification needs.
Yet somehow the game worked like that for years and years and years. And I never said no dungeons.
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[QUOTE=Baconeggcheese;52652435]
I agree that it definitely needs to be slowed down, but I'm wondering what long term paths means to you? For instance one of the main points in the OP in this thread is that M+ gear caps out at a lower ilvl than heroic raiding. Where do you see power related rewards capping out prior to participating in end game group activities? Or what other long term progression would you like to see for that part of the game that might not be power related?
They don't need to cap out much differently than where they do now. They just need to not drown you the minute you hit max level. Heroic dungeons ARE an endgame group activity, so this isn't about negating all endgame grouping. It's about that running a heroic is a pointless waste of time, when it used to be something people did for a long time to gear up.
This really just sounds like you don't want to accept what are clear as day numbers. Just throwing random questions out doesn't defeat data. If you have data that shows otherwise, present it, but no amount of "but uh but uh but uh" is ever going to actually be more reliable than data.How many of those players raiding a given difficulty wanted / aspired to be raiding another difficulty? How many players bought the game with the intention to raid, or do dungeons, or pick any content you want but never got that far? How many people who completed a highly completed achievement actually had fun doing so and / or were playing the game for that specific thing? How many players felt forced to do X or Y content for rewards but otherwise would not have done it?
I could keep coming up with questions like these all day, we don't have the information. All we can do is make assumptions.
"stop puting you idiotic liberal words into my mouth"
-ynnady