Pre-SL, M+ used to drop relevant gear to the difficulty of dungeon.
This was both good and bad in that it was good that you could gear up and continue progressing at your pace to get good gear, with the bad being that it was essentially infinitely farmable gear and became the ideal way to gear up.
You got a weekly chest where you would get a comparable item to what you completed.
It was simple, yet flawed.
In SL, M+ gear per run was purposefully lowered to combat the "infinitely farmable", but what that has done is made it effectively just an infinite farm of shards and vendor trash, with a weekly chest that overinflates gear way too much.
Example: clearing a M+10 gives you a 203/203 (or 203/200 if not timed) at the end, which if you are clearing 10s, odds are you have very little to no use for 203/200 level gear, but at the end of the week, you get a 220 in your chest, far higher ilevel than that of the run itself.
This is a huge hike in gear, even if it's once a week, to where you have this inflation happening at a weekly interval, making gear much more spiky (nothing useful throughout the week, maybe something start of new week).
The compromise I feel would be better would be to allow M+ to begin dropping gear of a relative ilevel of difficulty, like Legion/BFA, but limit the number of loot eligible runs to 10 total M+ runs.
This means that, regardless of the key level you run or the dungeon you choose, you get 10 chances per week to get an item from that end-of-run chest.
After the 10th run, you no longer get loot (you get gold/AP/whatever else is thematically proper), but each run still builds towards your weekly chest of options, so there's still value to run.
Then, your weekly chest would drop items relative to the highest + you cleared, based on their current formula of key levels so you can still push higher keys to get higher chest drops.
This would then work similar to how raids work, where you are eligible once a week per boss, then once you are no longer eligible, you cannot get drops, you cannot have items traded to you, you are just there to build your weekly chest and get currencies.
Your weekly chest would also be the same as raids as well, where you are getting relative rewards to what you complete.
The one thing that would need worked out is loot drops and eligibility percentages.
With this change, the first thing I thought was "4 loot locked people could carry a 5th, who would then be guaranteed all the loot", so it would need to be adjusted based on eligible looters.
Raids have (or had, at one point) a loot rule where each eligible person represents 20% chance at loot, so you would be guaranteed 1 item for every 5 eligible people, with non-5 divisible amounts of eligible leading to a % chance of drop (1=20% for additional, 4=80% chance for additional).
For M+, you would have to do a similar calc, where each person represents a 40% chance, with 2 items being the max, where:
- if all 5 people are eligible, you have 100% chance at 2 items.
- if 4 people are eligible, you have 100% chance at 1 item and 60% chance at a second item.
- if 3 people are eligible, you have 100% chance at 1 item and 20% chance at a second item.
- if 2 people are eligible, you have 80% chance at 1 item
- if 1 person is eligible, you have 40% chance at 1 item
This would curb the carry crowd to prevent guaranteed loot funneling like in raid, where a bunch of non-eligible people affect your total loot drops.
Then in terms of today's loot ilevel, completing a +10 would reward 213, then your weekly chest would reward 213.
+5 would give 200 (normal raid), and +15 would give 226 (mythic raid).
With 10 chances, this becomes supplementary instead of infinitely farmable, and people will still want to push at 10 +15s a week.
There would still be benefit to running more than 10 M+ if you do less than 15s because of it building your weekly chest and you still get currencies, so it's not "just do 10 and walk away with no reason to play", but I feel like this would be a better compromise than "run M+ infinitely for vendor/shard trash guaranteed each time".
So, the question: Would something like this be an appealing change to how M+ loot works?
It limits loot chances to just 10 runs, so people running 20 or more dungeons farming gear early in a season/patch gets stifled, but it makes each key run a bit more valuable in that the items each dungeon drops are more useful on a per-run basis throughout the season/patch.
The TL;DR:
Change M+ per-run drops back to equivalent ilevels similar to past expansions with a M+ loot lockout to curb the "infinitely farmable", then adjust weekly chest to reward accordingly.