is M+ and Tier Forge killing raid ?

[Arai]

What killed raiding is the revelation that M+ is todays standard of accessible while raiding itself is still stuck in 2005. Who wants to maintain a 20m roster just to try mythic? Excessive time wasting with too much trash (some is ok and good), extremely long run times when dying or having to summon someone because you miss a Warlock. Having to eat food every wipe. Unforgiving and unfun mechanics. Having to carry dead weight cause of the 20m structure which results in pure frustration and people leaving -> guild dies. There is so much work that has to go into a 20m mythic guild that most people just don't wanna bother anymore. All the log analysis, maintaining a roster, recruiting, trying to figure out how johnny can not die the 100th time and wipes the raid.

In todays age its a failed system. Some stick to it because the only alternative is M+ which isn't most peoples cake. What WoW needs is the return of 10m mythic, better boss design in terms of fun mechanics and not punishing the whole raid for the mistake of 1, cross-realm from day 1, better lockout system and less time wasting as in running back to the boss after each wipe etc.

[paxen]

Removing trash from raids, or at least 80%-90% of it, could help. Have all those tough NPCs do something useful for a change - thrall bladestorms away all the trash, and then we can get on with fighting the boss. It's a neat little trifecta: raids are still populated, NPCs are useful, and players don't have to go through the tedium of clearing trash every week.

If you like fighting trash you're probably running M+ anyway, where trash pulls are actually interesting.

[xjentai]

Why not just remove gear from Mythic? Have it be like arena, exclusive mounts, transmog or whatever they come up with? With my guild we still do heroic clearing, and tbh never for gear, we just do because we like to group up and have fun together. And like someone already mentioned, 10p mythic would be welcome aswell.

[exochaft]

What killed raiding is the revelation that M+ is todays standard of accessible while raiding itself is still stuck in 2005. Who wants to maintain a 20m roster just to try mythic? Excessive time wasting with too much trash (some is ok and good), extremely long run times when dying or having to summon someone because you miss a Warlock. Having to eat food every wipe. Unforgiving and unfun mechanics. Having to carry dead weight cause of the 20m structure which results in pure frustration and people leaving -> guild dies. There is so much work that has to go into a 20m mythic guild that most people just don't wanna bother anymore. All the log analysis, maintaining a roster, recruiting, trying to figure out how johnny can not die the 100th time and wipes the raid.

In todays age its a failed system. Some stick to it because the only alternative is M+ which isn't most peoples cake. What WoW needs is the return of 10m mythic, better boss design in terms of fun mechanics and not punishing the whole raid for the mistake of 1, cross-realm from day 1, better lockout system and less time wasting as in running back to the boss after each wipe etc.

This is pretty much what caused all my friends and former hardcore 25H/mythic guildmates to leave the game... the juice just isn't worth the squeeze anymore when it comes to the pinnacle of raiding content.

Blizz has had an obsession with constantly increasing the difficulty of raid content more and more, all under the guise that the player base as a whole is getting smarter and playing better. Realistically, this increase in player ability stopped probably 10 years ago if we're being generous, and this was due to the online resources being poor at the start but taking a few years to catch up. However, the difficulty of the raids keeps going up and up to where we've ended up with Blizz admitting they balance around the RWF and even pissed of that crowd with how punishing they made the raids. While you'll inevitably have players say they like the increasing difficulty, I can tell you from experience that most people just want the BiS gear that drops (I'm sure many people have had raid roster issues where people disappear from progression once they basically have BiS gear)... and Blizz just makes it harder and harder every expansion to obtain the best gear because reasons. It's not really a surprise that people keep leaving the raiding scene and raid participation has been in a downward trend for years.

One of the aspects that drew in a lot of players to WoW was the fact that it was way more casual and accessible. This doesn't just extend to the difficulty of the raiding content itself, but every other system in the game that gets between the player and the activity they want to complete. I feel like Blizz has completely forgotten what got the masses to want to play their game in the first place, instead focusing on the niche players while abandoning everyone else. It's no surprise Dragonflight has been throwing in stuff that players have been requesting for years, but at this point I think it's just a panic move versus Blizz turning over a new leaf.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

This is pretty much what caused all my friends and former hardcore 25H/mythic guildmates to leave the game... the juice just isn't worth the squeeze anymore when it comes to the pinnacle of raiding content.

Blizz has had an obsession with constantly increasing the difficulty of raid content more and more, all under the guise that the player base as a whole is getting smarter and playing better. Realistically, this increase in player ability stopped probably 10 years ago if we're being generous, and this was due to the online resources being poor at the start but taking a few years to catch up. However, the difficulty of the raids keeps going up and up to where we've ended up with Blizz admitting they balance around the RWF and even pissed of that crowd with how punishing they made the raids. While you'll inevitably have players say they like the increasing difficulty, I can tell you from experience that most people just want the BiS gear that drops (I'm sure many people have had raid roster issues where people disappear from progression once they basically have BiS gear)... and Blizz just makes it harder and harder every expansion to obtain the best gear because reasons. It's not really a surprise that people keep leaving the raiding scene and raid participation has been in a downward trend for years.

One of the aspects that drew in a lot of players to WoW was the fact that it was way more casual and accessible. This doesn't just extend to the difficulty of the raiding content itself, but every other system in the game that gets between the player and the activity they want to complete. I feel like Blizz has completely forgotten what got the masses to want to play their game in the first place, instead focusing on the niche players while abandoning everyone else. It's no surprise Dragonflight has been throwing in stuff that players have been requesting for years, but at this point I think it's just a panic move versus Blizz turning over a new leaf.

Top end raiding is more difficult than ever, but getting BiS gear (or at least close) has never been easier in the game than this season thanks to dinars and the vault.

I do agree that Blizzard's obsession with raid difficulty (specifically, one person fail mechanics etc to challenge RWF people) is bizarre as heck, and player skill growth has obviously slowed a bit since the influx of information. However, it is absolutely still growing, to some extent because of self selection bias where the people who are good or more likely to stick around bc they are rewarded etc.

[Zephre]

Raiding isn't rewarding, that's my problem with raiding, I also still have a problem with Blizzard's change in WoD in which mythic was made 20 man shifting away from 10 man which provided me the most fun I've ever had in this game. M+ is more convenient these days, I can get good gear and it's repetable without the need to sit online multiple nights a week hitting a brick wall for minimal gains.

[tomten]

Not a lot of people want to spend hours upon hours upon hours clearing trash and waiting for CDs to try an attempt again.

Have you raided since tbc? Because cooldowns have auto reset on wipe for literally over a decade now.

[Alroxas]

Raid doesn't give enough loot. I didn't get a single drop the entire 10 bosses this week.

What does GV say? Granted you might have picked from the other rows but technically you could have gotten a raid piece of loot.

[facefist]

This is rubbish. Anybody who actually spams M+ and raids knows that M+ gears you far quicker. It is not unusual to go a full clear with NOTHING. Or for your drop to be useless because you already have better from M+. And clearing the raid gives you 3 choices from the GV - but only from the ilvl of the content you did. Clear heroic? you don't get mythic loot from the GV. Unlike M+, which let's you fail to time an easy +15 and awards you mythic loot.

Take last season - I ran M+ and cleared the raid. Every single item I had equipped at the end of season 3 was from M+ - both trinkets, all tier, all other items. Every week I was expected to clear the raid, yet nothing ever dropped that was worth equipping I hadn't already got from M+.

This is true for low-end guilds that take several months to clear mythic raids (or don't clear them at all). If you start killing mythic bosses in the first week of its release, you are almost guaranteed to get relevant loot.

Proper guilds actually clear heroic raids too, several times. Just look at what top guilds do, they spam HC splits instead of m+.

But yeah, you are right if your guild is stuck in HC for 6 weeks in the beginning of new a tier. You are probably gonna have quite a bit of mythic level gear when you enter mythic for the first time.

[ClassicPeon]

If so, it's only proof that raiding needs to die because it's not nearly as popular a game mode in 2022.

But also no! It's not actually happening, there are still plenty of people raiding at different levels, and a lot of folks still enjoy it.

You made two assumptions and both of them where made with faulty logic.

1. "Raiding needs to die because its not as popular as m+". Raiding is the endgame of wow. Not everyone reaches the endgame but who the fuck would play a game where the endgame was cut of simply because not everyone reaches it?
2. "There is still plenty of people raiding" - raiding has seen as massive decline in participation throughout shadowlands. Most of it is obviously because less people play - some of it is because mythic+ makes normal and hc raiding completely irrelevant.

On topic:

I think the game has room for m+ but blizzard needs to set a clear design direction for it going forward. If you make m+ competitive with raids in terms of loot - raids will die out because of the accessability of m+. The most healthy thing to do for the game would be to make the best m+ rewards(+15 keys) on pair with normal raid loot - remove the Vault - and just stick to that going forward. The end - endgame needs to be raids hc and up. HC also should have just better loot in general then pvp.

[Kikazz]

sup folks

I make this thread because i think, M+ and Tier Forge is slowing killing raid .

every day is harder and harder to get enough people to fill an stable raid group, and my theory is that the loot system is a big factor.

weekly +15 mythic vault loot with same ilvl than 20M mithyc raid
for real, anyone think a +15 is hard as 20M mithyc raid?
not just the content difficulty , think about recruiiting and coordinating 20 players good enough to have success.
now think how much effort do you need to complete, just complete a +15 key

now add the new feature , the tier forge where you can get tier from literally any item from M+... why in the hell people will make raid content?
its harder, longer, requiere more people, coordination, compromise, effortt and it reward is misserable

in my opinion, and read it like that, like this post.
-weekly mythic vault should reward with the higher Ilvl just if you have made at least 20+ mythic keys
-tier set its a Raid reward, always was it... if you want raid rewards, you should make raid. (players cant get trinkets form M+ without doing M+)

i mean yes, lets kill off more end game options so people only do a few things and then log out, then people complain there isnt enough people to do things.

its ALWAYS a bad option to cut content that works and keeps people playing.

to upgrade a weapon from M+ to Mythic Content Level, you need to farm 6750 valour at 180 valour a run, thats a lot of runs.
its quicker to run Mythic raids.

the problem with Mythic raids is they are tuned around the top 0.5% of wow players, and the other 99.5% cant be bothered to put the effort into a mode they arent going to complete in its entirety.

they need to reduce the overall difficulty.

having bosses with 4 mechanics in normal, then adding 2 more in Heroic, and then added 10 more in Mythic to already having 6 mechanics. makes it hard for most if not all people and needs sever micro management.

id love to see how you would have coped back in TBC/Vanilla when we had Teamspeak, Ventrillo, MSN and AOL for communcating for raids.

[Bakis]

I'm not too worried.
M+ surely has increased in both popularity and esteem.
But raiding is raiding, if one disregard the loot and its ilvl the accomplishment of pulling it of in a raid compared to doing the same key and instance over and over has its differences.

That being said I dont look down on either of them but raiding is the bread and butter of WoW. Nothing will ever change that.
How much more of bread and butter it might be might differ and honestly is that a bad thing?

If you wanne push yourself but dont have the time or whatever reason for the work that a raid need, whats so bad about M+ being more than once/week for key?

[Dread13]

Get Mythic Raid to be flexible or 2-options based (10-20man) and you will probably see an increase in player interest on that. I personally have always hated 20-25M raiding. Having the chance to equip my characters by just doing m+ with a solid group of friends is much more enjoyable that sticking to a huge group of people with all the problems that it comes with.

[potis]

I raid to see the content, and the only reason i still play its because we are pretty much the same 10+ people the last 8 years, with 5 of them being IRL friends or familiars.

But i wont lie that the motivation to raid, compared to M+ is much lower cause i pretty much know we are gonna wipe 20 times to dumb shit cause the usual players need 10 more tries than the rest to learn, or our raid size isnt big enough to ignore mechanics ,major problem in HC raiding, how all soak type or generally the mechanics become irrelevant if you are 20 people, while almost being too much with 10-12 when at the same gear levels.

Its completely different when 3 out of 14 DPS have to run out, versus 3 out of 7-8 DPS, it becomes annoying.

M+ doesnt have that problem, and generally the problem isnt that M+ is better than raiding, its that the balancing is lacking on some aspects, but you cant have everything.

So we tolerate it and move on.

[mysticx]

You made two assumptions and both of them where made with faulty logic.

1. "Raiding needs to die because its not as popular as m+". Raiding is the endgame of wow. Not everyone reaches the endgame but who the fuck would play a game where the endgame was cut of simply because not everyone reaches it?
2. "There is still plenty of people raiding" - raiding has seen as massive decline in participation throughout shadowlands. Most of it is obviously because less people play - some of it is because mythic+ makes normal and hc raiding completely irrelevant.

You could wonder whether raiding as an endgame *should* still be as set in stone, with the amount of resources poured into it, if participation numbers are tanking. (It's becoming increasingly obvious that for many people, raiding isn't really worthwhile purely for the fun of it)

You're making a faulty assumption too: That raiding is the be-all-and-end-all of endgame, and always should be, maybe its popularity has been artificially propped up by the loot quality and tier sets in there, rather than it being such fun to do?

How far should Blizz go to prop up raiding, at the expense of other game modes? (It's zero-sum for a bunch of people, they'd play "Candy Crush" if it gave them the best loot)

[ohwell]

If mythic raids were tuned as easy as a +15 mythic raiding would be bazonkers popular. All expansion its tuned to be ball bustingly hard so of course people are noping out for M+.

Except heroic isn't harder than 15s(same drop level) and mythic is marginally harder up to the final bosses. I say marginally because the thing with raids is there's a higher chance for there being a dead weight player bringing you down whereas when you have 5 slots and doing 15s the odds are more often in your favor of getting decent players for all 5 versus filling a raid without hitting a garbage player or 2. Add in that there's more personal accountability in raids(not necessarily harder) and that makes the previous statement worse. The reality is if you got 2 5 man groups from 15s running mythic raids, they'd typically not have a problem.

Then again this seems to just be caused by people thinking Sep was immensely harder than previous raids in SL even though it wasn't.

[enigma77]

the problem with Mythic raids is they are tuned around the top 0.5% of wow players, and the other 99.5% cant be bothered to put the effort into a mode they arent going to complete in its entirety.

they need to reduce the overall difficulty.

having bosses with 4 mechanics in normal, then adding 2 more in Heroic, and then added 10 more in Mythic to already having 6 mechanics. makes it hard for most if not all people and needs sever micro management.

id love to see how you would have coped back in TBC/Vanilla when we had Teamspeak, Ventrillo, MSN and AOL for communcating for raids.

this right here is the only true answer to the problem of raiding

Sepulcher was the most egregiously wrong raid design of the last few years, but make no mistake it's just another symptom of a pervasive disease.

managing 25+ people and doing a lot of work (!) to even be prepared to pull bosses and then you you wipe 300 times because Billy makes a mistake is not fun for 99.9% people

they need to gut raiding difficulty back to Wrath/Cata levels and take a proverbial dump on the top 0.05 % raiders, let them quit, who cares, watch (Mythic) raiding popularity explode when it becomes fun and doable again for most players

[Coldkil]

That solves the issue of Heroic participation but probably at the cost of literally decimating any mediocre Mythic guild in existence since they'll opt to farm Heroic instead.

I see it as a good thing tbh.

In the end, the major issues are simply two in my eyes:
- the way higher accessibility of M+ killed all the "mid-tier" guilds because anything that's not Mythic raids is automatically obsolete week 1 or 2
- raids, and especially Mythic, are huge slogs that waste majority of people time and are logistically challenging, while not rewarding decent enough stuff.

M+ is just perfect as it is and really doesn't need any changes whatsoever. Raids up to HC should get a parification in ilvl with 15s (both drops and cache) - as i see them being basically on par in terms of diffculty (not braindead but definitely puggable). Raid lockouts should be loot-based per boss, meaning you can spam kill one boss until you drop something from it, then it doesn't drop anything for the week.

Mythic raid should just be treated as what it actually is: a specifically tailored activity for high end groups. The only thing that is different from now is that it actually drops the highest ilvl gear of the game, not available anywhere else; but it NEEDS to scale down to 15s/hc ilvl when not in mythic raids, because the last thing you want is to make M+ player be forced to run Mythic raids to be competitive. As i said, M+ is an environment that just works well as it is.

This should be obviously coupled with a way better raid structure, where down time is reduced to the bare minimum. M+ are fun for a lot of people because you just go in and 100% of the time you're playing the game and not preparing to play the game.

- - - Updated - - -

Secondly, yes. a mythic 15+ can be as hard as a 20m Mythic raid, it all depends on what you bring.

Not by a long shot. Just the fact you can spam queue it and get it done and even get loot even if you fail it shows how easy it is compared to Mythic raids.

[jlan]

For me, raiding is a chance to spend time with the guild once or twice a week. It's more about having a shared goal of getting that AotC and having a fun time doing so. If you reduce the rewards in m+ then the narrative turns into Blizzard are forcing m+ players into mythic raiding to be able to challenge for the highest keys. It'd be cool to have more cosmetic/mount rewards in the raids, but then again that doesn't satisfy a gear reward driven mindset.

[Enter Name Here]

[...]
Raid lockouts should be loot-based per boss, meaning you can spam kill one boss until you drop something from it, then it doesn't drop anything for the week.
[...]

my question would be "why?". people can spam m+ dungeons until their eyes bleed and always have a chance for loot. whats wrong with raids being the same?