Blizzard killed off Mythic+ on PTR

[Kralljin]

Is it declining? I do agree with what you are saying. But I feel that the number of guilds are declining. Not HC raid by itself. Ive seen alot of guilds disband and alot of them start pugging it is just the more efficent way to get gear and clear the Raid. Excluding guilds who can clear heroic in weeks 1-3.

Well, call it anecdotal but instead of people actually looking for other people to play, trade chat at least on my server is full of boost raids.
Point may be because a lot more people can do it than previously but i the overall relevance of heroic raiding has dissipated, my Hunter never touched heroic once yet still has like 402 Ilvl and barely needs anything from the raid except trinket(s) and some specific azerite piece.

The incentive to raid anything below mythic is just not there anymore in terms of character progression.
Previously, if people didn't like Pug raids, they had to organize to at least a 10man raid in order to progress their character, now four other people and some decent keys suffice.

I do get that the chest beeing almost mandatory cause it is the best non mythicraid gear.

I wouldn't blame the M+ chest itself, it is however a factor.

I do have to ask, who are we actually talking about when it comes to m+ vs hc.

People can aren't raiding mythic?

Mythic guilds who want to be top 30 to improve chances of getting there and doing alot of m+, they should be rewarded aswell. If you want to do +20 or higher you may need to kill some mythic bosses for better gear.

Personally i would exclude Mythic (raider) from this discussion entirely because, as said multiple times, their incentive in terms of progression / motivation isn't affected as much as compared to someone who raids below mythic.

People talk about it like you do one evening of 3h m+ and get 10 usefull items a WF weapon and 1 Titanforged BiS trinket.

That statement was never implied in any form.
The issue is just that unless a certain activity has a decent chance of providing an upgrade, people are less likely to be motivated to engage in an activity, one that requires actual organization on top of that.

If your character already is decked in 400 Ilvl pieces, the motivation for heroic raiding is just not there anymore for a lot of people, Titanforging does not fix that.

You could turn this around and let M+ only hand out really bad loot, then watch how the participation drops through the floor.

We had the same thing in Cata / MoP, 10man Heroic yielded same loot as 25man Heroic, yet people slowly but surely gravitated towards 10man because the organization part wasn't nearly as big as for 25man Heroic.
The reason why this effect wasn't nearly as big during Wotlk because 10man loot was made intentionally worse than its 25man counterpart, thus giving an incentive to push into 25man.

People should do what is fun for them

And this statement has shown not to be true for anyone who has actually played TBC.

Mechanar heroic was among the most popular 5man dungeons during TBC - was it however the best designed one?
No, it just yielded a lot of Badges for a rather small instance, thus many people made sure they ran it least once per day.

Similiar story with PvP in TBC, a lot of people just engaged in both Arena and Random Battlegrounds because the PvP Gear was pretty decent even for PvE.
On top of that, it was easier to acquire than any equivalent PvE piece.

Once PvP and PvE had a clear separation, participation rates dropped during Wotlk, because PvP gear was pretty bad for PvE.

The idea that people simply choose the type of content that is most fun to them is not true in a progression based RPG, because the progression itself is fun, not necessarily the activity.
The quintessence is that progressing your character is still fun, even if the activity you are doing may not be fun to you if viewed in isolation.

M+ is simply more efficient than heroic raiding, because a lot of the organization effort vanishes.

[Erolian]

...but it kinda is?

I mean, in your very first post you said:



This line was explicitly picked up by me.
Whether it's supposed to be "more fun" than M+ is another tale, but you literally raised the point that Blizzard should make raiding more fun.

But those points basically only correlate with raiding, especially AP is a gamewide system that doesn't affect just raiding.
Whether you say "Those systems aren't fun" or "raiding isn't fun" is a major difference.



Here is my big problem with your stance: I have no idea what sort of difficulty you are talking about.

10 / 25 man discussion is a discussion basically limited to high end raiders, the current mythic raiders, as any other difficulty is flexible in terms of size, with 10 people being the minimum.

However, those people (meaning mythic raider) are barely affected by M+ reward structure outside of the first week(s), as M+ relies on Titanforging in order to be on par with mythic loot.

Mythic raids aren't "dying" due to M+, normal and heroic raids are, because their rewards are in direct competition with M+ loot, unlike Mythic which still holds the most highest base loot.
To be clear on that, in my opinion, Mythic raiding still holds a greater incentive due to the superior loot reward, while normal / heroic raiding lack this advantage over M+, thus they are declining.

The fact that you however now seemingly limit this discussion to the "high end" difficulty confuses me, because earlier you also raised the argument that:


Despite the fact that if you are a "high end" raider, you cared about balance since freaking Vanilla - You always had to care about balance if you chose this sort of raiding.

And Balance is most certainly not an advantage of M+ once you start pushing into keys above +15.

Everything I was saying was related to mythic raiding and how people could have more fun inside of that content. When I said it could be more fun I didn't mean as a direct comparison to M+ just as a more general statement about mythic raiding and the number of guilds and players that are absent as that number continues to grow while things like M+ become this huge game wide content that many more people attempt to participate in. If you go back a few pages you'll see where I talked about the reward/difficulty curve between heroic raiding and M+. Its definitely broken in the case of M+ but rather than just making M+ gear bad they should just be adjusting that curve to where you need to actually invest time and effort if you want the weekly M+ reward that rivals mythic raiding gear and base loot to rival or maybe even surpass heroic raids if they let it scale beyond 15. Right now spamming M+ lets the mythic guild skip and not care about heroic week but the bar for a keystone level high enough to do that is so low that the heroic raiders can do the same thing thus invalidating anything possible in normal/heroic raids which is stupid. As for the Blizzard balancing part obviously that's always been that way but its never fun and instead of improving I would say they've done worse this expansion than the last couple so I added it to the pile of concerns

If you did stop and make the comparison between the two though while they share many of the same problems M+ is easier to organize and participate in whenever you want. I don't really think that just nerfing it to the ground as some people suggest is really the smart thing to do. People should be allowed to progress with and enjoy that content. They just need to make sure that people actually need to progress and make an effort to get the nicer things rather than putting them at 10 which is easy day one of any season. After that they need to try and help guilds successfully recruit and maintain rosters by hopefully addressing the things that pile up until players just aren't willing to grind anymore at the high end. I think everyone would be in a better place if they did this

[Kralljin]

Everything I was saying was related to mythic raiding and how people could have more fun inside of that content.

And all you listed were things that also apply to highkeys in M+, the only difficulty in M+ that comes close to Mythic raiding in terms of effort / difficulty.

When I said it could be more fun I didn't mean as a direct comparison to M+ just as a more general statement about mythic raiding and the number of guilds and players that are absent as that number continues to

But why compare it to mythic?
The one difficulty that is not in direct competition with M+ in terms of loot?

On top of that, why compare an entire system to a single difficulty mode another game system? That doesn't make sense.

grow while things like M+ become this huge game wide content that many more people attempt to participate in.

Greater participation doesn't necessarily proof it's superior, we've seen in TBC that this isn't true.
I remember Ion saying that most people just do a single M+ for the weekly chest, which in my opinion doesn't sound like a massive success to be honest.

As for the Blizzard balancing part obviously that's always been that way but its never fun and instead of improving I would say they've done worse this expansion than the last couple so I added it to the pile of concerns

I think it's bad as always, but M+ being added to the equation most certainly didn't help there, because M+ highkeys are imbalanced as fuck.

[Viromand]

M+ is simply more efficient than heroic raiding, because a lot of the organization effort vanishes.

Yes getting 5 people together i alot easier in terms of organization. On the other hand you open you LFG tool search for heroic BoD and you will get some in week 1 alot more in week 2 after that getting acces to a HC group is really easy cause there are so many open.

Like you said some people dont like pugs, some people dont like set dates or beeing a guild leader an organizing it. If you dont like both you have m+ if you dont like that well you could get gear comparable gear from warfronts and warfront world boss(it is alot easier but alot slower aswell, maybe even too slow to really get the sense of progression), or pvp maybe.

If item progression is your main source of fun, you have many ways to do so. Get a HC guild, run pugs, m+, pvp, warfront. It will not hurt you that much if you dont run either of them, I hate warfronts and maybe did them 2 or 3 times on my main. I believe having multiple options to obtain HC quality item level is a good thing, you can choose what is you want to do. Exluding the weekly chest. Getting rid of one of them will be bad.
Each has it perks. Having a raidguild may grant you the item you want faster cause some people could trade it and are willing too, or you have a loot council. Pugging allows you to queue for the same boss and using more extra loot. M+ is easier to organize but you might end up not getting the key you want or the item you need from that dungeon. our you need to go alone or find someone with that key and go with 1-4 randoms and maybe the group will disband.
If Ian data is correct and most of the people only run 1 for the chest, getting rid of it or giving raiders one aswell ( as i wrote in one of my previous posts) might help people who dont want to run m+. So if those people see m+ as a problem solve it that way not by taking away the "progression fun" of someone else.

Still if you dont like Guilds (set days or recruiting), dont like pugs, dont like m+, dont like pvp. Even if item progression is fun to you but means of getting those items isnt, well you will have to wait for content that is or dont play the game.

I do remember the days of mechanar on my old account, if you compare it to now, would everybody run freehol+10 to get the weekly chest, yes they would. If you gave HC raiders the chest for killing a certain amount of bosses in the raid, people would not run 1 m+ each week or maybe even more if they dont like it.
It does fell mandatory for a heroic raid beeing pug or guild to run atleast on m10 each week. Take that away and people you dont like m+ will not run it. It feels like you have so many options getting hc quality gear doing whatever pleases you, but one is more rewarding in terms of ilvl once a week.

[Kralljin]

On the other hand you open you LFG tool search for heroic BoD and you will get some in week 1 alot more in week 2 after that getting acces to a HC group is really easy cause there are so many open.

Yeah, but your average heroic raid still takes longer than an M+ dungeon and top of that, has a higher failure rate.
Unless your M+ group throws the towel, you will always at the bare minimum have a shot at loot or get your weekly cache from it.

This doesn't exist in raids, if you wipe, you wipe, period, no consolation prize given.

I believe having multiple options to obtain HC quality item level is a good thing, you can choose what is you want to do. Exluding the weekly chest. Getting rid of one of them will be bad.

I believe that the increased quantity of loot available to players made a system such as Warforging (and later on, Titanforging) a necessity.
Originally, your Raid lockout provided a natural throttle on your gear progression, you had to be one lucky person to basically get all items in earlier days.
Therefore, gear remained a valid motivation to continously log in and play your character, because "getting done" required some dedication.

While Blizzard did increase the quantity of loot within raids over the years, the thing just blew off once M+ joined in.

This is not an attack on M+ as a whole, but its extremely lenient reward structure has a deteriorating effect on gear as character progression.

Take that away and people you dont like m+ will not run it.

I think the problem is less people feeling "forced" into M+, but simply how it slowly kills off the motivation to raid.
If you have barely any upgrades to gain from a raid, a lot people will lose motivation to actually join a raid, that's natural.

Previously, if you killed a raid boss and you didn't get item you wanted, you basically had to wait another week for the next shot, however, once you got it, it felt amazing.
It was a pretty simple system that made you come back.

Nowadays, if you don't get a certain slot filled, you could just run an M+ and hope it drops, even gauge the odds in your favour via group composition.
Once you have it, you basically hunt titanforged items, which no one enjoys.

[dacoolist]

So that's a "no" then?

Was WoD the last time they had iLvl normalised content?

They reworked the system during the squish, the normalized stuff is gone - Boss Anus!

[barackohmama]

good change. M+ was too rewarding.

No it wasnt a good change.. M+ should be rewarding, it's just that +10 is too easy for a chance of good loot. +15 and +20 should have increased chance of good ilvl procs, that way not everyone and their mother gets good loot.

[Catblob]

Oh look, the exact same thing they did with Season 2.

They keep the ilvl lower at season launch so that guilds aren't mass farming M+ for gear prior to the opening of Mythic Raid.

[Unforgivenn]

I dont see why blizz should nerf. At least for paladins ret, the bests azerite gear comes.from raid (bod) and not dungeon (because of treacherous covenant)..

Even u can get 415 gear there, u still wont get that trait there. And for the new raid will be the same i guess, even with the new system introduced

[Viromand]

Oh look, the exact same thing they did with Season 2.

They keep the ilvl lower at season launch so that guilds aren't mass farming M+ for gear prior to the opening of Mythic Raid.

How do you know? Got a source for that, cause in season 2 ptr rewarded the max ilvl during testing. And during nhc/hc only week they lowered it to +5 beeing the highest in terms of ilvl. And the gear dropped in the first week was nhc ilvl now its not.
I do feel it could be like that but noone knows for sure.

I dont see why blizz should nerf. At least for paladins ret, the bests azerite gear comes.from raid (bod) and not dungeon (because of treacherous covenant)..

Even u can get 415 gear there, u still wont get that trait there. And for the new raid will be the same i guess, even with the new system introduced

The new system might force you to do other content. Due to the Essences beeing rewards from different content.

[Trustworthy]

Why they didn't just add a weekly lockout on the gear rewards with diminishing returns is beyond me (e.g. first 2 pieces each week are 400 ilvl, next 2 are 395 and so forth). I suppose something had to be done, someone taking a week off the 2nd week of new season to be all decked out in heroic gear in 1 week was pretty problematic imo.

The problem with moving the rewards higher up the m+ ladder is the (perceived) imbalance between classes and specs. There's a much bigger disparity regarding utility + aoe compared to single target damage between the different classes.

[dcc626]

youtube.com/watch?v=SDsZKDwL1ho




Thanks to all these selfish, arrogant raiders who kept complaining to blizzard that Mythic+ dropped good gear.

This game is soo garbage now, if you don't run raids then there is 0 content left. It's time to unsub until Classic WoW.

funny, +10 loot is at 430 again on the ptr. must have read how upset you are and fixed it /s

[Doctor Funkenstein]

youtube.com/watch?v=SDsZKDwL1ho




Thanks to all these selfish, arrogant raiders who kept complaining to blizzard that Mythic+ dropped good gear.

This game is soo garbage now, if you don't run raids then there is 0 content left. It's time to unsub until Classic WoW.

Psst. The only reason mythic+ dropped good gear was so Ion and his fellow elitist hardcore raiders could easily gear up despite their "much demanded" personal loot system to "fix [that] problem." They don't need it anymore, so nerfed it goes.

Anyone who didn't see that coming really hasn't been paying attention. That's literally the only reason you have mythic+.

[Sylvaeres]

Psst. The only reason mythic+ dropped good gear was so Ion and his fellow elitist hardcore raiders could easily gear up despite their "much demanded" personal loot system to "fix [that] problem." They don't need it anymore, so nerfed it goes.

Anyone who didn't see that coming really hasn't been paying attention. That's literally the only reason you have mythic+.

Yes, they funneled massive amounts of resources, for their own group, and then said fuck the next tier. Good analysis

[Tharkkun]

How do you know? Got a source for that, cause in season 2 ptr rewarded the max ilvl during testing. And during nhc/hc only week they lowered it to +5 beeing the highest in terms of ilvl. And the gear dropped in the first week was nhc ilvl now its not.
I do feel it could be like that but noone knows for sure.



The new system might force you to do other content. Due to the Essences beeing rewards from different content.

Because they would've announced such a drastic change prior to it going live on the PTR. Most likely they are avoiding the problem where M+ went live and awarded Mythic level gear earlier than intended. They also wouldn't keep their mouth shut now for weeks.

[dcc626]

Because they would've announced such a drastic change prior to it going live on the PTR. Most likely they are avoiding the problem where M+ went live and awarded Mythic level gear earlier than intended. They also wouldn't keep their mouth shut now for weeks.

watched people streaming m+ yesterday. 10 and above were all dropping 430s. im sure when people open chests on the ptr on tuesday it will give 440s. lets move onto the next thing to freak out about, this one is done.

[Reyuna]

i am more concerned about the fact that this affix seems to favor range.

so now we have raids that are filled with ranges, and m+ that are going to be filled with ranges.

world of rangecraft.

I bet you're a Rogue.

Oh the sweet tears.

[Hoeth]

I bet you're a Rogue.

Oh the sweet tears.

People who think "melee" dominate M+ have never tried to push up their M+ scores as a warrior, DK, ret, enhance, etc

WOuld be nice if Blizzard acknowledged that there are melee specs other than whichever rogue spec is currently broken, havoc and occasionally WW.

[dcc626]

as opposed to all the ranged meta classes like... that one ele shammy or the boomkin that one time. any class can do it, doesnt mean people will play anything that isnt the strongest/has the most utility.

unless every class/spec is exactly the same it will always be like this.

[Gatto]

I can accept the nerf in terms of weekly "free 410+", with no skill requirements.
But what about m+ progression?

Shouldn't they, since the players push themselves through high lvl m+, give instead those rewards to those who challenge m+ as they are intended?

• m+ lvl 10-14 > weekly reward 430
• m+ lvl 15+17 > weekly reward ilvl 435
• m+ lvl 18+ > weekly ilvl reward 440