Raiding feels meaningless currently with to many forms of different progression

[Sanguinerd]

Raiding has been meaningless since Cataclysm.

[Kaykay]

The purpose of all PVE is to gather gear so you can crush players in PVP.

TRUE

Also, risk/effort versus reward is out of whack, you can spamm mythic+ for hours a day with a pug, and end up with a set of gear thats on par with whatever mythic raiders roll with, titanforging and corruptions ensure that nobody has to step foot in a raid.

But if you choose to raid, you have to deal with organizing raids or joining a raid guild, unflexible raiding hours usually 2-3 days a week for x hours.
You have to deal with progression before you reach the bosses that drop the loot you could use, but by the time you reach the boss, you've gotten better from your weekly m+ cache.

There needs to be something other than challenge, as a reward for raiders. And i'm pretty excited to see where shadowlands goes with ilvl and set bonus's following the death of titanforging. Because i do want m+ to be relevant, just not a complete substition for raiding. Ideally you should get 70% of your bis from raiding, 15% from m+ and maybe 15% from pvp.

Give people some chase items to aim and work for, that doesnt include a slotmachine with 0 difficulty that offers titanforging.

[SirBeef]

I'll throw in a quick hit list

1. How does M+ existing diminish raiding? If you want to push high keys you're going to need trinkets from raids and if you want to raid at your best you at least need the 15 chest for gear.

2. Wrath's popularity is a conflux of Arthas, WoW reaching a natural peak, a lack of market competition (in the sense of mobs) and being relatively casual friendly. Raiding essentially had nothing to do with it, it's been shown like 5000 times raiding before LFR had vanishingly small participation.

3. How is getting 20 men for mythic a problem when in wrath (and explicitly in wrath) 25 man was the 'real' raid?

4. Who gives a shit about lfr if you have a guild?

5. I'm not judging you, but people who raid primarily for gear are not people I want in my raid. If those people have transitioned exclusively to m+ then they never really wanted to raid in the first place, did they?

1, as a raider, more options for those that want other activities and those that want endgame progression without raiding the better.

2, If you really look at the numbers WotLK barely grew WoW. Wrath added about 1M total players from the 11M at the of TBC.

3, These days with the extra competition for players time, and the option to raid easier options present, I can see it being a bigger issue today that is was 12 years ago.

4, Fragile, insecure people who base their life's value by what they accomplish in video games. When they see others do something similar but easier they easily feel invalidated. Instead of doing the rational and mature thing of ignoring them we see them post here daily.

5, Here, here. Been there done that. It's an awful mentality to have and an awful group to be a part of. Glad I found a group of like minded people that just want to have fun and not worry about the progression and loots. Yes we all better gear, but having fun a couple nights a week is more important to us.

- - - Updated - - -

Raiding has been meaningless since Cataclysm.

Everything is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. You make of it what you will. Raiding has been more meaningful since Cata since I got away from the progression race BS attitudes and mini dictators acting as raid/guild leaders.

[Relapses]

A timed 15 gives 5 items, depleted 4.

That's definitely not how it works. See here, most specifically:

When the Dungeon is complete, you will receive a chest containing loot at the end of the dungeon and the Mythic Keystone will be updated:

• Beating the timer rewards the party with a new, higher-level Keystone of a different dungeon, and a Challenger's Cache that contains Artifact Power and 3 pieces of loot at an appropriate ilvl.
• If you miss the timer but complete the dungeon, you will still get the Challenger's Cache upon killing the final boss of the dungeon containing Artifact Power and 2 pieces of loot. The Mythic Keystone will point to a different dungeon that is one level lower than the one you just used.
• If you do not complete the dungeon, you will have a Keystone that is one level lower for the same dungeon and receive no loot.
• For every Keystone level above level 15 (Patch 8.3), there is an additive 40% chance for an additional piece of loot in the chest.

[dacoolist]

Normal dungeons > Heroic dungeons > Mythic dungeons > Mythic+

LFR raid > Normal raid > Heroic raid > Mythic raid

You could literally not step foot into a raid and play Mythic+ as your main way of gearing, never seeing any content in raid beyond LFR just to experience the story, and you can hit item level 475.

Want to experience harder content? time commitment. Grinding dailies. RNG gear drops. find a guild. find 20 other people for mythic. Do visions. Do world bosses. Farm for gold to afford to raid. ect.

There is a reason that WOTLK had the biggest player base ever in Warcraft history, the game was easy. There was meaningful progression, when you were done gearing in dungeons for that patches current gear, you would look to find a 10 man or 25 man normal raiding guild. The content wasn't that hard, people had fun being able to clear the content, or learn the content together with their guild. I remember Naxx being easily puggable, Ulduar also wasn't half bad.

The point I am trying to make is that there's simply to many ways to get gear. Raids used to have this feeling of curiosity and people wanted to explore them. Instead of making it widely available via LFR, you had no other choice but to either commit to a guild to see the content, or you didn't get any better gear. It was that simple.

I'd rather see a system like this again then the current. I came back after a 5 year hiatus, found a guild to do Mythic+ and start raiding, and cleared LFR Nyalotha to see the content because I'm so many months behind on my cape. SO many trolls in LFR now, just ridiculous that this game mode is even still in development.

What are your thoughts on how raiding/gearing is laid out?

I'm literally the worst wow player of all time, that's exactly what I do, I just run one single 15 a week, log out - POOF next week BIS 475 WITH Corruption DANG DOE RIPINPEACE BLIZZ ;D (no really tho that's all I wear is some 475's from my mythic weekly cache... you think I have friends that can carry my weakass through mythicc raids?! I just afk through my 15's every week and reap the rewards)

[Relapses]

I'm literally the worst wow player of all time, that's exactly what I do, I just run one single 15 a week, log out - POOF next week BIS 475 WITH Corruption DANG DOE RIPINPEACE BLIZZ ;D (no really tho that's all I wear is some 475's from my mythic weekly cache... you think I have friends that can carry my weakass through mythicc raids?! I just afk through my 15's every week and reap the rewards)

Perhaps that's your MO currently but you do have over 50 Heroic/Mythic Ny'alotha kills and 90 M+s completed above level 10. :^)

[HitPoint]

Perhaps that's your MO currently but you do have over 50 Heroic/Mythic Ny'alotha kills and 90 M+s completed above level 10. :^)

I mean TBF 10-15's are kind of a joke rn with corruption resistance being as high as it is, you can have 2-3 carry 2 dead weights in a 15 and possibly even time depending on the week. I do it all the time in carry runs and have taken fresh toons and timed 15's.

[Kuruption]

A timed 15 gives 5 items, depleted 4.

I wish it did.

[Doffen]

Raiding is meaningless. It is in dungeons we are truly tested.

[deenman]

Gunna disregard your wild percentages. You or I have absolutely no clue what percent of the playerbase is skilled and which isn't. All I know is that the game is more fun when you play with better players. Playing with people who are a burden only makes the experience worse for everyone involved, except the person who is the burden. I honestly think cata dungeons were fine. They weren't challenging at all at release, just super punishing. None of the boss mechanics for any of the cata heroics were difficult once you saw them a couple times. You recognize the bosses attack patterns, utilize DBM and do the mechanics, simple. But if you didn't do the mechanic right, you were hit for a gazillion damage and died almost instantly. That's not hard, it's punishing.

I think the game should become harder, but in a progressive way. Start small and slowly inch your way until the game is at a point where the average player is better than they were a year ago. Outside of m+, raiding, and PvP, the game doesn't require the player to play optimally or efficiently. You can play like a total dunce and still get to where you're going. That scenario should never occur. If you're not playing your class right, you should die. If someone wants to quit WoW because they're unwilling to adapt and learn how to properly play, then good riddance. They're either a solo player or they play with people who don't mind dragging their dead weight through content.

There are countless easy to follow guides out there for every spec. There are simple guides and complex guides. It doesn't require hard work either. If you're going to play the game, you might as well practice playing it right. It's like learning to play a guitar but you only want to play one string because it's easier than using all 6 strings. Then when that person wants to join a jam session or some band, the people around them are looking at each other trying to decipher the situation.

the problem with early cata dungeons wasnt that they were to hard,it was that they upped the difficulty HUGELY by comparison to wrath,also they added 1 shot mecanics to bosses and guaranteed wipes if failing to deal with some mecanics,a better way to handle it would have been to have heroic not queable,have it be like mythic now

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Raiding is meaningless. It is in dungeons we are truly tested.

dont think anyone really contests this,simply on the fact that it scales it means its harder than a raid,also being only 5 people where if your healer makes a mistake,there is no1 else to pick up the slack,same with dps,on high keys a dead dps is a failed key,on raids even mythic often times even with a few dead dps you can still kill a boss if its not some uber dps check one

i wish they would bring back some form of hard mode for raids also,it would still not compare with dungeons almost infinite scaling but atleast it would offer somewhat of an extra challenge once the raid starts getting to easy

[Daedius]

Normal and Heroic ought to be combined... afterall, there's no "LFR" difficulty for dungeons, LFG does Normal and Heroic.

[Dakara]

Normal and Heroic ought to be combined... afterall, there's no "LFR" difficulty for dungeons, LFG does Normal and Heroic.

I agree, but I also want to see raid rewards improve or M+ rewards throttled.
M+ loot increases by increments of 5. It’s a much smoother progression curve, for someone starting out at M0 and working their way up.
Raids however, jump by +15 ilvls. Whilst the difficulty from Normal to Heroic is minimal, Heroic to Mythic is massive. As such, players hit a wall and turn to M+ for their upgrades after getting AOTC.

In PVP, there is a single weekly chest earned via Conquest, yet for PVE, the weekly chest is only from M+. If the weekly chest were changed to reward your highest content of the week +10 ilvls (right now it’s M+ +10 ilvls), it would five raids a bit more longevity and purpose.

[Ange]

But if you choose to raid, you have to deal with organizing raids or joining a raid guild, unflexible raiding hours usually 2-3 days a week for x hours.
You have to deal with progression before you reach the bosses that drop the loot you could use, but by the time you reach the boss, you've gotten better from your weekly m+ cache.

This has nothing to do with gear for challenge, because raiding was for the most part of WoW the easiest possible way to gear a character.

Blizzard decided that it is no longer needed to nerf a raid tier while its relevant (or at all) since LEGION and that makes basicly every other gearing path an alternative, if you are just a casual raider and not really successfull with progression raiding.

In the past you could just farm the entry bosses, wait for raid wide OVERNERFS and easy gear the full group, alts and guild socials with a casual raiding guild. That was changed because the "raiders" demanded more prestige. They got now more "prestige" but how that is really worth is seen on this m+/pvp envy discussions.

The truth is that the majority of the active players will ALLWAYS choose the least amount of resistance for gearprogression. Raiding is simply not that anymore and for the why - just ask the never happy raid community from WoD why they wanted prestige raiding in the first place. Complaing after they got what they wanted is a bit silly.

I raided since vanilla, every tier, it was stupid easy to keep up with high end gearing for many years. Tried LEGION with progression raiding and mythic+ and it made not much sense and the only string that keept me at least to participating in raiding was the tier sets. Thats dead in BfA and thats the reason why the raid community imploded. Casual raiding is not worth it when you can just get more out of mythic+ with the same amount of difficulty and time investment. With raider.io and its community acceptance building PUGs with a high success rate is the easiest thing in the world.

[ThePainTrain69]

I agree. I don't like doing (essentially) the same content four times over. I care about the looks and feel of the dungeon tho, it does get much harder mechanically in heroic and mythic (no duh).

[dcc626]

I agree, but I also want to see raid rewards improve or M+ rewards throttled.
M+ loot increases by increments of 5. It’s a much smoother progression curve, for someone starting out at M0 and working their way up.
Raids however, jump by +15 ilvls. Whilst the difficulty from Normal to Heroic is minimal, Heroic to Mythic is massive. As such, players hit a wall and turn to M+ for their upgrades after getting AOTC.

In PVP, there is a single weekly chest earned via Conquest, yet for PVE, the weekly chest is only from M+. If the weekly chest were changed to reward your highest content of the week +10 ilvls (right now it’s M+ +10 ilvls), it would five raids a bit more longevity and purpose.

good news. in shadowlands loot will end up being more rare. only 1 weekly box for everyone. reduced loot in raids and m+. just lego mats from torghast (and cosmetics) you can grind pvp for currency to buy gear i guess. thats pretty much it except world quests and crafted gear.

have fun.

[Depakote]

Which is why hopefully raiding will die soon.

Unfortunately raiding still provides huge gear advantages in terms of a whole extra Azerite lockout per week and 10 free ilvls of gear(485 vs 475) that you cant get in M+.

Get rid of the gear handicap for raiding and we'll see how many people actually want to do that.

Better idea, get rid of Mythic+. It serves no real purpose anyway and does real damage to the raiding community.

[Blackrunner01]

Better idea, get rid of Mythic+. It serves no real purpose anyway and does real damage to the raiding community.

That has got to be the most uninformed opinion I've read in a while.

Either that or just outright disingenuous.

[LordVargK]

You don't raid for the gear, you gear for the raid. Raiding is it's own reward.

[NatePsy]

Problem is if you remove multiple forms of progression via raid, it becomes harder to justify dumping resources and dev time into designing raids given how niche Mythic raiding is. Only a small percentage of the playerbase clears Mythic raid and if you remove a lot of the avenues of progression in raiding you basically cut out and alienate sizable portion of the playerbase which means they'll be designing content for a small minority which to the shareholders is money not effectively spent.

At the end of the day they're a business and if they alienate a large portion of playerbase that no longer see's much reason to play due to time constraints and just general lack of interest in harder content, that translates to less player engagement which reflects badly on the company which leaves investors and shareholders starting to ask questions.

The game is not designed to cater to the minority that wants and participates in that bleeding edge progression and it won't anytime soon because it's not a good return on investment. The buck stops at the majority population, which isn't your typical Mythic raider.

[dispatchcrab]

I only play to see the content in raiding terms, when I do LFR kill the last boss in a raid I loose all interest in spending my time to commit to raiding it..

In TBC all I wanted to do was kill Illidan so I commited the time to do it, LFR kills the game for me completely I just loose interest and yes I could just not do it but then what guild would recruit you if you dont even get the easy gear from LFR.

YES it makes things easier for progression etc but then when I buy a single player game I always put it on hard so I see all the content in a challening way if you just want to breeze through all the video games in your life see all the content without challenge why not just watch youtube runs I just cant understand the need to have like 4 difficulties have a normal which is challenging and potentially puggable and very puggable towards the end of the patch who just want to experience the bosses and then a hard mode which truely challenges what more do you need.