Raiding feels meaningless currently with to many forms of different progression

[Logwyn]

If raiding feels meaningless just because there are other forms of gear progression available, then it deserves to die.

Luckly people do raids for more than gearing so there's hope.

What reasons are those? Why do a raid difficulty more than a couple of times if you aren't there for the gear treadmill?

[Toybox]

What reasons are those? Why do a raid difficulty more than a couple of times if you aren't there for the gear treadmill?

Because raiding is fun & playing with the lads is a good time. Gear is just a tool to do a job.

I couldn't give a damn about forms of progression I'm not interested in, and there's people who don't give a damn about raiding/dungeon progression - Having options for both sides is great.

[A Chozo]

What reasons are those?

1. Beat the bosses
2. Socialize with the guild
3. Collect item appearances
4. Finish the storyline
5. Challenge myself
6. Explore the ambience
7. Quench my completionism
8. Try new gameplay
9. Socialize with NEW people!

[Twdft]

Honestly at least LFR/Heroic/Mythic would be better. Normal and LFR is honestly useless but I think removing normal would benefit EVERYONE. LFR players would still be able to see the content.

Now that I say that, just rename heroic to normal and mythic to heroic.

At the end of the day I'd love to see just heroic/mythic exist but that's NEVER going to happen.

It's no wonder balancing issues happen lol

As hard to believe as it may be for MMO-C where everyone is cutting edge on their main and pugs HC in half an hour, normal mode raid has an audience. There actually are people not skilled enough for heroic, friends&family guilds who need 2 months to progress through normal. They do it, they are happy with it. Taking normal away from them will not drivethem into LfR, they can't beat heroic so you would sentence them to stop raiding just because you feel overwhelmed counting to 4 to see how many difficulties a raid has.

[Dakara]

Heroic Raids are too easy, Mythic Raids are too hard, M+ is too rewarding. Take your pick, but it’s been the same for most Heroic Guilds every tier in BFA (and probably Legion, but I didn’t raid Legion).

Your average Heroic guild will have the raid cleared within a few lockouts. Then what? They step into Mythic and get smashed after progressing through a few farm bosses (for us, that was 5/12M in Ny’alotha). They then spend the rest of the Tier running M+, often is set clique groups of friends. If they keep persisting in Mythic raids, people often burn out and quit. Those who don’t have a M+ Clique also feel alienated with little to do between raid tiers.

Basically, outside of Mythic, raiding has lost its purpose after progression. I enjoy raiding, I enjoy farming, but there’s no point endlessly farming a raid for zero benefit for anyone as they all geared up in M+.

This also ties in to the serious gear overlaps. LFR drops what, 430? Normal 445? I have 460+ geared alts who have done nothing but WQ’s and Visions.

[Huzzaa]

Heroic Raids are too easy, Mythic Raids are too hard, M+ is too rewarding. Take your pick, but it’s been the same for most Heroic Guilds every tier in BFA (and probably Legion, but I didn’t raid Legion).

Your average Heroic guild will have the raid cleared within a few lockouts. Then what? They step into Mythic and get smashed after progressing through a few farm bosses (for us, that was 5/12M in Ny’alotha). They then spend the rest of the Tier running M+, often is set clique groups of friends. If they keep persisting in Mythic raids, people often burn out and quit. Those who don’t have a M+ Clique also feel alienated with little to do between raid tiers.

Basically, outside of Mythic, raiding has lost its purpose after progression. I enjoy raiding, I enjoy farming, but there’s no point endlessly farming a raid for zero benefit for anyone as they all geared up in M+.

This also ties in to the serious gear overlaps. LFR drops what, 430? Normal 445? I have 460+ geared alts who have done nothing but WQ’s and Visions.

Illustrates it rather well.

Raiding in my eyes should've stayed the sole progressions path end-game.

But nowadays, it's not there. The only progression path where it's relevant is in mythic ilvl. Since 475s drop from the weekly chests. Given enough time of derping around, you'll be decked at a relatively similar ilvl as most mythic raiders, which is a joke.

The 485 pieces and azerite make you stand out a bit more but to put that on the scale vs. just doing nothing basically is a bit broken.

[Logwyn]

1. Beat the bosses
2. Socialize with the guild
3. Collect item appearances
4. Finish the storyline
5. Challenge myself
6. Explore the ambience
7. Quench my completionism
8. Try new gameplay
9. Socialize with NEW people!

1) You do this two or three times and this reason is gone.
2) You don't need to raid to socialize.
3) Loot is the driving force of raiding reason.
4) You can do this in LFR and do it once. There is no need to do raid more than once for this.
5) This reason is gone after the bosses are on farm.
6) Yeah... No.
7) You might have one reason.
8) Do it once and this reason is gone.
9) Don't need a raid to do this.

Everything you list is a do once and then never again do you need to raid. Except 3 is raiding is about loot.

[Saltysquidoon]

What reasons are those? Why do a raid difficulty more than a couple of times if you aren't there for the gear treadmill?

Because if you only show up to three raids in a tier guess who is not getting invited to the next tier?

If you want to consistently be in on prog you have to show up consistently, and be involved in bringing bosses down consistently. Every Mythic guild on earth is going to wipe you like a dirty ass if you just stop showing up after you get 12/12.

Guilds are also communities where you want it to succeed because it helps you to succeed. There's something of a social contract wherein you are expected to expend effort without expectation of reward so at other time other members of the guild will expend effort on your behalf. I know this seems foreign to solo casual players but trust me it exists.

Finally, mythic raiders are generally by necessity competitive people, they like to do things efficiently and do things well so (legiondaries and corruptions aside) if better gear makes you parse higher or look better on the meter that's great too. Gear is a means to an end.

I can say with a great degree of surety most people who consistently raid mythic don't give a fuck about gear, they're there for the 12/12. If you asked them to hand in all their mythic gear for CE most would.

[Relapses]

I can say with a great degree of surety most people who consistently raid mythic don't give a fuck about gear, they're there for the 12/12. If you asked them to hand in all their mythic gear for CE most would.

Eh... this is the argument people use in favor of templates for raiding. (Give everybody the same amount of power and let actual ingenuity and performance be the determining factor in encounter difficulty, instead of just gear.) As a former Mythic raider, I agree with the first part of what you said but the thing which kept me coming back (even during long content droughts) was always gear. It wasn't only the destination which mattered.

[Shakana]

Good for competitors, which is not my case.

[GringoD]

1) You do this two or three times and this reason is gone.
2) You don't need to raid to socialize.
3) Loot is the driving force of raiding reason.
4) You can do this in LFR and do it once. There is no need to do raid more than once for this.
5) This reason is gone after the bosses are on farm.
6) Yeah... No.
7) You might have one reason.
8) Do it once and this reason is gone.
9) Don't need a raid to do this.

Everything you list is a do once and then never again do you need to raid. Except 3 is raiding is about loot.

I'd argue that number 2 is still a driving factor. You can't just dismiss that out of hand.
Concerning challenging yourself: There's also logs. Some people really live to top the meters, so they go back in to drive the numbers.

[A Chozo]

Everything you list is a do once and then never again do you need to raid. Except 3 is raiding is about loot.

3 Isn't raiding in the gear treadmill, which is quite different from raiding for loot. Many players raid countless times just to play with the guild, or to "parse" or even try new gameplay / test builds.

You lack vision.

[dcc626]

I liked past systems and i like current system as well.

My favourite system got to be Cataclysm patch 4.3
-hit level 85
-buy some vicious i377 pvp gear on AH (cheap blue pieces, no limit on # you can wear)
-queue for 4.3 heroics and farm a set of i378 gear
-fill out missing pieces with Justice Point vendor that sells i378 gear from Firelands (including some tier pieces!)
-you are also gaining Valor, this can purchase you i397 gear from the vendor = equal to Normal current tier
-there, you're ready to raid current tier which is 397-403 / 410-416.

I really missed that type of gearing. Zero questing, zero vision grinding, zero rep farming, zero essence farming. No time gated content except for Valor Point vendor being capped at 1000 VP a week.

The raid of patch 4.3 (DS) was a pile of garbage but the gearing system was damn near perfection. No RNG whatsoever, you get the item A it is always item A.

yeah, there is likely to never be a version of the game like this again. shadowlands may end up as close as we have been in a while. other than torghast once a week for legendaies, you can just raid or pvp or m+ with minimal questing. you will still need rep farming if you want to fly. but gearing is going to take a while. all these extra forms of gear progression are going to be gone. with zero rng in gear, we are going to go longer between upgrades. there is no reason for them to throw gear at us if its always the same. torghast wont give regular gear. m+ and raiding are likely to have their loot drops changed. no visions for guaranteed gear. no vendors (except pvp, and then we can get into people complaining they have to pvp for gear lol). 1 weekly box per week no matter what you do. you do some work once a week to make legendaries every couple of weeks (that you choose and create). no ap. no essences. yoou have to do some work for your covenant, but thats expected.

im prepared for the outcry of "how am i supposed to get geared. nothing gives gear anymore!" that will hear. gotta complain about something.

[SirCowdog]

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

I have no personal problem with raids as a concept. I just hate that the entire rest of the game is something else entirely, but you have this almost bait and switch gameplay that happens at "end game". What I mean by that is that most MMORPGs are actually two to three different games tied together, with very different gameply. WoW is more than that, but for simplicity's sake I'll keep it at a core concept level.

You have one game: Solo/matchmaking content where you can drop in/drop out at a whim and progress at your own pace.
Then another game: PUG/Organized small group content like dungeons or M+ that's super low commitment.
Then there's raiding: Super-organized, coordinated effort required by multiple people to supply and gear for, and requires multi-week commitment from all involved.

The problem arises when any one of these types of gameplay is given priority over the rest. WoW is pretty good about keeping all this balanced, especially with the more recent expansions. But raiding(especially heroic/mythic) is still this fat gravity well that the rest of the game is effected by. Raids still have the key story elements, the best gear, and often vital quest objectives or resources. Which would be absolutely fine....if that's all the game was about. But it's not.

Shadowlands is actually looking to be the best balance overall. Torghast and M+ will give solo or small groups extreme heights of challenging content to tackle. Raiding will still be its own thing, as ever. All types of gameplay mentioned above will have good support. Leveling is still kind of....pointless, however.

[Athulua]

yeah, there is likely to never be a version of the game like this again. shadowlands may end up as close as we have been in a while. other than torghast once a week for legendaies, you can just raid or pvp or m+ with minimal questing. you will still need rep farming if you want to fly. but gearing is going to take a while. all these extra forms of gear progression are going to be gone. with zero rng in gear, we are going to go longer between upgrades. there is no reason for them to throw gear at us if its always the same. torghast wont give regular gear. m+ and raiding are likely to have their loot drops changed. no visions for guaranteed gear. no vendors (except pvp, and then we can get into people complaining they have to pvp for gear lol). 1 weekly box per week no matter what you do. you do some work once a week to make legendaries every couple of weeks (that you choose and create). no ap. no essences. yoou have to do some work for your covenant, but thats expected.

im prepared for the outcry of "how am i supposed to get geared. nothing gives gear anymore!" that will hear. gotta complain about something.

I don't mind getting less loot if the loot i get is impactful.
Right now the game vomits loot at me but after a certain thereshold 90% of this loot is vendor trash. I literally vendor 5-10 epics each week because they aren't useful anymore, there's a slim chance for an upgrade but otherwise majority of this loot is trash.

In Shadowlands if i target a specific loot piece and get it that's it. I got it. So I can accept less odds of actually getting it.

[Dommie530]

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?

Personally mythic + in its current form is more damaging then its doing anything right, people that love seasonal type of gameplay will love it.

But from a gearing progression perspective.

U start doing mythic+. You gear up( lets say 100 ilvl) then you can finnaly do raids ( drops 110 ). Then when the next patch drops, the mythic+ rewards are suddenly 130. And the raid remains the same. Its super disturbing, but well i have played it since 2006, and ever since legion, the game has lost its mojo on me atleast. But to each their own.

I would be a big fan if mythic+ would be only cosmetics, mounts, tittles and such. Rather then gear. But well. Mythic + would then feel like it has a meaning rather then the shell of gameplay it has become.

[Erolian]

I feel like the way item level structure at the highest end works right now is totally fine in terms of the power of the best gear. The only things that I would personally address would be moving the mythic weekly m+ keystone level up to be a much more comparable difficulty to actually doing a mythic raid, moving the maximum PvP ilvl reward down to more reasonable skill expectations because requiring 2400 for that reward is far above the difficulty of any other content in the game, and moving the base m15 reward from the actual dungeon itself to be equal or even below heroic item level and reserving anything better than heroic for content which is actually more difficult than a heroic raid.

The reason for the changes above are mostly about requiring similar levels of skill and/or effort for similar rewards because right now the way its set up PvP demands far more skill than mythic raids require for the same ilvl rewards and the opposite is true in mythic + where getting a weekly mythic ilvl reward is significantly easier than farming a mythic raid. This balance will never be perfect in WoW but they're not even remotely close right now and it would be very easy to improve

[Osmeric]

Yea I think they need to scrap normal and make heroic the new normal and mythic the new heroic. Normal raids are too easy.

This is basically what they had in the start of MoP. It didn't work because there are many players for whom current heroic is too difficult, and consigning them to LFR was a mistake.

[Dommie530]

I'm going to get a lot of flack but I don't give a shit.

1) M+ gear, regardless of difficulty, should never ever be better than raiding gear. Oh you did +25 key? Get normal raid gear, sorry buddy. Good job. Pat yourself on the back. It's a dungeon. Get raid gear, go farther in M+ for prestige. That's about it. The reward system for M+ should be cosmetics, not gear.

2) Remove current normal mode raid difficulty. Rename mythic to heroic like the days of old. And heroic becomes normal. LFR becomes normal. I dont give a shit if it makes LFR harder. Bring back flex raids like in MoP for LFR.

I've been saying that ever since Legion, The current gearing progression through mythic + is dull and stupid.
Even when you think about how raids provide better gear and a patch later gives worse gear only shows how damaged the system is ( it's inherently titanforge, but then seasonal ) woopdiedoooo. I would love to see mythic+ stay the way it is, but only provide cosmetics, tittles, mounts. It would on the other side of the spectrem give more meaning.

If people keep advocating this system, their will come a day when raids will become ;RAID+ and blizzard will just make raids seasonal, lets PLEASE stop this nonsense.

Agree on the raid part ashwell, MOP version was tons better then it is now. LFR shouldn't eliminate entire mechanics or make them meaningless. Perhaps through in-game tutorials that would only apply in LFR people should have an easyer time learning how actual fights work or something, (this would also not affect world 1st races, since LFR always come 2-3 weeks later ) but it would help bridging people together in the knowledge department.

[Mardux]

Eh... this is the argument people use in favor of templates for raiding. (Give everybody the same amount of power and let actual ingenuity and performance be the determining factor in encounter difficulty, instead of just gear.) As a former Mythic raider, I agree with the first part of what you said but the thing which kept me coming back (even during long content droughts) was always gear. It wasn't only the destination which mattered.

You're arguing against points that werent made. Why?

- - - Updated - - -

Personally mythic + in its current form is more damaging then its doing anything right, people that love seasonal type of gameplay will love it.

But from a gearing progression perspective.

U start doing mythic+. You gear up( lets say 100 ilvl) then you can finnaly do raids ( drops 110 ). Then when the next patch drops, the mythic+ rewards are suddenly 130. And the raid remains the same. Its super disturbing, but well i have played it since 2006, and ever since legion, the game has lost its mojo on me atleast. But to each their own.

I would be a big fan if mythic+ would be only cosmetics, mounts, tittles and such. Rather then gear. But well. Mythic + would then feel like it has a meaning rather then the shell of gameplay it has become.

Its "super disturbing" that there's a system in place to allow players to continue with character progression after finishing content in the current tier?