no one does all 4 difficulties,the averege is 2,early on some mythic guilds maybe do normal,but not most,once mythic is on farm,many dont even bother with hc,personaly i just pugged hc if i needed something as guild stoped doing it
the only real bad thing about 4 difficulties is the scaling,every tier we go up imense in power because every version is 15 ilvls extra,personaly i wish they would just get combine hc and normal
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no1 is gearing up in lfr,its a waste of time lol,also why do lfr to see the bosses?just watch a youtube video,you do mythic because its the default challenge mode of the raid,its not even the same mecanicaly in many cases as lfr normal and hc
I probably have the unpopular opinion that there isn't enough avenues of progression in the game, and Blizz has actually taken away some of those over time. Let me explain...
While the OP seems to be focused on gear and raids, one is a motivation and the other is a vehicle for that motivation. However, to simplify things, let's boil this down to simple motivations, such that the goal of everyone is to have fun and enjoy the game. Everyone's source of enjoyment is different, and it can come down to clearing the game's most difficult content, having BiS gear, RPing, maxing out your achievements, soloing content that's not meant to be solo'd, speed clearing content, etc. Alright, so everyone has a different motivation, so what about the vehicles?
This where I feel Blizz has gone off the rails a bit with their vehicles, due various things such as the "everyone is a winner" mentality and other game design decisions. To cut to the chase, since the social aspects of WoW have been devolved to the point of the game being almost completely a single player adventure, it's fairly obvious that content like raids has a much smaller audience. Biggest response to trying to recruit for mythic raid is "Why would I want to mythic raid? I can just pug M+ and accomplish the same thing without time commitments." Now this isn't me saying that M+ is bad in itself, however Blizz has made M+ not a complimentary or alternate end-game path to raiding, they've made it replace raiding for most people. And this all comes down to goals and motivations of what people want out of the game.
One place where M+ has created a new end game goal for people is people competing for high key completion and R.io score competitions/goals. That aspect is pretty nice, however the gearing aspect of the system probably isn't in a good spot yet. One of the driving factors for raiding is the prestige factor, and gear (whether visually or power-wise) has historically been the biggest draw for many people. Not the only one, however, as there are people who like taking on support roles that come with clearing raids, such as forming/managing guilds, farming mats for the raid, etc. To boil this down to a simple statement to avoid myself typing a long post, the juice isn't worth the squeeze when it comes to raiding, and it's mostly due to how the rewards and benefits of alternate paths are structured and balanced, diminishing all the prestige and gear efforts that come from raiding.
To Blizz's credit, they are trying to rectify some of this, albeit slowly (can't blame them though, there will be growing pains as it's a reverse of years of WoW's philosophy. One example is the proposed M+ system for Shadowlands. Gone is the scaling loot from the end of runs, and there's a real obvious reason for this: it completely negates raiding for the vast majority of people, in terms of what they want out of the game. Even without the scaling loot, you'll still have people running to try to get that weekly chest, or compete for R.IO scores, or the achievement mounts, or various other player-imposed metrics to gauge themselves. Heck, some people run M+ just for the fun of min/maxing routes and setting a meta! You'll still get loot over time in a M+, but raiding will return to the main source of powerful loot in the game, as it probably should due to the increased difficulty of organizing and runing a raid and raiding guilds. This is all actually a good thing for the health of the game, although I guarantee some people (even some of my own guildies) will hate it.
I did mention Blizz took away one of my favorite goals in WoW, and that was many of the Server First achievements. My jam used to be min/maxing my leveling process, whether it was my actual character level or profession leveling. The first time they entered the game I didn't know they were in, but seeing that pop up I thought to myself, "Huh... bet I could do it better!" So every expansion after that, I got player/class Server Firsts on my realm, including a few profession ones at the same time. There was actually a community of people on my server that would compete for those, and we'd even organize or practice on the beta for when expansions went live. For MoP, I actually organized a 5man group to all get Server First for player max level, since everyone who dings max level w/i a minute of the first person gets the achievement, and while it was a dramatic experience for a few of the group members (I was laughing my butt off the entire time at how funny it was), we managed to accomplish 5 Server First achievements for our group. With the removal of almost all the Server First achievements, that community and I lost one of our favorite things to do in WoW, and sadly I'm probably the last player in that community of ours that still plays retail as that sort of activity (among others) was removed from the game, despite being a driving motivator for some players to actually play WoW.
What WoW needs more than anything is more paths of progression that don't all have the same goal objective, while forcing the community to actually need to be social. Even my bids for Server First tended to be a group effort, and forced me to know my server community and competition. Right now, the vast majority of the game allows people to not only avoid being social, but still 'win' at most things in the game. That's not what an MMORPG is supposed to be, and people inadvertently feel these negative effects and likely don't understand why they don't get a sense of fulfillment or accomplishment in WoW anymore.
“Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.”
“It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville
I get the impression you see this as a bad thing. Personally, I look forward to it. Hopefully raids will actually see some longevity beyond Mythic as loot becomes more scarce and isn't thrown at us like it's Diablo 3.
However, to my knowledge, raid loot isn't reducing, only M+ to bring it more inline with raids.
So don't do it. Simple solution.
Let's not go back to raid overloads just because that's how it's been.
Best advice is to just do what you enjoy doing.
To answer the question though, raiding feels meaningless because the reward system is messed up. M+ gifts 475 loot. You can achieve BiS gear outside of the raid for arguably much less pain and effort.
This, coupled with the fact that Mythic raids are literally 10x harder than heroic raids. Average guilds and early mythic boss guilds killed N'Zoth by week two of the patch, while proging now for over five months.
Paired with how easy it is to do a single 30m +15 dungeon... like, unless you REALLY enjoy raiding (like I do) it kinda is a waste.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
Remember "raid or die"? Well... now we're here.
While i agree it is too much... what do you want to get rid off?
If i have learned anything this last few weeks is that aparrantly many poeple play this game as a single player... and demand to be catered to for whatever reason in an MMO.
So LFR can't be kicked out. Normal.... that is truely useless.
So i would say kikc LFR make normal into LFR and so on. So you only have 3 difficulties.
LFR will be VERY hard but that is ok. You don't want to put ANY kind of time into it you don't deserve to clear the raid... which was supposed to be the hardest PvE activity.
Dungeons are fine i think. Norm, Hero and Mythic0 are basically dead and not used 1 month into the addon other than for leveling or weekly quests.
But you cannot disable LFR anymore. Poeple got it used it and got used to it. That would have a bigger backlash than if they would remove flying permanently.
Also: "there is a reason wotlk had XYZ" yes there is. But that is just one of MANY reasons. One of the is warcraft was newish and exiting. On the rise. Good looking and whatnot. It is not just that it was harder to do stuff in singleplayer.
I'm pretty sure the point of them having multiple progression levels is to minimize the emphasis on raids. Like I think their ideal situation would be that whatever the style you like to play there's some form of endgame progression for you. Solo/small group, group, large group, PVP, etc. there's a "path" you go towards.
To me that's a good thing. Allow overlap but have it so each major type of player has a "bucket" they go into so they can do meaningful content that they enjoy, rather than feel that they MUST do X or Y or Z in order to progress.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
Well it clearly serves a purpose, it gives an alternative/supplement to raiding. How does it damage the raiding community? And why should it take precedence?
Does anyone have numbers on how many do mythic+ and how many do mythic raiding? I am willing to bet the former is a larger segment of the population than the latter.
(Anecdotal evidence incoming) I have been in progression raiding guilds that lost players because they wanted to focus on m+. Honestly, I couldn’t blame them. Equal gear for much less effort and the ability to play on a very flexible schedule. The only appeal to raiding for them was raid sets and mounts, which can easily be purchased later by all the gold they can make from selling m+ runs.
That stated, I really believe they need to have pieces “turn off,” or be devalued under certain conditions. For example: raid gear maintains 400 ilvl in raids and world content but drops down 100 ilvls for m+ and PvP instance content. PvP gear has 400 ilvl in instance PvP and world content but drops 100 ilvl in raids and m+. M+ has 400 ilvl but drops 100 ilvls in raids and PvP. I can see the complaints from people who want to do all content, but I also see the benefit outweighing the bad as players who enjoy only 1 aspect don’t need to do all of them.
It's not a bad thing getting items from every source of what you play, but there should be more straight procedure. You do dungeons in order to compete in raids, not doing dungeons in order to dodge raiding like it is now. It is just my opinion, but you can use one to block out everything else, even with pvp you can get ready for raiding and that should not be the case.
You are aware that, without those dungeons, they would still "dodge" raiding by not playing the game at all, right?
For ages dungeons were just a stepping stone to raiding, which was the only PvE endgame. Nowadays we finally have World Content, Raids, Battlegrounds,Dungeons and whatever solo stuff Blizzard cooks up (Horrific Visions, Torghast, etc). Viable paths that reward according to their difficulty.
M+ is easily the highest participation endgame content in WoW. They stumbled into it almost by accident and it is now their golden goat. It even draws attention to the game because it allows streamers to keep pushing something long after the raid has been cleared.
Reducing the end of dungeon box to 1 plus the new weekly box formula should really fix everything. Makes heroic raiding worth doing again longer term and slows down gear acquisition while also minimizing RNG.
I'm not a fan of how it works today. There are very few raids, and little sense of progression.
I did very little raiding in Vanilla, ran a raid guild in BC, dabbled in raiding in Wrath, then raided with some guilds in MoP, WoD, Legion, and BfA (didn't like Cata long enough to get to raiding).
While gear was an element in early WoW, most of raiding was simply the challenge. Because of how classes worked, if I switched to a different toon but the same category (e.g. Ele Shaman to Surv Hunter), it was a slightly different experience even in the same raid. And once you completed one raid, you looked forward to the next one that was already available.
The key was that it wasn't just about the most current raid back then. In BC, you started with Karazhan even if you didn't start playing BC until 4 months in. Now, the only people that play the early raids of BfA are those that want to do it for the lawls or xmog gear.
And that is what I mean by little sense of progression. Gear should only be a component, not the sole reason for playing a game. There should be a sense of challenge that pervades the entire experience...not just for a few hours of a new raid, followed by mindless repetition set to a slider scale that sometimes add another pointless mechanic to dodge. There was far, *far* more content back then.
And I've seen raiding guilds suffer because some wanted to just raid. They fell behind because they weren't gearing in M+, and this caused the more progressed players to leave.
If raid progression is tuned around gear from M+. M+ is no longer optional for raiding.
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That's because it gives M raid level gear for content that is much easier than M raids.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"