I thought we left the mindset that raiding is better than everything else back in WoD

[Ealyssa]

Not everyone likes to raid all the time... why don't raiders (and apparently the dev team) see that?

So spaming MM+ wihout any weekly limit should reward more than raiding ? WTF ?
Shadowland is coming back with some sense on gearing.
Spamable content should reward lower gear that the locked one, that's play obvious... Why don't dungoneers see that ?

[ymirsson]

So, WoW was run for a long time (starting with vanilla WoW) by hardcore dudes, some of them coming from Everquest (Furore and Tigole, just to name those two).

These people design the game around what appeals to them, namely raiding, sinking huge sums of money (and designer time) into the said content at the expense of all other forms of content. These people are colloquially referred to as 'neckbeards' (I didn't coin that term

Err, no, maybe look up the term.

[Baconeggcheese]

This was never the "mindset" in WoD, not sure why the people who perpetuated that notion refuse to see that.

The only difference between WoD and the xpacs before it was that WoD took the entire outdoor reward structure that normally was allocated to dailies and reputations and instead funneled it all through the garrison mission table at a time when idle games were trending and blizzard was trying to ride that train.

Blizzard just got done with MoP where people complained about the amount of dailies... but instead of learning and addressing the specific issues they just made a bad decision of going all in on an idle game not realizing how many players rely on dailies for the bulk of their play time.

There was no conspiracy to force everyone to raid there, they just made a bad decision on dailies and then cut a ton of content.

[Kehego]

even if it was pointles as he said, WHAT ON EARTH would it have to do with me saying doing +15 first week is not something so easy most players would call it "joke"?!
bcs thats what my previous comment he reacted to was about... he was so off topic when reacting he should run for US president...

my fuckup about the date though, didnt check on rio so i though they cleared it week later... although 7days for video editing seems like a lot

I was talking about the itemlevel chest cap, which was a joke
+15 was the cap in legion, not bfa, so completing a 15 first week bfa was pointless as far as gearing went.

bringing up anything over itemlevel reward cap in an argument relating to gear is pointless.

[Baneto]

NO. And how on Earth did you jump to that conclusion? O_o


You should have started with that sentence, I would be happy to oblige

So, WoW was run for a long time (starting with vanilla WoW) by hardcore dudes, some of them coming from Everquest (Furore and Tigole, just to name those two).

These people design the game around what appeals to them, namely raiding, sinking huge sums of money (and designer time) into the said content at the expense of all other forms of content. These people are colloquially referred to as 'neckbeards' (I didn't coin that term

Now, sometimes, these guys are put back in check by the Accounting / Financial control department when they do something particularly stupid. For instance, when they pushed the raid logic to the extreme and designed the Shamanwell Plateau, which was only seen by like 2% of players while being a full blown raid tier (assets-wise), that level of retardation became apparent and we got LK where the raids were a lot more accessible. After that, we got LFR because it was no longer defensible to sink such huge amounts of money into content seen by <10% of the playerbase.

So, that contradiction went on and on in the game for the past 10+ years. Now, where are we at the end of BFA? We don't have the sub fligures because Blizzard no longer gives them, but from the MAUs alone we can see that BFA was at best stagnating. And more likely, going down.

Now, in this situation, what a rational person would do? He or she would think along the lines of "hmmm... what type of content brings the most players to the game and what do these players need? Well, they need a story, open-world content, dungeons, perhaps some easy raids. So, let's focus on that type of content"?

On the other hand, what does Ion do? "Hurrr, let's focus back on raiding again! I mean, that went so well in Lollords of Draenor, right? Sure it will work this time". I'm exaggerating a bit, of course, but that's the main idea.

So, this has nothing to do with "anyone who raids is a neckbeards". There are all kinds of raiders, good people, normal people, toxic people, you name it. But this people do not have the power to decide how the game should be designed. Unlike the ones running the show at Blizzard HQ.

Allright, while that is a good theory and all, there will allways be content for the casual player to delve into just like there will be for the end-game raider.
The most difficult raids have co-existed alongside the LFR-modes since Cataclysm now, so I dont really see what the OP is rambling about here.

[Kyphael]

One-3 pet per person or one person needing 10+ pets to beat a single boss?

One player with 10+ pets against a Legendary pet boss sounds awesome, with emphasis on pets that cap swap out and heal other pets/self heal, some pets that do damage, and every 3 rounds having to swap in a pet that can absorb a large ability that would otherwise be a 1 shot. Or dodge with Flight or Dive.

[Tesshin83]

What we need is raid+

Affixes from Mythic+ apply to raid as well. The format is 10 man with every 3 bosses rewarding a chest for clearing it in a set time. You receive a key for each wing that you clear in time.

No no no never. Setting a timer in mythic dungeons made people play it on full diablo mode where mindless aoe was the answer to everything.

At least we have raiding at the moment where there is actually some thought process going into it.

They should remove the timer from mythic+

[Rubim]

No no no never. Setting a timer in mythic dungeons made people play it on full diablo mode where mindless aoe was the answer to everything.

At least we have raiding at the moment where there is actually some thought process going into it.

They should remove the timer from mythic+

You're assuming some weird stuff.

There's thought process on every pull on M+.

Can we pull this pack with other stuff?
What's the affix this week?
Do we have enough interrupts for the next pull? How many can we pull?

I mean, did you actually did any M+ Past 15? Even so, at this point in the game you can obvious do mega pulls on keys below +20.

[Devilyaki]

Oh I know, I was repeating that term because it was used in reference to raiding.

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It kind of does. WQ gear is different from dungeon/M+ gear, which is different than PvP gear which is different than raiding gear. But I know when you you meant.

Ya it is different but not exclusive. Can only be used for where you got it. Tho the only overlap would be use in open world.

[Alvito]

I think Raid or die would be if M+ was suddenly removed and those M+ tournaments disappeared at the blink of an eye.

It wont be in a blink of an eye, but the amount of people running them long term and the popularity of them if they are a worse or worthless form of gear up will kill them off. I do expect in a patch they will bump things up because 1 piece of loot at the end of a run that is also lower item level than heroic raiding isn't going to cut it for most.

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No no no never. Setting a timer in mythic dungeons made people play it on full diablo mode where mindless aoe was the answer to everything.

At least we have raiding at the moment where there is actually some thought process going into it.

They should remove the timer from mythic+

There is far more thought put into higher end mythic plus than there is into raiding. Raiding fights and trash are scripted. Mythic plus changes week to week and is far less forgiving since you have less people if somebody messes up it can be a huge issue. Trash is the best example it is a major part of mythic plus, it is a non factor and just an annoyance in most cases in a raid. Gear and character builds being stuck in place also changes how you run a mythic plus, in raids you flip flop back and forth as desired. Having said that I think the idea of raid + is beyond silly and the only person I have ever seen want this before doesn't do mythic plus and has a zero responsibility role in the raid they just want to be carried in new content.

[Tesshin20]

Obviously, you're not that good at it if it takes you almost half a year to gear up.

Has nothing to do with good or bad as it affects everyone regardless of their skill level. RNG gods don't pick their favorites.

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You're assuming some weird stuff.

There's thought process on every pull on M+.

Can we pull this pack with other stuff?
What's the affix this week?
Do we have enough interrupts for the next pull? How many can we pull?

I mean, did you actually did any M+ Past 15? Even so, at this point in the game you can obvious do mega pulls on keys below +20.

Well 90% of the times I do play with pugs for a +12 or +15, the thought process is "How can we deal with this pack or skip it without doing any actual mechanics." But I take the point that on higher levels, more thought go into it. I was generalizing for sure.

Past 15? No, rarely.

[orsraunia]

Why not have multiple paths to gearing, rather than "Raiding has to be the best!"? If you like to Raid, then Raid. If you prefer to do M+, do that. Wjy does one need to automatically have the best rewards?

Let me start by saying that I don't agree with how Bliz is going about addressing things. Still, let me express some thoughts that will maybe help to put the whole thing into the right perspective.

Raids are not spammable because there's a lockout. On the other hand, M+ are spammable. So if they reward mythic ilvl gear or even close to that, dedicated players will get geared quite fast and then raiding normal and heroic raids gets trivialized. Even mythic gets a lot easier, close to being trivialized for skilled/dedicated raid groups, since outgearing content makes it a lot easier in like 95% of cases. And I guess they are balancing mythic raids around having heroic raid ilvl gear or something very close to this. So, if you can get close to mythic ilvl gear from M+, mythic raiding gets considerably easier.

Did bliz discover this just now? No. They knew this and it was intended, in order for less skilled/dedicated raid groups to have a better chance of progressing into mythic raids over time, by improving their gear outside mythic raids (aka in M+). During older content, like TBC before Sunwell patch that added a badge vendor, there was no real way to improve your gear outside of raid instances. So, some less skilled/dedicated/knowledgeable guilds, call them what you will, could very easily hit a "wall", like get stuck on a boss for weeks upon weeks. That was totally disheartening and guilds could break apart, people stop playing, etc.

That seemed bad to bliz and they introduced some mechanics to help those guilds survive. Mechanics to give them power over time, in order to cope better with that boss that kept wiping them. But they over-did it and gear became too accessible and that trivialized enough content and generally hurt the game. It's classic bliz, over nerfing or over buffing things. Usually having nice ideas, but implementing them so badly, they end up being unfun. It's very hard for them to find the right balance in a lot of things, probably because it's an inherently difficult thing to do, especially in such a game with so many interconnected systems. Still, they should had done better imo, speaking in general. Like island expeditions in BfA. I mean, what was that crap? In theory it sounded interesting, but the implementation was so lackluster, it ended up being totally unoriginal and unfun. A waste of development time.

So, now, they understand that this whole thing (loot being too accessible) was bad for PvE and they want to limit it. And in order to do that, they needed a more clear and more linear gearing progression path. They also want to gate mythic level loot upgrades behind weekly chest, like they do with almost everything power related (once per week...). It's not necessarily bad, because spammable content that gives player power can lead to burning out and quitting. Like it surely happened with artifact power, etc. Still, the thing is how you implement the said gating. If you implement it in a way that it undervalues the rewards of that content by a lot, then most people will just stop doing it and then you end up spending development time in something that people don't spend time enjoying and thus something that ultimately doesn't help much with player retention. Like dungeons in expansions that didn't have M+...

So, M+ giving slightly worse gear then heroic means that one has to run heroic raids to get the required gear for running mythics. Alternatively, an alt or a returning raider can spam M+ and get into mythic raiding relatively fast, provided that the rest of the raid group is decent. And ofc, M+ weekly cache etc works like a progressive buff to help raid groups overcome some bosses they have problems with and thus progress into mythic raiding and remain involved. Like the progressive buff they introduced to IC in WotLK. It's an "if you don't totally suck, you'll kill every boss, but it will take you longer" kind of thing.

I know some people were viewing M+ as an alternative to raiding, an alternative path to equal level of gear, which is fine with me. It's not fine with bliz though, not when they believe that it hurts their main thing, which is raiding, and ultimately hurts player retention. So, no, I don't think that raiding has ever been dropped by bliz as the main thing in WoW. They are still balancing everything with PvE raiding in mind and if they feel that something else (PvP, M+, etc.) stands in the way, they'll "sacrifice" it in the altar of PvE raiding. Ofc this is not a complete analysis, I am just describing the main reason behind the M+ loot change, at least according to my own understanding and experience with the game.

No no no never. Setting a timer in mythic dungeons made people play it on full diablo mode where mindless aoe was the answer to everything.

At least we have raiding at the moment where there is actually some thought process going into it.

They should remove the timer from mythic+

Death counter instead of timer would be better BY FAR. They could leave the timer for cosmetic rewards or bragging rights and for tournaments and get done with it. 99% of players wouldn't have to care about it and it would had been way more fun imo.

[Aggrophobic]

Has nothing to do with good or bad as it affects everyone regardless of their skill level. RNG gods don't pick their favorites.

If you only do M+ then RNG will be a huge factor yes. After 20+ raids you'll be geared up though. Trading makes that one easy and you also get the very same random box the people that only do M+ gets on top of the huge amoun of gear raids already provide.

[VinceVega]

Not everyone likes to raid all the time... why don't raiders (and apparently the dev team) see that?

I do nto see how we left that behind? Mythic raid clear has always been the most difficult and most prestig worthy PvE endgame.

Mythic+ gave you something else to do, thats it. You can still get the same gear level as a mythic raider exlcuded the max. 2 pieces from the last bosses.

Mythic15 is laughable easy. and the 3 iLvl difference won't break anyones neck. But these 3 iLvls will make it that heroic raiding is not completly useless for gearing.
If you can farm the gear again in mythic+ the whole getting new gear feeling of heroic is dead, as you can get it in one day in mythic+

[Rubim]

Has nothing to do with good or bad as it affects everyone regardless of their skill level. RNG gods don't pick their favorites.

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Well 90% of the times I do play with pugs for a +12 or +15, the thought process is "How can we deal with this pack or skip it without doing any actual mechanics." But I take the point that on higher levels, more thought go into it. I was generalizing for sure.

Past 15? No, rarely.

There you go.

I think you described better, how much can we skip the mechanics of this pull and how big can we pull before we can't do that anymore. That's the thought process of a +20 and up.

Also, the timer is there to punish deaths. Cause if there's no timer, you can eventually do most pulls/bosses with lust.