Quote Originally Posted by cozzri View Post
I personally had more drive to do those hard encounters when presented in such a way, as opposed to doing everything on LFR, then more of the same on normal raid, more of the same on mythic.
I think the takeaway there should primarily be that you need to think about the motivation/incentives. If you're someone who raids mythic, why are you going into LFR or normal in the first place? And if it's for disproportionately powerful rewards like shards/tier bonuses/trinkets etc. then that's where the problem lies, not with the nature of tiered difficulty.

Ideally you want only very specific forms of overlap: 1. a way to let people who want to progress "level up" into higher tiers of difficulty in a reasonable manner; 2. a way to have people from higher tiers want to help out people at lower tiers. And truth be told, I think they're not doing poorly in that respect. The Domination Shards are, perhaps, a bit of a step in the wrong direction; but overall I've definitely not felt like I even WANT to do lower difficulty raids in a long time, which is probably a good thing.

If you compress everything back into what it used to be, that's great for people who are in the middle of the field - they get minimal change, and a lot of help. But it sucks both for people who felt overchallenged AND for the people who were actively seeking out challenges. Even heroic raids barely hold any interest for me, for example, because they're just too simplistic. Bosses like Sylvanas are an exception, but the rest of it feels like a chore not like enjoyment; whereas on mythic, even the early bosses still feel satisfyingly challenging.

It's important to be empathetic about the perspective on things. Taking away difficulty from people who enjoy challenges is not a good solution; not the least because in many cases it won't just make them go "aw shucks" and go back to being heroic-level players, it'll instead make them quit and play something else entirely.