KSM is too easy.

[jeezusisacasual]

The whole point of this thread is that KSM is too easy and rewards Mythic Raid level gear in the GV. On its own, it rewards Heroic End-boss gear. In S3, you could upgrade your gear to 272 using Valour and your M+ rating. You know who drops 272 gear? Heroic Jailer. It is much, much harder to kill Heroic Jailer than it is to get KSM. Period.

But raiding is about the friendships and challenges you overcame to feel good upon with memories for the future right? Or is it that you only do it because it makes you stronger? Because i tend to play LoL or Dota2 for a good time not to become the next worlds champion ya know. When you only look at the reward instead of the road you travel to get there you are not really playing for the fun of it all and is the very reason why i stopped raiding mythic.

Have an alternative to raiding does not diminish raiding on face value it just gives people the opportunity to try something else and if they like it more then it shows you exactly what is wrong with raiding in the first place. If the new KSM is to get +20s then i will get those and then stop the moment i get them and feel just as accomplished as i did when i would get a cutting edge achievement because again i do not chase gear nor do i chase logs or server ranking or anything of the sort. When i would clear the raid once on mythic i stopped raiding also for those same reasons.

[Relapses]

But raiding is about the friendships and challenges you overcame to feel good upon with memories for the future right? Or is it that you only do it because it makes you stronger? Because i tend to play LoL or Dota2 for a good time not to become the next worlds champion ya know. When you only look at the reward instead of the road you travel to get there you are not really playing for the fun of it all and is the very reason why i stopped raiding mythic.

Have an alternative to raiding does not diminish raiding on face value it just gives people the opportunity to try something else and if they like it more then it shows you exactly what is wrong with raiding in the first place. If the new KSM is to get +20s then i will get those and then stop the moment i get them and feel just as accomplished as i did when i would get a cutting edge achievement because again i do not chase gear nor do i chase logs or server ranking or anything of the sort. When i would clear the raid once on mythic i stopped raiding also for those same reasons.

I believe KSM will remain at the +15 level. It's just to get the best rewards you'll need to push to +20s.

[jeezusisacasual]

But...unfortunately, it is. Ever since OG vanilla, the hardest part was finding enough consistent players to fill your roster. Another super hard boss that has decimated countless guilds is the summer holidays. Activity in WoW always drops during the summer hols. The guilds that I have been a part of for multiple years are the ones that DIDNT fold into themselves during the summer holidays, and the ones that could keep a healthy roster + bench, so as to not burn out their raiders. ALL of that, is much, much harder than the in-game skills required to clear the content. 18 years of raiding have shown me that, if you are a dedicated player, who shows up to raids, does his/her research, and puts effort in your performance, you are good enough to clear the content, gameplay-skillwise. It's the out-of-game skills that are hard to find. And ALL of THIS that I just mentioned isn't even an issue when building a 5-man M+ squad.

so 3 to 5 people working against the roster boss means everyone else gets more rewards?

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I believe KSM will remain at the +15 level. It's just to get the best rewards you'll need to push to +20s.

Then i stop at 15s but again i am likely not the target audience for MMO's anymore but if it is that saves me a week or 2 at worst.

[tomten]

The whole point of this thread is that KSM is too easy and rewards Mythic Raid level gear in the GV. On its own, it rewards Heroic End-boss gear. In S3, you could upgrade your gear to 272 using Valour and your M+ rating. You know who drops 272 gear? Heroic Jailer. It is much, much harder to kill Heroic Jailer than it is to get KSM. Period.

Not really no? Have capable people and jailer is a breeze, specially now with all the nerfs, its a joke, far harder getting KSM than pugging a single boss, which there is plenty off, every single day.. Just as +15 is a breeze with competent people.
You have really have no idea about the community, tuning or difficulty, you have your own very limited anecdotal story to tell, which im sorry, doesn't mean anything.

[Mojo03]

No one of high value cares about ilvl discrepancies.

ilvl just gets you the ticket to do the harder content and keeps the hamster wheel spinning.

It’s what content you can prove you can beat that matters.

Mythic raiding will always have the highest prestige.

This is a non issue.

[Mardux]

As someone who is both a raid leader and an M+ tank who got KSM in all 4 Shadowlands seasons, I can safely say that....

KSM is literally a joke. I've been clearing 15's on the day of the patch, with my squad we can get KSM in 2-3 weeks if we don't slack. S4 KSM took me 4 weeks cause I slacked with my Tyrannicals on week 2, meaning I needed to wait till week 4 to get Tyrannical clears again. KSM is easily attainable by any stable organized 5-man group that uses voice comms and min-maxes ever so slightly (correct Covenant, spec, conduits, legendaries, legendary combo later on etc). Now, let's contrast this with my Heroic Raiding guild....

Where it took us forever to clear Heroic Sepulcher. We literally got Ahead of the Curve like 2 weeks before it was removed. Why? Attendance and performance issues. On a good night we'll have 15 sign ups. 5 of those people are sub-par when it comes to performance, not even having the skills/knowledge to farm 15s on week 1 like I do with my main squad. I'm forced to take them though, because scaling is fucked up and extra bodies in raids are always welcome (more CD's, more people to do mechanics etc). If I had my M+ squad x4, then Heroic would be cleared on 1st reset and we'd be starting Mythic progress by week 2. Alas, that is not the case. Out of 15 Heroic raiders who consistently show up and enjoy raiding, I can safely say ~8 of them are Mythic raiding material.

That being said, we did get 1 night in Season 4 where we had 18 sign ups. I held a vote, the vote passed, we pugged 2 people and walked into Mythic Fated Castle Nathria. We managed to kill 2 bosses and got the Hungering Destroyer to 2%. Sure, some carrying was done in terms of DPS, but in terms of tactics and mechanics my raiders were stellar.

Would you look at that. The same group that easily farms 15s on week 1 so as to not fall behind on GV progress managed to muster 20 people ONCE (with 2 PUGs) in ~6 months of raiding. When we did muster those numbers, we were successful. But gathering those numbers was always the hard part, and always will be. To compare organized Mythic raiding to +15's is a farce. If you wanna compare Mythic raids to some M+ level, it's easily 20's+, maybe even 22s-25s.

Also, people are bound to ask, so here's my Armory link. Knock yourselves out.

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-gb/ch...rhood/dalinos/

If you're clearing 15s on day 1, you have no excuse for not having KSM on day 8. Its also kind of funny that you claim to have been clearing 15s day of patch, and then link a toon that cleared exactly zero 15s on day of patch. lol

[lllll]

That's very interesting. How would you compare it to 15s at various points through shadowlands? (ie have they tuned the dungeons easier baseline, or are you normally pushing 25s )

From a strictly pugging perspective as a healer, in my opinion, season 1 of shadowlands has been the hardest season we've ever had, I only did KSM in season 1 and then quit for the season because of how awful prideful was. It would be easier than season 1 of SL but harder than the other seasons based on what testing I did. But we've only had 2 dungeons and the affix is going to go through several iterations before it's live, no idea how hard or easy the other dungeons will be.

[Aresk]

do we actualy have any data suggesting smaller part of playerbase raids than before m+? hell, i would say thanks to m+ working as kind of "nerf" more people can raid than before...

We have some data on that. Below are the Ahead of the Curve percentages (with respect to WoWHead profiles) for the last raid tier of all expansions since WoD (when we got the current raid model):

• WoD: 24%
• Legion: 27%
• BfA: 36%
• Shadowlands (going with S3 since S4 isn't done): 21%

You can check out all the tiers here, if you want. Lowest was tied for Blackhand's Crucible and Uu'nat, Harbinger of the Void at 8%, and highest was N'zoth the Corruptor at 36%. It usually falls in the 15-20% range, with end of expansion bosses getting higher representation (I suspect due to returning players buying carries before the next expansion launches, but that's pure speculation on my part).

[Huzzaa]

I agree with OP.

Being special is part of the charm.
If everyone is, nobody is.

[Bigbazz]

I agree with OP.

Being special is part of the charm.
If everyone is, nobody is.

To some extent this is a thing, but KSM is something the majority of players don't have. KSM does take quite a bit of skill, the problem is people have massively skewed perception of skill, comparing themselves to the elite best players as if the bar should be the top elite. People who can do KSM without getting boosted are still among the best players in the game, despite them not fitting into the top elite level.

The thing is if you're really skilled at anything, feats that are even completely out of reach for many people might be easy for you, which means you seek a higher difficulty. There are people complaining the re-introduced mage tower was really just unreasonably hard, while I completed 3 of them with less than 10 attempts combined. Why? Because I already did them in Legion, they were easy for me because I already knew what I was doing.

KSM difficulty is fine, if anything too much focus on absolute elite level content (like Mythic raids particularly in the first weeks/months after launch) is a problem with the game. Classic shows you don't need super hard achievements or difficult content for good players to be able to stand out. Award people for being good at the game, not for being the best in the world, the game will retain more players.

[AlmightyGerkin]

From a strictly pugging perspective as a healer, in my opinion, season 1 of shadowlands has been the hardest season we've ever had, I only did KSM in season 1 and then quit for the season because of how awful prideful was.

Feel your pain. Hated doing some M+ cause of how some bosses were tied to the damn prideful buff.

[Temp name]

I agree with OP.

Being special is part of the charm.
If everyone is, nobody is.

So instead of getting KSM, get all 20s, or all 25s.

That way you can feel special for getting a bigger number than the people only doing 15s

[Loveliest]

We have some data on that. Below are the Ahead of the Curve percentages (with respect to WoWHead profiles) for the last raid tier of all expansions since WoD (when we got the current raid model):

• WoD: 24%
• Legion: 27%
• BfA: 36%
• Shadowlands (going with S3 since S4 isn't done): 21%

You can check out all the tiers here, if you want. Lowest was tied for Blackhand's Crucible and Uu'nat, Harbinger of the Void at 8%, and highest was N'zoth the Corruptor at 36%. It usually falls in the 15-20% range, with end of expansion bosses getting higher representation (I suspect due to returning players buying carries before the next expansion launches, but that's pure speculation on my part).

Yeah but SL raids were incredibly unscaled for smaller groups. Half my friend list either stopped raiding or stopped playing. It's a raiding design flaw, not an M+ design advantage.

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Not really no? Have capable people and jailer is a breeze, specially now with all the nerfs, its a joke, far harder getting KSM than pugging a single boss, which there is plenty off, every single day.. Just as +15 is a breeze with competent people.
You have really have no idea about the community, tuning or difficulty, you have your own very limited anecdotal story to tell, which im sorry, doesn't mean anything.

You are being inconsistent. If you have good group and the number of people required, both are a "joke". If you don't and have to pug, it's down to luck. Before nerfs, hc jailer was very poorly scaled for my 10-12 people guild and it was quite hard (though tbh getting past Rygelon before nerfs was impossible with 10 people, so hc jailer was out of the question) but I could easily do 20s with people from the same pool. So everyone's evidence is situational. There is no general truth.