Are raids becoming less popular?

[compas11]

Mythic+ just seems way better for the average person to gear up and get bis gear in no time. Each time you go up in difficulty, you get a high ilvl reward in the vault and you also get gear from mythic+ that can be upgraded to max level using valor, so your 390 gear becomes 400+.

Raid gear you can't upgrade, you wipe 2-3 hours on the same boss and in the end you get no loot.

[Accendor]

Yes, that is correct. If you compare the difficulty of the content, mythic raid rewards are way undertuned.

[czarek]

Actually HC raid is quite easy and its over 400ilvl. M+ are good but im not sure its better. Personally ive geared up over 410ilvl throu HC raid better and much faster than via M+ this season :P And tbh. Just do what you enjoy most Im raiding because ive get little bored to grind 5th season of M+ in a row. Just back to raiding and have fun. The problem is mythic raid diff. They limited it badly. Pugs were just around proper server. Now they are Xrealm but with lockout. This is the biggest nonsense ive ever seen. Except this raiding is very popular lol. How you assume they are not ? If you dont participate in. This doesnt mean the whole world is same as you

[Stickiler]

Mythic+ just seems way better for the average person to gear up and get bis gear in no time. Each time you go up in difficulty, you get a high ilvl reward in the vault and you also get gear from mythic+ that can be upgraded to max level using valor, so your 390 gear becomes 400+.

Raid gear you can't upgrade, you wipe 2-3 hours on the same boss and in the end you get no loot.

Raids have never been popular. They introduced LFR to justify continuing to spend money on making cool raids because such a small percentage of the population does them.

[Darsithis]

They were never popular, which is why LFR was introduced. For myself, I’ve been raiding since I started playing the game in 2010, and have only missed a few tiers. Still enjoy it and don’t like M+ very much at all.

[dacoolist]

+20 in my opinion is on par with the entry level mythic bosses that give the same loot out of the vault as those first 3-4 bosses. The bosses that give the extra ilvl - sure those are probably like timing 25s but just saying: tonsss of people were getting insane op 421 raid trinkets and full tier before m+ 20s were done by those same people AND you cant get the OP trinkets out of m+ anyway lol.. I had one tier piece before the catalyst released. Tons thats not for us filthy M+’ers except a mmo-c.com post at the tail end of the season thinking burial/cos 20s are even close to the rest of the 20s before nerf etc

[Ludek]

My guild is pretty much dead in terms of raiding since Shadowlands began.
We have active players, and we even raid sometimes (we clear tier on HC once, maybe twice in the end of season period and are done with it), but just the mode itself is not working good for bunch of middle aged people with work, real life etc.

It's way easier to organize quick M+ group and do 2-3 dungeons, than have at least 10 people sit for X hour straight and whack bosses - rewards have nothing to do with it, just not being able to reliably sync the schedules of everyone is pain that late in life.

[Biomega]

My guild is pretty much dead in terms of raiding since Shadowlands began.
We have active players, and we even raid sometimes (we clear tier on HC once, maybe twice in the end of season period and are done with it), but just the mode itself is not working good for bunch of middle aged people with work, real life etc.

It's way easier to organize quick M+ group and do 2-3 dungeons, than have at least 10 people sit for X hour straight and whack bosses - rewards have nothing to do with it, just not being able to reliably sync the schedules of everyone is pain that late in life.

That's probably the biggest factor, honestly.

Bite-sized content is where it's at. Anything that takes more than 1 hour at a stretch is in deep trouble - anything that takes actual SCHEDULING on top of that, is an anachronism.

That's just how gaming works today. And it's reflected in the way a lot of people want to play.

Not to say that raids are dead or anything, far from it. But the heyday of the big WoW raid is over. They still appear to be making good ones, and raiding is at least in some way at the core of WoW's identity, but I would not be surprised if the numbers show that less and less people actually want to do them the way we used to - meet for a couple of hours on a fixed few times a week, and all that. That's just such a minority of gamers now.

[McNeil]

In Classic its still very popular. In retail its just not fun doing due to an overload of mechanics and it isn’t rewarding enough.

[enigma77]

In Classic its still very popular. In retail its just not fun doing due to an overload of mechanics and it isn’t rewarding enough.

This

Raiding would be super duper popular if it weren't so obnoxiously difficult

[Apatrida]

In Classic its still very popular. In retail its just not fun doing due to an overload of mechanics and it isn’t rewarding enough.

Exactly! 8 pages of cern lab complexity skills and what if moves. Also really swirlies can go f themselves now. I want to stand still for 5 secs gd

[erifwodahs]

It's way easier to organize quick M+ group and do 2-3 dungeons, than have at least 10 people sit for X hour straight and whack bosses - rewards have nothing to do with it, just not being able to reliably sync the schedules of everyone is pain that late in life.

This. If we could do single bosses with no ID, raiding might be more popular, but now you have to Schedule 19 other people, you can't choose which boss you do and on top of that, you get saved if you kill any bosses and it becomes insanely hard to get any pugs to join raid with lets say 2 bosses down. I would be down for some 1hr sessions to join some groups trying to down some boss

[Twdft]

Mythic+ just seems way better for the average person to gear up and get bis gear in no time. Each time you go up in difficulty, you get a high ilvl reward in the vault and you also get gear from mythic+ that can be upgraded to max level using valor, so your 390 gear becomes 400+.

Raid gear you can't upgrade, you wipe 2-3 hours on the same boss and in the end you get no loot.

It takes 3 months with perfect luck to get M+ bis gear.

+20s are easier than the last two bosses of the raid which drop 424, so yeah the "average" player will get better gear from M+ than from raids, but that was always the case. The best players still get better gear faster in raids.

[Dalinos]

Honestly, after 19 years of raiding in this game, the roster and the summer holiday raid bosses have always been the strongest. Roster boss especially is a bitch. Oh, your Spriest who hasnt missed a raid since castle nathria got a job promotion? bye bye to one of your best DPSers. Your DK's mum got sick & requires help? Bye bye DK. Your Lizard got family visiting from abroad for 3 weeks? Bye bye Lizard. One of our rogues had his Bday party, got himself in a drinking marathon, went missing from Saturday night till Monday night, showed up to work on the Tuesday, didnt show up to raid on the Sunday. Fuck me, it's tiring trying to keep a roster solid.

Screw the gear and the difficulty. The first and hardest part is gathering the damn 20 people. On HC it was fine, we could raid with 12, 14, 16, whatever, depending on who showed up. But Mythic? Half the time the raid gets cancelled cause we got 16 signups instead of 20 and pugging 4 people is a nightmare.

[Archy]

Yes, that is correct. If you compare the difficulty of the content, mythic raid rewards are way undertuned.

Upping the diffuclty in M+ would be the solution here (as in higher keys required for gear), not buffing raid rewards. Also items like grieftorch, icon, neltharax, broodkeeper's promise, etc are more than enough to keep people raiding.

I think people just don't want to. Most of the difficulty in raiding comes to scheduling issues. Also if you're a guild who clears heroic and likes to try mythic you're even getting more roadblocks. Having exactly 20 players is a huge issue for most guilds. Another thing is that usually there are a few weaker links in the guild. People you like to play with, but hold the raid back. Benching them doesn't feel all that good and doing 2 raid ID's a week (main and alt) isn't really practical for most players.

Now let's compare that to M+. You can play whenever you want. Finding 1 or 2 (or even 4) additional players isn't usually a big problem. It's done in 30-40min (or should be). If you want to play with your "weaker" friends you totally can and can get even stuff out of it. Maybe a run with your main to fill your vault or a run with an alt to spice things up.

Edit: Also with 10.1 you can update your raid gear the same way as you upgrade your M+ gear.

[hzjf]

they should have never scrapped 10man raiding

[Ktperry]

Raiding would be super duper popular if it weren't so obnoxiously difficult

It's way easier to organize quick M+ group and do 2-3 dungeons, than have at least 10 people sit for X hour straight and whack bosses - rewards have nothing to do with it, just not being able to reliably sync the schedules of everyone is pain that late in life.

Both of this quotes are spot on.

[D3athsting]

This

Raiding would be super duper popular if it weren't so obnoxiously difficult

Rtwf, all esports shit and dbm ruined the game

As someone who works is a big no no getting back home and sitting to your pc just to wipe 50 times at a mythic boss, that can be more frustrating than rl stuff

[Danuel]

Yes, that is correct. If you compare the difficulty of the content, mythic raid rewards are way undertuned.

This plus repeatable and brainless form of m+ content.

[Foolicious]

Actually HC raid is quite easy and its over 400ilvl. M+ are good but im not sure its better. Personally ive geared up over 410ilvl throu HC raid better and much faster than via M+ this season :P

Raids are definetly better to get gear early in the season and because of that more popular. As time goes by m+ becomes more popular because less players are willing to spend several hours in a raid for gear they already have.
It also gets really easy to outgear heroic raids with uncapped valor and fullgeared people handing you loot in a +20 left and right because they are already bis geared.
From experience its when valor is uncapped you can really feel a dropoff in raid participation. But i don't think thats necessarily bad. Most are just burnt out and want to chill if they still play at all till the new raid comes out.