It’s not worse quality. The weekly chest - which is the primary way to gear in M+ in BfA too - rewards the same ilevel as mythic raid, sans the last two bosses. Exactly like in BfA.
While technically it is less loot, because the dungeons do drop less, since that is not the primary way to gear from M+ anyway, it doesn’t really matter. And from the weekly chest, you will now have the option to choose from multiple items, with no duplicates within a single week, as long as you did 4 or more M+ runs, which ain’t that much. That will lead to faster gearing in SL, because you’ll have less chance of receiving a useless item. Especially at the start, it will be easier to choose an upgrade.
…and 3 ilevels won’t make a difference.
Thankfully, the vault will allow you to choose an item from multiple possibilities, and there won’t be duplicates! So the weekly vault will be a far more useful part of gearing than it is now.
With the removal of corruptions, azerite traits, and the DR on secondaries, the vault’s value is even bigger, because for the vast majority of cases, ilevel will be the biggest upgrade.
In BfA, yes. In Shadowlands? Nope, definitely not. Which is something people tend to forget when they cry about the m+ ilevel nerf: the vault will be a whole lot more useful than the weekly chest is now.
Lets do a bit of calculation! We have 14 gear slots in total, but will only really use 13, because one slot will be the legendary. So we have 13 slots of 210 gear. If we get 4 items from the vault that are useful, we’ll be at 214 average ilevel. Getting four good items when you can choose from at least 2 (assuming you do 4+ m+ runs a week, which ain’t much), when they won’t be duplicates within a single week, chances are, you will get 4 good items very soon. And if you do 10+ mythics, the pool will be even bigger.
Much faster than if the dungeon would drop 213 gear, and you only had a single random 226 from the vault.
Except, with the weekly vault, gear progression will be faster. The only thing the m+ changes slow down is people abusing M+ to get high enough ilevel, and be able to do split heroic raids and trade gear. They will no longer be able to do that, and that’s fine, split heroics were awful to begin with.
For everyone else, the new system is going to result in more upgrades than BfA, even after the loot and ilevel nerfs - because of the vault.
Some may prefer it for that reason, I prefer it over raids because due to my IRL commitments, I can’t commit to specific raid times. But even if I could, I still don’t like raiding, so there’s that too. I had my fair share of raiding a few expansions ago, that was enough, thank you very much. M+ is a whole lot more flexible, it has much more variety: a raid is the same every week, M+ isn’t, the affixes vary it up a bit.
Yep, but picking one from 2 or 3 items (where they are not going to be duplicates), will lead to faster gear progression, if we also keep in mind that secondary stats will have DRs, making ilevel the primary “stat” in many cases.
As it is now, when M+ gives same or higher ilevel than heroic raids, you can spam M+ to get any gear in any slot, and then in heroic raids, which you can’t spam, you’ll be able to trade gear to other chars. This is what split heroic raids were for.
If M+ drops below-heroic ilevel, that pretty much kills the entire reason for spit heroics, because you won’t be able to spam m+ to make your char be able to trade gear.
Many guilds ran split heroic raids prior to progressing further in M+, to get even more gear: log in on reset day, spam M+ during the day. By raid time, do split heroics, and then continue progressing in mythic. That was a ton of gear for mythic raiders, which did help progression.
Once you cleared mythic, it’s not important. But during progress, when you’re racing for world first, every bit of gear helps, thus split heroics - with armor stacks even! - were born. But if you can’t spam M+, split heroics become irrelevant.
And that is a good thing.
result will trigger the problem I’m exposing