I understand why Raid ID’s were a thing. It was a necessity to slow down gear progress and have players chances on items on a weekly cap. You could do only so much bosses which resulted in a certain “average player time to get X gs”. Since Mythic+ is a thing now and players already have unlimited access to GS400 Items in 5 man dungeons, why are 20 man raids still limited? Removing Raid ID would simply give the players a choice where they get their gear, either 5 man or 20 man. The way it is right now 5 man is much more of a gear source than 20 man.
Removing the Raid ID would not affect the average time to gear up much but would give players a greater choice where they could equipp themself. Atleast if you remove it up to Heroic and maybe keep the mythic ID.
Now what’s the problem with that? Well, there’s a pretty big one, which doesn’t really matter in the context of lower tier raiding, but does matter higher up: Selling instances.
In Mythic there is one lockout, and thus each boss exists in one version inside that ID. If yuou were to trade or sell or otherwise give away that instance, other raid groups can kill your bosses, thus effectively preventing you from doing them yourselves.
Now this sounds massively inconvenient, and it is, which is why Heroic and Normal doesn’t have it, but when we’re dealing with guilds that are competing with each other for getting the most kills possible in the shortest amount of time, the absolute worst thing that could happen is if raiders felt compelled to purchase lockouts from each other in order to skip certain bosses because it was so easy since it’s now possible to sell a lockout and then complete the lockout yourselves while simultaneously having someone else also complete that same lockout.
If you did this, a huge market would spring up about selling Mythic lockouts. This has serious implications for the progressive nature and structure of Mythic raiding.
As for the idea of not having any lockouts at all and just being able to farm it indefinitely - I mean that’s obviously broken to the point where it’s stupid. Can you imagine of we had a world first race that involved Method farming Faction Champions 20 times with the same character to get the best weapons, and then bought an instance from someone else and then killed Jaina before those who sold the lockout could kill her, even though they killed the 7 bosses in between the first and the last that Method didn’t? That would just be absolutely terrible.
The issue here is more with titanforging and mythic+ needing to stay relevant than it is with raid lockouts existing.
Artifact power and now azerite power already add to this issue. The more you play, the more powerful you get compared to those who didn’t. Same applies to gear; the more you grind (M+ in this case), the higher the chance you outgear the content before someone who didn’t does.
It’s giving me vibes of vanilla/TBC raiding, where you needed to grind way too hard during downtime in order to be able to compete in raids. Skilled players would get replaced by folks who simply had too much time on their hands, simply because they didn’t just show up to raids; they showed up with a character that was far superior stat-wise obtained outside of said raid. This issue was removed in WotLK and wasn’t really re-introduced until Legion.
Now, removing the raid lockout will only add to this problem. They’d just raid 24/7 to get the edge on others. How to fix it though? Hard to say. If raiding was the only way to get stronger in raiding again, top guilds would just force their members to have 20+ alts so they can do 20+ split runs and gear every single player individually. And as said, they want to keep mythic+ relevant.
While I think that completly removing IDs from raids doesn’t work, something should be done. Mythic+ can give you gear as often as you want but there is a fixed number of raidbosses available for each ID.
I agree it’s actually a little bit unclear. He talks about instance ID’s, but then suggests that instance ID’s are a thing in Normal and Heroic, which they are NOT. So if his suggestion has something to do with the different lockout structure of Mythic vs. lower difficulties, I disagree with him.
But he then goes onto make a comparison with M+ where he points out that M+ has no lockouts at all, and that this causes a situation where M+ is offering up so much gear so quickly that it is invalidating Heroic (and down) raiding as a method of acquiring gear, at which point I think he’s suggesting to just remove lockouts entirely. If that’s the case, I agree with the diagnosis, but disagree with the solution. There should be lockouts, beacuse the alternative is incredibly repetitive farming of the same boss over and over again in a single day, as well as being able to entirely exhaust the gearing up process in a matter of weeks, which further breaks WoW’s long term reward loop; which would be some feat because it’s already taken a serious beating.
remove titanforging/warforging and all the coin flip
change ilvl drops from pve content.
increase heroic raids to 410, mythic to 425.
keep M+10 drops to 400, weekly to 410, Add M+15(?) that drops 415/410(?) ilvl and weekly of 420/425(?)
which is not a bad thing. time investment making your character stronger is how I imagine an RPG should work, unlike mobas or fps or w/e. but there should also be a big room for skill, where it matters. a mix of both investment and skill is how I imagine a good raider.
like, you could milk first boss of the raid, kill it every 5 minute lmao and get full 425 ilvl titanforges for everyone then go to second etc.
Well, they’ve always been able to do that and it quite literally cannot be solved without making loot entirely personal - no trading allowed. Gear funneling was just not a tactic people really used way back when, because it was incredibly impractical. In a world where character boosts don’t exist and where levelling a new character takes 250 hours and the catch-up mechanisms are limited, leading to each character taking almost a thousand hours to get raid ready, nevermind further maintenance, it is just entirely unfeasable for literally everybody to level that many alts and do splitruns, so people just didn’t even try. Very high end guilds might ask for 2 or 3 characters, but no more than that. Ever.
Yes, you read that right. I believe the solution to splitrunning a longer levelling process and end-game gearing process. A more appropriately tuned, appropriately updated, and appropriately long levelling process would also have a huge number of positive impacts on the casual side, who gets to enjoy a rich world of levelling up in an open world RPG without having to worry themselves about end-game raiding and things like that. Right now WoW offers that experience for a grand total of about 15 hours and $60, and then that’s it. Done. Not much of an RPG adventure, is it?
Yeah, but you could then also take all that gear, buy a lockout at the last boss (which the seller wouldn’t even lose!), skip like 4 bosses that are harder to farm and take more wipes, and then use your superior gear to those who actually progressed to swoop in and kill the last boss earlier than those who got there through progression raiding.
how is beeing able to spam M+ to farm high level items better than that? you can also farm 425 titanforges with M+ by spamming it…
there are 2 ways I can imagine to balance out M+ and raid gearing… and both ways go to 1 way… “make it the same”
either make raids spammable like M+ or
give M+ a lockout system…
For example we currently have 11 raidbosses (correct me if I am wrong, I am not to sure about that number) so you should be able to do 11 M+ dungeons at most per week.
This number can be adjusted by the keystone level, so for example 11 M+ per week only applies to +10 or higher. If you are not doing 11 +10 dungeons, you can replace 1 +10 dungeon with 2 lower dungeons (which means, if you do 9 M+10, you can still do 2 M+10 or 4 M+2-9) or something like that.
The reason is, that Blizzard stated, they view 1 M+ dungeon as 1 Raid encounter (they got rid of the ability to change talents for that reason) and you also have a chance to get 1 Item per raid boss, so it is reasonable for M+ to be the same…
Doing a M+ 10 (or higher) of a dungeon will lock you of loot for said dungeon. You will be able to bonus roll though. Same why as in raiding you can kill and seal the boss once a week though. Since we have 4 difficulties the problem is where we put boundries, that’s the problem with the M+ system. Hard to point out the lines…
but at the moment it is too effective as a loot box… you get WAY MORE loot from M+ per week, than from raiding… this must be balanced at the moment M+ is no alternative, it is almost a MUST
it’s purpose was supposed to be an alternative to raiding, but how is it an alternative, if it rewards you more often
Well people say raiding is the best way, but getting runs where you get no loot at all happen. Or the dreaded 1-3 items but you had them already but lock out is lock out. If somebody after 11 M+ dungeons get 1-3 pieces of loot they can still do more. It’s hard to balance the loot, but it’s a problem. Hence why you see guilds pushing people to do M+ at the start of every raid tier.
Tbh I agree with this. I was surprised you could keep spamming M+ for loot. Most people don’t have the time for that luxury. I’d be happy if you could only loot once from the dungeon per week in m+ (like m0), but a fair compromise would to then make keys work in any dungeon. I.e a level 10 key and you could choose which dungeon you want to do, allowing you to rotate dungeons as yo see fit and promote player agency. Maybe you wouldn’t do Waycrest Manor until you have a level 10 key etc. Just a thought.