use this time during season 4 to play other games,
theres a few good ones coming out soon
You "forget " that gear from "lower " content is upgradable. Champions go up to 502 itlv without even stepping into +2 for wyrm crest
So in coupel of weeks IT will be like 500 for +2 , 510 for like +6 and 520 + for +10 as "expected " itlv in pugs especialy that crest caps are higher and a lot of world content offer you Drake crests which bump you to 502.
Its just grindy as hell and requires you to Play really a lot of content you are not that intwrested in in first place.
Lets be honest here - anyone semi serious about farming gear and pushing on 1 character is already 500+ itlv
Tbh I really love this season so far…
I did multiple world tour runs on my various healers on M0 and was pleasently surprised.
Okay yeah, it could be annoying that someone essentially wiped us on certain mechanics, but no one left. We even wiped at a boss 3 times, but we just kept telling whoever did something wrong, what needed to be done, and finished.
The only times I’ve really felt stressed is when doing higher keys, but people are trying to do them with too low ilvl… If you don’t know mechanics and you’re trying to do keys with 475 of course its going to be hard… Now say the average is 475… Of course people are going to eat mechanics left, right and center and the dungeon will feel tough…
The only thing the old 2-9 keys were good for, was the first few weeks, when people needed to gear, it felt like you “progressed” because you went from “+2” to “+5” even if the difficulty was essentially not even harder… Now people are calling for heads, with torches in their hands because “how dare they make me do M0 or HC to gear?!? I did +10’s last season!! ermagherd!”
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Yeah I came across a bit more defensive than was intented lol, apologies.
Though I still fail to see the reason why that level needs to be brought up when talking about a mechanic.
I am healer main and so far I’ve been able to heal 3 chains in a +7, like I said I even pref doing it like that because some dps tend to run around like headless chickens and dying to the aoe/splash or even getting out of range of my aoe heals.
I can see myself being able to heal it in a +10 tyran with 4set and better gear, but yeah it also depends on self-mitigation and it’s a sad fact a lot of dps just don’t use their defensives.
I am not forgetting that? It is about my own ‘rule’ of ilvl i think the content is sort of reasonable doable. It does not matter gear is replacable or upgradable or whatever.
You have to define semi serious. That sounds like a subjective definition. I am 494 now and i played quite a lot.
Nothing will change in this regard though . Give it 4-5 weeks and anything below +8 / +10 will be ghost town again 
once good players move up and weak players being unable to complete "lower " keys without them
Eh, I think i will focus more on saving money and preparing to move to a new apartment this year instead.
They already are… Difference is, now “weak” and new players will just be grouped in HC/M0/M+2 rather than scattered between +2-11, leaving new players completely desserted in HC and M0
If you make an alt, you must likely will have to go through the HC/M0 grind again, whereas before you could just fly up and start farming +5, +9 etc. heck you could even farm +11’s because SO many high ilvl people would farm them for ressources not caring if they boosted you xD Sad season
ok… 
But that’s not true. The ability of players to complete the content is more dependent on their skill level.
I started doing +2 in last season’s gear. We’ve seen others clearly struggle. I have geared a bit but hit my own ceiling, others have gone much further than I can.
Puny, we both know that without gear you can’t complete content due to your stats going down into the basement, especially with older gear from older expansion.
Again, I am not saying that individual and group skill can’t compensate this gear handicap. But we also know that not every PuG is perfect and that gear is just 1 out of many factors that contribute to a successful completion in raids/dungeons/etc.
Gear will not carry you through content this content. That is where we differ. That minimum ilvl is meaningless because it still doesn’t mean you can complete it.
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Why do I feel like everyone reads it so overcomplicated when it is just so simple…
Ok, I explain it again.
Gear affects stats → Stats affect your characters strength → Your characters strength amplifies your own player (character) skill
If your gear is bad, your character is weaker and your own skills are handicapped by that to some degree.
I never said that having good gear “magically” makes you able to complete activities. But it diminishes difficulty to have good gear.
And as a Blizzard developer (I assume that now, not saying it is) you want players to prepare accordingly for the activities, may it be knowledge, skill and gear so they have a good playing experience when participating in the activities they design.
As a good player, you want to reduce as much risks as possible in a run. That includes having allies that know what to do, you knowing what to do and all of you being geared properly so you don’t take a few minutes more to beat trash packs and bosses.
Because the best player skill in the world can’t fix you pulling bad damage/healing numbers due to your stats being bad because of your gear not supporting your skill in the activity.
You don’t fight a world-ending threat with just a stick.
What you you seem to miss is that there are not 3 categories. Looking at any season’s chart, even last season. The people that went over 2k rating last season, which was not even an achievement considering the difficulty bar was so low even a 5 yo kid could do that, is still less than 50%. Considering that average is where 50% is, average player is bad. Average player is the reason why if I go in a +2 now I take a friend with me, because it needs 2 good people to carry the average player now.
In another response you said that players might risk their time if they don’t do the dungeon. It’s a game, it’s meant to be played. At the end of the day, we put time in it for no other reason than to have fun, make friends, have challenges, collect things and so on. There is not such term of “risking their time” when it comes to a game.
And in a more serious note, you don’t need a number written there, and that is the problem with most of the community now: they need to be told what can and from when they can do that. They lack the power to thing of it themselves. I went in m+ this season as everyone else and saw until where I can go. Even if that number was there, I would’ve stopped in the exact same spot. Why? Because I played the game, not because some dude from blizzard came and wrote a number under “recommended for +12”.
For an average player, as the game is right now, they would need War Within gear to finish a 12, considering the score that is given and where the 50% mark it is
Someone with lots of free time at hand would say that.
Someone who works a lot IRL might not say that.
The people that have scarcely time to play games (I now count to those people too since the last 2 months) want to know beforehand if the invested time is worth it even.
I’m not going to spend the 2-3h I have after a long working shift to try getting some gear in M+ when the experience will be immensely bad and my gear not being good enough for it to do so. Counting on other players to carry me because they already have that gear is actually worse, because it means I am deadweight to them, affecting their experience negatively, as you implied yourself already with that comment:
It limits your freedom and requires you to team up “just to carry the average player now”. And that’s an issue. You, as a player, should want people to pull their weight themselves. Not team up with others to still drag the deadweight with you. That’s the wrong mentality.
Carrying the deadweight makes people dependent on you and others.
Forcing the average player to get better first (skill/gear/etc.) before attempting the difficulty makes them becoming better players, ergo becoming more useful instead of deadweight.
Imagine it like a situation where someone struggles with a task and you do it for them instead of teaching them to solve it themselves. That leads to dependent behavior.
I know that, because I have a young co-worker at my job that constantly asks me to do a specific task for him because he didn’t put in the effort to learn to fix it himself. And me constantly having to fix his problem is getting not only annoying but forces me to stop my current work and help him.
So instead of continuing this the last few days, I forced him to learn it. And he learned it (althought he needs more practice). Which means I have more time to focus on my given tasks at work instead of working both on my stuff and his…
The issue is not “they can’t think for themselves” but gatekeeping to allow them to be efficient. Most people aren’t efficient by nature. You have to tell and show them how to be it.
Remember back when you started WoW (or any other online game) and others told you what you need to do better when playing in a group. That’s exactly that. You weren’t thinking for yourself, you were told to.
The gear scaling and seasonal content with new gear scaling is a problem, that doesnt really fit into this MMORPG.
WoW in its core was a game to progress characters and get stronger and identify with them etc. - what a RPG has to be.
With M+ and the seasonal content and stuff this character progression is lost and all you want to do is play a quick round M+ , like a quick round Counter Strike or Dota.
That is why Boosts became so popular, to be quick into the content.
Additionally they created a seasonal treadmill analogue to Action RPGS like Diablo. This further creates frustration instead of enjoyment.
What if there wouldnt be anymore gear progression? People could finally start playing the game in competition with the people that are now “better” than them because of gear - be it with luck or invested time.
Imo, to start solve this problem with minimal effort, M+ should be a separate mode with normalized gear and ilvls, same as PvP should be since the beginning.
But this would mean less bought boosts for Blizzard.
Seasonal content with treadmills, competitive content with gear treadmills, are bleeding casual players, devalueing achievements of determined players because: “everybody could do it when he would have that gear luck” and feel like a job, with too short intervalls.
Actually when I started to play the game, I started with an ex and we both discovered how the game was. We played only the 2 of us for like 6 months before joining a guild.
And that made the game fun. The fact there was nobody there to tell us what to do. We had to discover. A game has to be played in order to be discovered. We discovered by ourselves guides on youtube, we tried different talents, we did some hc, m0 and then we went for m+. First few weeks we didn’t even try something upper than 5, and it was last season in legion.
By the time we joined the guild, we were knowing at least the basic mechanics in those dungeons.
Look at the average player now: 2 interrupts per dungeon, 0 by the time he dies from a cast. 1 season and a half worth of damage. Not even a clue what a boss does. And the information is there. Most of these average players have been playing wow for 3-4-5 years. More than enough time to know where to look for the info. But they don’t because average wow player is entitled now: they deserve the best gear with close to 0 effort.
As I said, a game is there to be played, not to be gatekept. We are humans, we have rational thinking (or at least we are supposed too, had a couple of tanks these past days that made me realize that jellyfish have been living on this Earth for a couple times more than humans, and they don’t have brain). We as human gatekeep animals… we don’t need to become sheep in blizzard eyes, even if it’s obvious that the majority of the m+ community are exactly this: they see a comp in +20s, and they instantly need the same comp in 2s, and eventually better geared people than the loot of that dungeon.
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I really would like to see some evidence of this.
Especially your last sentence is very true for pugging. When I play on alt accounts, or turn third party data off, people cant see my main io and this is where the declines of invitations start. It is so sad for people that dont have a premade.
As an example which I had today. I pugged on my 477 shadow priest a +2 neltharus where the 480 vdh with his 480 friends wiped on the chain boss 5 times before disbanding the group (edit: The tank died, not the group by stacks. He used meta, I even gave tips after wipes to kite boss, stay out of melee against focus fire, dont turn back on boss, etc.). I did 40% of group damage on magmorax and trash despite having to queue for 20-30 dungeons until acceptance (i got acceptance after I linked the achievement for 2k this season, i couldnt take it anymore). Well this led me to being frustrated so I got onto my 450 VDH alt (note: with 2 421 weapons, so not actually 450 ilvl if we just see the average, but way less because of stats). I queued for a +2 quickly, also by posting achievement to get invitation. I did the +2 neltharus without damage mitigation from a heal (was rshaman) or druid buff, didnt even spike on chain boss and after that was happy to have been able to do that but also VERY FRUSTRATED of the playerbase I have to face, when I decide to pug because my premades are only online after work. (edit note: my cheatdeath didnt proc and I had no deaths, also the dps were not overgeared to make the argument that everything died instantly.)
I can totally relate to your arguments.
Just to add also, that 30+ key level of S3 people of non-meta specs (where playerbase is low and therefore pro playerbase even lower or non-existent) are very bad too.
You can watch replays on youtube over raiderio and e.g. the best prevoker of last season on his highest atal key, fails all the time in his echo combos.
“It’s not me that doesn’t get it - its everybody else in the world thats wrong” Heramaar.