Hi,
Many of us remember the days of MoP or WoD where challenge modes were a thing, right before M+.
Back then, you had a “ilvl scaling” system that did scale your item level to the heroic difficulty maximum item level at maximum.
That made the gearing process to actual play the game very short, where you only had to focus on stats/gems/enchants and usually some borrowed power trinkets and so on.
You had no weekly cap or coffer, you could forget about raiding if you wanted to. All you had to do was to farm the gear, form a group and try to end the dungeons in certain time.
Seasons were not a thing as they are now, they did only matter regarding trinkets and such borrowed power items.
For some players, the difficulty was not so hard, and we could agree that timing a 15 as 670 right now would be “something” of the same difficulty as it was (personal perception, don’t take it literal).
When Mythic+ was introduced in Legion, they changed the whole system by making raid ilvl matter (and being able to farm for it through mythic+ too), which made sense if we see the game as a “mmorpg” (duh), where your character power had to increase as long as you progress in dificulty.
Nowadays, we have this problem where skilled people don’t get invites due to ilvl or just because they are late in the season, and others get invited because they could play the game week after week, get mythic track items in vault (from m10+) and get high ilvls (not so much though, but it matters a little bit).
So I was wondering if it would be nice to add a system where you could have the old Challenge mode scaling system mixed with the Mythic+ difficulty increases, where a raider player would not see any difference (aside from X or Y borrowed power trinket), because every item would be scaled down to HC dungeon ilvl (or mythic dungeon ilvl, that would make more sense).
Players would only have to farm stat items over ilvl. Upgrading an item would not be a thing, and every player would have access to the same content where the only thing (or the most impactful thing) would be player skill/team composition/yada yada.
As of rewards, probably pushing high keys would bring some “extra socket” items, or “X or Y” procs, or whatever that Blizzard could imagine, with the catch that those items would not matter for raiding, since the item level would be flated to “mythic0”, so those items would not increase player power outside of mythic+ dungeons (well, probably they could have more item level outside of M+ just to make the character relevant outside, but not too much to make it compete with raiding).
I think that adding a system like that would bring a lot of possitive aspects to the game and little negatives, just to point a few:
1.- With separated items and content, people who want to raid will actualy form or join a raiding guild/group, progress and gear acordingly for it. No more M+ pushers that can join a raid and clear it “easy peasy”. In summary, it will bring raids the glory that they used to have, a mandatory endgame content if you want the maximum character power.
2.- Kill the RNG or Lootbox system, or make it less relevant. Since items for the majority of the playerbase (players who casualy only play M+) will be scaled down to certain ilvl, players could farm the items from here and there, without the need of “mythic track item level RNG”. So the game will be more healthy and straightforward in therms of character progression for a given content.
3.- Reduce the itemlevel or time spent entry to play the game, and erase (or at least partially erase) the need of a catch up system. Since evey player could gear up relatively easy (at least to get the required ilvl), whoever can join a key and perform well. No more “0 dps” vs “10000dps” just by ilvl; infact, a player that could level an alt and gear it up just by ilvl, could perform better than a less skilled BiS player.
4.- Force players to actual learn the game. Following the last part of the last point, if a full BiS player is losing (in DPS at least) against the same class/role with wrong stats and same build, a player will understand that has room to improve and do things better.
5.- More relevant seasons, given that item levels will be scaled to certain number, as the seasons progress, items would still be usable for the M+ content. That would require the addition of certain vendor who could sell “old season dungeons’ items”, such as trinkets, or the mentioned borrowed power items, that could make a class more viable than others just by the fact of having played a past season.
6.- More accessibiltiy. Since the average player is nowadays farming 10s, I feel guilty when I see a +2 or +5 queued in LFG. Nobody queues there, and if so, it uses to be a weird dungeon, where 2/5 players need to farm certain item and literally boost 3 other players; one could agree that low level keys are not keys but straightforward W spam. There’s no difficulty, and there’s nobody that could rather do 2s or 5s than 10s when a character is geared up; so low keys are a bad consequence of poor system design.
As of negatives, I can’t imagine others than:
1.- Raiders not finding value in farming Mythic+ for raid progress.
2.- Gatekeep players if after an invite, the leader realises that the “stats” are not bis, and something is wrong.
3.- Boosting for rewards, boosts will be more accessible than ever and easily performable if skilled enough by just alters to certain ilvl.
4.- (this is not a negative point, just a variable one). Depending on how the “item rewards” after a dungeon would work, those could bring so much borrowed power that “lower keys” could suffer the same as mentioned in the point 6 above. Requering Blizzard to brainstorm and design the proper system that balances “extra borrowed power” with “not much difference from a new BiS player vs a player that has been farming M+ alit” is a thing that, well, we all know how can end.
If you reached this far, thank you for your time, and let me know below your opinions. 