wonderfulheaven

Senya · @wonderfulheaven

15th Nov 2016 from TwitLonger

Mythic Raiding - The Artifact Pow(d)er Keg


As one of the greatest additions of Legion, Artifact Power serves as a great way to assure character progression is always available to anyone at any time. If someone plays a few hours a day doing whatever they like, it's a wonderful system to enjoy the RPG element of your character becoming more powerful or striving towards a goal of power. It's designed well for players playing in leisure time and feeling a sense of purpose for logging in alongside a goal.

What seems to be an Emerald Dream for a majority is an Emerald Nightmare for mythic raiders. The game isn't "bring the player" or "bring the class" for deciding rosters. The top end game has devolved into "bring the person."

On behalf of those who work full-time and raid with an as-strict-as-we-can-be 12-hour guild, it's hard not to feel that one who doesn't have or use as much free time for grinding as others cannot be optimal or considered raid-worthy.

Going into Trial of Valor, there are "bring in" raiders with their hidden trait and "bring in (if room)" ones who did not or could not push for their hidden trait. These players who cannot find the time are behind 5% or more from where they should be and what the mythic fights are most likely tuned for. At a reasonably attainable 32 traits, one will find he or she is behind --7 million AP-- (several traits) of the top 10 players. While less extreme, comparing to even the top 100+ players still yields millions of AP as disparity.

The more someone can (let alone will) play the game, the more worthy of a raid spot he or she will become. There is no cap. There is no "catching up" before progression since Artifact Knowledge takes 5 days to roll in (because, being realistic, 25% on world quests won't make up for someone else's 12+ hours a day of mythic+ grinding).

There is an extremely uneven playing field highly dependent on time able to be spent in WoW. At the current AK, to catch up if the top 10 AP players hypothetically were to quit today, that amounts to ~240 M+7-9 runs or ~470 M+2-3 carries. That is a massive time commitment, and it's one hardcore mythic players cannot rationally downplay as unnecessary or excessive.

Grinding and grinding and grinding mythic+ dungeons for those who have the ability to do so nets a 5%-10% damage boost. It nets a raid spot over someone else in a guild. It nets guild progression rankings. It's the reason why people are grinding mythic+ over and over and over. They don't want to be benched, and they don't want some guild to beat them because more of their damage dealers had a damage boost to trivialize slimes on Helya or the Guarm DPS check. It's an escalating arms race to spam AP into that Arms artifact.

Top 10 players are unhappy to be doing this on multiple alts and essentially living in the game during and after progression crunch time. Mythic raiding guilds feel pressured to force people to log in outside of raid hours to do dungeon content players may not particularly enjoy or want to do whatsoever.

This kind of grinding at the start of the expansion was acceptable because it had an end, but the first 3 weeks of an expansion is now eternal. It's draining. It's asking way too much of a population of decade-old raiders now with familial/vocational/educational responsibilities. The game made it feel possible and great to progress at a high level while maintaining real life's calling, but that seems to be going the way of the dodo and reforging as Legion pushes forward and power disparities created by limitless, efficient AP farming start to become apparent.

The grind needs an end or at least have brakes put on it. The end of the grind shouldn't be 2000 mythic+ carries or entail playing 5% damage behind the fight's tuning in progression until months of AK allow reasonable time spent to catch up. Once a player falls behind, there isn't a sprint to catch up; there's an endurance race lasting weeks of 12+ hour dungeon grinding instead of months.

In 12 years of World of Warcraft, this has never been the philosophy of Blizzard. It's part of the game that made it stand out over the sea of grindy Asian MMOs. No matter what, skill affected performance more than raw time invested into the game. There were no artificial blockades keeping players from performing their best and getting better. Nowadays, that is far from the case. The current state of the game on a fast track to burn out some of the most loyal, die-hard fans of World of Warcraft who loved and stuck with the game for what little actually needed to do to be competitive.

Legion brings some amazing improvements, but the elephant-in-the-room grind is making it seem like the expansion telling veteran mythic raiders that the only way to be hardcore is to find a way to travel back in time to when they had the time to play this game as much as needed to be optimal.

It's the Artifact Pow(d)er Keg waiting to explode and dismantle the top end if Blizzard doesn't change anything to save do-what-it-takes hardcore players from themselves to, in turn, save them as players.

tl;dr I wish I could use JumboTweet over TwitLonger because it has a hippo on it.

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