This season killed my guild
Before I say anything I want it to be understood that this is constructive criticism for the devs. I understand that my individual experience cannot be extrapolated to the broader player base. Having said that, I've got some feels right now. I love my guild, and raiding with the homies is a huge part of my week to week entertainment. I actively look forward to it. For the last several years we have actively raided two nights a week until damn near the end of the season. We usually take 2-3 weeks at the end for people to focus on M+ or refresh themselves for the grind that follows. We aren't very good, and that doesn't matter to us. We're a bunch of beer dads that have fun on the weekends and make as much progress as we can.
Historically we have cleared AOTC in the first month or so of the season and then progressed into mythic. This season we got AOTC this week, and the entire time felt like a slog. I'm sure there are metrics to prove or disprove how I personally feel, but to us this season was beyond enjoyably hard. We had a few die-hard players that went and got AOTC in the first week or two with pugs or other communities, but to us as a group it was rough.
Normally our next step after getting AOTC would be to start working through Mythic. We usually get 4-5 bosses down by the end of the season and then go into the next season thinking "This is going to be the one! We're going for CE." Not so much this time around. I can pinpoint a few reasons in particular why the interest in raiding has completely dried up for my guild and I think they might be helpful for the devs to understand; After all, this season came with a slew of major changes to gearing and progression so it's not unusual that some players or entire guilds might react negatively to them.
First, the gearing system this season felt awful to us. Usually on days when my guild isn't raiding there are multiple M+ groups running concurrently. That was not the case this season. After the first week or two there was no gear that was useful from M+ at all, and because of the incentive to take bonus rolls from the vault there was no reason to even fish for the few items that may be minor upgrades with slightly better stats because taking those from your vault would be a giant mistake. What had consistently been an active community outside of raid nights rapidly evaporated as people realized they could just do their t1 delves and get basically the same rewards as people who spent orders of magnitude more time farming keys. Sure, they didn't get the crests that they would have gotten from M+, but they had no use for them because they were hoarding their bonus rolls for the last 2 bosses so it didn't matter. This paradigm essentially meant that my guild was for all intents and purposes as geared as we would get for our progression at the end of week 1 because we got 3 healer trinkets to drop right out of the gate. Spending more than a month feeling "gear capped" absolutely sucks, and with hindsight I can say definitively that we made absolutely the right call. We were never stuck on a boss because we lacked the gear for it, we were stuck on bosses because of mechanics that gear would have made no difference in. I'm ending my season as an AOTC raider with an unused bonus roll and I am very confident that if you gave my guild 10 free bonus rolls each we would have cleared the raid within one week of when we did. For us, gear didn't matter. What mattered was spending 1000 wipes learning how to dodge waves, place circles, soak hula hoops, drop puddles, click boxes, and taunt adds.
Second, the rewards from heroic with bonus rolls made mythic completely redundant for us. We all took one look at this raid through the lens of RTWF and came to the conclusion that we were never going to touch the last couple bosses on mythic. Yes, I know that nobody else in the world will ever experience the RTWF version of those fights, but the psychological damage was done. Fourteen nerfs don't actually matter if some players see it on week one and think Hell, we BARELY hung on long enough to kill them on heroic... Without M+ to keep us engaged with WoW on a day-to-day basis everyone found new stuff to play. I picked up Wardogs with a couple of my buddies, some people found other MMO's, a few guys ran a bunch of Diablo, etc. All of a sudden the thought process shifted from "If we kill this boss this week I have a chance at clearing that 17 that I almost timed last week." to "If we kill this boss this week I can go back to playing that other game that I'm having fun with sooner." We got mythic gear from heroic but because of the nature of the raid and the lack of a serious M+ season there was really nothing to do with it. If I had a single piece of advice that I could give a dev it would be that bonus rolls are sweet. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Just get rid of the 13/14 items from M+ that nobody wants and add a few more chase items to M+ so there is a reason to do it. M+ scales well with difficulty and the current level of personal responsibility that people are looking for. It gives rewards from 10's when you're dog tired and can't think straight and for 21's when your kids are on a sleepover, your wife is on a work trip, and you really want to game and push IO. The raid scales like shit. Rather than 20+ difficulties to choose from when you log in, you get 2. The next point naturally follows:
The raid was too hard for us. I get it, we're bad. We have always had fun with the game and to us that's what matters. However, in the past, when we have hit a brick wall in the raid the expectation was always that we would eventually out-gear the encounter. We could rely on our handful of really good players to hold seeds for us while the dudes that had a rough week drunkenly stood in fire. This time around that wasn't the case. Making a heroic boss where you wipe to a single dude making a mistake in phase 1 is a miserable experience for players that aren't very good at the game. WoW has always been fun because it's been a game where people who aren't very good at it could still excel. I've been playing since vanilla and I can say from first hand experience that WoW was always way more fun that CoD or LoL because it was significantly more forgiving. You didn't have to be turned on 100% of the time. It was an escape from the stress of reality, not something that cranked the stress of reality up to 11.
I completely understand the appeal of incredibly difficult boss fights. In my experience there has never been a game that brought as much communal joy as what is felt when a tight-knit guild downs a tough boss, but the cathartic release of victory is defiled immediately when you know you're now 5/18 for the season. That is just too much for normal sane people to give a shit about. In previous seasons heroic raids were fun. They didn't offer much in the way of rewards aside from a few chase trinkets, but they were interesting and rewarding enough to keep us engaged for the first month or so. This season the heroic raid just wasn't fun...and the mythic version looks even worse.
At the end of our season there wasn't a single person in my guild that killed Ulatek and wanted to continue into Mythic. Every single person decided on their own that they were done. It was a huge relief to us officers when someone broke the seal and announced that they were calling it for the season because none of us wanted to play anymore either. We had all found new games. Maybe Forever will bring us back again, or maybe we'll all wake up on the next major patch day with the same fervor we had this time, but in my heart I know that won't be the case. We had a really good run. One month between now and Forever is already a long time in gamer years, and 4-5 months before the next raid in retail is basically the next ice age. Our best players will find new guilds, our worst players will find new games, all of our players will be sad that it's over.
-An anonymous raider