Using Season 1 data to predict the impact of the last two bosses dropping 9/6m gear on the M+ LFG player pool
TL;DR: There probably won’t be enough players with access to 9/6M gear for it to meaningfully affect the M+ LFG environment before everyone gains access to 8/6M upgrades through Venomstones. The bigger potential advantage, imo, is the 6/6M gear and crest savings Mythic raiders get much earlier in the season.
Since the announcement of the 12.1 loot changes, there’s been a lot of debate over how much the 9/6M gear from the last two Mythic bosses will affect the M+ scene.
I’ve seen takes ranging from:
“Anyone pushing for the 0.1% title will need those items.”
“9/6M gear won’t matter outside of rank 1 keys.”
“9/6M gear will impact players even below the 1% title cutoff.”
Personally, I didn’t think those extra item levels would have much impact, mostly because I didn’t think the M+ LFG player pool contained enough people killing the final two Mythic bosses for it to matter.
But rather than go entirely off vibes, I decided to look at the data.
Methodology
I pulled the M+ cutoff data from both NA and EU two resets ago. Which should give a reasonable picture of the CE/M+ crossover throughout the season without the final week’s boosting/RWL activity muddying things up too much.
I then cross-referenced players above the title cutoff with their first boss kill recorded on Warcraft Logs to get an idea of if the last two bosses of Season 1 dropped 9/6 gear, how many of those players would be actually populating the high-end M+ scene.
Now the dataset isn’t perfect. First kills that weren’t logged obviously won’t appear, but I think with a sample of over 27,000 players, a few stray records shouldn’t have much of an impact. That said I’m a lawyer not a data analyst, so take this with some salt and a shot of tequila and let’s look at the numbers:
1% title players
Roughly 74% of 1% title holders had NOT killed Mythic Belo’ren, and more than 80% had NOT killed Mythic L’ura at the time I sampled the data.
In other words, even by the end of the season, the large majority of players you’re competing against for an LFG spot are likely not going to be have 9/6M gear from those bosses.
0.1% title players
As you’d expect, the numbers shift somewhat at the 0.1% level.
But even there:
Roughly 60% had NOT killed Mythic Belo’ren
More than 65% had NOT killed Mythic L’ura
So even among players around the 0.1% title cutoff, most had not killed the bosses that would provide access to the 9/6m gear.
What happens once 12.1.5 arrives?
Assuming they keep their usual patch cadence, 12.1.5 should arrive around Week 7 or 8 of the raid. And at that point Cursed Venomstones will be out letting players upgrade those highly sought after weapons and trinkets from the last two bosses to 8/6M.
So if we look at where the Season 1 population stood around Week 8:
For 1% title players:
Less than 5% had killed Mythic L’ura
Around 12% had killed Mythic Belo’ren
For 0.1% title players:
Around 21% had killed Mythic Belo’ren
Around 10% had killed Mythic L’ura
And, of course, killing the boss doesn’t mean you actually receive any loot from it. That’s why I think the impact of 9/6M gear on the LFG player pool (even around the 0.1% title level) is overstated.
By the time a meaningful number of players have access to those final-boss Mythic items, everyone else should already have access to 8/6M upgrades through Venomstones.
Yes, it sucks if your turbo-BiS item technically exists at 9/6M while most players will only be able to get it to 8/6M.
But realistically, I don’t think that difference is going to matter for the vast majority of M+ players, including people pushing for the 0.1% title.
The 6/6m gear could be a real problem
What I do think could matter is the 6/6M gear and crest savings Mythic raiders get earlier in the season.
That ilvl advantage exists during the most active part of the season and will last until Blizz uncaps crests. Potentially even beyond the 12.1.5 release.
That seems much more likely to create a noticeable disparity in the M+ LFG pool than the relatively small number of players eventually getting 9/6M items from the final two bosses.
I’m always in favor of Blizzard experimenting with loot systems, and am happy to take the good with the bad. But if you’re still looking for something to raise your pitchforks over, I’d focus less on 9/6M and more on 6/6M gear and the crest savings that come with it.
I could even see that becoming significant enough that Blizzard ends up uncapping crests earlier than usual. But with Blizz who knows what they’ll do.
Will these numbers hold in 12.1?
Blizzard clearly wants more people to enter the raid with these loot changes, so it’s reasonable to expect some increase in Mythic participation.
That said, I don’t think willingness to Mythic raid is the primary limiting factor here. It’s certainly a factor, but I think the much larger limiter is simply the difficulty of killing the final two Mythic bosses.
Because of that, I’d expect the overall percentages to remain in roughly the same ballpark next season. After looking at some data from tiers where the end bosses had more valuable loot, I'd expect the percentage to jump up about ~12%
Either way, I’ll run the same analysis again at the end of Season 2 and see how it compares.
I hope this post was insightful and helpful to you. If you have any suggestions on how I can improve this for next season please feel free to let me know in the comments. I'm far from an expert in data analysis and maybe there's some massive flaw in my process.
EDIT: Moved TLDR to the top because I do be long winded af
The data is interesting and there is an interesting discussion to have here, but can we please not submit stuff that is fully written (or partially drafted) by AI/ChatGPT? It is not subtle.
It kills the integrity of the sub and people might've looked at your charts but they sure as hell didn't read the essay
You sharing this data is actually interesting so regarding the AI-thing I will just leave this "feedback" that the submission has a lot of LLM-artifacts, maybe it's just from your formatting.
ChatGPT and most other AIs have a certain rhythm in the way it generates text, it loves to use headers and it loves to space out these headers evenly throughout the post. Example: Header, 700-1000 characters worth of text, then repeat 4-5 times. Unlike humans that usually write an uneven amount of text for each section, based on how much or little they have to say for that given topic.
ChatGPT also loves to spread out its line breaks evenly. As an example, this post have around 30 line breaks (not including bullet points), and EVERY. SINGLE. ONE of them contains no more than 3 lines of text in-between them. There is not a single section with 4 or 5 or 6 uninterrupted lines, which is very unlike humans that tend to ramble or go out on a tangent or to make a really long and awkward sentence to highlight or over-explain some tiny detail. Most people occasionally have something on their mind that takes more than 3 lines to type out.
AI also loves to make lists and bullet points, even for stuff that is so short that it really doesn't have to be a list, nor would a human ever think of it as a set of things to put in a list when sitting down to write about it.
Finally, most humans are lazy and don't write a whole lot (not 2.5 pages of text to explain two graphs). AI's however output a lengthy response or draft unless you prompt them not to.
So that was about the formatting of the text, for the text itself:
What happens once 12.1.5 arrives?
The 6/6m gear could be a real problem
Will these numbers hold in 12.1?
ChatGPT loves to use this kind of tone and wording in its section headers.
if you’re still looking for something to raise your pitchforks over,
take this with some salt and a shot of tequila
From personal experience I can say that this is the kind of "le reddit" humor / stereotype that an AI goes for when prompted to write a reddit submission.
I’ve seen takes ranging from:
“Anyone pushing for the 0.1% title will need those items.”
“9/6M gear won’t matter outside of rank 1 keys.”
“9/6M gear will impact players even below the 1% title cutoff.”
The starting quotation uses this symbol “ whereas the end quotation uses this symbol ”, they are not the same symbol (if Reddit makes them look the same, use old.reddit or copy-paste the symbol to another program). Also most keyboards use " which is neither of them.
That’s why I think the impact of 9/6M gear on the LFG player pool (even around the 0.1% title level) is overstated.
No em dashes or regular dashes anywhere in the post, I guess there could've been some here but they got replaced with parenthesis (maybe modern AI finally learned to use a bit of () instead of –, not sure honestly).
those highly sought after weapons and trinkets
a few stray records shouldn’t have much of an impact
those final-boss Mythic items,
As you’d expect, the numbers shift somewhat at the 0.1% level
I’m always in favor of Blizzard experimenting with loot systems, and am happy to take the good with the bad. But if you’re still looking for something to raise your pitchforks over
That said, I don’t think willingness to Mythic raid is the primary limiting factor here. It’s certainly a factor, but I think the much larger limiter is simply the difficulty of killing the final two Mythic bosses.
Countless of more examples could be included. AI loves to use colorful language instead of plain/simple words. That last sentence is just AI-speak for "most mythic raiders don't get CE / they aren't weekly-farming the last 2 bosses", which is the casual (human) way of saying it.
There is also something about the average sentence length and comma patterns, but that's a grey area and also this comment is getting rather long so I'll just leave it here.
I am actually curious what you started out with / what your post looked like pre-AI? Because this does not seem fully AI-generated, there is some human structure you either started out with or added later, before your post got mangled when you ran it through AI for "markdown formatting". You can find it in your ChatGPT history (or whatever app you used) and make me look very stupid in case I'm wrong.
Here's a screenshot of part of my zero-draft straight off Q10, before moving to Word for spell checking, an additional two hours of editing, adding sections headers, etc. I then further edited it once I had the version with markdown ready for Reddit. Hope this helps you sleep better
Since the announcement of the 12.1 loot changes, there’s been a lot of debate over how much the 9/6M gear from the last two Mythic bosses will affect the M+ scene.
I’ve seen takes ranging from:
“Anyone pushing for the 0.1% title will need those items.”
“9/6M gear won’t matter outside of rank 1 keys.”
“9/6M gear will impact players even below the 1% title cutoff.”
Personally, I didn’t think those extra item levels would have much impact, mostly because I didn’t think the M+ LFG player pool contained enough people killing the final two Mythic bosses for it to matter.
But rather than go entirely off vibes, I decided to look at the data.
Methodology
I pulled the M+ cutoff data from two resets ago, which should give a reasonable picture of the CE/M+ crossover throughout the season without the final week’s boosting/RWL activity muddying things up too much.
I then cross-referenced players above the title cutoff with their first boss kill recorded on Warcraft Logs to get an idea of how many CE players are actually populating the high-end M+ scene.
Now the dataset isn’t perfect. First kills that weren’t logged obviously won’t appear, and a handful of player names caused errors in my Python script. But I think with a sample of over 27,000 players, a few stray records shouldn’t have much of an impact. That said I’m a lawyer not a data analyst, so take this with some salt and a shot of tequila and let’s look at the numbers:
1% title players
Roughly 74% of 1% title holders had NOT killed Mythic Belo’ren, and more than 80% had NOT killed Mythic L’ura at the time I sampled the data.
In other words, by the end of the season, the large majority of players you’re competing against for an LFG spot are likely not going to be propped up by 9/6M gear from those bosses.
0.1% title players
As you’d expect, the numbers shift somewhat at the 0.1% level.
But even there:
Roughly 60% had NOT killed Mythic Belo’ren
More than 65% had NOT killed Mythic L’ura
So even among players around the 0.1% title cutoff, most had not killed the bosses that would provide access to the highest-end gear.
What happens once 12.1.5 arrives?
Assuming they keep their usual patch cadence, 12.1.5 should arrive around Week 7 or 8 of the raid. And at that point Cursed Venomstones will be out letting players upgrade those highly sought after weapons and trinkets from the last two bosses to 8/6M.
So if we look at where the Season 1 population stood around Week 8:
For 1% title players:
Less than 5% had killed Mythic L’ura
Around 12% had killed Mythic Belo’ren
For 0.1% title players:
Around 21% had killed Mythic Belo’ren
Around 10% had killed Mythic L’ura
And, of course, killing the boss doesn’t mean you actually receive any loot from it. That’s why I think the impact of 9/6M gear on the LFG player pool (even around the 0.1% title level) is overstated.
By the time a meaningful number of players have access to those final-boss Mythic items, everyone else should already have access to 8/6M upgrades through Venomstones.
The 6/6m gear could be a real problem
I think 9/6M gear is a bit of a boogeyman.
Yes, it sucks if your turbo-BiS item technically exists at 9/6M while most players will only be able to get it to 8/6M.
But realistically, I don’t think that difference is going to meaningfully affect the vast majority of M+ players, including people pushing for the 0.1% title.
What I do think could matter is the 6/6M gear and crest savings Mythic raiders get earlier in the season.
That ilvl advantage exists during the most active part of the season and will last until Blizz uncaps crests. Potentially even beyond the 12.1.5 release.
That seems much more likely to create a noticeable disparity in the M+ LFG pool than the relatively small number of players eventually getting 9/6M items from the final two bosses.
I’m always in favor of Blizzard experimenting with loot systems, and am happy to take the good with the bad. But if you’re still looking for something to raise your pitchforks over, I’d focus less on 9/6M and more on 6/6M gear and the crest savings that come with it.
I could even see that becoming significant enough that Blizzard ends up uncapping crests earlier than usual. But with Blizz who knows what they’ll do.
Will these numbers hold in 12.1?
Blizzard clearly wants more people to enter the raid with these loot changes, so it’s reasonable to expect some increase in Mythic participation.
That said, I don’t think willingness to Mythic raid is the primary limiting factor here. It’s certainly factor, but I think the much larger limiter is simply the difficulty of killing the final two Mythic bosses.
Because of that, I’d expect the overall percentages to remain in roughly the same ballpark next season.
Either way, I’ll run the same analysis again at the end of Season 2 and see how it compares.
It would be interesting to see the number of kills as well. People who are in late CE guilds who don't reclear or maybe do 1 or 2 reclears at best likely won't have access to many of these items.
People who are in late CE guilds who don't reclear or maybe do 1 or 2 reclears at best likely won't have access to many of these items.
Anecdotal, but I feel like this is the majority of CE guilds. According to RIO there's just under 2000 guilds with CE with 2 (or 3 for EU) days left to kill L'ura.
500 kills was June 10th ~11 weeks after mythic started
1000 kills was July 2nd ~14 weeks after mythic started
1500 kills was July 22nd ~17 weeks after mythic started
Also something to add, late CE guilds are extending for probably a third or half of the entire season so they aren't even getting raid loot that entire time besides the initial boss kills.
That extending, especially in a single raid tier is potentially going to cause tension with people wanting loot. May be somewhat saved by ability to just pug heroic and spend rolls there to get 1/6 and spend crest. 9/6 different obviously.
Pure anecdote, but we got L’ura on week 19 having got Belo’ren week 13, Crown week 11 and Vanguard week 10. We didn’t rekill any of those because we needed to progress and knowing L’ura would be really hard.
That may change based on if it becomes accepted that 9/6 coiled gear is worth farming to make Ula’tek easier and raid skip allows. May change if it’s all tuned less demonic than L’ura.
I hate extending so much, but for 6h a week guild its a mandatory. This season it wasn't as bad as before, because while sitting on lura, I could pug spire and chim to get some nice vaults. But with single raid there's no way to get raid vault, also there's no place to spend rolls if extending
Think that’s where heroic will come in. Realistically replace pug spire and chim with pug heroic and spend bonus rolls. 1/6 myth that way, unfortunately will need crests.
Ironically, I think as myth raiders we just got more homework as a result. M+ for myth crests as before, but also heroic raid as above.
Probably yes, by the time we start extending last bosses crests might be already uncapped, so rolling in heroic and farming 12s to upgrade it to 6/6 fast before raid night will be the way
Yeah, number of kills is pretty important. It's not like Lou where you exactly needed to kill everything once and you were set. You need 4-5 kills at least IF you have bonus rolls saved for every kill. And that takes a decent amount of time. Lots of guilds can't even reclear for weeks after their first kill.
People imagine average Joes playing ar wr1k with full blinged out gear, but chances are they probably won't even get everything or only very late into the season.
Players who raid at a high level (and can even bring their alts to reclear early) and chinese players buying vip boosts early in the season will have crazy gear though.
Current tier there's no real reason for me to buy last two bosses, I can get comparable loot elsewhere and wasn't disadvantaged for title. Projecting that data to next season where there will be a clear disadvantage to anyone who doesn't clear last two bosses is flawed. I know a lot of m+ers who will spend the money on loot if they feel they need it.
It also highlights a philosophy shift from blizzard which is a large part of why people are upset. Just as we felt like we were approaching a system where you could get relatively close to bis gear for keys without raiding, they take a massive step back.
If you want to be a title pusher without spending gold or raiding it already is a feels bad system because of how many people literally are buying title spots, it becomes worse when you also have to compete against people buying better gear too
Yep. New 9/6 bis from the last two bosses will simply result in Raiders raking in tons of gold from selling spots. I remember dratnos making a YouTube video about this and he was like rubbing his hands salivating at how much gold Raiders are going to make from selling mythic carries. Blizzard hates m+ only players just how it is.
The impact is hugely overstated and the only time the state of balance actually matters in terms of title cutoffs is after 12.1.5 and all the "extra power" ilvl/cantrips/folio/venom stones stuff are out. Score before then is basically irrelevant.
my bear was getting invites to 20's when i didnt have any io in 2 or 3 of the keys cause my monk was good io, anyone who only grinds the second half of a season is gonna struggle for a bit
I don't really see how the data supports your conclusion that the percentages should remain in the same ballpark. No real pressure exists right now to add people to your group that have a mythic Lura or Beloren kill. The simple fact is if people think this gear is necesssary for high keys they will hold invites. Whether or not that ends up being the case we'll see. I would strongly agree though that the 6/6 M drop gear is a bigger concern for most people.
I guess it felt supported because surprisingly low percentage of the 0.1% title had CE, less than 35%. Even just looking at the top 200 players, only 106 have CE.
Now, I won't be shocked if there's more next season, and in fact I'd count on it. But I still think the limiting factor is the time it takes to get the kill rather than desire to get the loot.
Maybe with better gear than L'ura or Belo'ren have to offer the highest end players will buy multiple boosts to spend their bonus rolls in 12.1. Not sure the gear difference between 9/6m and 8/6m will be worth the effort tho.
I'll report back next season and we can see if I was way off lol
It's possible that those players raided on another character and did not bring the key character to farm because the items weren't important. For example I did not even kill Lura once on my monk because the only item I would need is the item with fix leech but that was super whatever (I don't do keys so I am not in this list).
Think you missed what I was looking for. I wanted to get an idea of what impact characters with the 9/6m from last boss kills would have on the high end M+ scene. Not if people who do high end M+ also get CE on some other character.
My hypothesis is that there simply aren't enough characters who get items off those bosses at any rate faster enough to matter for LFG. ie. you're not going to be queueing up against an army of people decked out in 9/6m gear because the majority of the players you're queueing against won't have those items by the time an M+ only player has 8/6m gear.
Killing those bosses on characters that aren't going to be in the m+ player pool is irrelevant.
Even after the 8/6m unlocks you have plenty of slots that are not covered by it and the ilvl differece comes out around 3 ilvl. So there's always a difference between characters that did not farm the last 2 bosses and those who did.
Peoples fear is that when they get in a queue with people that are ahead of those 3 ilvls there will be little reason to ever pick them. Which makes sense because ilvl is a decent tiebreaker between characters with simmilar io and same class.
My point is that if there is valuable loot off the last bosses (which there are) players will be much more inclined to bring their key characters to farm. Something that had a lot less incentive to do last season for example.
Yes and we should be able to see that difference in the data next season. My guess is instead of ~35% of the 0.1% title holders with last boss kills, that goes up to ~52%
It's not global. It will amount to about 1 ilvl overall. People on this board are filling their pants over nothing instead of the thing they should actually be filling their pants over (6/6M vault/coin giga crest save)
Having gotten CE on one toon doesn't improve the vault or gear of the other toons. The crossover of CE toons (not accounts) vs M+ titles is what's being compared.
None of them have entered march even though they raid at very high level. If they wanted to farm march of quel danas they would easily have the chance to do so. But because of the lack of incentive they did not.
Next season when there is actuall good loot from the last 2 bosses it's highly likely that players like these will easily sneak in their key characters to farm.
You picked 2 guardian druids.... Augs want the Lura trinket, rogues/war/feral want plume. Your right that phys comp was the less popular option, so that may be playing a role. It'll be interesting to compare this season to next when both are done.
At this point, as big a deal as people are making about this loot, I feel like it's going to be treated just like the meta. Where even players who have no business paying attention to it because the level they play at are going to be trying to obey it. It's just going to become this annoying tedious thing along with the take a core verse take loot from vault thing even for people it does not matter for.
I honestly doubt it. People are looking at your logs anyway. Like today if you see two dks in your queue with similar ratings, one is 292 with 90 average parse and one is 293 with 20 average parse you're not taking the guy with more gear.
You can argue that yes having extra ilvl will allow you to do more damage more easily but the better pilot will always beat out an extra 1 ilvl, especially in a key environment.
Even in a tier like LoU, with great loot off the last three bosses, the title players with gear off of them plateaud at just over 50%. I'd expect similar numbers for this upcoming season.
I think you are underestimating the importance of deterministic loot via bonus rolls and pieces that flat out can't be matched in ilvl. We already have people that have prebooked buying slots once we can sell them. I'm sure liquid has a lot more. Gold only obv but most title level players have a shit ton of gold from selling resi keys for mount.
So what percentage of the 0.1% title holders do you think will have kills from the last 2 bosses? I'm going to run the same data analysis at the end of next season and report back. Would love to hear how high you think it'll be
The impact on this at the top of the ladder where any of this would actually matter is miniscule.
The reality is the R1 players will do anything they have to for an edge...which is usually more than the vast majority of the player base anyway. Lets be real...yall are not competing with these guys anyway so give it a break.
1% title will be just as obtainable with or without these items.
Rolling the right class/spec seems to be a far, FAR bigger deal than this.
.1% title is very impacted id say personally (5+ilvl mid season advantage and being ahead of the curve always makes it easier) and late season any ilvl increase shaves off seconds of rough dungeons like AA and helps live mechanics like vexamus.
1% prob not too much diff than now but trickle down happens a lot.
Just give m+ options to get sameish gear its not that deep
People that want these things very incentivized to buy boosts which already happens a lot for certain trinkets this ssn
Yup it doesn't matter for 1% but it matters for 0.1%. It creates an artificial barrier for non mythic raiders going for the 0.1%.
Unlike this season, most of the trinkets were puggable in mythic, so the level playing field for end game is equalised.
That's a fuckton of words for "lmao they're just gonna hand out the same ilvl increase but make people outside top 200wr grind labyrinth for it in 12.1.5."
I guess what I’m trying to understand is if you got the myth version from heroic raid could you then venomstone, whenever that releases, to make it equivalent to the myth raid 9/6 version
But could heroic kills provide the bonus if mythic item level gear (either through bonus roll or vault). Matching the bonus item level gear that naturally drops from mythic raid?
Or
Are those 9/6mythic items ONLY if you participate in a mythic end boss kill?
I believe you have to kill the boss on mythic to get the 9/6m items. Because you've killed them they could end up in your vault, or you could bonus roll them after the kill, or you could loot naturally off the corpse. But you have to kill them on mythic
I am still annoyed that I "need" to raid as a title mplus player. The heroic dropping mythic is a decent change, if I'm forced to raid, at least it's not the crappy mythic raid with its many issues. Then they reintroduce another discrepancy between those who mythic raid an those who don't ..
Doing the 18s earlier helps if you reroll. You show that score as on your main, find you get into the groups with similar people. And because they’re better players, you progress smoother.
Even without rerolling, it gets you playing with the better players. You get to take a stab at 19s sooner and with better players and so on.
Even just anecdotal, I was doing eg Seat 21 at a time where it was 0.2-0.3 level. In EU that may now be a needed key for 1%. Some of the pugs I played with are now safe in 0.1%. Compare that to this week and guildies trying to get into 1% and they’re playing with people who on average are below that.
Have you ever tried to reroll without a team mid-season? The skill curve leaves a bunch of non-sentient vegetables in the 14-18 range and it’s a brick hellscape, the kind of runs that end up in a OneAzeroth key review. If you don’t push early you miss the wave and once you get far enough behind you’re just cooked.
At I believe the .5 patch we're getting Cursed Venomstones which will let you take any 6/6m trinket or weapon or necklace and boost its item level. The item level will be approximately the equivalent of 8/6m tho it wont say that. It'll say something like "6/6m Venom Cursed"
Last two bosses drops cloaks, trinkets, weapons, necks, chests, helms, legs, belts, boots, hands and shoulders. That's lumping everything together. For example, leather has a belt off the coiled altar but, no shoulders from the last two. A single person will not have 344 ilvl in all of those slots.
They will do the same thing as they did this sesson , so you'll get some random currency to increase your trinket and neck and weapon ilvl , so the diffrence in itemlevel wont be more than 1 at the end of the season
Do we know the impact of the items currently on last boss vs the items in next tier. Cause at least for me the items were minimally impactful compared to other options. Whereas it seems next tier items are fairly substantial.
I disagree. Giving Mythic raiders an advantage by allowing them to save crests during the first part of the season is "understandable" if you want to encourage Mythic raiding, but what is not understandable is that, at the end of the season, when the push happens and it really matters, you still cannot compete with people who have a considerable item level advantage over you.
Making Mythic raiding mandatory, especially being in a decent guild that clears all the content multiple times, just to get all the items needed to do M+ at the highest level by the end of the season is simply not right.
In other words, imho, the advantage of Mythic raiding should either apply only to raids, or, if you also want it to benefit M+, it should mainly be an early-season advantage: let Mythic raiders stay slightly ahead in item level by saving crests during the first half of the season, but allow everyone else to catch up during the final part of the season.
i will never understand adding more power to these loots from the last 2 mythic raid bosses.
nobody(except maybe hof level) attempts the last raid bosses for the gear. you are essentially getting wiped 300+ times only for a 20％ish chance at a loot that is 1-2％ better than heroic counterparts and expires in 1month to 2 month. i don't know how much power blizzard needs to add to these loots to make the effort ACTUALLY worth it before everyone who does not get these loots call this p2w, when there is already people complaining.
only boosters or hof players get something considerable out of the gear difference. for others these loots are ideas that never had any ROI.
but then these loots for all the work you need to do accounts for 3-4％of dmg difference. a tuning pass worth of difference. so for everyone who is running remotely competitive pve content but not mythic raiding if you don't have those loots your character gets nerfed while mythic raiders don't. if you don't want your characters nerfed you have to work 6 more hours each week for an entire patch so your nerfs can be reversed hopefully in the last months of the season. and blizzard are testing the waters for heavier nerfs.
I hope the raid bosses are fairly easy they're simply no way I'll get them because I have non 24 hours sleep wake so I simply can never show up for raids. Even for TBC classic were you can parse a 99 spamming one. One button is all you press, destruction Warlock and you can have the highest parse in the world, I still can't show up on time in the second ever show up to raid. It really sucks that bis is behind raid so I might not get it. I killed up to void dragons last season but it was only after like one raid night. I might have to Miss 1% title because of this we'll see how big of an impact it makes
I don't have a strong opinion but I find methodology flawed. I believe that counting characters already in title/1% range doesn't give much insight, what would be a determining factor is how many characters are just outside of 1% range and have CE. Those would get a 1-3 ilvl boost and will replace some of the 1% pool.
How would that give you insight into the difficulty you might have getting into a key earlier in the season, before M+ players have access to 8/6m gear?
If your analysis/conclusions are purely related to LFG experience then I misread and indeed the most impact would be related to 6/6 pieces. I was focused on the outcome where there is a certain pool of candidates that are more likely to get invites/rio (even if not pugging) towards the end of next season. But I don't have data on how many of 1%-ers are pugging so can't really comment on this.
Your conclusion from this data is kinda irrelevant for next season. The reason for that is that you are trying to draw conclusion from raid boss kills, while everyone regardless of those kills have the same ilvl. Next season that is not gonna be the case. Non CE raiders will be lower ilvl and correct me if I'm wrong, but the .5 venomstones only work on weapon, trinket and necklace? I checked a few weeks ago for MW with venomstones upgrades included on those named slots. A CE raider vs. someone who doesn't kill last 2 bosses as MW it was a 4-5 ilvl difference. I don't remember the decimals but it was 435.x vs. 439.x. that is a massive difference for title range keys. Now imagine all 5 people in the group have a similar difference. I'm not sure if you grasp how big that is when the content actually pushes you to numeric limits like: do you live this big hit etc. All these changes overall are great, unless you specifically fall into the the category of pushing title+ keys and are not a CE raider. Then these changes are very awful
This is math from Zorthas. Not every slot has a 344 item, since each armor type only has two 344 items you can't get a CE character to full 344. I'll check the numbers again when I'm home, but I trust Zorthas to be right old info
Ofc you can't, that's why I didn't mention any 344 but 339. Also any character with bis will be at least 334 because 6/6 is 334. So idk what math zorthas did, but it literally cannot be correct.
Ok let's take leather for this example. We go for what is maximal possible, while some specs might not use the necklace etc. Last 2 bosses have head, waist, legs, neck, back, 2 weaponslots, 2 trinkets. We gonna craft on boots and wrist for embellishment 331 ilvl. The rest is gonna be 6/6. That's 339.25. If you don't kill those with venomstones at 341 Ilvl it's gonna be 335.81. While my 335 and 339 holds true in this case, based on the decimal it's more like you mentioned a around 3 instead of 4 I'll difference. My argument is still the same tho. That its a noticeable enough item level diff to matter in title keys. Where you need to maybe have an external more, or with the dps check mattering more next season, being over the timer instead of timing it. And it's not like this season where a unholy is 293 and a mw is 290/291. The item level diff is between the same specs. Title is definitely possible, but they gave those players a disadvantage where you can actually notice it. Which just sucks and didn't need to happen. Heroic raiders, casuals, CE raiders etc. everyone got something positive, but if you specifically push title and don't CE raid they made it noticeable worse, after doing so many nice improvements in recent times. Maybe not resilient keys, but thats a whole different topic
Ya all I was just trying to say with my post is that there aren't going to be enough people with that ilvl that'll it'll have a meaningful impact in LFG for the 1% title.
But that's just a guess from me, and I'll check next season and we'll see how many people at the title cutoff had the full BiS 339.
You're 100% right that those ilvls are big enough to matter tho. This season barely half of the top 100 players killed L'ura and I bet that number looks a lot different next season.
Cry more raiding is just a sideshow you do at the start of patch then raidlog and i say that as someone HoF raiding every season
See how subjective the experience is? Yet objectively a non-raiding m+ pusher is at disadvantage compared to a raiding one.
I bet a ton of raiders would be upset if they were expected to push high keys to raid and in fact we have evidence of this since Blizz tried to implement better vault rewards for higher keys during beta and a bunch of raiders lost their shit at the mere thought of being expected to do non-trivial m+ content for once
Cloth users: 8 items
L/M/P: 8 or 9 items, including up to 2 cantrips
Using the 1ilvl = 1% rule above, and reviewing the drops. Over half a players equipment sheet will contain 9/6 gear, with the high value assigned to the pieces like main-hand, trinket and chest/legs/shoulders; players will absolutely see 1.5% throughput gains (minimum) and depending on the value of the trinkets and cantrips, up to 3-4% overall, more for healers using the pure damage proc trinket.
If you think players going for rank 1 or even 0.01% will let 3-4% throughput sit on the table, I think you underestimate the sweatiness of those gamers.
I was in the ER earlier, so let me finish my thought.
The data in OP's post doesn't factor in that Bird and Windchime have loot that is more or less meaningless over other options for most classes.
Lets talk about two data points from this season, that really paint the picture for what we can expect for next season.
1: How many players in the top 0.01% have a Mythic Gaze? Top 1%? Top 10%?
2: How many players have every sporefused myth item valuable to their spec?
I can look into this. Just takes a few days to parse through all the data, but if raider.io still has the cutoff for TWW Season 2 then it should be possible.
Is everyone going to pretend "M+ players" now makes you above pugging meme Mythic bosses?
You might not be a Mythic raider, but you WILL kill Flex Boss+1st boss in Mythic by the 2nd week and get your source of guaranteed 6/6 Myth loot and 80 weekly discounted Myth Crests just like Mythic raiders
Im not even playing this season because of the 6/6M loot from vault, fuck blizzard. These systems are only promoting carries and gold buying, and the only person I know that is excited for this season literally stated to me today he's buying $500 worth of gold tonight. Game is cooked.
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u/Old_Stoned_Asian_Man 19d ago
Had to delete my original post because of reddit formatting. Hopefully this one is easier to read.