Mythic isn’t a sealed-off difficulty island. WoW is vertically integrated. The top end establishes the assumptions that then propagate downward through almost everything: That’s why treating the current raid issues as “well, only a tiny number of people do Mythic” misses how WoW is actually structured. Blizzard designs the game around what the highest-end players are capable of breaking, optimizing, automating, or trivializing. Then the countermeasures needed to constrain those players become part of the baseline game for everyone else. You see it in class design. If top players can squeeze absurd value out of layered cooldown interactions, Blizzard tunes around that ceiling. Then the average player gets the same class with the same button density, same maintenance mechanics, and the same rotational failure states. They just execute it all much worse. You see it in encounters. If Liquid and Echo can solve a mechanic with communication, custom tooling, positional assignments, and hundreds of pulls, Blizzard adds another layer of complexity or tightens the timing. That design language doesn't remain quarantined to the last Mythic boss. It becomes part of Blizzard's encounter vocabulary, and it trickles down to CE guilds, AotC guilds, and casual Normal guilds. Heroic and Normal are still descendants of the same flawed design philosophy and the players in those brackets inherit the problems of that philosophy. And then it feeds into M+ too. Classes get balanced around coordinated high-end groups extracting maximum utility, so dungeon encounters expect interrupts, stops, defensives, dispels, externals, movement, target priority, and increasingly precise cooldown coordination. A casual player isn't playing some completely different WoW. They're playing the same systems at a lower numerical pressure. The game is not really casual WoW and then optional hardcore Mythic mode. It's much closer to one systemic game whose design ceiling is established by the best players, with difficulty progressively sanded off as you move downward. If Blizzard decides that RWF players can solve this because they have people on payroll that can create a custom solution for it, then the encounter remains harder. That harder encounter contributes to the design standards for future encounters. Those standards affect class kits and UI needs. Those kits affect M+ and raid expectations. Those expectations affect Heroic. Those expectations influence what guides tell people to run. Those guides influence what PUGs demand. Eventually some guy trying to do a +6 is being rejected because he doesn't have the correct build that was created around a problem solved by players doing content orders of magnitude beyond his ability. On top of this, when encounters increasingly rely on individual pass/fail execution the skill gap between individual players creates social problems rather than mere personal DPS differences. Blizzard is not just designing content for the top 100 players in the world. They are using the capabilities of those players to determine what the game is allowed to ask of everybody at every level. RWF is not just an entertaining edge case, it acts as the R&D department for difficulty escalation. And this gets absolutely absurd next to the accessibility argument. If Blizzard really wanted a simpler and more accessible WoW after combat-addon restrictions, then they need to be able to say "We do not care if Liquid kills this boss in 40 pulls". Because as long as preventing that outcome remains a design priority, Blizzard is still letting the most extreme outlier of players set the tone for everyone else. You cannot simultaneously optimize around "make the game broadly accessible" and "ensure the world's best 100 players, with extraordinary resources, cannot solve it TOO quickly" without the second objective exerting enormous pressure on the first. This heavily contributes to guild attrition and to WoW’s reputation for being hostile or inaccessible outside its committed player base. And I am SURE most of the RWF players do not appreciate how Blizzard does this either. This is not an attack on them.

What is there to even be hyped for? Another boss that drops gear that will be replaced immediately once the next season begins? Another invasion mechanic that drops catchup gear?

They could simply stop catering to them at all because they don't actually pay the bills. But RWF and MDI are the only time there are eyes on the game outside of expansion announcements and launches. The people designing the game all come from high-end raiding backgrounds and only care about that group. Everyone else basically subsidizes the game for the RWF guilds and Blizzard likes it that way.

The duel tournament is a fun idea on paper but in practice it financially incentivizes degenerate behavior like this. Blizz also can't just ban it because it's massive publicity for their game and the average gamer following the event will make excuses for the streamers that cheat.

Painful truths.

>There have to be fundamental changes to the world and WoW itself to have true horizontal progression. Yes, that IS the idea. Otherwise, you just get Retail again. I swear people don't even know the history of this game. The vertical progression is exactly how we got no attunements, LFR, and the seasonal content treadmill. You are literally begging for Retail 2.0 with superficial Classic aesthetics.

The end result of this is that nobody wants to grind from Tier 1 to Tier 14 if they come into the game later. There will be far less guilds and groups running the lower tiers. If any exist at all. Then Blizzard needs to introduce catch-up content that lets lapsed and new players access the newest tiers, thus fully invalidating all of the previous content. Congratulations you have now recreated Retail WoW! It's so funny watching people recreate the game we already have from first principles. How do you guys think Retail got to the state it's in? Like this!

I love how this went from a random all-22 post, to a drafting game, and now we have NFL combine stats for each 'mon. I love the internet. By tomorrow we will have a full on ROM hack of Pokemon x NFL .

60% chance to have a 98% chance to win or a 99% chance to have a 96% chance to win, I am taking the 99/96 every single time.

A $100k tournament means it's fiscally irresponsible to not RMT and basically do everything you possibly can to get even a slight edge. It's why these "community events" are always a bad idea. They promote degenerate behavior, cheating, and generally give anyone with an audience and clout an inherent insurmountable advantage.

We are winning the championship and there is nothing you can do to stop us.

Solid changes. Now we won't have dungeon spamming like Era devolved into, but people also won't feel like dungeons are a waste of their time.

Because every Retail WoW story goes like this: Bad guy: This...is your...END *Dark orchestral music Good guys: No...this is...our HOPE *Swelling hopeful orchestral music* Bad guy: All according...to my PLAN *vanishes in a cloud of smoke or dies* Good guys: We heckin' did it *Looks smugly at the camera* *More swelling hopeful orchestrals* Other good guy:....for now.... *Everyone gives a resolved expression*

Tom Brady is the greatest Quarterback to ever play the game and he became that way through hard work and discipline, not by being the greatest athletic talent the sport had ever seen. He became the best by working harder than everyone else for longer. Shut the fuck up.

>imaginary problem As if Era didn't devolve into everyone spamming cleave groups to 60 and then further devolve into everyone paying boosters to power level them to 60 on their alts.

Classic Andy pretends like we didn't do this already back in 2019. You didn't need a dedicated 5 man. Everyone just ran cleave groups nonstop and non-cleave classes were excluded. Then once everyone else hit cap it became impossible to find leveling groups for alts that weren't paying someone for a power leveling boost. Fuck off with the dishonesty. We know how you people play this game and it's degenerate as fuck.